National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has denied charges he is spying for China and vowed to release more details on the top-secret intelligence agency's ''direct access'' to tech companies' servers.
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''Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,'' Snowden said during a live blog on The Guardian website. He said the US government ''is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me''.
Mr Snowden, a former NSA contractor who fled the US after revealing top-secret details on the government's collection of Americans' phone and internet records, has said he ''does not expect to see home again''. He denied any plans to give information to China in exchange for asylum.
Former vice-president Dick Cheney told Fox News he thought Snowden was a ''traitor'' and warned the analyst might be spying for the Chinese government.
''Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honour you can give an American,'' Mr Snowden responded, ''and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Dianne] Feinstein, and [Peter] King, the better off we all are.''
He called Mr Cheney ''a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up'' for the war in Iraq. And he ridiculed Mr Cheney's claims he was a spy.
''Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now,'' he said.
China also denies allegations Mr Snowden is a spy, but has raised the possibility Beijing may intervene to halt his extradition to the United States.
Extraditing Mr Snowden would be ''unwise'', a Chinese state newspaper said, stating Beijing should ''safeguard its interests''.
The Global Times, one of the most strident state newspapers, published an editorial in its English and Chinese editions calling on Beijing not to return Mr Snowden.
In response to a question of why he fled to Hong Kong, Mr Snowden said the US government ''immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home'' and declared him guilty of treason. ''That's not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it,'' he wrote.
He also suggested it was easier to go to Hong Kong than risk being intercepted and arrested on the way to Iceland, another potential haven. He insisted that he had not revealed any US operations against military targets.
''I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals and private businesses because it is dangerous,'' he wrote. ''These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target.''
He also took a shot at the media coverage. ''Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.''
Mr Snowden also said Google, Facebook and other tech companies had been ''misleading'' in their denials of a giant government surveillance program called PRISM.
USA Today
