Edward Snowden(Whistleblower) Biography | Edward Snowden | Who is Edward Snowden?|
Where is Edward Snowden now?
Edward Snowden(Edward Joseph Snowden) is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 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.
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 leaving 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, and Ewen MacAskill.
Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by other publications including Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
On Snowden’s 30th birthday, 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 Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been canceled, 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, and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020.
In early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance. As of 2017 he is married and living in Moscow.
On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On the first day of publication, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden over the publication of his memoir, alleging he had breached nondisclosure agreements signed with the U.S. federal government.
Former The Guardian national security reporter Ewen MacAskill called the civil lawsuit a “huge mistake”, noting that the “UK ban of Spycatcher 30 years ago created huge demand”.
The memoir was listed as no. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list that same day. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on September 26, 2019, Snowden clarified he considers himself a “whistleblower” as opposed to a “leaker” as he considers “a leaker only distributes information for personal gain”.
Edward Snowden Age | How Old is Edward Snowden?
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency employee and subcontractor.
Edward Snowden is 36 years old as of 2019. He was born on 21 June 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, United States
Education, Childhood, And Family
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. 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 also an officer in the Coast Guard, and his mother, Elizabeth, is a clerk in 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. Snowden scored above 145 on two separate IQ tests.
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.
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 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
Edward Snowden Net Worth And Salary
The former American computer professional has an estimated net worth of $8 million as of 2019. Snowden had quite an illustrious career that helped him accumulate a good amount of fame as well as fortune. He collected wealth from various renowned companies like the CIA and NSA.
Although he has said his career-high annual salary was $200,000, Snowden said he took a pay cut to work at Booz Allen, where he sought employment in order to gather data and then release details of the NSA’s worldwide surveillance activity.
Height | How Tall is Edward Snowden?
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency employee and subcontractor. As of 2019, Edward Snowden has a height of 5ft 11in (181 cm) tall
Edward Snowden Wife, Girlfriend | Who is Edward Snowden Married to?
Lindsay Mills is an American acrobat and blogger. She came to international attention as the girlfriend of Edward Snowden in 2013 at the time of the Global surveillance disclosures. Mills left the United States to join Snowden in exile in Moscow by October 2014.
Where Is Lindsay Mills Now? Edward Snowden’s Girlfriend Has A Busy Life
Everybody knows about Edward Snowden. The former government contractor took part in perhaps the biggest government scandal of this century when he leaked classified documents about the NSA’s monitoring activity to the press in 2013.
Since that time, Snowden has left the United States, where he is wanted for stealing government property and for violating the Espionage Act. He’s been living in asylum in Russia for the past three years — but not alone.
The whistleblower was dating someone at the time of his NSA leak, and for those wondering where Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills is now, it appears that the duo are still together — but given the low-profile nature of their years-long relationship, it’s hard to tell for sure.
Mills, a dancer, an acrobat, has been dating Snowden since 2009 — four years before his famous leak. They had been living together in Hawaii prior to Snowden fleeing for Hong Kong, then Russia, which he did while telling her that he was only going on vacation.
After learning the truth about his whereabouts, she remained in the U.S. for a time (since she did not commit any crime, she runs no risk to herself by staying in America). However, she was then revealed to be living with Snowden in Russia in the 2014 documentary Citizenfour, having moved there in July of that year.
Due to visa restrictions though, she doesn’t live there full-time, according to The New York Post. Instead, she travels back and forth, which demonstrates her commitment to her and Snowden’s relationship.
Perhaps the best way to categorize Mills’ living situation is to say she’s nomadic. She has a blog, and a Twitter account, and an Instagram, and she posts pictures on all of them. She almost never says where the pictures are taken place, but some appear to be taken in the U.S., while others seem to be in Moscow.
Mills also spent this summer traveling around Europe, posting photos from Iceland, Poland, and other spots throughout Eastern Europe. It’s unknown whether or not Snowden accompanied her for her travels, but given that he risks extradition to the U.S. in many countries, even years after his leak, it’s pretty unlikely.
Without question, Mills’ most notable public appearance occurred last year, when she showed up at the 2015 Academy Awards. She was there on behalf of Citizenfour and even made her way onstage alongside filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald when the film won the award for Best Documentary Feature. That’s arguably when the public saw her in person for the first time.
