Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former CIA engineer currently said to be hiding out in Hong Kong, has claimed that the U.S. National Security Agency has been hacking computer and telecommunications networks in China since 2009, lifting the lid on the U.S. longtime cyber operations in China and putting the U.S. in an embarrassing position.

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old American intelligence contractor, has revealed himself as the source who disclosed the U.S. government's secret phone and Internet surveillance programs.

Snowden, the man who gave out top-secret documents to British newspaper The Guardian, told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post in an interview that one of the surveillance targets included Hong Kong's Chinese University and public officials, businesses and students.

The Hong Kong newspaper reported that according to a number of confidential sources, a highly secretive unit of NSA, called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, has successfully been penetrating Chinese computer systems for almost 15 years, generating some of the best and most reliable intelligence information about what is going on inside China.

Snowden said he believed there have been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally.

"We hack network backbones – such huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he said.

Earlier last week, The Guardian revealed that NSA has developed a tool to analyze and map the intelligence it collects from computer and telephone networks, according to documents the newspaper had acquired.

If Snowden's allegations are true, they support China's image more as one of a victim of hacking than as an attacker.

Ironically, at the summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama last week, Obama pressed Xi to control China's cyber espionage by the nation's military.

As the scandal is brewing, the U.S. is panning to file criminal charges against Snowden, which in turn would lead to extradition proceedings in order to bring him back to the country for trial and eventually jail.

Profile of Edward Joseph Snowden

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American former technical contractor and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) before disclosing details of a classified NSA spy program to the press.

Snowden released classified material on top-secret NSA programs including the PRISM surveillance program (a clandestine national security electronic surveillance program operated by NSA since 2007) to The Guardian and The Washington Post in June 2013.

Snowden said his disclosure of PRISM and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) orders related to NSA data capture efforts was an effort to expose what he believes is excessive government surveillance of the American people. [Source: Wikipedia]