Edward Snowden: It was worth it

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on Saturday defended his disclosure of reams of classified information and said his actions were worth fleeing his seemingly idyllic life in Hawaii and ending up in hiding in Russia, where he was joined by his girlfriend in July.

“It was about getting the information back to people so they could decide if they cared about it, and on that account … I could not have been more wrong in thinking that people wouldn’t care,” he said. But he also suggested that if he had been a journalist handling the leaked documents, he would have been more conservative than some of the reporters who wrote about the surveillance programs.