They think I still have smoking gun: Snowden on US government's fears
Former NSA contractor sees a government in fear because 'they don't know what was taken'
Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed mass cybersurveillance by American and British spy agencies, says the US government fears the most damaging leaks are yet to come.
"I think they think there's a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically," Snowden said in a new interview with , a monthly US technology magazine.
Speaking from Russia where he was granted temporary asylum in June 2013 after leaving Hong Kong, Snowden said the NSA's audit of what he took had wrongly included all the documents he had simply "touched", putting the total estimate at a staggering 1.7 million papers.
"The fact that the government's investigation failed - that they don't know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers - implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, 'Holy s**t'.
"And they think it's still out there."
In the interview, Snowden recalls taking a flight from Hawaii - where he worked for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton - to Hong Kong in May 2013 to reveal himself to reporters as the source of the leaks.
