The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt writes from the Union Square rally to support Edward Snowden:

Around 20 people have gathered at Union Square to rally in support of Edward Snowden. It’s pouring with rain, which organisers say has impacted numbers.

“History has shown that whistle blowers of this nature tend to be demonised quickly,” said Andrew Stepanian, who helped organise the event. He said he hoped rallies like this would celebrate Snowden’s “heroic act” in exposing the extent of the US government’s surveillance.

Attendees wrote messages on yellow and pink signs expressing support for Snowden. Stepanian’s said: “We stand with Edward Snowden.” Another sign described Snowden as a “hero,” while one woman had a banner which said: “I [heart] Manning and Snowden.”

Jeff Jarvis, the prominent media commentator, was among those at the small rally. He said the revelations could be damaging for the US as other countries were already wary of storing their users’ data in the states.

“I also fear for the Internet,” he said. “I think this could yield more of a lack of trust in the cloud, which I think is bad for the Internet.”

Adam made a Vine of scenes from the rally here.

“Call it digital Blackwater”: that’s the tagline of a new Tim Shorrock piece in Salon about the magnitude of the private contractor presence at US intelligence agencies:

With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector – a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon– contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA. [...]

If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.

But it’s probably much more than that.

Read the full piece here. Tom Gara reports in the Wall Street Journal that of the 25,000 employees of Booz Allen Hamilton, whistleblower Edward Snowden’s employer, “76% have government security clearances allowing them to handle sensitive national security information.”

Rod McLeod, a regional security director for a major multinational company who spent 14 years with British military intelligence, tells the Guardian that Snowden’s case would be among the minority of leak cases in the UK, where most unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information are carried out by permanent staff.

McLeod (on Twitter) defines “insiders” as those who exploit their legitimate access to an organization’s assets for unauthorized purposes:

Recent (UK) evidence reveals that the majority (88%) of insider acts are actually carried out by permanent staff. Only 7% of cases involve contractors and 5% agency/temp staff. That said, there seem to be an enormous number of contractors working in the US intelligence community.

Back in the UK, other factors seem more closely aligned with these recent US cases. Most insiders have been male (82%), aged between 31-45 years and most take place within 5 years of employment (and extend over a period of around 6 months). The most frequent type of insider activity is unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information.

George Orwell’s 1984 is climbing Amazon’s list of Movers & Shakers – the site’s “bigger gainers in sales rank overs the past 24 hours,” the Washington Examiner’s Charlie Spiering notes.

Sales are up 83% since Sunday.

The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt is in Union Square, where a rally to support Edward Snowden is proceeding under rainy skies:

British foreign secretary William Hague was specifically asked how the NSA collects the information and on what date Hague was made aware of the Prism programme.

He refused to answer this.

The statement and question session is now over.

The Guardian’s Rory Carroll reports on a crowdfunding campaign to help whistleblower Edward Snowden pay legal fees and other costs:

The campaign on Crowdtilt, an alternative to Kickstarter, has raised over $4,700 and is aiming for $15,000, urging would-be donors: “We should set a precedent by rewarding this type of extremely courageous behavior.”

Dwight Crow, a Facebook employee from San Francisco’s bay area, said he launched the initiative to reward and encourage whistleblowing and because he heard Snowden’s accounts had been frozen. He wrote: “Figured a little cash might help significantly ”

Crow said he hoped to get the money to Snowden in Hong Kong via relatives. How feasible this would be and whether there was any potential legal risk for donors was unclear.

Here are the key quotes from British foreign secretary William Hague in full:

It has been suggested that GCHQ uses our partnership with the United States to get around UK law, obtaining information that they cannot legally obtain in the United Kingdom.

I wish to be absolutely clear that this accusation is baseless.

Any data obtained by us from the United States involving UK nationals is subject to proper UK statutory controls and safeguards …

Our agencies practise and uphold UK law at all times, even when dealing with information from outside the United Kingdom.

Hague was also asked whether any member of parliament was having his or her phone tapped. He refused to answer.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights group, calls for a “new Church committee” to investigate potential government infringements on privacy and to write new rules protecting the public.

In the mid-70s a Senate investigation led by Idaho Senator Frank Church uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the US government of its eavesdropping powers, an episode Glenn Greenwald has written frequently about. The Church Committee report led to the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and set up the Fisa courts that today secretly approve surveillance requests.

A statement from EFF reads in part:

Congress now has a responsibility to the American people to conduct a full, public investigation into the domestic surveillance of Americans by the intelligence communities, whether done directly or in concert with the FBI. And it then has a duty to make changes in the law to stop the spying and ensure that it does not happen again.

