The Pentagon Papers, the Iraq War Logs… US history is full of infamous leaks that
blew the government wide open. But there’s one set of leaks that stands
head and shoulders above the others. In 2013, a contractor with the National Security
Agency, or NSA, quietly handed a cache of documents over to The Guardian, detailing
how the NSA had been hoovering up information on millions of Americans while lying to Congress. It was the single most explosive story of
the post 9/11-era. The man behind it all? Edward Snowden. A young computer whizz from North Carolina,
Snowden is today infamous. Currently holed up in asylum in Russia, he’s
both loved and loathed by millions. To some, he’s a fearless whistleblower who
sacrificed everything to do what was right. To others, he’s the 21st Century version
of a Cold War defector. But the truth is more complex than either
of those portrayals. Snowden’s life is one of contradictions,
surprises, and enough shades of gray to fill a million E.L. James novels. Today, we investigate the man behind the most
notorious leak in American history. Early Years – The Drop Out
If you know the name Elizabeth City, North Carolina, it’s likely because of the Coast
Guard base. By some measures the busiest in the US, the
base dominates the lives of local residents. The Snowdens were no exception. When Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June
21, 1983, it was into a family with deep military connections. Young Snowden’s maternal grandfather, Edward
J. Barrett, was a rear admiral, and his father Lonnie also worked in the Coast Guard. For Snowden, that meant a childhood instilled
with deep respect for the services. But it was also a childhood marked by something
more tragic: the slow breakdown of his parents’ marriage. Lonnie and Elizabeth Snowden (known to her
friends as Wendy) were high school sweethearts who’d married young. Although Wendy suffered from epilepsy, it
wasn’t debilitating. She managed to get a job as a Maryland district
court clerk, moving the family north in 1992. But if the Snowdens were expecting their new
lives in Maryland to be easy, they were mistaken. As Wendy and Lon’s marriage drifted, young
Snowden was stumbling into a crisis at high school. Despite being clearly intelligent, the teenage
boy didn’t excel at anything. When he missed four months study after catching
glandular fever in 1998, it knocked him back to a place he couldn’t recover from. He flunked high school. Perhaps desperate to salvage something from
this debacle, Snowden enrolled in computer classes at Anne Arundel community college. But his prospects were low. Message board posts he left around this time
are tinged with cheerful desperation about being unemployed. The family stumbled on for another couple
of years, but by 2001, the writing was on the wall. Wendy and Lon split, and Wendy took off for
Ellicott City, near Baltimore. One year later, 19-year old Snowden followed
her. At this stage, Edward Snowden was about as
far from a potential Biographics subject as you’re likely to get. His only achievement was being webmaster of
an anime message board. Yet even now, there were two clues to his
future notoriety. The first was his incomparable tech skills. After enrolling at Anne Arundel, Snowden had
discovered he had not just an aptitude for computers, but a genius. The second was his location. Ellicott City is home to somewhere that’s
going to become very important to our story. It’s home to NSA Headquarters. Unfortunately, real life isn’t as narratively
pleasing as fiction, and we need to take a quick detour to get there. On March 20, 2003, the US invaded Iraq. Although the main fighting was over by the
end of May, a call for recruits went out nationwide. This call struck a chord with the unemployed
Snowden. Maybe it was his family’s Coast Guard background,
but for whatever reason, Snowden felt compelled to join up. In May, 2004, he reported for duty at Fort
Benning, Georgia. His training didn’t last long. Snowden later said he broke both legs. The Army claimed he flunked out with shin
splints. Either way, the result was the same. After barely a month, Snowden was discharged. He returned to Maryland, an unemployed failure. Finally, in 2005, Snowden got a security guard
job at Maryland's Centre for Advanced Study of Language. And there his story could have ended, were
it not for one little fact. The Center was backed by the NSA. And the NSA was desperate to recruit computer
geeks. A World of Shadows
After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, America’s intelligence agencies went through an era
of downsizing and shedding staff. That all changed on September 11, 2001. Faced with the new terrorist threat, the agencies
were desperate to make up for lost time. They were also desperate to catch up with
evolving tech. Way into the 2000s, the senior staff were
so technologically illiterate that some could barely distinguish a laptop from a sandwich. It was clearly time to start hiring the best
tech guys. And one of the best just happened to be working
as an NSA security guard. Within months, Snowden had switched his security
