Edward Snowden

Introduction

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer professional, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and former contractor for the United States government who copied and leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 without prior authorization. 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.

In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. 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 newspapers including Der Spiegel and The New York Times.

On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property. On June 23, he flew to Moscow, Russia, where he remained for over a month. Russian authorities granted him one-year asylum, which was later extended to three years. As of 2015, he was still living in an undisclosed location in Russia while seeking asylum elsewhere.

Early Life

Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, was a rear admiral in the United States Coast Guard who became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, when it was struck by an airliner hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists. Snowden's father, Lonnie Snowden, was also an officer in the Coast Guard, and his mother, Elizabeth B. Snowden, is chief deputy at the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. His older sister, Jessica, was a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington D.C. Snowden said that "in one way or another", his entire family has been employed by the federal government, and that he "expected to pursue the same path". His parents divorced in 2001, and his father remarried. Friends and neighbors described Snowden as quiet and nice, generally congenial. One longtime friend said that he was always articulate, even as a child. His father said he was not surprised when his son scored above 145 on two separate IQ tests, but Snowden's father was more after Edward's well-being than anything else. Snowden's father described Edward as "the smartest one in the family", "a deep thinker" and "a sensitive, caring young man."

Controversy

Release of NSA documents

The New York Times' James Risen reported that Snowden's decision to leak NSA documents "developed gradually, dating back at least to his time working as a technician in the Geneva station of the CIA." Snowden first made contact with Glenn Greenwald, a journalist working at The Guardian, on December 1, 2012. He contacted Greenwald anonymously as "Cincinnatus" and said he had "sensitive documents" that he would like to share. Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications, such as encrypting email, too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013. According to Poitras, Snowden chose to contact her after seeing her New York Times article about NSA whistleblower William Binney.[citation needed] What originally attracted Snowden to both Greenwald and Poitras was a Salon article written by Greenwald detailing how Poitras' controversial films had made her a target of the government.

Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February or April 2013, after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them. Barton Gellman, writing for The Washington Post, says his first "direct contact" was on May 16, 2013. According to Gellman, Snowden approached Greenwald after the Post declined to guarantee publication within 72 hours of all 41 PowerPoint slides that Snowden had leaked exposing the PRISM electronic data mining program, and to publish online an encrypted code allowing Snowden to later prove that he was the source.

Snowden communicated using encrypted email, and going by the codename "Verax". He asked not to be quoted at length for fear of identification by stylometry.

According to Gellman, prior to their first meeting in person, Snowden wrote, "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end." Snowden also told Gellman that until the articles were published, the journalists working with him would also be at mortal risk from the United States Intelligence Community "if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information."

In May 2013, Snowden was permitted temporary leave from his position at the NSA in Hawaii, on the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy. In mid-May, Snowden gave an electronic interview to Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum which was published weeks later by Der Spiegel.

After disclosing the copied documents, Snowden promised that nothing would stop subsequent disclosures. In June 2013, he said, "All I can say right now is the US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."

Motivations Behind Disclosure

Snowden's identity was made public by The Guardian at his request on June 9, 2013. He explained: "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong." He added that by revealing his identity he hoped to protect his colleagues from being subjected to a hunt to determine who had been responsible for the leaks. According to Poitras, who filmed the interview with Snowden in Hong Kong, he had initially not wanted to be seen on camera, because "he didn't want the story to be about him." Poitras says she convinced him it was necessary to have him give an account of the leaked documents' significance on film: "Not just because I knew that the mainstream media interpretation would be predictable and narrow, but because to have somebody who understands how this technology works, who is willing to risk their life to expose it to the public, and that we could hear that articulated, would reach people in ways that the documents themselves wouldn't." Snowden explained his actions saying: "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things [surveillance on its citizens] ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded ... My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them." In a later interview Snowden declared:

For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself. All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.

Snowden said that in the past, whistleblowers had been "destroyed by the experience," and that he wanted to "embolden others to step forward" by demonstrating that "they can win." In October, Snowden spoke out again on his motivations for the leaks in an interview with The New York Times, saying that the system for reporting problems does not work. "You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it," Snowden explained, and pointed out the lack of whistleblower protection for government contractors, the use of the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute leakers, and his belief that had he used internal mechanisms to "sound the alarm," his revelations "would have been buried forever."

