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Computer Geek – Portrait Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden
In 2013, Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) exposed highly classified information from the National Security Agency. Following his departure from an NSA facility in Hawaii in May 2013, Snowden traveled to Hong Kong. In June 2013, he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill.
As a result of his disclosures of several global surveillance programs, many of which are conducted by the National Security Agency and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in collaboration with telecommunication companies and European governments, a culture-wide discussion was sparked regarding national security and privacy concerns. As a result of recent leaks of documents, it has been possible to gain insight into a global surveillance apparatus that the United States’ NSA operates in partnership with three of its Five Eyes partners: Australia’s ASD, the United Kingdom’s GCHQ, and Canada’s CSEC.
There was a time during Snowden’s career when he and his colleagues began to have grave ethical doubts. Snowden said 18 to 22-year-old analysts were suddenly “thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of necessary sense—for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation. But they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker … and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people.”
When Snowden submitted his testimony to the European Parliament in March 2014, he explained that ten officials ignored his reports of “clearly problematic programs”. Over time, he became disillusioned with the programs in which he participated, and he attempted to voice his ethical concerns internally, but was ignored.
According to Snowden, he was instructed to remain silent after raising concerns regarding the legality of NSA spying programs and the NSA’s interpretation of its legal authorities in a May 2014 interview with NBC News. I had raised these complaints not just officially in writing through email, but also to my supervisors, to my colleagues, in more than one office.” NSA denies Snowden discussed these concerns with them.
A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report declassified in June 2015 said that Snowden took 900,000 files. Snowden asserts that he did not turn over documents indiscriminately to journalists. “I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over” (The Guardian) “I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists … If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country.” (South China Morning Post.)
Programs revealed as follows:
PRISM which allows court-approved direct access to Americans’ Google and Yahoo accounts.
Tempora is a secret British surveillance program run by the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ.
NSA call database details, Boundless Informant, and a secret court order requiring Verizon to provide the NSA with millions of Americans’ phone records every day, along with surveillance of French citizens and high-profile individuals in business and politics.
XKeyscore, an analytical tool that allows for collection of “almost anything done on the internet,” was described by The Guardian as a program that shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements: “I, sitting at my desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email.”
Black Budget exposes the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, and reveals that the NSA pays U.S. private companies to provide clandestine access to their communication systems. The agencies were allocated $52 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.
According to the report, the NSA harvests millions of email and instant messaging contact lists, searches for email content, tracks and maps mobile phone locations, undermines attempts at encryption by using a highly classified program known as Bullrun, which cracks encryption of data and online communications.
The NSA agency used cookies to piggyback on the same tools used by Internet advertisers “to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.” (The Washington Post.)
MUSCULAR secretly accessed Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables.
The NSA, the CIA and GCHQ spied on users of Second Life, Xbox Live, and World of Warcraft, and attempted to recruit potential informants. NSA agents also spied on their own “love interests,” a practice called LOVEINT by NSA employees.
A program referred to as Blackpearl, which targeted private networks, led to allegations that the NSA extended its mission beyond its primary objective of national security. The agency’s intelligence gathering operations had targeted the nation’s largest oil company, Petrobras. Furthermore, NSA and GCHQ were also revealed to be spying on organizations such as UNICEF and Médecins du Monde, as well as allies such as the European Commissioner, Jonathan Almunia, and the Israeli Prime Minister.
According to The Guardian’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, only a fraction of the documents have been released. In an interview with German television in January 2014, Snowden claimed that the NSA did not limit its data collection to national security issues, accusing the agency of conducting industrial espionage. Using German company Siemens as an example, he said, “If there’s information at Siemens that’s beneficial to US national interests—even if it doesn’t have anything to do with national security—then they’ll take that information nevertheless.”
The United States Department of Justice revoked Snowden’s passport on June 21, 2013, after he was charged with two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and stealing government property. Because his passport was canceled two days later when he landed he was restricted to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport terminal. Upon receiving asylum from Russia, Snowden was granted an initial one-year residency visa, which was continuously extended. In October 2020, he was granted permanent residency. President Vladimir Putin granted Snowden citizenship in September 2022, and he swore an oath of allegiance to the Russian government on December 2, 2022.
Early in 2016, Snowden was appointed president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect journalists against government surveillance and hacking. 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.” In September 2019, his memoir Permanent Record, published on September 17, 2019, sparked debates about mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and privacy of information. On September 2, 2020 a federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin, that the U.S. intelligence agency’s mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.
Edward Snowden is a whistleblower. He lost his home and the ability to reside in his country because of his decision to bring to light National privacy concerns and the limitless surveillance that affects every day civilians throughout the world. In the era of technology, it is dangerous to have no rights or privacy online when so much of our lives are entangled on the web. The release of these records sparked debates about mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and privacy of information. On September 2, 2020 a federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin, that the U.S. intelligence agency’s mass surveillance program exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.
