Edward Joseph Snowden (born
June 21, 1983) is an American whistleblower who copied and
leaked highly classified information from theNational Security Agency (NSA)
in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and
subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs,
many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the
cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and
prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA
contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the
CIA. Snowden says he gradually became
disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved and that he tried to
raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored. On May
20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in
Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to
journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to
international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The
Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by
other publications including Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
On June 21, 2013, the United States
Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of
violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following
which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he
flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, where Russian
authorities observed that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was
restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted
Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year,
and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020. In
early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a
San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect
journalists from hacking and government surveillance.
The exact size and scope of Snowden's
disclosure is unknown, The unclassified portion of a September 15, 2016 United
States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, estimated the
number of downloaded documents at 1.5 million. In a 2013 Associated Press interview,Glenn
Greenwald stated that Snowden's disclosures contained sensitive NSA blueprints
detailing how the NSA operates, and which would allow someone who read them
to evade NSA surveillance.
A subject of controversy, Snowden has
been variously called hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, a traitor, and a patriot.
Snowden has defended his leaks as an effort "to inform the public as
to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. U.S. officials condemned his actions as
having done "grave damage" to the U.S. intelligence capabilities.
On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent
Record was published. On
the first day of publication, the United States Department of Justice filed a
two-count civil lawsuit against Snowden over publication of his memoir,
alleging he had breached nondisclosure agreements signed with the U.S. federal
government. The United States prevailed
on December 17, 2019, in a summary judgement on both counts. Former Guardian national
security reporter Ewen MacAskill called the civil lawsuit a "huge
mistake", and said that the "UK ban of Spycatcher 30 years ago
created huge demand. The memoir was listed as no. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list
that same day. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on
September 26, 2019, Snowden clarified he considers himself a
"whistleblower" as opposed to a "leaker" as he said "a
leaker only distributes information for personal gain".
In 2017, Snowden married Lindsay Mills. In April 2020, Snowden requested a three-year
extension of his Russian residency permit. On August 16, 2020, President Trump announced that he was
considering a pardon for the former NSA contractor.
Employment at CIA
After attending a 2006 job-fair focused
on intelligence agencies, Snowden accepted an offer for a position at the CIA. The
Agency assigned him to the global communications division at CIA headquarters
in Langley, Virginia.
In May 2006, Snowden wrote in Ars
Technica that he had no trouble getting work because he was a
"computer wizard". After distinguishing himself as a junior
employee on the top computer team, Snowden was sent to the CIA's secret school
for technology specialists, where he lived in a hotel for six months while
studying and training full-time.
In March 2007, the CIA stationed Snowden
with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for
maintaining computer-network security. Assigned to the U.S. Permanent Mission
to the United Nations, a diplomatic mission representing U.S. interests before
the UN and other international organizations, Snowden received a diplomatic
passport and a four-bedroom apartment near Lake Geneva. According to
Greenwald, while there Snowden was "considered the top technical and cybersecurity
expert" in that country and "was hand-picked by the CIA to support
the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania". Snowden described
his CIA experience in Geneva as formative, stating that the CIA deliberately
got a Swiss banker drunk and encouraged him to drive home. Snowden said that
when the latter was arrested, a CIA operative offered to help in exchange for
the banker becoming an informant. Ueli Maurer, President of the Swiss
Confederation for the year 2013, in June of that year publicly disputed
Snowden's claims. "This would mean that the CIA successfully bribed the
Geneva police and judiciary. With all due respect, I just can't imagine
it," said Maurer. In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA.
NSA Subcontractee as an employee at Dell
In 2009, Snowden began work as a
contractee for Dell, which manages computer systems for multiple government
agencies. Assigned to an NSA facility at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, Snowden
instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks
from Chinese hackers. Snowden looked into mass surveillance in China which
prompted him to investigate and then expose Washington's mass surveillance
program after he was asked in 2009 to brief a conference in Tokyo. During his
four years with Dell, he rose from supervising NSA computer system upgrades to
working as what his résumé termed a "cyberstrategist" and an
"expert in cyber counterintelligence" at several U.S. locations. In
2011, he returned to Maryland, where he spent a year as lead technologist on
Dell's CIA account. In that capacity, he was consulted by the chiefs of the
CIA's technical branches, including the agency's chief information officer and
its chief technology officer. U.S. officials and other sources familiar with
the investigation said Snowden began downloading documents describing the
government's electronic spying programs while working for Dell in April 2012. Investigators
estimated that of the 50,000 to 200,000 documents Snowden gave to Greenwald and
Poitras, most were copied by Snowden while working at Dell.
In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden
to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA's information-sharing office.
NSA Subcontractee as an employee at Boos
Allen Hamilton
On March 15, 2013 – three days
after what he later called his "breaking point" of "seeing the Director
of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress – Snowden
quit his job at Dell. Although he has said his career high annual salary was
$200,000, Snowden said he took a pay cut to work at consulting firm Booz Allen
Hamilton, where he sought employment in order to gather data and then release
details of the NSA's worldwide surveillance activity.
