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Edward Snowden, the former CIA and Booz Allen computer security technician who says he leaked information about National Security Agency surveillance programs, has told The Guardian that he wants "to seek asylum in a country with shared values."

"The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland," he added, during an interview in Hong Kong, to which he has fled. "They stood up for people over Internet freedom."

Snowden's comment about "Internet freedom" is almost surely a reference to the help Iceland has given to WikiLeaks — the destination of choice for leakers such as U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning. That's an organization that knows firsthand about seeking asylum. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living at the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a year as he seeks to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he's wanted for questioning in a case involving alleged sexual assaults.

Iceland's most recent move that lent support to WikiLeaks was an April Supreme Court decision that "ordered Valitor hf, the Icelandic partner of MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc., to process card payments for [the] anti-secrecy website ... within 15 days or face daily penalties," Bloomberg News says. So, as other nations have tried to put roadblocks in WikiLeaks' way by cutting off its access to funds, Iceland has gone the opposite direction.

In February, Digital Journal reported, Iceland's interior minister ordered the deportation of FBI agents who had come to the nation — without notice — to question a WikiLeaks associate. And Digital Journal added that:

China's central government might intervene to say he can't be sent elsewhere, but barring such action a request from the U.S. could mean he'd be sent back to face prosecution.

Authorities in Hong Kong also may not allow Snowden to get to a place where he could apply for asylum in Iceland. Kristn rnadttir, the Icelandic ambassador in Beijing, has reportedly said in an email to the South China Morning Post that Snowden would need to be in Iceland to make such an request.

But, Iceland has intervened before to convince a third country to let it give safe haven to someone wanted in the U.S. — without first requiring that the asylum-seeker get to its territory.

In 2004 and 2005, former chess champion Bobby Fischer spent nine months in a Japanese prison. He was held there for trying to leave the country without a valid passport. Meanwhile, the U.S. wanted to take Fischer into custody because he had once played in a chess match in Yugoslavia — allegedly violating U.N. sanctions then in place against that country.

Iceland gave Fischer citizenship. Japan decided that was where he should go. Fischer died in Iceland in 2008.

Watch for more about Snowden, extradition law and the rules of asylum on the Parallels blog.