job for IT. He must have made an impression. Not two years after flunking basic military
training, in mid-2006, young Snowden got a job offer from the CIA. Saying “yes” would turn out to be a key
decision in his life. The young IT genius was whisked away to Geneva,
Switzerland in 2007. While his actual job was a mixture of the
cool and the not-so-cool – between maintaining network security, he was also tasked with
fixing the aircon – the money it paid was no joke. As a CIA technician, Snowden was able to live
every boy’s James Bond fantasies. He bought a brand new BMW, befriended an Estonian
rock star, and played the stock market, boasting he’d lost $20,000 in a single month. He also traveled extensively, washing up in
Rome, in Bosnia, in London. Not that his opinions of these places were
always PC. Of London’s vibrant Muslim community, he
wrote they were “terrifying…. I didn’t want to get out of the car.” Yet even in this dream job, disillusionment
could creep in. In 2008, Snowden supposedly witnessed the
CIA arranging for a banker to be caught drink driving, then offering to suppress the charge
in return for cooperation. The Swiss authorities have denied this ever
happened. Still, the anguish Snowden felt working for
the CIA was real enough. He would later claim:
"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions... I realized that I was part of something that
was doing far more harm than good." Not that he seemed like a potential whistleblower
just yet. When the New York Times published a leaked
Pentagon plan to attack Iran in January 2009, Snowden raged online that anyone who leaked
such information to the press “should be shot in the balls.” Still, there’s no doubt that Snowden was
struggling with something in Geneva, and it was making him angry. In February, 2009, he abruptly resigned from
the CIA. Anonymous sources in the Agency later said
he’d been on the verge of being fired for trying to hack their database. Back in the US, the young computer whizz underwent
a change. His message board posts became full of angry
rants against government programs like social welfare, and invective against Obama’s new
administration. In a world full of angry young men, it seemed
Edward Snowden was simply another voice screaming into the online void. But there was one crucial difference. Snowden was still useful. Within a couple of months of leaving the CIA,
Snowden had a new job, this time as a contractor for Dell working on NSA projects. The first was working on anti cyberspying
software in Tokyo. For the lifelong anime fan, moving to Japan
should have been a dream come true. Instead, it plunged Snowden into a moral nightmare. Secret Plots and “Spooky Types”
On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange previewed a leaked military video at a National
Press Club event. Known as “Collateral Murder” it showed
US military pilots gunning down two Reuters journalists mistaken for terrorists in Baghdad
in 2007. The video was the first major scoop in the
history of Wikileaks. It was also the beginning of the biggest intelligence
leak in history. Throughout the rest of the year, Wikileaks
and The Guardian, New York Times, and Der Spiegel published the Afghan War Logs, the
Iraq War Logs, and finally a trove of leaked US diplomatic cables. Supplied to Wikileaks by intelligence analyst
Chelsea Manning, the classified files turned the world’s opinion of the US upside down. But not Edward Snowden’s. Over in Japan, the young IT professional had
become increasingly disturbed by the work the NSA was up to. On February 18, 2010, he’d posted on a message
board: “It really concerns me how little this sort
of corporate behavior bothers those outside of technology circles. Society really seems to have developed an
unquestioning obedience towards spooky types.” But it wasn’t until Manning’s leaks shook
the media that Snowden seems to have decided to reveal the NSA’s secrets. In 2011, Dell transferred him back to Maryland
from Japan. On the outside, this was perfect for Snowden. He moved in with his younger girlfriend, the
free spirited Lindsay Mills. But inside? Inside, Snowden had already made his decision. It was while back in Maryland that he started
downloading the documents he would soon release into the world. In early 2012, Snowden contacted the Tor Project,
an online community dedicated to providing everyone with the tools to encrypt their internet
activity. While this seems innocuous enough, Tor was
deeply connected with Wikileaks. Many have suggested Snowden made contact with
Tor as a way of getting to Assange. If that was the plan, though, it soon ran
into trouble with a capital T. On June 19, 2012, the Wikileaks founder fled
to the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid arrest on a rape charge. The subsequent media circus may have made
Snowden rethink Wikileaks as the place to publish his revelations. By now, Snowden and Mills were in Hawaii,
where Snowden had work with the NSA’s regional cryptological center. At this point, he was actively looking for
opportunities to steal documents. But he may have also been looking for something
