Snowden, Edward (1983-…), is a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who is charged by the United States with espionage. The NSA is an agency within the U.S. Department of Defense. Its full name is the National Security Agency/Central Security Service. The agency’s missions are to ensure the security of classified (secret) and sensitive information and systems within the U.S. government and to gather, analyze, and handle the secret information of foreign governments. Snowden is accused of leaking to newspapers thousands of highly classified documents on the U.S. government’s antiterrorism program within the United States and on its program of spying on foreign governments. The Snowden affair is regarded as one of the most damaging security leaks in U.S. history.
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983. He grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His father was an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. His mother was a chief deputy clerk in the Baltimore, Maryland, federal court system. Snowden dropped out of high school and later earned a high school equivalency certificate while taking classes at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland. In 2004, Snowden joined the U.S. Army Reserves. He spent four months training in a special forces program before he was discharged because of an injury.
Snowden’s early jobs included an information technology position with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2007. In 2009, he went to Japan to work for the NSA as a contractor through Dell Inc., a computer technology company. Snowden transferred in early 2013 to the NSA office in Hawaii, where he worked as a systems administrator through Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and technology consulting firm. Almost immediately, he began collecting documents on the NSA’s large-scale surveillance (monitoring) activities. These activities included the agency’s secret monitoring of the telephone calls and internet usage of millions of U.S. citizens. In addition, the documents revealed that the NSA spied on both countries considered allies and countries considered enemies of the United States, including China, Germany, and most Latin American countries. According to the documents, the NSA hacked into the computers of foreign nations and intercepted the communications of foreign diplomats at United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York City.
In May 2013, Snowden left his job at the NSA and fled to Hong Kong with electronic copies of the top-secret documents. He then leaked the information to The Washington Post newspaper in the United States and The Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. Both newspapers published some of the information and directly reprinted portions of some documents. Snowden claimed that he had leaked classified information to the public to trigger a global debate about the U.S. government’s domestic surveillance activities.
Snowden eventually traveled to Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. An extradition treaty requires one country to hand over to another country a person accused of a crime there. Snowden spent nearly six weeks at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport before the Russian government granted him asylum (shelter and protection). Russia granted Snowden temporary residency in 2014 and 2017, permanent residency in 2020, and citizenship in 2022.
Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., filed charges of espionage and theft of government property against Snowden in June 2013. United States authorities demanded Snowden’s extradition to face prosecution on the charges. In 2016, several human rights groups called on U.S. President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden before the end of Obama’s term in January 2017. However, Obama chose not to do so.
Snowden published a memoir (autobiography) titled Permanent Record in 2019.
