Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden disclosed the scale of American and allied mass surveillance in June 2013 and has lived in Russia ever since. Born in North Carolina in 1983 to a Coast Guard officer and a court clerk, he grew up near Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency. He did not finish high school, took community college courses, and enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2004 for special forces training, discharged after breaking both legs. He worked as a security guard at an NSA-linked facility, then in IT for the CIA, with a posting under diplomatic cover in Geneva, and afterwards as a contractor for Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton at NSA sites in Japan and Hawaii. The contractor role gave him system administrator access across the agency's internal networks. In May 2013 he flew to Hong Kong with a set of documents and met the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and the Guardian's Ewen MacAskill. The reporting revealed the bulk collection of American telephone metadata under a secret court order, the PRISM programme drawing on data from major technology companies, tapping of fibre-optic cables, the British Tempora programme, and surveillance of allied leaders including Angela Merkel's phone. He identified himself immediately rather than remaining anonymous. The United States charged him under the Espionage Act, revoked his passport while he was in transit, and he was stranded at Sheremetyevo airport for thirty-nine days before Russia granted asylum. A federal appeals court ruled the telephone programme unlawful in 2020, and the USA Freedom Act of 2015 ended it. He was granted Russian citizenship in 2022.

• Lived: 1983 CE – ?
• Nationality: American
• Roles: activist