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On June 2, 2013, in Hong Kong, a 29-year-old man approached a man and a woman and asked what time a restaurant opened. They noticed he was holding a Rubik's cube, and they said they didn't know. He then asked to be shown to the hotel lobby and showed them to his room. When they entered the room, the woman silently opened her briefcase on the unmade bed, set up her camera on a tripod and began recording. "My name is Edward Joseph Snowden. I used to work for the government, but now I work for the people. It took me almost 30 years to realize the difference.
Edward Snowden is a former CIA spy and national security agent who now lives in exile in Russia after revealing U.S. government secrets. Today we will talk about one of the biggest scandals in the history of American cyber intelligence. The day it became known that the CIA and NSA have secret programs that allow them to spy on citizens around the world. This is the story of Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the US mass surveillance.
The beginning of the journey.
Edward Snowden was born in 1983 in a small town called Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
It is literally a typical American town with a population of 18 thousand people. There he lived with his mother, who worked as an administrator, and his father, who served in the Coast Guard. It was his father, Loni Snowden, who instilled in Edward a love of technology. Because of his work, he was often absent from home, but when he returned, he always brought with him various technological gadgets that aroused the curiosity of the boy. One of these gadgets was the Commodore 64, one of the first personal computers. On the Commodore, Edward played Tetris, Asteroids, and most of all, he spent the most time in the game Choplifter, a game where you had to control a helicopter.
Thus passed his happy childhood in Elizabeth City, filled with video games, but everything changed when he moved to Crofton, Maryland. His father was promoted in the Coast Guard and became a chief officer of the aviation and engineering department, and his mother, Wendy, got an administrative position at the National Security Agency. The family moved to a large beautiful house in a good area, but Edward himself faced serious difficulties. The thing is, he was from the South and had a strong Southern accent, a bit like the Simpsons characters.
His classmates started teasing him, so he decided not to speak at all until he got rid of the accent. At the same time, he began to do poorly in school, the teachers decided that he was really lagging behind and gave him IQ tests. And it turned out that everything was quite the opposite, the boy turned out to be a Child Prodigy. However, for his parents, this was hardly a surprise. Since childhood, when Edward asked to buy him a toy in the store, his mother made him add up the cost of all the goods in the basket. If he named the exact amount, the toy was bought. But that's not all. He also had to calculate the 3% tax and add it to the total cost.
In his book, he recalls this moment. Why should I add 3%? It’s a tax. When you buy something, part of the money goes to the government. And why do they need this money? Do you like the roads? Well, this money goes to fix them. And also to buy books for the library. After a while, his math skills were called into question. When the amount he calculated in his head did not match the amount on the cash register display, he panicked, thinking he was wrong, but his mother explained again.
They raised the sales tax, now adding 4%. Does that mean there will be even more books in the library now? I hope so, his mother replied. Either way, Edward was a very smart kid. His father kept bringing home new gadgets, including a Compact Prisario 425, which at the time cost $1,399, which is about $3,000 today. Edward used the computer to play video games, like any 12-year-old.
He was into the game Loom, but he also started spending a lot of time on the Internet. For him, it was a more interesting world than real life. He could spend hours looking for cheat codes for video games, but what attracted him most were Internet forums where users could share files and participate in discussions. And that’s how, step by step, thanks to the emerging Internet, Edward Snowden plunged into the world of programming and network engineering. In the early 2000s, Edward Snowden started working as a programmer thanks to his 25-year-old married friend.
She owned a web design company and hired the young Snowden to help write codes for websites. They paid him $30 an hour, which was a huge amount for an 18-year-old teenager. But on September 11, 2001, while Edward was working quietly at his computer, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was his boss’s husband, screaming in panic. Two American Airlines Boeing planes crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. Another one hit the Pentagon, the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
Edward was so shocked by the footage of the attack that he no longer wanted to work as a programmer at a regular job. He wanted to protect his country, and to do this, he needed to get into the CIA. A dream impossible for almost most IT specialists. Snowden did not give up. He understood that to achieve his goal, he needed not only technical skill, but also the ability to remain anonymous. He knew that in the digital world, every step leaves a trace. This is called a digital fingerprint. Information that is collected from you when you go online.