So while Mills seemingly spends much of her time alongside boyfriend Snowden in Russia, she does not lead the restricted life that he does. She is free to travel (which she does extensively) and have amazing experiences (like going to the Oscars) that Snowden simply can’t due to his legal situation. But Moscow seems to still be the place that she most likely calls home. Most of the time.
Political views
Snowden has said that, in the 2008 presidential election, he voted for a third-party candidate, though he “believed in Obama’s promises.” Following the election, he believed President Barack Obama was continuing policies espoused by George W. Bush.
In accounts published in June 2013, interviewers noted that Snowden’s laptop displayed stickers supporting Internet freedom organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tor Project.
A week after the publication of his leaks began, Ars Technica confirmed that Snowden had been an active participant at the site’s online forum from 2001 through May 2012, discussing a variety of topics under the pseudonym “TheTrueHOOHA.” In a January 2009 entry, TheTrueHOOHA exhibited strong support for the U.S. security state apparatus and said leakers of classified information “should be shot in the balls.”
However, Snowden disliked Obama’s CIA director’s appointment of Leon Panetta, saying “Obama just named a fucking politician to run the CIA.” Snowden was also offended by a possible ban on assault weapons, writing “I and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.”
Snowden disliked Obama’s economic policies, was against Social Security and favored Ron Paul’s call for a return to the gold standard. In 2014, Snowden supported a basic income.
Career
Feeling a duty to fight in the Iraq War to help free oppressed people, Snowden enlisted in the United States Army Reserve on May 7, 2004, and became a Special Forces candidate through its 18X enlistment option. He did not complete the training. After breaking both legs in a training accident, he was discharged 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. 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 check.
Employment at CIA
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.
In May 2006, Snowden wrote in Ars Technica that he had no trouble getting work because he was a “computer wizard”. After distinguishing himself as a junior employee on the top computer-team, Snowden was sent to the CIA’s secret school for technology specialists, where he lived in a hotel for six months while studying and training full-time.
In March 2007, the CIA stationed Snowden with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer-network security. Assigned to the U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations, a diplomatic mission representing U.S. interests before the UN and other international organizations, Snowden received a diplomatic passport and a four-bedroom apartment near Lake Geneva.
According to Greenwald, while there Snowden was “considered the top technical and cybersecurity expert” in that country and “was hand-picked by the CIA to support the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania”. Snowden described his CIA experience in Geneva as formative, stating that the CIA deliberately got a Swiss banker drunk and encouraged him to drive home.
Snowden said that when the latter was arrested, a CIA operative offered to help in exchange for the banker becoming an informant. Ueli Maurer, President of the Swiss Confederation for the year 2013, in June of that year publicly disputed Snowden’s claims.
“This would mean that the CIA successfully bribed the Geneva police and judiciary. With all due respect, I just can’t imagine it,” said Maurer. In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA.
NSA sub-contractee as an employee for Dell
In 2009, Snowden began work as a contractee for Dell, which manages computer systems for multiple government agencies. Assigned to an NSA facility at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo, Snowden instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers.
During his four years with Dell, he rose from supervising NSA computer system upgrades to working as what his résumé termed a “cyber strategist” and an “expert in cyber counterintelligence” at several U.S. locations. In 2011, he returned to Maryland, where he spent a year as a lead technologist on Dell’s CIA account.
In that capacity, he was consulted by the chiefs of the CIA’s technical branches, including the agency’s chief information officer and its chief technology officer. U.S. officials and other sources familiar with the investigation said Snowden began downloading documents describing the government’s electronic spying programs while working for Dell in April 2012.
Investigators estimated that of the 50,000 to 200,000 documents Snowden gave to Greenwald and Poitras, most were copied by Snowden while working at Dell.
In March 2012, Dell reassigned Snowden to Hawaii as lead technologist for the NSA’s information-sharing office. At the time of his departure from the U.S. in May 2013, he had been employed for 15 months inside the NSA’s Hawaii regional operations center, which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea, the last three of which were with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
While intelligence officials have described his position there as a system administrator, Snowden has said he was an infrastructure analyst, which meant that his job was to look for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.
On March 15, 2013 – three days after what he later called his “breaking point” of “seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” – Snowden quit his job at Dell.
Although he has said his career-high annual salary was $200,000, Snowden said he took a pay cut to work at Booz Allen, where he sought employment in order to gather data and then release details of the NSA’s worldwide surveillance activity.
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