Edward Snowden: 'If I could go anywhere that place would be home'

One year after revealing himself as the source of the biggest intelligence leak in US history, Edward Snowden appeared in a long network television interview on Wednesday to describe himself as an American patriot and to make the case that his disclosures were motivated by a desire to help the country.

In his most extensive public comments to date Snowden sought to answer critics who have said his actions damaged US national security or that the threat from the secret government surveillance he revealed was overblown. Snowden was interviewed by the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who travelled to Moscow for the meeting.

Snowden defended his decision to leak documents to the press, instead of restricting his complaints to internal channels, and explained why he had decided for the moment not to travel back to the United States to face criminal charges.

“If I could go anywhere in the world that place would be home,” Snowdentold Williams. “I’ve from day one said that I’m doing this to serve my country … I don’t think there’s ever been any question that I’d like to go home.”

Snowden said he had not second-guessed his decision, however, to release an estimated 1.7m top secret government documents. “My priority is not about myself,” Snowden said. “It’s about making sure that these programs are reformed – and that the family that I left behind, the country that I left behind – can be helped by my actions.”

The interview, which took place at Kempinski Hotel in Moscow last week, followed months of negotiations between the news network and representatives of Snowden. The conversation, which was held in a library and lasted more than four hours, was billed as Snowden's first interview with a US television network.

Snowden has regularly participated in interviews over the last year, although never on such a large stage, or on one as likely to bring his words – and his argument – into American living rooms. NBC Nightly News, which ran clips from the interview, drew about 8.4m total viewersper night in May.

On Wednesday Snowden, 30, described for the first time his experience of the 9/11 terror attacks and talked about his views on the threat of terrorism.

“I’ve never told anybody this,” he said. “No journalist. But I was on Fort Meade [Maryland] on September 11th. I was right outside the NSA. So I remember – I remember the tension of that day. I remember hearing on the radio the planes hitting. And I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it.

“I take the threat of terrorism seriously. And I think we all do. And I think it’s really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort of scandalize our memories, to sort of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up and our constitution says we should not give up.”

Snowden said he did not consider himself blameless. “I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout history where what is right is not the same as what is legal,” he said. “Sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break a law.”

In a Pew Research poll of Americans earlier this year 57% of 18 to 29-year-olds said Snowden’s leaks had served the public interest but respondents 65 and over disagreed. A majority of respondents in older age groups supported prosecuting Snowden, while the 18-29 group split 42-42% on the question.

As much as he wanted to return home, Snowden said, he did not plan “to walk into a jail cell”. He repeated a view explained elsewhere by his legal counsel that the charges he faces under the 1917 Espionage Act would not allow him to mount a defense that he had acted in the public interest.

“These are things that no individual should empower himself to really decide, you know, ‘I’m gonna give myself a parade,’” Snowden said in reply to a question about how he judged his actions. “But neither am I going to walk into a jail cell, to serve as a bad example for other people in government who see something happening, some violation of the constitution, and think they need to say something about it.”

In the year he has lived in Russia as a fugitive from US law, Snowden said, he had not met President Vladimir Putin. “I have no relationship with the Russian government at all,” he said.

NBC News said it had confirmed “with multiple sources” that before he took the story to the press Snowden had raised a concern about possibly illegal surveillance on at least one occasion with intelligence agency superiors. Snowden said he had advanced his concerns on multiple occasions, even sending emails to the office of the NSA general counsel, and that the NSA would have a paper trail. The NSA has denied Snowden took such steps.

Snowden said he remained comfortable with the decision he made.

"I may have lost the ability to travel but I've gained the ability to fall asleep at night and know I've done the right thing and I'm comfortable with that.”

• This story was amended on 29 May to clarify that Snowden did use internal government channels to raise his concerns.

VIDEO: Rapper 50 Cent throws worst first pitch you'll ever see

Multi-platinum rapper and New York City native Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson was invited to toss out the first pitch at a New York Mets game on Tuesday. The result was something just a bit outside.

