Edward Snowden
Updated: Oct 13, 2020
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National 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, Barton Gellman, 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.
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. 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.
In early 2016, Snowden 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. In 2017, Snowden married Lindsay Mills. In April 2020, Snowden requested a three-year extension of his Russian residency permit. On September 2, 2020, a US federal court ruled that the US intelligence’s mass surveillance program, exposed by Edward Snowden, was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. They also cited that the US intelligence leaders, who publicly defended it, were not telling the truth.
Source: www.wikipedia.com
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