Former NSA whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden has been granted documents that will allow him to leave a Moscow airport where he has been for the last month, Reuters and Russian media report.
BBC notes that Russia's Federal Migration Service will soon issue a document granting him rights as a Russian citizen.
But Snowden's lawyer saysSnowden won't leave the airport today and will remain in the transit zone until paperwork is finalized.
On Tuesday his Moscow lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said that if Snowden is granted a one-year temporary asylum, the term "can be prolonged for another year and this can be repeated an indefinite number of times afterwards."
“He’s planning to arrange his life here. He plans to get a job," Kucherena, who has links to the country's intelligence service (i.e. FSB), told RT. "And, I think, that all his further decisions will be made considering the situation he found himself in.”
Snowden is an elite hacker, trained by the NSA, who gained access and "carefully read" 10,000 classified NSA files. Furthermore, Snowden knows his way around the vetting process of the world's largest spy agency.
"Snowden is a nightmare," Robert Caruso, a former assistant command security manager in the Navy and consultant, told Business Insider. "While he didn't give away the Crown Jewels, he has certainly behaved irresponsibly. Snowden has claimed to be in possession of classified and compartmented material. This will be a headache for our counterintelligence professionals across government."
When he arrived, a radio host in Moscow "saw about 20 Russian officials, supposedly FSB agents, in suits, crowding around somebody in a restricted area of the airport," according to Anna Nemtsova of Foreign Policy.
"The safest place would be a GRU [Russian military intelligence] apartment," Moscow political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin told Foreign Policy after Snowden arrived.
"Snowden has given foreign intelligence services ample opportunity to exploit what he knows," Caruso told BI. "It's hard to overestimate how irresponsible he is."
Snowden's disclosures to newspapers around the world have resulted in the exposure of concrete evidence detailing a U.S. domestic spying apparatus of questionable effectiveness that for years has benefitted from weakoversight and misdirection to harvest data.
Furthermore, the classified documents — one of the largest leaks of intelligence in U.S. history — informed the rest of the world that the NSA, often in cooperation with governments, is collecting their communications too.
On July 12, after Snowden accepted all offers for asylum, former senior U.S. intelligence analyst Joshua Foust wrote that the "involvement of known FSB operatives at [Snowden's] asylum acceptance ... suggests this was a textbook [Russian] intelligence operation, and not a brave plea for asylum from political persecution."
Now he has recieved a certificate that will “guarantee him the same rights and freedoms possessed by the citizens of the Russian Federation,” according to Kucherena, and is in the jurisdiction of Russian masters of human exploitation.
“We must understand that security is the number one issue in his case," Kucherena told RT. "I think the process of adaptation will take some time. It’s an understandable process as he doesn’t know the Russian language, our customs, and our laws.”
SEE ALSO: Snowden's Moscow Lawyer: NSA Leaker Is Planning To Live In Russia And Get A Job
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