else: validation for his genius. That summer, Snowden hacked the answers for
an NSA job promotion test and subsequently aced it. When he was offered a new position, he got
angry that it wasn’t high up enough and rejected it. The NSA’s Deputy Director would later tell
reporters he considered this the moment Snowden turned on the agency. Whatever the truth, it wasn’t only at work
that people were noticing the change in Snowden. In July 2012, Lindsay Mills blogged that the
couple’s relationship in Hawaii was under stress. By October, she was writing about “heavy
conversations” and “stress paralysis”. Whatever was preying on Snowden’s mind was
tormenting them both. That Thanksgiving, Mills returned to the US
mainland to see her family for an extended break. While she was away, Snowden finally set the
wheels of his plan in motion. On December 1, 2012, Guardian columnist and
vocal Wikileaks defender Glenn Greenwald got an unusual email, suggesting he set up PGP
encryption software on his laptop. Like anyone getting such a paranoid email,
Greenwald ignored it, assuming the sender was a crank. Little did Greenwald know this was his first
contact with the man who’d soon make his career. The Heist of the Century
A month after being frozen out by Greenwald, Snowden tried again. This time, he contacted the journalist’s
friend, documentary maker Laura Poitras. Poitras was deeply connected to the Tor Project
we talked about earlier. When she first heard from Snowden, she assumed
he was trying to entrap her. But when her contacts at Tor gave him the
green light, she began to listen. Using a fake name, Snowden told Poitras he
was a high-ranking intelligence officer. This was a total lie, but the next part wasn’t. He told her he could get hold of files that
would paint the US in a very bad light. If Poitras wanted to see them, all she had
to do was get Greenwald onboard. That February, Snowden changed jobs again. While still working at the NSA’s Hawaii
center, he took a pay cut to move from contracting with Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton. His new role was a Sysadmin, a role with two
unbelievable bonuses for the potential leaker. One, that it made Snowden one of the only
people at the NSA with a legitimate reason to carry normally-forbidden thumb drives. And two, that it gave him access to almost
the entire system. Still, some to this day are skeptical that
even a Sysadmin could have accessed so many confidential areas without help. It’s thought Snowden may have stolen 14
people’s login credentials to maximize his reach. Pro-Snowden sources say he used his Sysadmin
title to trick people into handing them over. Anti-Snowden sources say he may have received
help from Russian intelligence. Back in the real world, Poitras was desperately
trying to convince Greenwald her source was on the level. That March, they tentatively agreed to meet
Snowden face to face. Yet the trio missed their first chance that
very month. On March 30, Snowden flew back to the US mainland. But rather than go meet the journalists, he
went to see his father. On April 4, 2013, Lonnie and Edward had dinner. Lonnie later said his son seemed preoccupied,
like something was weighing him down. When they finished eating, the two men hugged. “I love you, dad,” said Snowden. “I love you too, son,” Lonnie replied. Back in Hawaii, the disconnect between Snowden’s
private and public lives was growing. At the same time he and Mills moved into a
new house, Glenn Greenwald was receiving two thumb drives with instructions on how to encrypt
his communications. Not that Greenwald was the only journalist
Snowden was courting. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post was
also in contact with Snowden in May 2013, and was even given the first major cache of
NSA files. But Gellman wanted too much time for fact
checking. Angry at the delay, Snowden cut him off. Between his secret chats with Greenwald, Gellman
and Poitras, Snowden was laying the groundwork for his escape. He told his employers he was suffering from
epilepsy, just like his mother, and needed some time off. On May 17, Mills left for a sailing vacation
with friends. With remarkable understatement, Snowden told
her he might not be around when she got back. Three days later, the 29 year old traveled
to Honolulu airport and got on a flight to Hong Kong. He had with him four laptops and a stack of
thumb drives carrying an estimated 1.7 million top secret documents. About a week later, Greenwald got a message
over his newly-installed encrypted system, asking him to come to Hong Kong. Not unreasonably, Greenwald asked why. In response, Snowden sent him a welcome package. As Greenwald opened the files, his eyes went
wide. Here, in black and white, was solid proof
that the NSA had knowingly lied to Congress about the extent of its covert surveillance
programs. And this was just the taster. The main course would be waiting for him in
Hong Kong. Provided he was willing to come. Three days later, on June 1, 2013, Greenwald
was on a plane heading for Asia. Alongside him were Laura Poitras and veteran
Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill. The story of the century had begun. Who Watches the Watchmen? Much later, when the dust had settled, Glenn Greenwald would
write that he was expecting to meet a veteran of the intelligence services in the hyper-crowded
city. Someone middle aged, with the grizzled look
and gray hair of a longtime secret operative. In Snowden, he got exactly the opposite. Prior to leaving, the reporters had arranged
to meet Snowden in the lobby of the Mira hotel, an imposing glass edifice in trendy Kowloon. Snowden had supplied them with code words
and said he would be carrying a Rubik’s cube. The first day, Greenwald and Poitras waited,
only for Snowden to not show. The second day, they waited again, keeping
their eyes peeled for the heavyset ex-military man carrying his Rubik’s cube. When they saw skinny, delicate Edward Snowden,
Greenwald later said his heart sank. Still, they stuck to the script. Greenwald sauntered up to the young man and
asked: “What time does the restaurant open?” “At noon,” came the reply, “but don’t
go there, the food sucks.” For a moment, the two stood there awkwardly. Then Snowden muttered “follow me,” and
led them to his room. Right up until Snowden began talking, Greenwald
was convinced the whole thing was a waste of time. But as they settled into the anonymous room
and Snowden began to spin his tale, the doubts slowly melted away. What was left was a feeling of sheer terror. As Poitras filmed, Snowden told Greenwald
how the NSA could hack any phone in the world and turn it into a microphone that spied on
its owner. He explained that nearly every social media
platform had been compromised, that the US government – and its allies in Britain,
Israel, and elsewhere – was hoovering up metadata on every citizen that gave them an
accurate picture of your entire life. Your loves, your dreams, your frustrations,
your desires, even the type of sleazy movies you liked to watch, all of it was available
to access. Your privacy was just an illusion. At some point, Greenwald invited Ewan MacAskill
up to meet Snowden. As the most experienced reporter there, MacAskill
would be able to sniff out if Snowden was faking it. He even had a special code to use with the
Guardian offices. If Snowden was a hoaxer, he’d text a single
sentence to the US editor: “the Guinness is bad.” Not long after, a text arrived at the paper’s
offices: “the Guinness is good.” Greenwald and MacAskill’s first story went
live at 7pm, June 6, 2013. Detailing how phone company Verizon had allowed
the NSA to collect data on millions of Americans, it was a bombshell. Barely 24 hours later, it was followed by
Bart Gellman’s delayed Washington Post story on the NSA’s PRISIM system. In NSA headquarters, the stories triggered
a meltdown. They knew they had a mole in their midst,
but who? On June 8, the agency used digital footprints
to identify Snowden as the likely leaker. It was the moment the young hacker’s normal
life ended. To this day, the extent of Snowden’s theft
remains unknown. The NSA estimates 1.7 million documents went
missing, of which only one percent have been released. Some think the rest found their way to the
Kremlin. Others believe Snowden wasn’t lying when
he said he took no copies to Russia. Like so much in this tale of lies and shadows,
the truth remains hidden. But on that day in 2013, the NSA feared the
worst. At 3pm on June 9, Snowden consented to the
Guardian uploading a video in which he confessed to being the source of the leaks. He claimed he’d outed himself to control
the narrative, to stop the NSA spinning a false counter story. Former NSA analysts have said it’s because
he’s an egomaniac. Before an hour was out, the video was playing
all over the world. By the time morning dawned on June 10, a wily
Twitter user had identified the Mira from its lamps. As journalists converged on the hotel, Snowden
calmly dressed and slipped out into the sprawling concrete jungle of Hong Kong. It was a sweltering day, the air thick with
humidity, and Edward Snowden was now the most wanted man alive. The Fugitive
The ripples that slowly spread out from Snowden’s vanishing act were many, affecting people
half a planet away. In Hawaii, Lindsay Mills panicked and pulled
her own disappearing act, vanishing to America’s west coast. In Iceland, a rumor that Snowden was headed
there caused mass pro-Snowden protests on the streets and a diplomatic incident with
the US. In the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian
Assange leapt on the phone and demanded Wikileaks get a representative to Hong Kong and co-opt
the story. Which is how an eager young Brit named Sarah
Harrison wound up flying to the city with a mission to track down the NSA leaker. In Hong Kong itself, a gang of human rights
lawyers led by Canadian Robert Tibbo set up a safe house system, giving Snowden places
to stay in the city’s slums. As journalists and intelligence operatives
combed the seedy streets and waded through pools of neon, Snowden disappeared into the
homes of Hong Kong’s forgotten and neglected. Today, those that helped him – all asylum
