Edward Snowden

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American and naturalized Russian citizen who was a computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was an employee and subcontractor.

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 and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

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 passed the GED test and took classes at Anne Arundel Community College.

His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, a rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks.

Snowden's father, Lonnie, was a warrant officer in the 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. 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.

Feeling a duty to fight in the Iraq War, 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 bilateral tibial stress fractures, 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.

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.

Although Snowden had no undergraduate college degree, he worked online toward a master's degree at the University of Liverpool, England, in 2011.

He was interested in Japanese popular culture, had studied the Japanese language, and worked for an anime company that had a resident office 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 Buddhism as his religion on a military recruitment form, noting that the choice of agnostic was "strangely absent."

In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA.

Snowden says he gradually became disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved, and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored.

On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after taking a medical leave from 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, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill.

Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other publications.

On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport.

Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport, where Russian authorities observed the canceled passport, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month.

Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, which was subsequently repeatedly extended.

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.

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.

"I have to lay my head down in Moscow on a pillow at night," he told an Israeli audience in November 2018, "but I live on the internet and every other city in the world."

On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published.

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.

In October 2020, he was granted permanent residency in Russia.

In September 2022, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin.

A subject of controversy, Snowden has been variously praised and condemned for his leaks.

Snowden has defended his actions as an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

His disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy, something that he has said he intended to do in retrospective interviews.

On September 2, 2020, a U.S. federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin that the U.S. intelligence's mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.

The couple's first son was born in December 2020, and their second son was born sometime before September 2022.