Edward Snowden

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E dward Snowden — traitor or hero? When the former CIA operative leaked a trove of classified documents about American surveillance programs to the world press, he was praised by some, vilified by others, and ultimately indicted on espionage charges by the U.S. government.

Snowden perhaps seems an unlikely candidate for masterminding the biggest intelligence leak in history. Born in 1983, the gun-owning, political conservative never finished high school and took computer classes at a community college. In 2006 he got a job in information technology with the CIA. From 2009 to 2013 he worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency.

As a systems analyst with a high-level security clearance, Snowden had access to highly classified NSA materials. Over the years, he grew increasingly outraged by the extent of secret government surveillance. In contravention of NSA regulations, he began to copy files on a personal thumb drive and ultimately collected tens of thousands of top-secret documents from NSA archives.

In January 2013 a journalist working for the liberal British newspaper the Guardian and an American documentary film maker received e-mails from an anonymous source asking for an exchange of encrypted (highly encoded) information. “I am a senior member of the intelligence community,” read the anonymous e-mail. “This won’t be a waste of your time.”* Enticed, they agreed to meet the source in a Hong Kong hotel. There Snowden disclosed his identity and handed over a selection of documents. Recognizing a scoop, the Guardian revealed the secret surveillance programs. Other media outlets pounced on the story, and Snowden’s revelations became a global sensation.

The explosive news reports described extensive U.S. spy programs that shocked people around the world. The leaks revealed that the NSA had collected phone records from virtually every person in the United States and had misled the U.S. Congress about the extent of the surveillance. The agency had accessed the Internet servers of major telecommunications providers and could thus collect information about e-mail messages, Internet searches, and individual friends and contacts from Facebook and Google. The documents described programs that monitored the telephone calls of notable politicians in friendly nations. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a close ally of the United States, was infuriated to find out that the NSA had tapped her cell phone; so were the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, among others.

The response took many forms. Foreign leaders were dismayed by the extensive leaks from a major allied security service and by the pervasiveness of U.S. surveillance programs. Conservative pundits and U.S. officials condemned Snowden, arguing that the leaked materials revealed secret antiterrorism operations and could even endanger the lives of agents in the field. As President Barack Obama put it, “If any individual who objects to government policy can take it in their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will not be able to keep our people safe, or conduct foreign policy.”†

Proponents of civil liberties, defenders of the right to online privacy, and critics of U.S. foreign policy nonetheless welcomed Snowden’s revelations. “It is time for President Obama to offer clemency to Edward Snowden, the courageous U.S. citizen who revealed the Orwellian reach of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans,” wrote a liberal commentator in the Washington Post. “His actions may have broken the law, but his act . . . did the nation a great service.”‡

Fearing for his freedom, Snowden went underground in Hong Kong. Several weeks later, he surfaced in Russia, where he received an offer of temporary asylum. Snowden now lives somewhere around Moscow, where he continues to comment on electronic surveillance and privacy rights.

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