Donate Take action! Who Is Edward Snowden? Quick facts For quick access to information on all aspects concerning Edward Snowden and his case, please read our Frequently asked questions page. Edward Snowden: Sam Adams Award Snowden talks at the Sam Adams Award award ceremony in October about the secret surveillance he revealed and its dangers to democracy.
It turns out, however, that the IT guy, in an institution whose currency is information, is one of the most powerful people in the org chart. Snowden was, in fact, one of the young IT elite, deeply aware of the generational divide that helped put him in that role. In one passage from a period he spent working at a CIA data center, he describes, with conscious immodesty, his daily walk past an array of IT help desk staffers on his way into a more highly classified compartment of secrets inside the building.
So my very job was to know what sharable information was out there. At one point early in his NSA career, Snowden writes that he was asked to use his deep access to assemble a counterintelligence presentation on Chinese surveillance and internet control—one of the first moments when he began to wonder how exactly the equivalent US systems of internet surveillance might compare. But on that point, Snowden remains a kind of First Amendment absolutist.
That story climaxes in a tense meeting between Snowden and an officer of the FSB in the Moscow airport. The official does his best, briefly, to turn Snowden into a Russian intelligence asset.
Snowden writes that he interrupted to decline before the pitch was even finished, the better to avoid any unscrupulous editing of hidden recordings of the meeting. Snowden flatly denies that he has had any other interactions with Russian intelligence since. After all, he never brought a single NSA document to Russia.
If he has to spend the rest of his life in Russia, on the other hand, so be it, he says. The U. Snowden has found asylum in Russia and continues to speak about his work. Citizenfour , a documentary by Laura Poitras about his story, won an Oscar in He is also the subject of Snowden , a biopic directed by Oliver Stone and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and has published a memoir, Permanent Record. His mother works for the federal court in Baltimore the family moved to Maryland during Snowden's youth as chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology.
Snowden's father, a former Coast Guard officer, later relocated to Pennsylvania and remarried. Edward Snowden dropped out of high school and studied computers at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland from to , and again from to Between his stints at community college, Snowden spent four months from May to September in special-forces training in the Army Reserves, but he did not complete his training.
Edward Snowden during an interview in Hong Kong in Photo: The Guardian via Getty Images. Snowden eventually landed a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language. The institution had ties to the National Security Agency, and, by , Snowden had taken an information-technology job at the Central Intelligence Agency.
In , after being suspected of trying to break into classified files, he left to work for private contractors, among them Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, a tech consulting firm. While at Dell, he worked as a subcontractor in an NSA office in Japan before being transferred to an office in Hawaii. After a short time, he moved from Dell to Booz Allen, another NSA subcontractor, and remained with the company for only three months.
While working for Booz Allen, Snowden began copying top-secret NSA documents, building a dossier on practices that he found invasive and disturbing. The documents contained vast information on the NSA's domestic surveillance practices. After he had compiled a large store of documents, Snowden told his NSA supervisor that he needed a leave of absence for medical reasons, stating he had been diagnosed with epilepsy.
On May 20, , Snowden took a flight to Hong Kong, China, where he remained as he orchestrated a clandestine meeting with journalists from the U. On June 5, The Guardian released secret documents obtained from Snowden. In these documents, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court implemented an order that required Verizon to release information to the NSA on an "ongoing, daily basis" culled from its American customers' phone activities.
A flood of information followed, and both domestic and international debate ensued. The fallout from his disclosures continued to unfold over the next months, including a legal battle over the collection of phone data by the NSA. President Obama sought to calm fears over government spying in January , ordering U.
Attorney General Eric Holder to review the country's surveillance programs. On June 14, , federal prosecutors charged Snowden with "theft of government Property," "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.
The last two charges fall under the Espionage Act. Before President Barack Obama took office, the act had only been used for prosecutorial purposes three times since Since President Obama took office, the act had been invoked seven times as of June While some decried Snowden as a traitor, others supported his cause.
More than , people signed an online petition asking President Obama to pardon Snowden by late June Snowden remained in hiding for slightly more than a month.
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