Edward Snowden‘s admirable intentions to leak some confidential documents while contracted to the NSA shot the systems-analyst to worldwide infamy; and he has now revealed his thoughts in his first interview with a US outlet.

After being called a “traitor” who “betrayed his country” by  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Snowden said that he still believes himself to be a patriot above all.

Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else. Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country, knowing when to protect your Constitution, knowing when to protect your countrymen, from the violations of and encroachments of adversaries. And those adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries.

Interestingly, Snowden, being referred to as a number of different things throughout his criticism, proved that looks really can be deceiving, and revealed that he had been trained as a spy.

I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine.

When asked WHY he leaked the documents, Snowden responded saying that, morally, he had no choice, and even tried going through the official channels with his intent.

The reality is, the situation determined that this needed to be told to the public. The Constitution of the United States had been violated on a massive scale. Now, had that not happened, had the government not gone too far and overreached, we wouldn’t be in a situation where whistleblowers were necessary.

I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities,” Snowden said. “And the response, more or less, in bureaucratic language was, ‘you should stop asking questions.

And most importantly, he’s just like us: spending his time watching TV shows like the Wire, even though the second season is “not so great” according to Snowden.

[source: CNN]