It was the day his life changed forever. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on mass surveillance by the US government, he traded a comfortable existence in Hawaii, the paradise of the Pacific, for indefinite exile in Russia, now a pariah in much of the world.
But 10 years after Snowden was identified as the source of the biggest National Security Agency (NSA) leak in history, it is less clear whether America underwent a similarly profound transformation in its attitude to safeguarding individual privacy. Was his act of self-sacrifice worth it – did he make a difference?
“I wish things had changed more than they have,” says Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in New York. “I would say that the Snowden disclosures made a huge difference to how informed public debate is about the government’s surveillance activities.”
Snowden grew up in North Carolina and suburban Washington, where his father served in the US Coast Guard and his mother worked as a clerk at the NSA. His early obsession with technology – he hacked the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory network as a teenager – led him to a career as a CIA and NSA systems engineer.
Snowden was disturbed to see how NSA analysts used the government’s collection powers to read the emails of current and former romantic partners and stalk them online. One particular NSA program, known as XKeyscore, allowed the government to scour the recent internet history of ordinary...
By MELISSA GOLDIN During a Cabinet meeting on Friday at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, President Donald Trump claimed without evidence that recent cyberattacks in Minnesota were ...