Holder promises Snowden will face justice

US attorney-general Eric Holder has vowed to bring Edward Snowden to justice, accusing the former intelligence contractor who leaked information on top-secret surveillance programmes of endangering the safety of Americans and their allies.

Speaking in Dublin ahead of the G8 summit, Mr Holder said the actions taken by the 29-year-old now believed to be in hiding in Hong Kong had damaged “the safety of the American people”.

“The national security of the United States has been damaged as a result of those leaks,” he told reporters on Friday. “The safety of the American people [and] the safety of people who reside in allied nations have been put at risk as a result of these leaks.”

His comments came as European politicians continued to raise concerns about the disclosure, first reported earlier this month in The Guardian and The Washington Post, that the US National Security Agency was working with Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies to monitor foreigners’ emails abroad.

Viviane Reding, the EU justice commissioner, said she had reached an agreement with Mr Holder to form a transatlantic group of experts to address questions raised by the disclosure of the “Prism” programme. She also linked the disclosure to continuing negotiations over an agreement on the exchange of data between American and European law enforcement agencies.

“For us Europeans [the issue] is very essential,” she said. “Even if there is a national security issue, it cannot be at the expense of the fundamental rights of EU citizens.”

The meeting in Ireland came as the South China Morning Post on Friday published new details of an interview with Mr Snowden, in which he provided evidence he claimed was of specific attacks by the NSA against individual computer internet addresses in both Hong Kong and mainland China.

The newspaper said the records, which it could not verify independently, showed specific dates and the IP addresses of computers that had been targeted over the past four years, as well as information about whether the attack was continuing.

Mr Snowden’s decision to hand over the information to the newspaper could be an attempt to rally public opinion in Hong Kong to his cause. He has said he hopes Hong Kong’s courts will reject any US attempt to extradite him.

The Chinese University – one of the alleged targets according to Mr Snowden – is home to the Hong Kong Internet Exchange (HKIX), which is a central hub for local internet traffic in Hong Kong.

The university said it had no evidence that its network had been hacked. “Every effort is made to protect the university’s backbone network as well as the HKIX, which are closely monitored round the clock to ensure normal operation and defend against network threats,” it said. “The university has not detected any form of hacking to the network, which has been running normally.”

Mr Snowden’s leak to the South China Morning Post was interpreted by some as an attempt to send a message to the US government that he has more sensitive information he can leak if it pursues him aggressively. According to Glenn Greenwald, a journalist with The Guardian who received some of the leaked documents, Mr Snowden said he would use other records in his possession to protect himself.

However, the mere suggestion that he is passing sensitive information to the Hong Kong or Chinese authorities could endanger some of the political support he might have in the US, where opinions are divided over the leaks.

Several leading US politicians have raised questions about Mr Snowden’s connections with China in recent days.

“We are going to make sure that there’s a thorough scrub of what his China connections are,” Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee, said on Thursday. “We need to ask a lot more questions about his motives and his connections – where he ended up, why he is there, how is he sustaining himself while he is there and is the Chinese government fully co-operating?”