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Edward Snowden
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Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former United States National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs.
Born in 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, he attended a community college and later enrolled in a master's programme at the University of Liverpool without finishing it. In 2006 he started working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then moved to Dell in 2009, where he managed computer systems for the NSA. In 2013, he worked for two months at Booz Allen Hamilton, with the purpose of gathering more NSA documents.
In May 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunications companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden on two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. He stayed in Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow for a month before being granted asylum. He became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2022.
In early 2016, Snowden became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco–based nonprofit organization that aims to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance. He also has a job at an unnamed Russian IT company. In 2017, he married Lindsay Mills. On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On September 2, 2020, a US federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin that one of the U.S. intelligence's mass surveillance programs exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.
== Early life and education ==
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Snowden's father, Lonnie "Lon", was a warrant officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. His older sister, Jessica, was a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, a rear admiral in the Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. Edward Snowden said that he had expected to work for the federal government, as had the rest of his family. His parents divorced in 2001, and his father remarried.
In the early 1990s, while still in grade school, Snowden moved with his family to the area of Fort Meade, Maryland. Mononucleosis caused him to miss high school for almost nine months. Rather than returning to school, he claims to have passed the GED test. He took classes at Anne Arundel Community College. Although Snowden had no undergraduate college degree, he worked online toward a master's degree in computer security at the University of Liverpool in 2011. He was interested in Japanese popular culture, had studied the Japanese language, and worked for a now defunct start-up anime company based in the U.S. He also said he had a basic understanding of Mandarin Chinese and was deeply interested in martial arts. At age 20, he listed his religion as Buddhism after working at a U.S. military base in Japan.
In September 2019, as part of interviews relating to the release of his memoir Permanent Record, Snowden revealed to The Guardian that he married Lindsay Mills in a courthouse in Moscow. The couple's first son was born in December 2020, and their second son was born sometime before September 2022.
== Career ==
Snowden enlisted in the United States Army on May 7, 2004, and became a Special Forces candidate through its 18X enlistment option. He did not complete the training due to a leg injury and was given an administrative discharge on September 28, 2004.
Snowden was then employed for less than a year in 2005 as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a research center sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA). According to the university, this is not a classified facility, though it is heavily guarded. In June 2014, Snowden told Wired that his job as a security guard required a high-level security clearance, for which he passed a polygraph exam and underwent a stringent background investigation.
=== Employment at the 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.