Snowden vows to fight extradition for NSA phone spying leak WASHINGTON, June 12 (UPI) -- Ex-CIA analyst Edward Snowden says the U.S. government has been hacking to gain information from hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide for years. In an interview with the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, Snowden said the National Security Agency has attacked the computers of non-military targets, including Chinese public officials, businesses, academics and students, since 2009. Snowden said he believes there are more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, the Post said. "We hack network backbones -- like huge Internet routers, basically -- that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," Snowden told the Post. Snowden defended his actions in revealing the U.S. secret telephone metadata-gathering program. I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American," he told the Post. Interviewed in Hong Kong, Snowden said he picked the city because "I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality." A Gallup poll Wednesday showed a majority of Americans disapprove of the federal government's domestic telephone data mining program by a 53 percent to 37 percent margin. The Princeton, N.J., polling company conducted its survey Monday and Tuesday. Democrats (49 percent) were more likely to approve of the surveillance than Independents (34 percent) or Republicans (32 percent). Gallup didn't provide a margin of error in its release. Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States, but Snowden vowed to fight any attempt to send him to America for trial. "My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate," he said. CBS reported Snowden had left Hong Kong. Former Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, told Fox News Tuesday he feared Snowden would be targeted for assassination by a cruise missile or a drone rocket. "I mean, we live in a bad time where American citizens don't even have rights and that they can be killed, but the gentleman is trying to tell the truth about what's going on," CBS quoted Paul as saying. In the wake of the revelations, high-tech giants this week called on Washington to make public more information about the spying programs and lift gag orders about Internet data collection. At the same time, a bipartisan group of eight senators announced a bill to declassify the secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions that give the NSA the legal power to carry out the sweeping Internet surveillance programs. But they said the NSA has also collected data on U.S. citizens and residents that under certain circumstances can be reviewed by officials.