In short, we need a new Church Committee.

Read the full statement here. There’s support for such a new push inside Congress, too. On Sunday Senator Rand Paul said he would try to challenge the NSA surveillance programs in court, and Senator Mark Udall said he wanted to “reopen” the Patriot Act, to clarify limits on what it allows. Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner recently wrote an editorial for the Guardian saying “I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.”

Responding to his Labour opposition shadow Douglas Alexander, British foreign secretary William Hague said he was not saying the security agencies were incapable of error – ”but I am arguing that there is a strong system of checks and balances”. The combination of ministerial oversight, independent scrutiny and parliamentary oversight minimise the chance of error, he said.

Hague was asked by Tory David Davis about US law that distinguishes how far the American government can apply surveillance to US citizens as opposed to foreigners. Hague said: “We apply our own laws.” All of the acts that we have passed relating to the gathering of intelligence are applied to data from other countries, Hague said.

Earlier my colleagues Nick Hopkins and Richard Norton-Taylor drew up a list of eight questions Hague had to answer.

He sort of answered question 4: has GCHQ been garnering information about British citizens living in the UK from the NSA? He said it was “baseless” to say that GCHQ had used the NSA to get around UK law.

And he sort of answered question 8: is he sure that GCHQ is strictly abiding by the law and ministerial oversight – and how can he be satisfied? He said British intelligence agencies practised and upheld UK law at all times.

But he failed to answer the other questions, which you can read again here.

Frank Gardner of the BBC said the key question was whether Hague said “no British law has been circumvented”. Hague does seem to have said that by saying British intelligence agencies always operated within the law and that GCHQ had not used the NSA to get around UK law.

William Hague, the British foreign secretary, has just spoken to the House of Commons about GCHQ and Prism.

Hague said that the claim that GCHQ had used the NSA to get around UK law was “baseless”.

British intelligence agencies practise and uphold UK law at all times, he said.

The Commons intelligence and security committee has received some information from GCHQ and will receive a report from GCHQ tomorrow. He said the committee would be free to take any further action it saw fit once it had read the report.

Hague said that to intercept any individual’s communications required a warrant signed by him or another secretary of state and was “no casual process”. Not every proposal was approved, he said. The system of checks and balances was one of the strongest anywhere in the world, he said.

The relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalents – today the NSA – was a unique one, Hague said, and was “essential” to the security of both nations. It had stopped many terrorist and espionage plots and saved many lives, he said.

The basic principles of the relationship and the framework for exchanging information had not changed.

Hague said he deplored the leaking of any classified information wherever it occurs. Leaks are dangerous because they provide a “partial and misleading picture”, he claimed.

He said he would not confirm or deny any aspect of the leaked information.

The Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman flags a 2012 video featuring Booz Allen Hamilton CEO and president Ralph Shrader talking about how the company can respond quickly in the event of a security breach.

“If a breach occurs, we’re there to help, with real-time incident response,” Shrader says in the video, “Missions that Matter: Inspired Thinking,” which was produced to go with the company’s 2012 annual report.

On Sunday whistleblower Edward Snowden, accused of / credited with creating a major intelligence breach, revealed himself to be a Booz Allen Hamilton employee. In a statement the company called the revelation “shocking.”

“Booz Allen’s inspired thinking can also be seen in the way our people apply their expertise to help make the world a better place,” Shrader says, but he was talking about reducing gang violence.

I’ve been speaking with Guardian finance and economics editor Heidi N. Moore, who notes that BAH stock, which is down 4.22% on the day as of this writing, is trading at five times normal volume today.

Not everyone thinks it’s an obvious sell. Here’s CNN Money:

William Hague, the British foreign secretary, is about to address the House of Commons on the relationship between GCHQ and Prism. We’ll be covering his statement and his answers to MPs’ questions here.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has cancelled at extremely short notice a planned photo op this morning with Hong Kong chief executive, Leung Chun-ying.

The Guardian’s Matt Williams headed down to New York’s city hall to capture the moment, only to be turned away.

“It would have been a circus, so we decided to catch up with him another time,” a mayoral spokesperson told Matt.

Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald is an active Twitter user whose timeline hosts many lively mini-debates about privacy and security issues:

Here is a video presenting two expert views on Edward Snowden’s decision to seek refuge in Hong Kong and the likelihood or not of his finding such refuge there.

Regina Ip, Hong Kong’s former security secretary, calls on Snowden to “leave Hong Kong.”