How to join the CIA.
After September 11, a wave of nationalism began in the United States. Thousands of people were ready to serve the country. Snowden was one of them. Edward convinced himself that he wanted to get into the CIA. He does it out of sincere patriotism, feeling that the best way to help the cause is to apply all his knowledge in programming in the service of the state.
True, he had one serious problem - he did not have a degree, and the CIA and the National Security Agency usually required candidates to have a degree in engineering. After the terrorist attacks, there was a race to strengthen the country's defense. Institutes were growing rapidly, and agencies like the CIA began to hire people without degrees, provided that they demonstrated the necessary skills. However, to be accepted without a university degree, you first had to serve in the army.
So Edward packed his things and enlisted in the US Army. There he was given the nickname Snowflake, which means snowflake. But the service lasted only 6 months, during one of the training sessions he broke his leg, and instead of treatment, the state simply fired him so as not to pay for medical expenses. After these 6 months, he could not be considered a veteran of the army, but Edward hoped that he would have a better chance of getting into the CIA. To further increase his chances, he applies for a security clearance.
In the United States, there are three levels of secrecy - confidential, secret and top secret. Snowden chose the most difficult one – top secret. This is already the level of the CIA and NSA. Then comes the most difficult stage – candidate verification. This is where his life will change forever. To get this clearance, he had to go through a process called Single Scope Background Investigation, which is essentially a full investigation of who you are, who your family is, what you did in your life and, of course, what trace you left on the Internet.
A full analysis of his family, friends, work and studies. Scanning his digital footprint, what he wrote on the Internet, what sites he visited, searching for weak points, whether there are skeletons in the closet that can be used to blackmail him. Snowden had no dirt, but his biography had some awkward moments. For example, as a teenager, he left stupid comments on forums. He also had accounts on dating sites, where he believed that Laura was only 5 kilometers away from him. One of these sites was HotOnOt.
A service similar to Tinder. Users uploaded their photos, and others rated them on a scale of 1 to 10. It was there that Edward met his future wife Lindsay Mills. After passing the final polygraph test, Edward was hired. After that, he was admitted to the world of intelligence. But Snowden did not immediately become a CIA agent, he was hired by a private company that worked under contract with the CIA and the NSA. At that time, intelligence had a limit on the number of full-time employees, but the law did not limit the number of contractors, so his path into the shadow world of cyber espionage began.
He got into the CIA through a contract with the company Comso. When he came to the Comso office to discuss his salary, he asked the director for 50 thousand dollars a year, but the director offered him 60 thousand. After signing the contract, Edward never returned to the Comso offices again, since his place of work was at the CIA headquarters. There, his training as a spy began. They began to teach him basic things, such as not telling people where you work and learning to be invisible, live in a very ordinary house, drive a very ordinary car and wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else.
There he also learned that the CIA has its own Internet and even its own search engine created by Google itself. Edward quickly rose through the ranks and was transferred to Dell, the very company that makes computers. But in reality, it was a cover, because he worked at the headquarters of the National Security Agency. And then he saw the difference between the CIA and the NSA. The CIA was engaged in collecting intelligence through people, like a typical spy like James Bond, and the NSA specialized in intercepting digital and radio signals, satellites, phones and the Internet.
Snowden was shocked by the technical level of the NSA, but at the same time horrified by their approach to security. At the CIA, employees encrypted hard drives every night and put them in safes, and at the NSA there was no encryption. Databases were stored locally on servers at different tracking stations and were not synchronized with each other. If a server broke down, the data was simply lost. But one day, completely by chance, a very strange file appeared in front of him, with a classification level that Edward had never heard of before.
Extremely controlled information. Edward read it, and I quote "The activities described in the text were so criminal that no government would ever allow them to be published." It was about the "Star Wind" project.
Secrets of the NSA.
When Snowden discovered the Prism and XKeyScore programs, he realized that the US government was engaged in mass data collection, not limited to suspects, but was listening to and collecting information about every single person without exception.
