Edward Snowden to work for mystery Russian website
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to start job at "major Russian website", lawyer reveals
US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden will on Friday start working for a major Russian website, his lawyer said, sparking speculation his new employer could be Russia’s largest social network.
Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena declined to give the name of the company but attention centred on VKontakte, which is seen as the Russian equivalent of Facebook.
“Edward Snowden will start working at a big Russian company on Friday, November 1. His job will be to support and develop a major Russian website,” Kucherena told the Interfax news agency.
“We invite Edward Snowden to St Petersburg and will be glad if he decides to join the star team of programmers”
The charismatic founder of VKontakte Pavel Durov, often described as the Russian Mark Zuckerberg after the equally youthful Facebook founder, publicly offered Snowden a post in August.
“We invite Edward Snowden to St Petersburg and will be glad if he decides to join the star team of programmers,” Durov wrote on his social networking page on the same day as Snowden received asylum in the country.
Twenty-nine-year-old Durov, who co-founded the social networking service in 2006, suggested Snowden could work on “protecting the personal data of millions of our users”.
VKontakte, or In Touch, says it has over 100 million users.