American whistleblower Edward Snowden has attacked his Russian protectors by criticizing the government's human rights record and suggesting that its officials have been involved in hacks on US security networks. Snowden's criticism, which came in an interview in the Financial Times, called the Russian government's online surveillance of its citizens "costly and corrosive to individual and collective rights." Snowden, a former CIA contractor, has been living in Russia since he fled the US via Hong Kong in 2013, carrying documents that revealed the NSA's mass surveillance program PRISM.