These programs allowed data to be collected on people without any court order. Initially, Snowden tried to justify these actions as necessary measures for national security, but with each passing day he realized more and more that the scale of the invasion of privacy was beyond reasonable. He saw how the agency completely disregarded people's rights to privacy and how their data was used without any control. These programs allowed phone calls to be secretly listened to, messages read, and people's online activities to be studied.
In the midst of all this thinking, Edward was transferred to the NSA headquarters in Hawaii, which was located in the Kunia Tunnel, a converted bunker built during World War II. There, Snowden created the Heartbeat software, a tool designed to collect data from various databases into one, including the NSA, CIA, and FBI. Of course, it also gave him the ability to access vast amounts of information without raising suspicion.
This is how he discovered Prism, a highly skilled program that allowed US intelligence to penetrate the servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other tech giants and capture data such as videos, photos, text messages, and emails. There was also Xcase Core, software that allowed NSA employees to listen in on phone calls, view browser history, and even read Microsoft documents in Word, all without having to go to court or get approval from their superiors.
At this point, Edward was starting to feel like a vengeful person. He felt he had to tell the world what he had found and expose what he saw as a corrupt political system. But first he needed to get copies of the documents. Edward copies the files onto a CD, hides it in a Rubik's cube and hands it to a guard just before he goes through the metal detector. The guard hands it back and Edward walks out with his prize in hand. He used the micro SD cards to smuggle out information for 8 months.
He started playing with the Rubik's cube more because at the time he was so nervous every time he had to go through that metal detector and the Rubik's cube calmed him down.
Passing on the information.
Once he had gotten all the documents out, he contacted the famous journalist Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist for The Guardian. Meanwhile, Snowden took a leave of absence from the NSA, citing treatment for his epilepsy. He left his girlfriend Lynsey, saying he was going away for a few weeks.
Snowden chose Hong Kong as the meeting place because the city would grant him asylum after the media published his materials. Snowden, 29, arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013, and did not leave his room at the Mira Hotel for 10 days. After waiting for the journalists, the three met at the hotel on June 2, 2013, like in a spy movie. Edward told Laura that he would wait for her in the hotel restaurant, holding a Rubik's cube so she could recognize it. He also said that he would ask them what time the restaurant opened, to which they should answer, we don't know.
He would then offer to show them around the lobby and take them to his room to pass on the information. Once alone, Edward gave Laura and Glenn the information he had promised, and on June 6, 2013, The Garden published the first news story, announcing the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden. Snowden claimed that his goal was to draw public attention to human rights violations and government abuses, and he succeeded. Over the next few days, the world learned of the forced collection of phone records, the ability of the NSA to view all digital communications without a warrant, and the mass collection and storage of personal data.
Soon after, the Justice Department indicted Snowden on espionage charges. The hunt began for Snowden to be extradited to the United States to face trial. After giving his interviews, Snowden went into hiding in Hong Kong for several days. When it became clear that he would not be granted asylum, he decided to leave the country. Snowden left Hong Kong on June 23, 2013, and went to Ecuador.
According to him, editor Vicki Leaks was supposed to help him find asylum in Ecuador. He had to change planes at Sheremetyevo Airport in Russia. But he was detained at the Russian airport because the US government revoked his passport while he was in the air. The Russians offered him political asylum in exchange for cooperation, but he refused. On August 1, 2012, after 40 days at the airport, the Russian authorities granted him temporary asylum. Meanwhile, mass protests began in the US, and a heated debate about the human right to privacy erupted.
In 2022, he received Russian citizenship. His wife Lindsay, who had no idea about what was happening before, met Edward in Russia, where they got married and had a child.
Life in Russia.
Today, Edward claims that living in Russia was not his decision, he was forced to do it. He currently lives in Moscow, but his exact location is not disclosed for security reasons. Some government officials accuse him of having a political context for his exile to Russia and that it was all planned.
Former NSA editor Keith Alexander said Snowden's disclosures have caused significant damage to the US and its allies. They call him a traitor and accuse him of stealing government property and disclosing state secrets. Edward, for his part, remains quite active in the field of privacy and digital rights. He also participates in cryptocurrency and blockchain conferences and is doing well.
