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Privacy Rights in the Digital Age

Snowden, Edward Joseph

by Reuben Fuller-Bennett

An American information technology professional responsible for one of the most significant disclosures of classified U.S. government documents in history.

Edward (“Ed”) Joseph Snowden was born June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In May 2004, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve as a special forces candidate. He joined the global communications division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2005, as part of a team charged with the maintenance of CIA computer network security in Geneva, Switzerland. In 2009, he was hired by Dell Inc., a contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), as an expert in cyber-counterintelligence. He began working for the NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in 2013, for the express purpose of gathering classified data to leak it to the press.

The U.S. Department of Defense estimates that Snowden disclosed a total of 1.7 million classified documents, as well as the existence and structure of several secret NSA surveillance programs. Snowden stated that he carefully evaluated every document that was disclosed to ensure that such disclosure was in the public interest. The disclosures notably revealed the details of three secret global surveillance programs—PRISM, Boundless Informant, and XKeyscore—operated by NSA with the support of the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The PRISM program granted NSA direct access to the Google and Yahoo accounts of people within the United States. The Boundless Informant program allowed access to worldwide telephonic metadata and provided analytic tools for analyzing them to reveal patterns and connections between callers. The XKeyscore program granted access to nearly everything the average user does on the Internet, including the content of emails, web searches, and websites visited. Snowden further disclosed the existence of NSA's MonsterMind program, which is capable of automatically responding to unusual patterns of Internet use consistent with cyberattacks and blocking such potential attacks from entering U.S. networks.

Snowden testified before the European Parliament that he had expressed his doubts about the legality of the programs to ten NSA officials, who either took no action or told him to remain silent on the matter. This contention is disputed by NSA, which claims that there is no evidence that Snowden ever made any such reports.

Snowden chose to make his identity public rather than remain anonymous, as had many prior whistleblowers. He did so to protect fellow NSA contractors and employees from being subjected to government scrutiny in a potential hunt for the source of the leaks, as well as to embolden others to step forward with their own disclosures and because he believed that he had done nothing wrong. Snowden initially did not want to appear on camera; however, out of a desire that the press focus on the content of the disclosures rather than their source, he changed his mind.

Eighteen days after the leaks were first published, the U.S. government revoked Snowden's passport while he was en route to Ecuador to seek asylum. As a result, he was forced to stay in Moscow, Russia, where his flight had landed for a layover. He lived in Moscow's Sheremetyevo international airport for thirty-nine days before being granted a temporary one-year asylum in Russia on August 1, 2014, which was extended, upon expiration, into a three-year Russian residency permit.

The U.S. government filed the following criminal charges against Snowden on June 14, 2013: theft of government property, two violations of the Espionage Act, and willful communication of classified intelligence information to an unauthorized person.

Snowden's disclosures have contributed to the grounds of two notable lawsuits. In Klayman v. Obama (957 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C., 2013)]), plaintiff Larry Klayman alleged, based on the Snowden leaks, that the U.S. government had unlawfully collected his telephonic metadata in violation of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. In ACLU v. Clapper (no. 13–3994) (S.D.N.Y, 2013), the American Civil Liberties Union alleged that NSA's mass collection of telephonic metadata, revealed by Snowden, had violated the First Amendment as well as the Fourth Amendment's protection of the right to privacy.

Expressly in response to Snowden's disclosures, the United Nations General Assembly in December 2013 adopted nonbinding Resolution 68/167, which is meant to protect the right of privacy against unlawful surveillance.

Snowden was the subject of Laura Poitras's 2014 documentary Citizenfour, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Among the many awards and honors bestowed upon Snowden in recognition of the disclosures, he was named the Guardian's person of the year, was the runner-up for Time magazine's person of the year, and was presented with the Sam Adams Award, all in 2013.

Further Reading

1 

Greenwald, Glenn. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. New York: Metropolitan Books/H. Holt, 2014.

2 

Harding, Luke. The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man. New York: Vintage Books, 2014.

3 

Lyon, David. Surveillance after Snowden. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2015.

4 

Snowden, Edward. The Snowden Reader, edited by David P. Fidler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

See also: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); Boundless Informant; Electronic surveillance; Espionage Act; Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; Greenwald, Glenn; Metadata; Poitras, Laura; PRISM; The Right to Privacy; Whistleblowers

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Fuller-Bennett, Reuben. "Snowden, Edward Joseph." Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PRDA_0195.
APA 7th
Fuller-Bennett, R. (2016). Snowden, Edward Joseph. In C. Anglim & JD (Ed.), Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Fuller-Bennett, Reuben. "Snowden, Edward Joseph." Edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD. Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.