The US government is hacking Chinese mobile-phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages, Edward Snowden has told the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

US spies have also hacked China’s Tsinghua University in Beijing and Asia Pacific fibre-optic network operator Pacnet, the newspaper reported on Saturday quoting the former US…NSA contractor charged with espionage for exposing secret US surveillance activities…

The Post said Snowden had provided documents listing operational details of specific attacks on computers, including…IP addresses, over a four-year period…

The claims followed soon after a report in the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he claimed the British government’s electronic-eavesdropping agency had gained secret access to fibre-optic cables carrying global internet traffic and telephone calls…

The Post has previously quoted Snowden saying there have been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, targeting powerful “network backbones” that can yield access to hundreds of thousands of individual computers.

He said these included hundreds of targets in mainland China and Hong Kong.

Snowden told the Post in the report that Tsinghua University, which counts China’s President Xi Jinping and previous President Hu Jintao among its graduates, was the target of extensive hacking by the US.

The university, which is home to one of the mainland’s six major backbone networks from where internet data from millions of Chinese citizens can be gathered, was breached as recently as January, he said…

The latest disclosures come amid reports that the US was pressuring Hong Kong to act quickly on its request to extradite Snowden…

The extradition effort was a failure. Hong Kong rejected what it termed an illegal effort. Snowden flew out of Hong Kong this morning – on his way apparently to Ecuador via Moscow and Havana to seek asylum.

US authorities had earlier issued a provisional arrest warrant and filed espionage and other charges against Snowden…

Snowden was charged with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person, the document said.

The United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights is the property of the people. As such it must supersede all other laws. Laws used by our government to violate our rights and our privacy are not legitimate. They must fall by the wayside as shall the politicians and bureaucrats who support them over our constitutional liberties.