- The beginning of the journey
- How to join the CIA
- NSA Secrets
- Transfer of information
- Life in Russia
On June 2, 2013, in Hong Kong, a 29-year-old man approached a man and a woman and asked what time a restaurant opened. They noticed he was holding a Rubik's cube, and they said they didn't know. He then asked to be shown to the hotel lobby and showed them to his room. When they entered the room, the woman silently opened her briefcase on the unmade bed, set up her camera on a tripod and began recording. "My name is Edward Joseph Snowden. I used to work for the government, but now I work for the people. It took me almost 30 years to realize the difference.
Edward Snowden is a former CIA spy and national security agent who now lives in exile in Russia after revealing U.S. government secrets. Today we will talk about one of the biggest scandals in the history of American cyber intelligence. The day it became known that the CIA and NSA have secret programs that allow them to spy on citizens around the world. This is the story of Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the US mass surveillance.
The beginning of the journey.
Edward Snowden was born in 1983 in a small town called Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
It is literally a typical American town with a population of 18 thousand people. There he lived with his mother, who worked as an administrator, and his father, who served in the Coast Guard. It was his father, Loni Snowden, who instilled in Edward a love of technology. Because of his work, he was often absent from home, but when he returned, he always brought with him various technological gadgets that aroused the curiosity of the boy. One of these gadgets was the Commodore 64, one of the first personal computers. On the Commodore, Edward played Tetris, Asteroids, and most of all, he spent the most time in the game Choplifter, a game where you had to control a helicopter.
Thus passed his happy childhood in Elizabeth City, filled with video games, but everything changed when he moved to Crofton, Maryland. His father was promoted in the Coast Guard and became a chief officer of the aviation and engineering department, and his mother, Wendy, got an administrative position at the National Security Agency. The family moved to a large beautiful house in a good area, but Edward himself faced serious difficulties. The thing is, he was from the South and had a strong Southern accent, a bit like the Simpsons characters.
His classmates started teasing him, so he decided not to speak at all until he got rid of the accent. At the same time, he began to do poorly in school, the teachers decided that he was really lagging behind and gave him IQ tests. And it turned out that everything was quite the opposite, the boy turned out to be a Child Prodigy. However, for his parents, this was hardly a surprise. Since childhood, when Edward asked to buy him a toy in the store, his mother made him add up the cost of all the goods in the basket. If he named the exact amount, the toy was bought. But that's not all. He also had to calculate the 3% tax and add it to the total cost.
In his book, he recalls this moment. Why should I add 3%? It’s a tax. When you buy something, part of the money goes to the government. And why do they need this money? Do you like the roads? Well, this money goes to fix them. And also to buy books for the library. After a while, his math skills were called into question. When the amount he calculated in his head did not match the amount on the cash register display, he panicked, thinking he was wrong, but his mother explained again.
They raised the sales tax, now adding 4%. Does that mean there will be even more books in the library now? I hope so, his mother replied. Either way, Edward was a very smart kid. His father kept bringing home new gadgets, including a Compact Prisario 425, which at the time cost $1,399, which is about $3,000 today. Edward used the computer to play video games, like any 12-year-old.
He was into the game Loom, but he also started spending a lot of time on the Internet. For him, it was a more interesting world than real life. He could spend hours looking for cheat codes for video games, but what attracted him most were Internet forums where users could share files and participate in discussions. And that’s how, step by step, thanks to the emerging Internet, Edward Snowden plunged into the world of programming and network engineering. In the early 2000s, Edward Snowden started working as a programmer thanks to his 25-year-old married friend.
She owned a web design company and hired the young Snowden to help write codes for websites. They paid him $30 an hour, which was a huge amount for an 18-year-old teenager. But on September 11, 2001, while Edward was working quietly at his computer, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was his boss’s husband, screaming in panic. Two American Airlines Boeing planes crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center. Another one hit the Pentagon, the fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.
Edward was so shocked by the footage of the attack that he no longer wanted to work as a programmer at a regular job. He wanted to protect his country, and to do this, he needed to get into the CIA. A dream impossible for almost most IT specialists. Snowden did not give up. He understood that to achieve his goal, he needed not only technical skill, but also the ability to remain anonymous. He knew that in the digital world, every step leaves a trace. This is called a digital fingerprint. Information that is collected from you when you go online.
