Edward Snowden

Snowden met Lindsay Mills back in America and the couple started dating, but right before the leaks he broke up with her, citing her safety to be the main concern. However, when he went to live in Russia, Lindsay joined him there and the couple has been together ever since. In 2015, Mills showed herself at the Oscar award ceremony, when Poitras accepted the award for ‘Citizenfour’.

Born on June 21, 1983 in North Carolina, USA, Edward Snowden’s father was a coast guard officer and mother chief deputy at the US District Court in Maryland. His grandfather served at FBI for some years. Snowden said that ever since he was a kid, he was quite sure about the fact that he will serve the federal government like rest of his family.

His parents separated while Snowden was a teenager but he didn’t let that affect his academics and went on scoring top ranks in school. His mind was sharp and his I.Q. was well over 140, making him one of the rarest of human beings who possess high level intelligence. An illness caused him to remain absent from the high school for a long stretch, and despite that, he went straight for a GED test, which he cracked and went on to attend classes at Anne Arundel Community College.

He didn’t even finish his undergraduate degree, and went on to attempt a master’s degree at the University of Liverpool. He was pretty much influenced with Japanese and Chinese culture, which encouraged him to learn Japanese and Chinese along with Chinese martial arts. He adapted Buddhism as his religion at the age of 20.

Edward Snowden got a job at the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, as an IT professional in 2006, which he instantly knew wasn’t what it seemed from a distance. He discovered the surveillance system which infiltrated the privacy of general population and started collecting documents. Following a suspicion of breaking into the top classified documents, Snowden was fired and he went on to work with Dell, in one of NSA’s offices in Japan. He worked as a sub contractor there from 2009 until 2013.

He went on to work with Booz Allen Hamilton after leaving Dell, another tech consultant company, where he worked for three months. His interest in the top secret files of NSA grew while working at Booz Allen and he devised ways to break into the top secret vaults of their system, and found out the practises which he thought were immoral, unethical and needed to be halted immediately. He went on to build a dossier of all the information he collected, which he thought were necessary to prove his point.

Once he was done with collecting the relevant documents, he took a medical leave stating that he suffered with epilepsy. He arranged a meeting with a journalist from ‘The Guardian’ and a documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in a Hong Kong hotel. In June 2013, the information was officially presented to the whole world through The Guardian where it stated that American public’s phones were getting tapped without their knowledge and some of them were being kept under surveillance.

The information was gathered through PRISM, a program devised by NSA itself. The world was shaken and NSA went bitter as Edward kept addressing media from Hong Kong and told them that he wouldn’t allow this to happen on his watch that the privacy of general public was monitored every second of the day and it harms the basic rights of human beings to be free. The US government replied to the leaks almost immediately and charged Snowden with the accusations of ‘theft of government properties’ and ‘illegal communication of intelligence information to an unauthorized person’ under the espionage act.

Snowden moved out of Hong Kong and went to Russia, where due to the passport issues, he got stranded at the airport for close to a month, but somehow, Russian government allowed him to stay in the country and rejected several of America’s requests to extradite him. Americans started considering him a national hero and a petition was started to free Snowden of all the charges to President Barack Obama. Several appeals of clemency made by Snowden were rejected by the American government.

Edward Snowden’s net worth is close to USD 8.6 millions.