US President Barack Obama said Monday that the US authorities would pursue extradition of the whistleblower Edward Snowden from Hong Kong.

Edward Snowden [People.com.cn]

"The case has been referred to the DOJ for criminal investigation … and possible extradition. I will leave it up to them to answer those questions," Obama said in an interview with the Public Broadcasting Service(PBS) while attending the G8 summit in Northern Ireland.

Hong Kong Chief Executive CY Leung said on Monday that the HK Government will handle the Snowden case in strict accordance with the law and established procedures, and the facts.

In an online chat with the Guardian on Monday Snowden expressed his disappointment with the President. "Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly."

"Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge," he added.

Snowden believed that his disclosure "provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men."

He urged the president to look into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leap forward into it.

He also suggested the president calling for "a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous 'State Secrets' privilege."

Obama told the PBS that he had set up "a privacy and civil liberties oversight board, made up of independent citizens including some fierce civil libertarians."

Despite harsh criticism from the public since the disclosure of the surveillance program, the President continued to defend the program, "My concern has always been not that we shouldn't do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances."

But he said it was a "false choice" to say that American freedoms needed to be sacrificed for national security.

"That doesn't mean that there are not tradeoffs involved in any given program, in any given action that we take," he continued.

"To say there's a tradeoff doesn't mean somehow that we've abandoned freedom," he said, adding that it was his job to "make sure that we're making the right tradeoffs".

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