How to join the CIA.
After September 11, a wave of nationalism began in the United States. Thousands of people were ready to serve the country. Snowden was one of them. Edward convinced himself that he wanted to get into the CIA. He does it out of sincere patriotism, feeling that the best way to help the cause is to apply all his knowledge in programming in the service of the state.
True, he had one serious problem - he did not have a degree, and the CIA and the National Security Agency usually required candidates to have a degree in engineering. After the terrorist attacks, there was a race to strengthen the country's defense. Institutes were growing rapidly, and agencies like the CIA began to hire people without degrees, provided that they demonstrated the necessary skills. However, to be accepted without a university degree, you first had to serve in the army.
So Edward packed his things and enlisted in the US Army. There he was given the nickname Snowflake, which means snowflake. But the service lasted only 6 months, during one of the training sessions he broke his leg, and instead of treatment, the state simply fired him so as not to pay for medical expenses. After these 6 months, he could not be considered a veteran of the army, but Edward hoped that he would have a better chance of getting into the CIA. To further increase his chances, he applies for a security clearance.
In the United States, there are three levels of secrecy - confidential, secret and top secret. Snowden chose the most difficult one – top secret. This is already the level of the CIA and NSA. Then comes the most difficult stage – candidate verification. This is where his life will change forever. To get this clearance, he had to go through a process called Single Scope Background Investigation, which is essentially a full investigation of who you are, who your family is, what you did in your life and, of course, what trace you left on the Internet.
A full analysis of his family, friends, work and studies. Scanning his digital footprint, what he wrote on the Internet, what sites he visited, searching for weak points, whether there are skeletons in the closet that can be used to blackmail him. Snowden had no dirt, but his biography had some awkward moments. For example, as a teenager, he left stupid comments on forums. He also had accounts on dating sites, where he believed that Laura was only 5 kilometers away from him. One of these sites was HotOnOt.
A service similar to Tinder. Users uploaded their photos, and others rated them on a scale of 1 to 10. It was there that Edward met his future wife Lindsay Mills. After passing the final polygraph test, Edward was hired. After that, he was admitted to the world of intelligence. But Snowden did not immediately become a CIA agent, he was hired by a private company that worked under contract with the CIA and the NSA. At that time, intelligence had a limit on the number of full-time employees, but the law did not limit the number of contractors, so his path into the shadow world of cyber espionage began.
He got into the CIA through a contract with the company Comso. When he came to the Comso office to discuss his salary, he asked the director for 50 thousand dollars a year, but the director offered him 60 thousand. After signing the contract, Edward never returned to the Comso offices again, since his place of work was at the CIA headquarters. There, his training as a spy began. They began to teach him basic things, such as not telling people where you work and learning to be invisible, live in a very ordinary house, drive a very ordinary car and wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else.
There he also learned that the CIA has its own Internet and even its own search engine created by Google itself. Edward quickly rose through the ranks and was transferred to Dell, the very company that makes computers. But in reality, it was a cover, because he worked at the headquarters of the National Security Agency. And then he saw the difference between the CIA and the NSA. The CIA was engaged in collecting intelligence through people, like a typical spy like James Bond, and the NSA specialized in intercepting digital and radio signals, satellites, phones and the Internet.
Snowden was shocked by the technical level of the NSA, but at the same time horrified by their approach to security. At the CIA, employees encrypted hard drives every night and put them in safes, and at the NSA there was no encryption. Databases were stored locally on servers at different tracking stations and were not synchronized with each other. If a server broke down, the data was simply lost. But one day, completely by chance, a very strange file appeared in front of him, with a classification level that Edward had never heard of before.
Extremely controlled information. Edward read it, and I quote "The activities described in the text were so criminal that no government would ever allow them to be published." It was about the "Star Wind" project.
Secrets of the NSA.
When Snowden discovered the Prism and XKeyScore programs, he realized that the US government was engaged in mass data collection, not limited to suspects, but was listening to and collecting information about every single person without exception.
