MOSCOW - President Barack Obama sought Thursday to minimize the significance of a fugitive former national security contractor wanted for leaking government secrets, calling him a “29-year-old hacker” and suggesting that U.S. frustration with China and Russia for apparently helping him evade extradition was not worth damaging relations with those countries.
Edward Snowden, who turned 30 last week, has been ensconced out of sight at a Moscow airport international transit lounge since Sunday, when he arrived from Hong Kong despite a U.S. effort to extradite him on criminal charges.
Obama said he had not called the presidents of China or Russia on the Snowden case because he did not want to elevate its importance. He said other nations should simply be willing to return Snowden to the United States as a matter of law enforcement.
He rejected the suggestion that he might order the military to intercept any plane that might be carrying Snowden.
“I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” Obama said.
Ecuador, which is protecting Julian Assange, the founder of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, at its London embassy, has confirmed that Snowden has requested asylum and has suggested he is a victim of human-rights abuses by the United States. But Ecuador also has said the application process could take months.
Adding to the legal questions of his asylum request, government officials in Quito said Thursday that Ecuador had not authorized any travel documents to be given to Snowden, whose passport has been revoked by the United States. Their assertions appeared to contradict Assange’s statements this week that Snowden had been givena passage of safe travel.
Ecuador also said Thursday that it was pre-emptively rejecting millions in trade benefits that it could lose by taking in the fugitive.
Fernando Alvarado, the secretary of communications for leftist President Rafael Correa, suggested the U.S. use the money to train government employees to respect human rights.
Meanwhile, federal investigators told lawmakers they have evidence that USIS, the contractor that screened Snowden for his top-secret clearance, repeatedly misled the government about the thoroughness of its background checks, according to people familiar with the matter.
The alleged transgressions are so serious that inspector general of the Office of Personnel Management plans to recommend that the office, which oversees most background checks, end ties with USIS unless it can show it is performing responsibly, the people said.
In the latest revelations in the case, documents disclosed Thursday show that the Obama administration gathered U.S. citizens’ Internet data until 2011, continuing a spying program started under President George W. Bush that revealed who Americans exchanged emails with and the Internet Protocol addresses of their computers.
The National Security Agency ended the program that collected email logs and timing, but not content, in 2011 because it did not do what was needed to stop terrorist attacks, according to the agency’s director. Gen. Keith Alexander, who also heads the U.S. Cyber Command, said all data was purged at that time.
The Guardian newspaper on Thursday released documents detailing the collection, though the program also was described earlier this month by The Washington Post.
The collection appears similar to the gathering of U.S. phone records, and seems to overlap with the Prism surveillance program of foreigners on U.S. Internet servers, both revealed by Snowden. U.S. officials have said the phone records can only be checked for numbers dialed by a terrorist suspect overseas.
Alexander said at a Baltimore conference on cyber-security that the National Security Agency decided to kill the Internet data-gathering program because “it wasn’t meeting what we needed and we thought we could better protect civil liberties and privacy by doing away with it.”
He said the program was conducted under provisions of the Patriot Act, and that agency leaders went to the Obama administration and Congress with the recommendation to shut it down.
Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said the program has not resumed.
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Barry, Michael D. Shear, Rick Gladstone, William Neuman and Andrew Roth of The New York Times; by Kimberly Dozier, Lolita C. Baldor, Julie Pace, Michael Weissenstein, Gonzalo Solano, Peter Orsi and Ken Thomas of The Associated Press; and by Tom Hamburger and Zachary A. Goldfarb of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 06/28/2013