Jackson's errant throw has made its way around the Internet quickly, making many understand why he's in the music business and not sports.

Fifty's net worth was listed around $140 million by Forbes in 2014, so he probably doesn't have a lot of time to worry about tossing baseballs.

Maya Angelou: cook, prostitute and literary trailblazer

Was there anything Maya Angelou didn’t do? Anyone she didn’t know? Any significant moment of black American history from the last 86 years that passed her by?

When Joe Louis fought Primo Carnera in 1935, she was a child in Arkansas listening to the radio and wondering "if the announcer gave any thought to the fact that he was addressing as ‘ladies and gentlemen’ all the Negroes around the world who sat sweating and praying, glued to their ‘master’s voice'". In 1958 she was in Los Angeles when Billie Holiday visited her house and sang Strange Fruit. Angelou had to scold her son for interrupting to ask "What’s a pastoral scene, Miss Holiday?", but Holiday’s "scornful" answer – "it means when the crackers are killing the niggers" – reveals another historical moment.

When she was 16 Angelou became San Francisco’s first African-American streetcar conductor. Her friends included Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, she recited a poem that urged Americans "to give birth again / To the dream". In 2010 Barack Obama awarded Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour. Is it surprising to learn that her most famous poem is entitled "Phenomenal Woman"?

But it’s not her poems nor her performances that will ensure Angelou a place in American literary history, but her autobiographies, particularly the first of the seven, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969 at the height of the radical Black Arts movement.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings explores the poverty and violence of racial segregation in 1930s Arkansas and relates the story of Angelou’s rape at the age of seven by a boyfriend of her mother. Angelou testified at the man's trial but he was released and kicked to death outside the courthouse. In response Angelou stopped speaking for five years, believing that her voice was a "killing machine". "When I pick up the pen to write," she told an interviewer once, "I have to scrape it across those scars to sharpen the point." Harold Bloom has spoken of her "almost unique tone" as one that "blends intimacy and detachment".

The story Angelou tells is both personal and historical; something she later acknowledged as linking her work to the great tradition of African-American autobiography, from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X: "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'. And what a responsibility." Like Douglass and Malcolm, Angelou tells a story of transformation and reinvention. If her story begins in segregation, violence and silence, it moves towards recovery and the discovery of a voice.

As she relates it, the turning point in Angelou’s life came when she heard her teacher, Mrs Flowers, read from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: "Her voice slid in and curved down through and over the words. She was nearly singing."

What was new, in 1969, was to have that voice be that of a black woman. Angelou was one of the trailblazers. In 1970 both Toni Morrison and Alice Walker published their first novels. While Walker and particularly Morrison would go on to greater success, Angelou was never to receive as much critical acclaim for her subsequent memoirs. But if none of the later volumes can match the horror and poignancy of the story of her childhood, they retain its cool wit and sharp observational skill. Angelou’s method was anecdotal, but what anecdotes she had to relate.

By the time she was 19, she had worked as a short-order cook, a prostitute, a nightclub waitress and dancer, and had a two-year-old son to support. Many more jobs and relationships followed, before she became a successful dancer, singer and actor, adapting her first husband’s name to become, finally, Maya Angelou. And that was only the start. We read of meetings with Martin Luther King, life as a journalist in Ghana and an editor in Egypt, directing plays and films, playing the part of Kunte Kinte’s grandmother in the acclaimed television adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots, romance, motherhood and inspiration.

While she eventually became a kind of one-woman industry, lending her name to all manner of inspirational souvenirs, including a series of Hallmark cards, and acting as mentor for another phenomenon, Oprah Winfrey, Angelou will finally be remembered for writing one of the definitive accounts of what it meant to be a black woman in America during a period of immense change. As she told the thousands gathered below the Capitol building in 1993:

History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, and if faced

With courage, need not be lived again.