These programs allowed data to be collected on people without any court order. Initially, Snowden tried to justify these actions as necessary measures for national security, but with each passing day he realized more and more that the scale of the invasion of privacy was beyond reasonable. He saw how the agency completely disregarded people's rights to privacy and how their data was used without any control. These programs allowed phone calls to be secretly listened to, messages read, and people's online activities to be studied.
In the midst of all this thinking, Edward was transferred to the NSA headquarters in Hawaii, which was located in the Kunia Tunnel, a converted bunker built during World War II. There, Snowden created the Heartbeat software, a tool designed to collect data from various databases into one, including the NSA, CIA, and FBI. Of course, it also gave him the ability to access vast amounts of information without raising suspicion.
This is how he discovered Prism, a highly skilled program that allowed US intelligence to penetrate the servers of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and other tech giants and capture data such as videos, photos, text messages, and emails. There was also Xcase Core, software that allowed NSA employees to listen in on phone calls, view browser history, and even read Microsoft documents in Word, all without having to go to court or get approval from their superiors.
At this point, Edward was starting to feel like a vengeful person. He felt he had to tell the world what he had found and expose what he saw as a corrupt political system. But first he needed to get copies of the documents. Edward copies the files onto a CD, hides it in a Rubik's cube and hands it to a guard just before he goes through the metal detector. The guard hands it back and Edward walks out with his prize in hand. He used the micro SD cards to smuggle out information for 8 months.
He started playing with the Rubik's cube more because at the time he was so nervous every time he had to go through that metal detector and the Rubik's cube calmed him down.
Passing on the information.
Once he had gotten all the documents out, he contacted the famous journalist Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist for The Guardian. Meanwhile, Snowden took a leave of absence from the NSA, citing treatment for his epilepsy. He left his girlfriend Lynsey, saying he was going away for a few weeks.
Snowden chose Hong Kong as the meeting place because the city would grant him asylum after the media published his materials. Snowden, 29, arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2013, and did not leave his room at the Mira Hotel for 10 days. After waiting for the journalists, the three met at the hotel on June 2, 2013, like in a spy movie. Edward told Laura that he would wait for her in the hotel restaurant, holding a Rubik's cube so she could recognize it. He also said that he would ask them what time the restaurant opened, to which they should answer, we don't know.
He would then offer to show them around the lobby and take them to his room to pass on the information. Once alone, Edward gave Laura and Glenn the information he had promised, and on June 6, 2013, The Garden published the first news story, announcing the NSA leaks from Edward Snowden. Snowden claimed that his goal was to draw public attention to human rights violations and government abuses, and he succeeded. Over the next few days, the world learned of the forced collection of phone records, the ability of the NSA to view all digital communications without a warrant, and the mass collection and storage of personal data.
Soon after, the Justice Department indicted Snowden on espionage charges. The hunt began for Snowden to be extradited to the United States to face trial. After giving his interviews, Snowden went into hiding in Hong Kong for several days. When it became clear that he would not be granted asylum, he decided to leave the country. Snowden left Hong Kong on June 23, 2013, and went to Ecuador.
According to him, editor Vicki Leaks was supposed to help him find asylum in Ecuador. He had to change planes at Sheremetyevo Airport in Russia. But he was detained at the Russian airport because the US government revoked his passport while he was in the air. The Russians offered him political asylum in exchange for cooperation, but he refused. On August 1, 2012, after 40 days at the airport, the Russian authorities granted him temporary asylum. Meanwhile, mass protests began in the US, and a heated debate about the human right to privacy erupted.
In 2022, he received Russian citizenship. His wife Lindsay, who had no idea about what was happening before, met Edward in Russia, where they got married and had a child.
Life in Russia.
Today, Edward claims that living in Russia was not his decision, he was forced to do it. He currently lives in Moscow, but his exact location is not disclosed for security reasons. Some government officials accuse him of having a political context for his exile to Russia and that it was all planned.
Former NSA editor Keith Alexander said Snowden's disclosures have caused significant damage to the US and its allies. They call him a traitor and accuse him of stealing government property and disclosing state secrets. Edward, for his part, remains quite active in the field of privacy and digital rights. He also participates in cryptocurrency and blockchain conferences and is doing well.
