Holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room awaiting possible extradition to the United States, 29-year-old Edward Snowden defends his decision to leak details of Prism, a top-secret American surveillance program.

“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” the source, Edward Snowden, told Britain’s the Guardian, one of the papers that broke stories on the program last week. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

A former technical assistant for the CIA, Snowden most recently worked for the National Security Agency. Knowing the fallout that awaited him for leaking top-secret information to the press, Snowden walked away from a six-figure job with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii to hide in Hong Kong. Based on his tips, the Guardian reported June 5 that Verizon was ordered to provide the NSA with telephone records detailing every call made from April 25 to July 19.

Snowden also disclosed the existence of Prism, a 6-year-old program that allows the NSA to obtain records of “audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents” and other information from the main servers of nine US internet firms, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple. Snowden decided to share the classified information because Prism poses “an existential threat to democracy.”

“I don’t see myself as a hero, because what I’m doing is self-interested,” he said. “I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.“

The consequences to Snowden are likely to be severe. House Homeland Security subcommittee chairman, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), has already called for Snowden’s prosecution.

“If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date,” King said in a written statement. “The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence.“

So why did Snowden step forward? He told the Guardian he’s done nothing wrong. The high-school dropout—who later earned his GED—said he “carefully evaluated every single document (he) disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” adding that he was aware of “all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact” that he didn’t provide since he had no intention of harming anyone.

Despite what one might expect, Snowden is no expatriate. In fact, he served in the US Army before two broken legs led to his early discharge. And he doesn’t question the honorable intentions of those working for the NSA. But he firmly believes their efforts have overreached.

“The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for a period of time,” he explained. “It’s getting to the point, you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they could use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”