At the time of his departure from the
U.S. in May 2013, he had been employed for 15 months inside the NSA's Hawaii
regional operations center, which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China
and North Korea, first for Dell and then for two months with Booz Allen
Hamilton. While intelligence officials have described his position there
as a system administrator, Snowden has said he was an infrastructure analyst,
which meant that his job was to look for new ways to break into Internet and
telephone traffic around the world. An anonymous source told Reuters that,
while in Hawaii, Snowden may have persuaded 20–25 co-workers to give him their
login credentials by telling them he needed them to do his job. The NSA sent a
memo to Congress saying that Snowden had tricked a fellow employee into sharing
his personal public key infrastructure certificate to gain greater access to
the NSA's computer system. Snowden disputed the memo, saying in January 2014,
"I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers.
Booz Allen terminated Snowden's employment on June 10, 2013, the day after he
went public with his story, and 3 weeks after he had left Hawaii on a leave of
absence.
A former NSA co-worker said that
although the NSA was full of smart people, Snowden was a "genius among
geniuses" who created a widely implemented backup system for the NSA and
often pointed out security flaws to the agency. The former colleague said
Snowden was given full administrator privileges with virtually unlimited access
to NSA data. Snowden was offered a position on the NSA's elite team of hackers,
Tailored Access Operations, but turned it down to join Booz Allen. An anonymous
source later said that Booz Allen's hiring screeners found possible
discrepancies in Snowden's resume but still decided to hire him. Snowden's
résumé stated that he attended computer-related classes atJohns Hopkins
University. A spokeswoman for Johns
Hopkins said that the university did not find records to show that Snowden
attended the university, and suggested that he may instead have attended
Advanced Career Technologies, a private for-profit organization that operated
as the Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University.The University of
Maryland University College acknowledged that Snowden had attended a summer
session at a UM campus in Asia. Snowden's résumé stated that he estimated that
he would receive a University of Liverpool computer security master's degree in
2013. The university said that Snowden registered for an online master's degree
program in computer security in 2011 but was inactive as a student and had not
completed the program.
In his May 2014 interview with NBC News,
Snowden accused the U.S. government of trying to use one position here or there
in his career to distract from the totality of his experience, downplaying him
as a "low level analyst." In his words, he was "trained as a spy
in the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover
overseas—pretending to work in a job that I'm not—and even being assigned a
name that was not mine." He said he'd worked for the NSA undercover
overseas, and for the DIA had developed sources and methods to keep information
and people secure "in the most hostile and dangerous environments around
the world. So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't
know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading. In a June
interview with Globo TV, Snowden reiterated that he "was actually
functioning at a very senior level.
In a July interview with The Guardian, Snowden explained
that, during his NSA career, "I began to move from merely overseeing these
systems to actively directing their use. Many people don’t understand that I
was actually an analyst and I designated individuals and groups for
targeting." Snowden subsequently
told Wired that while at Dell in 2011, "I would sit down
with the CIO of the CIA, the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical
branches. They would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my
job to come up with a way to fix them."
Of his time as an NSA analyst, directing
the work of others, Snowden recalled a moment when he and his colleagues began
to have severe ethical doubts. Snowden said 18 to 22-year-old analysts were
suddenly thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where they now
have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work,
they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of
necessary sense—for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually
compromising situation. But they're extremely attractive. So what do they do?
They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker ... and sooner or
later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other
people."
As Snowden observed it, this behavior
happened routinely every two months but was never reported, being considered
one of the "fringe benefits" of the work.
Asylum in Russia
On June 23, 2013, Snowden landed at
Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport aboard a commercial Aeroflot flight
from Hong Kong. On August 1, after 39
days in the transit section, he left the airport and was granted temporary asylum
in Russia for one year. A year later, his temporary asylum having expired,
Snowden received a three-year residency permit allowing him to travel freely
within Russia and to go abroad for up to three months. He was not granted
permanent political asylum. In January 2017, a spokesperson for the Russian
foreign ministry wrote on Facebook that Snowden's asylum, which was due to
expire in 2017, was extended by a couple more years. Snowden's lawyer Anatoly
Kucherena said the extension was valid until 2020.
As of October 2019, Snowden had been
granted permanent residency in Russia, which is renewed every three years. He
secretly married Lindsay Mills in
2017. By 2019, he no longer felt the need to be disguised in public and lived
what was described as a "more or less normal life", able to travel
around Russia and make a living from speaking arrangements (locally and over
the internet). His memoir Permanent
Record was released internationally, and while U.S. royalties were expected
to be seized, he was able to receive the advance. According to Snowden, "One of the things
that is lost in all the problematic politics of the Russian government is the
fact this is one of the most beautiful countries in the world" with
"friendly" and "warm" people. In another interview, Snowden
went on to say: "There's a way to criticize the Russian government's
policies without criticizing the Russian people who are ordinary people, who
just want to have a happy life; they just want to do better. They want the same
things that you do.”
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