WASHINGTON - The United States has charged National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden with espionage and is seeking his return to stand trial, officials said.
Federal prosecutors charged Snowden, believed to be in Hong Kong, with one count of theft of government property and two counts of giving national defence information to someone without a security clearance and revealing classified information about ‘communications intelligence’, according to American media reports. He faces a maximum of 30 years in prison.
The US government also has filed a ‘provisional arrest warrant’ seeking Snowden's arrest in Hong Kong and his eventual extradition to the United States.
Snowden worked for contractor Booz Allen Hamilton when he provided details to Britain's The Guardian newspaper and The Washington Post about the NSA's phone and Internet surveillance programmes. A probe of the background check performed on Snowden may itself have been faulty, a government inspector general told lawmakers earlier.
"We do believe that there may be some problems" with the reinvestigation of Snowden's background check, Office of Personnel Management Inspector General Patrick McFarland told a Senate panel when asked by Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat, if he had concerns the background-check reinvestigation wasn't carried out appropriately. McFarland did not elaborate on what the problems might have been.
But he said his office was investigating US Investigative Services (USIS), a company that handles nearly half of the US government's contracted background checks, for contract fraud.
The company conducted the reinvestigation into Snowden in 2011, he said.
USIS, which calls itself "the leader in federal background investigations," said in a statement it received a subpoena for records from McFarland's office in January 2012. It said it "has cooperated fully" with the government's civil investigation but said it has not been told it is under criminal investigation.
USIS would not comment on whether it conducted any investigations into Snowden, saying those investigations are confidential and under investigation, the Federal Times publication reported. Snowden fled his base in Hawaii for Hong Kong last month and then leaked the NSA information.
Booz Allen has said it "will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter."
Agencies add: The charges against Snowden are the government's first step in what could be a long legal battle to return Snowden from Hong Kong and try him in a US court. A Hong Kong newspaper said he was under police protection, but the territory's authorities declined to comment.
Snowden was charged with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person, said the criminal complaint, which was dated June 14.
The latter two offenses fall under the US Espionage Act and carry penalties of fines and up to 10 years in prison.
A single page of the complaint was unsealed on Friday. An accompanying affidavit remained under seal.
Two US sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States was preparing to seek Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong, which is part of China but has wide-ranging autonomy, including an independent judiciary.
The Washington Post, which first reported the criminal complaint earlier on Friday, said the United States had asked Hong Kong to detain Snowden on a provisional arrest warrant. Hong Kong's Chinese-language Apple Daily quoted police sources as saying that anti-terrorism officers had contacted Snowden, arranged a safe house for him and provided protection. However, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) said Snowden was not in police protection but was in a "safe place" in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong Police Commissioner Andy Tsang declined to comment other than to say Hong Kong would deal with the case in accordance with the law.
On Saturday, Hong Kong's SCMP said Snowden had divulged information to the newspaper showing how computers in Hong Kong and China had been targeted.
The SCMP said documents and statements by Snowden show the NSA programme had hacked major Chinese telecoms companies to access text messages, attacked China's top Tsinghua University, and hacked the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet, which has an extensive fibre optic submarine network.
The criminal complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, where Snowden's former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is located.
That judicial district has seen a number of high-profile prosecutions, including the spy case against former FBI agent Robert Hanssen and the case of Al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui. Both were convicted.
Documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA has access to vast amounts of Internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies such as Facebook and Google, under a government programme known as Prism.
They also showed that the government had worked through the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to gather so-called metadata - such as the time, duration and telephone numbers called - on all calls carried by service providers such as Verizon.
President Barack Obama and his intelligence chiefs have vigorously defended the programmes, saying they are regulated by law and that Congress was notified. They say the programmes have been used to thwart militant plots and do not target Americans' personal lives.
US federal prosecutors, by filing a criminal complaint, lay claim to a legal basis to make an extradition request of the authorities in Hong Kong, the Post reported. The prosecutors now have 60 days to file an indictment and can then take steps to secure Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong for a criminal trial in the United States, the newspaper reported.