NEW YORK, June 21 (UPI) -- Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak says he admires Edward Snowden, the man who blew the whistle on U.S. monitoring of citizens.
Wozniak compared Snowden to Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s.
"I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot," he said in an interview on CNN.
Wozniak said he was not the kind of person to "just take sides in the world -- 'I'm always against anything government, any three letter agency,' or 'I'm for them.'"
He said he was disturbed by the revelations of the U.S. government's actions in collecting massive amounts of information on it citizens.
"Read the facts: it's government of, by and for the people" he said. "We own the government; we are the ones who pay for it and then we discover something that our money is being used for -- that just can't be, that level of crime."
Wozniak admitted he's bothered that technologies he helped develop have made such activities possible.
"I actually feel a little guilty about that -- but not totally. We created the computers to free the people up, give them instant communication anywhere in the world; any thought you had, you could share freely.
"We didn't realize that in the digital world there were a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us, to make things possible that weren't," he said.
