Former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden reportedly used login credentials provided by his colleagues at a spy base in Hawaii to access classified material he leaked to the media. Reuters on Friday reported that NSA's employees at the agency's regional operations center in Hawaii who gave their login details to Snowden were questioned and removed from their assignments.

NSA had failed to install the most up-to-date, anti-leak software at the Hawaii site before Snowden went to work there and downloaded classified documents.

Since then, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill intended in part to tighten security over U.S. intelligence data.

The United States' alleged large-scale surveillance of global communications networks has prompted outcry and angry calls to the U.S. for explanations from countries around the world, which were said to be monitored by NSA.

Speaking at a Thursday IT event in Norway, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, said that large-scale surveillance of global communications networks would badly harm the U.S. cloud computing industry but also posed a threat to Internet freedoms.