Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper has published less than one per cent of the information leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden and kept the rest secure, editor Alan Rusbridger said.

Summoned by Parliament’s home affairs select committee as part of its counter-terrorism in­quiry, Rusbridger defended his decision to publish the leaks as some MPs suggested he had helped terrorists by making top secret information public and by transmitting it to other news organisations.

“We have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we’ve seen, or 58,000 plus. So we have made very selective judgements about what to print,” he said. “We have published no names and we have lost control of no names.”

The Guardian was among several newspapers which published leaks from US spy agency contractor Snowden about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ.

Guardian articles over the last six months have shown that the United States and some of its allies, including Britain, were monitoring phone, e-mail and social media communications on a previously unimagined scale.

The revelations provoked diplomatic rows and stirred an inter­national debate on civil liberties.

Britain’s security chiefs have said the leaked data had put lives at risk and the country’s enemies were “rubbing their hands with glee”.

Snowden, who is believed to have downloaded between 50,000 and 200,000 classified NSA and British government documents, is living in Russia under temporary asylum. He has been charged in the US under the Espionage Act.