clearaIn May 2013, a 29-year-old NSA contractor named Edward Snowden boarded a flight to Hong Kong. He carried with him laptops loaded with as many as 1.5 million classified documents, a conservative estimate later offered by the House Intelligence Committee. In the weeks that followed, he handed a portion of that trove to journalists, revealing that the National Security Agency was collecting phone metadata on millions of Americans and tapping into the servers of major tech companies through a program called PRISM.
He called himself a whistleblower.
He claimed that he was exposing a surveillance apparatus the public had a right to know about. But when authorities moved to charge him with theft of government property and violations of the Espionage Act, he didn’t stay to make his case in court. He ran. First to Hong Kong, then to Moscow, where he’s lived ever since – granted first asylum, then residency, and finally, in 2022, Russian citizenship.
Whatever you might think of the surveillance programs he exposed, his choice of flight path is telling. Real whistleblowers don’t make a getaway to an adversary’s capital. They don’t seek sanctuary from the intelligence services of a rival government. Details matter, and Snowden’s escape to a communist country complicates the mythology.
He painted himself as a hero of transparency. Supporters point to his self-described motive – alerting Americans to a surveillance state operating beyond its legal bounds – as proof of his courage...
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