In December 2013, upon learning that a U.S. federal judge had ruled the collection of U.S. phone metadata conducted by the NSA as likely unconstitutional, Snowden stated: "I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts ... today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights. It is the first of many."

In January 2014, Snowden said his "breaking point" was "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress." This referred to testimony on March 12, 2013—three months after Snowden first sought to share thousands of NSA documents with Greenwald, and nine months after the NSA says Snowden made his first illegal downloads during the summer of 2012[4]—in which Clapper denied to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the NSA wittingly collects data on millions of Americans. Snowden said, "There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs." In May 2014, Vanity Fair reported that Snowden said he first contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008, but that "Snowden held back, in part because he believed Barack Obama, elected that November, might introduce reforms." Snowden stated that he had reported policy or legal issues related to spying programs to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor had no legal avenue to pursue further whistleblowing.

Employment at CIA

In 2006, after attending a job fair focused on intelligence agencies, Snowden was offered a position at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which he joined. He was assigned 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. mission to the United Nations, Snowden was given 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 to become 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. The revelations were said to have come at a sensitive time as the U.S. was pressing the Swiss government to increase banking transparency. In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA.

Criminal Charges

On June 14, 2013, United States federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Snowden, charging him with theft of government property, and two counts of violating the Espionage Act through unauthorized communication of national defense information and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person." Each of the three charges carries a maximum possible prison term of ten years. The charge was initially secret and was unsealed a week later.

Snowden was asked in a January 2014 interview about returning to the U.S. to face the charges in court, as Obama had suggested a few days prior. Snowden explained why he rejected the request: "What he doesn't say are that the crimes that he's charged me with are crimes that don't allow me to make my case. They don't allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury that what I did was to their benefit. ... So it's, I would say, illustrative that the President would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial." Snowden's legal representative, Jesselyn Radack, wrote that "the Espionage Act effectively hinders a person from defending himself before a jury in an open court, as past examples show," referring to Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou and Chelsea Manning. Radack said that the "arcane World War I law" was never meant to prosecute whistleblowers, but rather spies who sold secrets to enemies for profit. Under this law, she states, "no prosecution of a non-spy can be fair or just."

On October 29, 2015, the European Parliament voted 285 to 281 for a non-binding resolution for EU states to drop criminal charges against Snowden and prevent his extradition by third parties, in recognition of "his status as [a] whistle-blower and international human rights defender", reflecting fears of mass surveillance from European nations. Snowden responded in Twitter by calling it a "game-changer" and "not a blow against the US government", but rather "a chance to move forward."

Political Views

Snowden has said that in the 2008 presidential election, he voted for a third-party candidate. He has stated that he had been planning to comment on NSA surveillance programs at the time, but he decided to wait because he "believed in Obama's promises." He was later disappointed with President Barack Obama, saying that his policies were a continuation of those espoused by George W. Bush.

A week after publication of his leaks began, technology news provider Ars Technica confirmed that Snowden had been an active participant at the site's online forum from 2001 through May 2012, discussing a variety of topics under the pseudonym "TheTrueHOOHA". In a January 2009 entry, TheTrueHOOHA exhibited strong support for the United States' security state apparatus and said he believed leakers of classified information "should be shot in the balls". However, in February 2010, TheTrueHOOHA wrote, "Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?"

In accounts published in June 2013, interviewers noted that Snowden's laptop displayed stickers supporting Internet freedom organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project. Snowden stated that he was "neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American."

In 2014 Snowden stated that "women have the right to make their own choices" and supported providing "a basic income for people who have no work, or no meaningful work".

List of Awards (Recognition)

• German "Whistlebower Prize"
• Sam Adams Award
• Alternative Christmas Message
• Reactor of the University of Glasgow
• German "positive" Big Brother Award
• Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize
• Right Livelihood Award
• IQ Award

Public Opinion Poll on Edward Snowden's Disclosure (August 2013)

Opinion	% of people
Whistle-Blower	55
Traitor	34
DK/NA	11