ANKARA
Former US security subcontractor Edward Snowden, who left his mark on the last decade by leaking highly classified information from the country's National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, has been granted Russian citizenship.
The 39-year-old whistleblower shared classified material about top-secret NSA programs, including the PRISM surveillance program, with The Guardian and The Washington Post, both of which published their first exposes in early June 2013 when he was still an employee and subcontractor of the agency.
Snowden's disclosure of thousands of documents sparked long and intense debates on the balance between national security and individual privacy and has made him the target of both admiration and accusations of treachery.
Today, Snowden's leak has become a benchmark to compare similar large-scale leaks of secret government information, as in the 2016 release of the Panama Papers, which contained 11.5 million documents, some 2.6 terabytes of data -- often described as "more than that released by US intelligence informant Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks."
Revealing numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, along with the cooperation of telecom providers and European authorities, the Snowden leak also opened discussions among governments around the world on spying or wiretapping.
The former defense subcontractor, whom the US has accused of...
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