Edward Snowden facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Edward Snowden
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Snowden in 2013
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| Born |
Edward Joseph Snowden
June 21, 1983 |
| Citizenship |
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| Occupation | Computer security consultant |
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| Known for | Revealing classified U.S. Government surveillance programs; in exile in Russia since June 23, 2013 |
| Spouse(s) |
Lindsay Mills
(m. 2017) |
| Children | 2 |
| Relatives | Edward J. Barrett (grandfather) |
| Awards | Right Livelihood Award |
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Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American-Russian former NSA intelligence contractor and whistleblower who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. He became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2022.
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 one of the U.S. intelligence's mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.
Contents
Early life and education
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Snowden's father, Lonnie, 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 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 his religion as Buddhism after working at a U.S. military base in Japan.
Career
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 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).
In 2013, while working as a government contractor, Snowden leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA). He was indicted for espionage. 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.
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 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 repeatedly extended. In October 2020, he was granted permanent residency in Russia. In September 2022, Snowden was granted Russian citizenship by President Vladimir Putin.
Personal life
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.
Recognition
For his global surveillance disclosures, Snowden has been honored by publications and organizations based in Europe and the United States. He was voted as The Guardian's person of the year 2013, garnering four times the number of votes as any other candidate.
The "Snowden effect"
In July 2013, media critic Jay Rosen defined the "Snowden effect" as "Direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden's leaks of classified information about the surveillance state in the U.S." In its Spring 2014 Global Attitudes Survey, the Pew Research Center found that Snowden's disclosures had tarnished the image of the United States, especially in Europe and Latin America.
Images for kids
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Slide from an NSA presentation on "Google Cloud Exploitation" from its MUSCULAR program; the sketch shows where the "Public Internet" meets the internal "Google Cloud" where user data resides.
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Data visualization of U.S. intelligence black budget (2013)
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Spain, France, and Italy (red) denied Bolivian president Evo Morales permission to cross their airspace. Morales's plane landed in Austria (yellow).
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A demonstration at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during Barack Obama's visit on June 18, 2013
See also