seekers – are known as the Snowden refugees. Even without its main player, the story rumbled
on. On June 14, the US Justice Department charged
the missing contractor with espionage. An arrest warrant was sent to the Hong Kong
authorities. One week later, Robert Tibbo made contact
with Hong Kong officials, asking if they would extradite his client. By now, Wikileaks’ Sarah Harrison had successfully
found Snowden. When Hong Kong’s people declined to answer,
she suggested he head for asylum in Ecuador. The net was closing in. In an interview with Glenn Greenwald, CNN
had helpfully revealed that Snowden was still in Hong Kong. On June 22, the US authorities cancelled his
passport. It was time for Snowden to run. The next day, Snowden and Harrison boarded
a flight to Moscow, supposedly intending to catch a flight to Havana, and then another
onto Ecuador. Hong Kong’s passport control failed to detain
either of them. When asked why, they would later say the US
had filed an international arrest warrant for Edward James Snowden, not Edward Joseph
Snowden. That evening, June 23, 2013, Snowden and Harrison
touched down at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International to a media circus. Someone, likely an official in Hong Kong,
had leaked the airliner’s destination to the press. Under international pressure, Russian officials
refused to let Snowden board his Havana flight. At the time, Vladimir Putin claimed Snowden’s
arrival in Moscow was “an unwanted Christmas gift”. However, the Wall Street Journal has since
claimed Snowden was in contact with the Kremlin in the last desperate days before his flight
from Hong Kong. Regardless, it was here that Snowden’s time
as James Bond finally ended. Stuck in the international transit lounge
of the airport for a month, his entire life was placed in limbo. Even as The Guardian and Washington Post kept
publishing stories based on his material, Snowden himself was regulated to a bit part. A strange ghost hanging around an airport
lounge. On August 1, 2013, over a month after he touched
down, Edward Snowden was allowed to leave Sheremetyevo airport with Harrison. The whistleblower was granted temporary refugee
status in Russia. He’s been there ever since. But don’t worry. This video isn’t going to end with Snowden
slinking out a Moscow airport one warm day in 2013. There’s still one more act to get through. The Aftermath
The legacy of Edward Snowden is a story in its own right, not least in how different
countries treated the revelations. In the UK, agents from GCHQ raided the Guardian’s
offices and smashed up their hard drives. Not long after, Parliament passed new laws
actually expanding the agency’s powers. In the US, President Obama led the charge
personally criticizing Snowden, but nonetheless set up an independent panel examining US surveillance
practices. In December 2013, the panel recommended that
bulk collection of data be suspended as unconstitutional. Today, the NSA operates under close Congressional
oversight. What else? Well, the Snowden revelations arguably led
to the EU’s extremely strict GDPR data protection laws, just as they led to Russia, China and
others passing data sovereignty laws, meaning any data collected on their citizens must
be physically stored on servers in their territory. As for Greenwald and co? They wound up winning the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. On the darker side, US intelligence agencies
have said the damage done by the leaks was irreparable. Trust was lost between nations, and terrorists
were given intimate knowledge of NSA operations. As for the man behind this chaos, well, it’s
been a mixed bag. On October 9, 2013, Edward Snowden was spotted
in Moscow for the first time since leaving the airport. Not long after, his father Lon flew out to
visit. Quite what the two talked about that day remains
a mystery. In March 2014, Snowden made his first online
speaking appearance at Texas’s South by Southwest festival. Today, such engagements are his main source
of income, netting him an estimated $200,000 a year. Not that life is all roses and honey for the
man trapped in Moscow. In 2018, a despondent Snowden told reporters
that Russia was a corrupt society and he no longer felt safe there. As for the US, Washington still considers
the whistleblower a wanted man. So, at the end of all that excitement, what
can we really say about Edward Snowden? Was he a hero or a traitor? The answer is… who knows? Yep, you didn’t really expect us to answer
that question, did you? We’re just a regular ol’ YouTube channel. Despite what you’ll hear online, it’s
likely no-one knows the answer except for Edward Snowden himself. The story of Edward Snowden is not over yet. It could end with an unexpected Presidential
pardon a week from now. It could end in sixty years when Snowden dies
alone in an anonymous Moscow apartment, still a wanted man. Or it could end in a billion other ways. All we know for sure is that the final chapter
in the life of Edward Snowden is still to be written. But his place in history is already assured.
