Edward Snowden, who leaked classified NSA documents obtained when he was an employee, was granted Russian citizenship by Vladimir Putin on Monday. He, along with 75 others, officially became Russians as per a decree signed by Putin and published on a government website.
The 39-year-old is on the US’s hitlist for violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property since leaking information on NSA’s multiple surveillance programs in 2013. He moved to Russia in the same year to escape prosecution and lived as a refugee till 2020, when he was granted permanent residence.
Also read: Vladimir Putin grants NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden Russian citizenship
Who is Edward Snowden?
Edward Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in North Carolina. His first major role in state security came when he joined the CIA as an IT officer in 2006. A self-described ‘computer wizard’, he quickly moved up the ladder and became a network security officer at CIA’s Geneva offices when he was only 24.
According to a Guardian report, Snowden had strongly Republican views in his early twenties and disliked Barrack Obama as a president. The report further says that Snowden had anonymously criticised a 2009 investigative piece by the New York Times which revealed Israel’s plans of starting a war with Iran.
He had said that the anonymous sources leaking the information to NYT should be “shot on the balls.”
However, four years later, the same Edward Snowden would leak over 1.7 million classified documents from the archives of the NSA, one of US’s top intelligence bodies.
“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he had told The Guardian in a June 2013 interview.
His stint at NSA came after he joined Dell as a contractee and worked in the division that managed computer operations for government bodies. Starting off as a supervisor with the responsibility of ensuring that the NSA computer systems are upgraded to the latest tech standards, he again showed his mettle and made his way up at NSA.
He discovered the US’s alleged surveillance apparatus when he was monitoring mass surveillance in China, the SCMP had reported. At that time, his resume said that he was working as an “expert in countercyberintelligence” at multiple US facilities.
He claims that after he discovered US mass surveillance, he tried to talk about it with supervisors and coworkers. At a 2015 Courage Foundation programme, he said he made “tremendous efforts to report these programs to co-workers, supervisors, and anyone with the proper clearance who would listen.”
However, he further said, “The reactions of those I told about the scale of the constitutional violations ranged from deeply concerned to appalled, but no one was willing to risk their jobs, families, and possibly even freedom to go through what Thomas Andrews Drake did.”
Also read: Edward Snowden granted permanent residency in Russia
Snowden left his $200,000 job at the NSA in May 2013 and flew to Hong Kong. Within a month, in early June, he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists.
On September 2, 2020, a federal court ruled that the expose by Snowden was “illegal and possibly unconstitutional”.
He has been described as a “genius among geniuses” by a former NSA colleague and has been serving as the president of Freedom of the Press Foundation- a San Francisco–based nonprofit organization