“Hong Kong is not a legal vacuum as Mr. Snowden might have thought,” she says:

However Simon Young of the University of Hong Kong says “coming to Hong Kong is probably a good decision”:

because not only do we have protections under extradition law through the court system, and the political offense exception, but we also have strong protections for people making asylum claims.

Young says he doesn’t think China “is going to be involved in any decision. I think that this is a matter that China is going to leave to Hong Kong’s autonomy.”

A spokesman for the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said Snowden’s case had been referred to the justice department and US intelligence was assessing the damage caused by the disclosures. The spokesman, Shawn Turner, said:

Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law.

Read the full report by the Guardian’s Julian Borger and Spencer Ackerman here.

Daniel Ellsberg, who as a 40-year-old defense researcher leaked documents to the New York Times 40 years ago that would become known as the Pentagon Papers, writes in the Guardian that Snowden’s disclosure “gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an ‘executive coup’ against the US constitution.”

“In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago,” Ellsberg writes:

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: “It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.”

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense – as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time – as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads –they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

Read the full piece here.

Christine Harper is chief financial correspondent for Bloomberg News:

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange claims he has had “indirect communication” with Edward Snowden, the whistleblower behind the Guardian’s exclusive revelations on the NSA surveillance scandal, reports Oliver Laughland in Sydney.

Speaking to Lateline, an Australian current affairs TV show, from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange declined to go into detail on the nature or level of correspondence he had entered into with Snowden’s “people”, but claimed that the whistleblower stood for the same the aims of the Wikileaks organisation.

“What he [Snowden] has revealed, is what I’ve been speaking about for years, that the National Security Agency and its allies have been involved in a mass interception programme,” he said.

Assange, who is standing for election in the Australian senate later this year, also claimed that Snowden’s actions complemented those of the Wikileaks political party.

“If I am elected to the [Australian senate], the Australian Wikileaks party position is there should be no interception, none at all of Australians without proper judicial oversight…

“We run the danger here of the west more broadly drifting into a state where there are two systems. There is one law for the average person and there is another law if you are inside the American intelligence complex … That is not acceptable, I don’t believe Australians find that acceptable, I don’t believe Americans find that acceptable, Snowden clearly didn’t find it acceptable, and he was even someone in the system.”

When pressed on precisely the sort of correspondence he had with the whistleblower, Assange said: “I don’t think it’s appropriate we go into more details.”

Frank Gardner of the BBC was just telling BBC News that if William Hague does not say “no British law has been circumvented” during his statement to parliament in an hour he (Gardner) will be concerned.

Index on Censorship, the free-speech lobby group, has condemned the Prism programme.

“Mass surveillance is a major chill to free expression and so undermines the right to free speech as well as the right to privacy,” the group wrote in a statement calling on the EU’s José Manuel Barroso and Herman van Rompuy to “stand up against mass surveillance on the scale seen in the Prism programme and to stand by the EU’s position against mass surveillance”.

Kirsty Hughes, the group’s CEO, said:

National security should not be used by governments to justify the mass surveillance of their citizens. This is not about the targeted surveillance of criminals but surveillance of private citizens on a massive scale. It is the kind of free speech violation we expect from Iran and China, not a democracy like the US. The Prism scandal shows that tech companies’ transparency reports are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to data surveillance by governments.

A Hong Kong legislator has called for Edward Snowden to leave the territory, the Independent reports. Regina Ip, whom the paper describes as a “pro-Beijing” legislator, said Hong Kong was “obliged to comply with the terms of agreements” with the US government (although this includes exceptions for political fugitives) and adds: “It’s actually in his best interest to leave Hong Kong.”

The US army has confirmed an aspect of surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden‘s military service to the Guardian, Spencer Ackerman writes from New York.

As Snowden told the Guardian in announcing his responsibility for detailing multiple mass surveillance efforts by the National Security Agency sweeping up Americans’ communications data, Snowden indeed tried to join the elite special forces.

Snowden was unsuccessful.

“His records indicate he enlisted in the army reserve as a special forces recruit (18X) on 7 May 2004 but was discharged 28 September 2004,” the US army’s chief civilian spokesman, George Wright, emailed the Guardian on Monday.

“He did not complete any training or receive any awards,” Wright added.

Wen Yunchao, an outspoken Chinese blogger now based in Hong Kong, has noted on Twitter that Snowden has “left the tiger’s den and entered the wolf’s lair”, the Guardian’s China correspondent Tania Branigan notes.

Julian Assange of Wikileaks has been speaking to the Lateline news programme in Australia about the Snowden case. My colleagues in our Sydney office are watching and will send me full details shortly.

