Who is Edward Snowden?

Who is Edward Snowden?

In 2013, Edward Snowden made headlines by leaking top secret information about NSA surveillance activities.

Called a hero or a patriot by some and a whistleblower or a traitor by others, Snowden was key to launch a debate about national security and information privacy.

Childhood and education

Edward Snowden was born on June 21st 1983, in North Carolina. His mother Elizabeth works for the federal court in Baltimore and his father Lonnie is a former Coast Guard officer. Like the rest of his family, Snowden knew he was expected to to work for the government.

Snowden studied at a community college to be able to obtain a high school diploma, but never finished the course. In 2004, he enlisted in the army reserve as a special forces candidate and, one year later, he worked as a security guard at the Center for Advanced Study of Maryland, aresearch facility affiliated with the NSA.

Career

After his job as a security guard, Snowden took a job at the Central Intelligence Agency as an IT professional.

In 2009, and after a suspect of accessing to classified documents, he started working for private contractors. First he worked for Dell and then for Booz Allen Hamilton. During this time, he was transferred by other places and also worked in Japan, Maryland and Hawaii.

However, it was during his time at Booz Allen that he started copying NSA documents and creating a dossier about NSA’s practice that he found invasive.

NSA leaks

In May 2013, after requesting a medical leve of absence, Snowden flew to Hong Kong. There, he contacted journalists from the The Guardian and orchestrated the disclosure of the documents.

On June 5th, The Guardian released some of these secret documents where the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court gave an order to Verizon for release information daily from American’s phone activities.

The next day, on June 6th, both The Guardian and The Washington Post release information on PRISM. The next months, the information flow continued and America was shaken by all these unknown informations to the public eye.

Charges against him

It didn’t took long for the US government to took action. Snowden got two charges under the 1917 Espionage Act – “unhauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communication intelligence information to an unauthorized person” – and was also accused with “theft of government property”.

These charges create two different moviments and opinions about Snowden actions. While some considered him a traitor, others supported him and more than 100 000 people asked President Obama, through an online petition, to forgive Snowden.

After some time hiding and the annullation of his passport from the American government, Snowden got aground in a Russian airport. At first, he thought about ask for asylum to Ecuador and Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia also offer him asylum. However, Snowden talked to his lawyers and asked Russia for asylum.

At the end of 2013, he asked for clemency to the U.S. government but this request was rejected. In 2014, Russia gave him a three-year residente permit.

The fame and the influence

Besides the controversial opinions, Snowden actions launched a heated debate about personal information at a time where technology has so much more attention.

In 2013, The Guardian voted him a person of the year. The next year, he gave a revealing and important interview with NBC News where he admitted that he thought of himself as a “patriot”. In 2015, he appeared with Poitras and Greenwald (the journalists who he gave the information in Hong Kong) at a video-conference for students at Upper Canada College. At the same year, he joined Twitter and got almost two million followers in a day.

“Citizen Four”, a documentary film about Snowden’s life was released in 2014 and it even won an Oscar. Many others movies and documentaries followed “Citizen Four” and there’s still many discussion about the importance and relevance of Snowden actions.