Edward Snowden (1983 - )

Tue Jun 21, 1983

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Image: Edward Snowden speaks about the NSA leaks in an interview with reporter Glenn Greenwald at the hotel The Mira Hong Kong. [Wikipedia]

Edward Snowden, born on this day in 1983, is an American whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the NSA in 2013 when he was working as a CIA employee, exposing multiple governments’ widespread surveillance programs.

Snowden’s disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, prompting a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

In 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, revoking his passport. Two days later, he flew into a Moscow Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been canceled, and he could not leave the airport terminal for over one month.

Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and he continues to reside there on extension today.

“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give to an American.”

- Edward Snowden

  • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    202·
    1 day ago

    A common critique of China and Russia is mass surveillance of their citizens and this is true, China through more in depth social registration and facial recognition, Russia through sorm and isp data retention, etc.

    The difference is that Snowden revealed America does much of the same but without any transparency. His leaks forced some - PRISM, XKEYSCORE, MUSCULAR, STELLARWIND, etc are now public knowledge and have congressional oversight. But a lot has changed in the past 12 years. Modern AI was essentially nonexistent during his leaks. His leaks did not cover any military or CIA programs. By his own and the governments admission information was highly compartmentalized for security so he potentially only knew a small chunk of what was happening at the time.

    Since then there have been a number of tools and things acknowledged but not expanded upon that are used by the government, such as the cia vault 7 tools disclosed by Wikileaks in 2017 (malware for many things, smart TVs, ios and android, cars, many web browsers, etc). To further complicate things a lot of government surveillance in the us happens outside of the government thanks to our military contracting system. Actors such as booz allen, amazon govcloud, and palantir maintain databases so they bypass FISA requirements.

    This is finally becoming more concrete with trumps ICE raids as we begin to see leaks that show ICE, DHS, FBI, and local police departments are relying on palantir databases of American citizens for profiling and arrests. These databases did not appear overnight. They were built over a long time and indicate our government clearly has an issue both with spying on its own citizens and being transparent about it.

    In the modern age it is clear that we are going to be tracked. We need to demand transparency and regulation surrounding this. We also need to demand fair treatment for federal whistleblowers, especially related to the military as these often get exempted from whistleblowing protections and charged as espionage. Snowden still lives in exile and is facing 30 years, reality winner got the harshest espionage sentence in history for leaking memos about russian hacking in the 2016 election (by the trump admin, which seems unfair), Chelsea manning got 35 years (which was commuted by Obama), Daniel hale got 45 months, etc.