Snowden told the Guardian that he chose Hong Kong because of its “spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent“. Yet analysts say that mainland China’s encroaching influence in the territory’s schools, media and courts have put these values at risk, reports Jonathan Kaiman in Hong Kong.

“Most people here just got the news this morning, and they are very, very surprised,” said Luther Ng, a television journalist in Hong Kong. Ng called Hong Kong a “free, but not democratic city,” where “freedom of speech is getting tighter and tighter”.

“I hope [Snowden] is right,” said Charles Mok, a member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. “To some, these comments about Hong Kong’s environment may be an encouragement. To others it’s a reminder that we need to preserve it, to make sure it doesn’t go away.”

“At least in the system here, being in the Legislative Council, we don’t get to decide what happens to him,” Mok continued. “We’ll keep a close eye on him, but we want to make sure that China doesn’t just grab the guy and turn him over to the Americans.”

“[Snowden] is right, but he should also know that people here are very worried about losing our freedoms,” said Emily Lau, another member of Hong Kong’s legislative council and chairwoman of the influential Democratic party. “That’s why we are so vigorous and so vocal – when we see anything we think is wrong, we speak out, we protest … The government is coming in thick and fast, and people are concerned.”

Carl Miller of the British thinktank Demos is more surprised at the tech companies who collaborated with Prism than the fact the US operated the programme.

The real and sensational revelation is that this transfer of data was allegedly on the basis of willing, cooperation from the internet giants – Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, Apple – as voluntary ‘Special Sources’ for the NSA. These same internet companies have, both in public and in private championed the privacy of their users’ data and long and noisily championed a vision of a free internet altogether hostile to government involvement in the internet. They have consistently opposed a British attempt – the Communications Data Bill – to create a legal basis to be able to conduct information collections ironically similar to those revealed in the slides. Google, for instance, publishes regular transparency reports on attempts by public authorities across the world to remove content from its search index.

The fact that these very same companies were willing, if secret, partners in this endeavour, whilst mounting a vocal opposition to it, would be a gruesome hypocrisy. ‘You have to fight for your privacy or you will lose it’, Google’s Eric Schmidt insisted earlier this year. The stunning duplicity is, it seems, this is exactly what they have failed to do.

The communications data bill was blocked by Nick Clegg, the UK deputy prime minister, but since the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last month there have been calls to put it back on the table, with talk that Labour could work with the Tories on it to circumvent Lib Dem objections. Miller argues that the internet companies implicated in Prism have now lost the moral authority to oppose the communications data bill.

In the US, Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives counter-terrorism and intelligence subcommittee, has called for Snowden to be extradited from Hong Kong and prosecuted. He flew there 10 days ago in order to disclose the top-secret documents and give interviews to the Guardian. King said:

If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date. The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence.

Malcolm Rifkind, the chair of the UK’s intelligence and security committee, has suggested that GCHQ may have broken the law if it accepted information from the NSA on British citizens through Prism, Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt report. Rifkind told BBC Radio 4 this morning:

One of the big questions that is being asked is if British intelligence agencies want to seek to know the content of emails can they get round the normal law in the UK by simply asking an American agency to provide that information?

The law is actually quite clear. If the British intelligence agencies are seeking to know the content of emails about people living in the UK then they actually have to get lawful authority. Normally that means ministerial authority. That applies equally whether they are going to do the intercept themselves or whether they are going to ask somebody else to do it on their behalf.

Rifkind will meet NSA and CIA representatives in Washington this week.

Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, said he was going to ask William Hague, the foreign secretary, today about the legal framework GCHQ worked under:

What we need clarity from the foreign secretary [about] today is the legal framework governing UK access to intercepts secured by the NSA.

My colleague Nick Hopkins notes that since the revelations on Friday, neither GCHQ nor any government minister has denied the agency had access to material gathered by Prism.

The classified documents obtained by the Guardian stated that GCHQ had last year generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism, which was set up in 2007 to help the US monitor traffic of potential suspects abroad.

The papers also showed GCHQ, the UK’s eavesdropping and security agency, has had access to Prism since at least May 2010. Nick writes:

Ministers have also not attempted to explain why GCHQ would need to access information from Prism, rather than going through the normal legal protocol when seeking information from an internet company based in another country. This involves making a formal request to the US department of justice, which would make the approach to the firm on the UK’s behalf. The company then has to decide whether to provide information.

In the UK, GCHQ is bound by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to seek approval for intercepting material from telecoms and UK-based internet companies …

Prof Peter Sommer, a cybersecurity expert, said it was well known the US and British intelligence agencies shared information, but asked whether [William] Hague and Theresa May, the home secretary, had any way of independently verifying what the GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 were telling them.

