Obama under pressure

Edward Snowden

President Barack Obama was facing a mounting domestic and international backlash against the surveillance operations as his administration struggled to contain one of the most explosive national security leaks in US history.
Political opinion in the US was split with some members of Congress calling for the immediate extradition from Hong Kong of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden. But other senior politicians in both main parties questioned whether US surveillance practices had gone too far, reported The Guardian.
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange yesterday hailed Snowden as a "hero" defending personal liberty. Assange urged nations around the world to offer safe haven to the young American.
Snowden, a 29-year-old technology expert working for a private firm subcontracted to the US National Security Agency, has gone to ground after evading a press pack and apparently checking out of his Hong Kong hotel on Monday.
Snowden is still in the southern Chinese city, the Guardian newspaper's Washington bureau chief, one of the reporters who broke Snowden's story, told CNN yesterday.
Russia yesterday said it will consider an asylum request for Snowden if one is made, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said.
"We will take action based on what actually happens. If we receive such a request, it will be considered," Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the newspaper.
Last week a series of leaks by the former CIA worker led to claims the US had a vast surveillance network with much less oversight than previously thought.
The US insists its snooping is legal under domestic law.
Snowden told the Guardian in an interview published Sunday that he chose Hong Kong as a refuge as it has a "strong tradition of free speech". But the semi-autonomous southern Chinese city also has an extradition treaty with the United States.
The US government appeared to be gearing up for action against Snowden Monday with senior lawmakers branding the leaks as "treason" and saying he should be extradited as quickly as possible.
California Senator Dianne Feinstein -- the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence -- declined to go into specifics but said US authorities were vigorously pursuing Snowden.
"All the departments are proceeding, I think, aggressively," she told US media.
Snowden said he had gone public because he could not "allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building".
Under the so-called PRISM program revealed by Snowden, the NSA can issue directives to Internet firms such as Google or Facebook to win access to emails, online chats, pictures, files, videos and more, uploaded by foreign users.
Obama says such surveillance has helped to keep Americans safe from terror. And 56 percent of Americans support the use of phone records in counter-terrorism despite the invasion of privacy, a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll said Monday.