Edward Snowden

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Edward Snowden grew up in Crofton, Maryland, close enough to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade to see the campus. He dropped out of high school, earned a GED, and studied intermittently at Anne Arundel Community College without completing a degree. What he had instead was a demonstrable talent for computer systems that the intelligence community’s contractor apparatus was built to absorb. After an intelligence-community job fair in 2006, he accepted a CIA offer; in March 2007 the Agency deployed him to Geneva under diplomatic cover as a State Department IT specialist — his first prolonged exposure to classified material. By his account in Permanent Record (2019), the Geneva period was formative, registering a gap between the intelligence community’s stated purpose and its operational practice.

Snowden left the CIA in 2009 and moved into the NSA contractor pipeline — first through Dell, then through Booz Allen Hamilton, both major nodes in the intelligence contractor-industrial complex. Dell sent him to Hawaii in March 2012 as lead technologist for an NSA information-sharing office, based at the Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center in central Oahu. His positions as infrastructure analyst and system administrator gave him, in his own account, “access to all but the highest-level security information.” In March 2013, days after watching Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testify to the Senate that the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans, Snowden quit his Dell contract and took a position at Booz Allen Hamilton — by his account at $122,000 a year (a self-reported 2012–2013 figure), a cut from a prior Dell salary he put near $200,000 — deliberately seeking broader access to NSA program documentation.

On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong carrying downloaded NSA documents. The first publication — Glenn Greenwald’s June 5, 2013 Guardian article disclosing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order compelling Verizon to deliver telephony metadata to the NSA — appeared while he was still there. Over the following weeks, Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill published the core disclosures: the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata program, PRISM’s acquisition of internet content from nine major U.S. technology companies under Section 702, the XKeyscore analytic system, and the NSA/GCHQ MUSCULAR program that tapped fiber links between Google’s and Yahoo’s data centers. On June 9, at Snowden’s request, The Guardian released Poitras’s video of his on-camera self-identification; Booz Allen terminated his employment the next day. On June 21, 2013, the Justice Department unsealed Espionage Act charges and the State Department revoked his passport.

On June 23, 2013, Snowden flew from Hong Kong toward Ecuador, transiting Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where the U.S. passport revocation left him stranded in the international transit zone for 39 days. Russia granted temporary asylum on August 1, 2013, followed by a three-year residency permit in 2014, permanent residency in October 2020, and citizenship via a Putin decree signed September 26, 2022 (oath sworn December 1, 2022). He has married and had a child in Moscow. Poitras’s account of the disclosure, Citizenfour, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2015 ceremony.

Sources

• Edward Snowden, Permanent Record, Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, September 17, 2019 — autobiography (birth, education, CIA/Geneva, contractor career, salary figures).
• Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, May 13, 2014.
• Luke Harding, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man, Vintage Books, February 13, 2014.
• Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, Penguin Press, May 19, 2020.
• “U.S. charges Snowden with espionage,” The Washington Post, June 21, 2013 — Espionage Act charges, passport revocation.
• Laura Poitras, Citizenfour (documentary), Praxis Films / HBO Documentary Films, October 10, 2014.