The intelligence and interception commissioner, who reviews whether the agencies are working to the letter of the law, and the members of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC), have some powers of scrutiny, but Sommer questioned whether they had enough resources to give proper oversight.

David Cameron’s official spokesman has also spoken about GCHQ’s relationship with Prism this morning:

I think the PM’s view is that the agencies operate within this framework and as the foreign secretary said the idea that in GCHQ people are sitting working out how to circumvent a UK law with another agency in another country is fanciful.

He thinks that the necessary and important frameworks are in place and that there has been a lot of questions that have been raised and the right thing to do is for the foreign secretary to go to the House [of Commons] and give a statement.

He refused to be drawn on whether the UK and the US had discussed the allegations.

Here is some of the Guardian’s key coverage of Edward Snowden and his revelations about the US internet surveillance programme.

• Here Julian Borger, our diplomatic editor, explains why Snowden’s decision to choose Hong Kong as the place where he would unmask himself represents a “high-stakes gamble”.

Just before sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from Britain to China in 1997, the US signed a new extradition treaty with the semi-autonomous territory. Under that treaty, both parties agree to hand over fugitives from each other’s criminal justice systems, but either side has the right of refusal in the case of political offences.

Beijing, which gave its consent for Hong Kong to sign the agreement, also has a right of veto if it believes the surrender of a fugitive would harm the “defence, foreign affairs or essential public interest or policy” of the People’s Republic of China. In short, the treaty makes Snowden’s fate a matter of political expediency not just in Hong Kong but in Beijing …

The combination of a comparatively liberal civic culture and the sovereignty of Beijing, America’s great Pacific rival with which it has an often testy relationship, seems to have been a factor in Snowden’s choice of Hong Kong. It may play to his advantage that Presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping reportedly agreed to differ on cybersecurity issues in their weekend summit in California. Against this background, Snowden’s extradition might be seen in the party leadership in Beijing as a capitulation. But such calculations can change.

• The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill asked Snowden a number of key questions over several days. Here are his answers in Q&A form. They include:

Q: Why did you decide to become a whistleblower?

A: “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

Q: What about the Obama administration‘s protests about hacking by China?

A: “We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world. We are not at war with these countries.”

Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?

A: “You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.”

Q: Washington-based foreign affairs analyst Steve Clemons said he overheard at the capital’s Dulles airport four men discussing an intelligence conference they had just attended. Speaking about the leaks, one of them said, according to Clemons, that both the reporter and leaker should be “disappeared”. How do you feel about that?

A: “Someone responding to the story said ‘real spies do not speak like that’. Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk. Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process – they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general.”

David Cameron has been speaking about the cooperation and involvement of the UK’s GCHQ intelligence agency with the US Prism programme.

He emphasised repeatedly that the British security services operated within UK law (“a law that we have laid down”).

The British prime minister said:

First of all I think it’s worth remembering why we have intelligence services and what they do for us.

We do live in a dangerous world. We live in a world of terror and terrorism. We saw that on the streets of Woolwich only too recently.

And I think it is right that we have well-organised, well-funded intelligence services to help keep us safe.

But let me be absolutely clear. They are intelligence services that operate within the law, within a law that we have laid down, and they are also subject to proper scrutiny by the intelligence and security committee in the House of Commons.

And that scrutiny is going to be very important, and I’ll always make sure that it takes place.

He was asked how long GCHQ had been cooperating with Prism, and said the foreign secretary, William Hague, would “answer all these questions” in a statement to the Commons expected this afternoon at 3.30pm. But he added:

Let us be clear. We can’t give a running commentary on intelligence issues.

There will be things that he will be able to explain, questions he will be able to answer. I’m satisfied, as I’ve said, we have intelligence agencies that do a fantastically important job for this country to keep us safe and they operate within the law. They operate within a legal framework and they also operate within a framework of being open to proper scrutiny by the intelligence and security committee.

That is what the foreign secretary will discuss today in the House of Commons. And he and I have discussed this matter, will continue to discuss this matter, always to make sure that we are satisfied that they operate properly in our interests and within the law.

Good morning.

On Sunday the Guardian revealed the source behind its series of stories on the US National Security Agency – one of the most significant leaks in US political history.

Edward Snowden, 29, revealed his identity at his own request.

Here he talks about why he revealed the existence of the US’s Prism programme, which gives the NSA direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants:

I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.

You can watch Snowden – who is now in Hong Kong – speaking about his decision to go public and his thoughts about the US government’s probable reaction might be in this video interview.

We’ll have full coverage of the continuing fallout from the revelations here throughout the day.