Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a US former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) employee who leaked details of top-secret US and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.
Working primarily with Glenn Greenwald of London's The Guardian, which published a series of exposés based on Snowden's disclosures in June 2013, Snowden revealed information about a variety of classified intelligence programs, including the interception of US and European telephone metadata and the PRISM and Tempora Internet surveillance programs. Snowden said the leaks were an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them".
On June 14, 2013, US federal prosecutors filed a sealed complaint, made public on June 21, charging Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorized person; the latter two allegations are under the Espionage Act.
Snowden's leaks are said to rank among the most significant breaches in the history of the NSA.[ Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said disclosures linked to Snowden have "confirmed longstanding suspicions that NSA's surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew."
Snowden grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina.[ His father, Lonnie Snowden, a resident of Pennsylvania, was an officer in the United States Coast Guard, and his mother, a resident of Baltimore, Maryland, is a clerk at a federal court in Maryland.
By 1999, Snowden had moved with his family to Ellicott City, Maryland, where he studied computing at Anne Arundel Community College[ to gain the credits necessary to obtain a high-school diploma, but he did not complete the coursework. Snowden's father explained that his son had missed several months of school owing to illness and, rather than return, took and passed the tests for his GED at a local community college. Snowden worked online toward a Master's Degree at the University of Liverpool in 2011. Having worked at a US military base in Japan, Snowden reportedly had a deep interest in Japanese popular culture and had studied the Japanese language. He also said he had a basic understanding of Mandarin and was deeply interested in martial arts, and he listed Buddhism as his religion.
On June 17, 2013, Snowden's father spoke in an interview on Fox TV, expressing concern about misinformation in the media regarding his son. He described his son as "a sensitive, caring young man... He just is a deep thinker." While he was in agreement with his son in his opposition to the surveillance programs that he revealed, he asked his son to stop leaking and return home.
Before leaving for Hong Kong Snowden lived with his girlfriend in Waipahu, Oahu, Hawaii.
Snowden has said that in the 2008 presidential election he voted for third-party candidates. He has claimed he had been planning to make disclosures about NSA surveillance programs at the time, but he decided to wait because he "believed in Obama's promises". He was later disappointed that Obama "continued with the policies of his predecessor". For the 2012 election, political donation records indicate that he contributed to the primary campaign of Ron Paul.
Snowden is widely believed to be the author of hundreds of archived online postings under the pseudonym "TheTrueHOOHA" (TTH), which may document Snowden's views on various political topics. In a January 2009 entry, TTH 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, by February 2010 TTH was framing privacy debates in Constitutional terms: "I wonder, how well would envelopes that became transparent under magical federal candlelight have sold in 1750? 1800? 1850? 1900? 1950?". The last known public posting by TTH was made on May 21, 2012.
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. Summing up his activities in a clandestine interview with the South China Morning Post, he said, "I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American."
On May 7, 2004, Snowden enlisted in the United States Army as a Special Forces recruit but did not complete the training. He said he wanted to fight in the Iraq war because he "felt like [he] had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression." However, he said he was discharged four months later on September 28 after having broken both of his legs in a training accident.
His next employment was as a National Security Agency (NSA) security guard for the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland, before, he said, joining the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to work on IT security. In May 2006 Snowden wrote in Ars Technica, an online forum for gamers, hackers and hardware tinkerers, that he had no trouble getting work because he was a "computer wizard". In August he wrote about a possible path in government service, perhaps involving China, but said it "just doesn't seem like as much 'fun' as some of the other places."
Snowden said that in 2007 the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer network security. Snowden told The Guardian he left the agency in 2009 for a private contractor inside an NSA facility on a United States military base in Japan. NSA Director Keith Alexander has said that Snowden held a position at the NSA for the twelve months prior to his next job as a consultant. Individuals occupying these positions may have been required to obtain a Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances, which requires a special background investigation. Snowden would have been subjected to drug testing and required to take and pass a polygraph test.[ The company USIS completed a background check on Snowden in 2011.
Snowden described his life as "very comfortable", earning a salary of "roughly US $200,000".At the time of his departure from the US in May 2013, he had been working for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton for less than three months inside the NSA at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in Hawaii. While intelligence officials have described his position there as a "system administrator", Snowden has claimed 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. Snowden was employed on a salary of $122,000. He said he had taken a pay cut to work at Booz Allen, and that he sought employment in order to gather data on NSA surveillance around the world so he could leak it. The firm said Snowden's employment was terminated on June 10 "for violations of the firm's code of ethics and firm policy.
According to Reuters, a source "with detailed knowledge on the matter" stated that Booz Allen's hiring screeners detected possible discrepancies in Snowden's résumé regarding his education since some details "did not check out precisely", but decided to hire him anyway; Reuters stated that the element which triggered these concerns, or the manner in which Snowden satisfied the concerns, were not known. The résumé stated that Snowden attended computer-related classes at Johns Hopkins University. A spokesperson 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 which operated as "Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins". A spokesperson for University College of the University of Maryland said that Snowden had attended a summer session at a University of Maryland campus in Asia.]
On June 30, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa told the Associated Press that Snowden is "under care" of Russia and can't leave Moscow.[158] President Evo Morales of Bolivia offered assylum to Snowden druring an interview with Russia Today.
On July 1, WikiLeaks revealed that Snowden had applied for political asylum to 19 countries in addition to Ecuador and Iceland; these included Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nicaragua,Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, and Venezuela. A statement attributed to Snowden also contended that the U.S. administration, and specifically Vice President Biden, had unjustly pressured the governments of these countries to refuse his petition for asylum.[ Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly said any asylum request would be considered only if he stopped leaking the United States' secrets. In response, Snowden withdrew his asylum application to Russia.[ India and Brazil have turned down Snowden's application, while Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Switzerland have stated that applications for political asylum can be accepted only from applicants who are physically present on the respective countries' territory. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski added that, in any case, Snowden's request would likely be rejected. Norway rejected the application on July 2 of formal reasons, but the Norwegian chapter of P.E.N.stated that they will use their right to ask for a renewed handling of the application.
A bipartisan group of eight Senators prepared legislation that would require government disclosure of criteria used to interpret laws justifying surveillance of the type revealed by The Guardian and The Washington Post.
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