Age, Biography, and Wiki
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983. He is an American computer security consultant and whistleblower, best known for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013. This revelation led to charges under the Espionage Act, prompting Snowden to seek asylum in Russia, where he currently resides.
| Occupation | Activists |
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| Date of Birth | 21 June 1983 |
| Age | 42 Years |
| Birth Place | Elizabeth City, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Gemini |
| Country | U.S |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited publicly available information regarding Snowden's physical measurements. However, he is often recognized for his distinctive appearance in public appearances and interviews.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Edward Snowden is married to Lindsay Mills, an American dancer and artist. The couple got married in Russia after Snowden obtained Russian citizenship in 2020.
Snowden's father, Lonnie "Lon", was a warrant officer in the U.S. Coast Guard, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. His older sister, Jessica, was a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, a rear admiral in the Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. Edward Snowden said that he had expected to work for the federal government, as had the rest of his family. His parents divorced in 2001, and his father remarried.
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| Husband | Lindsay Mills (m. 2017) |
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Net Worth and Salary
Estimates of Snowden's net worth vary, with reports suggesting it could be as high as $57.7 million in some sources, while others estimate it to be around $500,000. His primary income sources include speaking engagement fees, which reportedly reach up to $200,000 annually. Before his exile, Snowden earned a peak salary of $200,000 per year in the private sector and $122,000 while working for the government.
On March 15, 2013—three days after what he later called his "breaking point" of "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress" —Snowden quit his job at Dell. Although he has said his career high annual salary was $200,000, Snowden said he took a pay cut to work at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where he sought employment in order to gather data and then release details of the NSA's worldwide surveillance activity.
Career, Business, and Investments
- Whistleblowing and Activism: Snowden's career took a dramatic turn after he leaked NSA documents, leading him to become a prominent figure in the fight against government surveillance. He serves as the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, advocating for journalists' rights and security.
- Literary Ventures: Snowden authored the memoir "Permanent Record," which became a bestseller upon its release in 2019. He received a $4 million advance for the book.
- Cryptocurrency Involvement: Snowden participated in the creation of the zcash cryptocurrency under the pseudonym John Dobbertin in 2016.
In early 2016, Snowden became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco–based nonprofit organization that aims to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance. He also has a job at an unnamed Russian IT company. In 2017, he married Lindsay Mills. On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On September 2, 2020, a U.S. federal court ruled in United States v. Moalin that one of the U.S. intelligence's mass surveillance programs exposed by Snowden was illegal and possibly unconstitutional.
In the early 1990s, while still in grade school, Snowden moved with his family to the area of Fort Meade, Maryland. Mononucleosis caused him to miss high school for almost nine months. Rather than returning to school, he claims to have passed the GED test. He took classes at Anne Arundel Community College. Although Snowden had no undergraduate college degree, he worked online toward a master's degree in computer security at the University of Liverpool, England, in 2011. He was interested in Japanese popular culture, had studied the Japanese language, and worked for an anime company that had a resident office in the U.S. He also said he had a basic understanding of Mandarin Chinese and was deeply interested in martial arts. At age 20, he listed his religion as Buddhism after working at a U.S. military base in Japan.
Snowden was then employed for less than a year in 2005 as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a research center sponsored by the National Security Agency (NSA). According to the university, this is not a classified facility, though it is heavily guarded. In June 2014, Snowden told Wired that his job as a security guard required a high-level security clearance, for which he passed a polygraph exam and underwent a stringent background investigation.
After attending a 2006 job-fair focused on intelligence agencies, Snowden accepted an offer for a position at the CIA. The Agency assigned him to the global communications division at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
According to Greenwald, while there Snowden said he was "considered the top technical and cybersecurity expert" in that country and "was hand-picked by the CIA to support the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania". A 2016 report from the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence said that Snowden's official position at CIA was an entry-level technical services officer.
The former colleague said Snowden was given full administrator privileges with virtually unlimited access to NSA data. Snowden was offered a position on the NSA's elite team of hackers, Tailored Access Operations, but turned it down to join Booz Allen. An anonymous source later said that Booz Allen's hiring screeners found possible discrepancies in Snowden's résumé but still decided to hire him. Snowden's résumé stated that he attended computer-related classes at Johns Hopkins University. A spokeswoman for Johns Hopkins said that the university did not find records to show that Snowden attended the university and suggested that he may instead have attended Advanced Career Technologies, a private for-profit organization that operated as the Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The University of Maryland University College acknowledged that Snowden had attended a summer session at a UM campus in Asia. Snowden's résumé stated that he estimated he would receive a University of Liverpool computer security master's degree in 2013. The university said that Snowden registered for an online master's degree program in computer security in 2011 but was inactive as a student and had not completed the program.
In his May 2014 interview with NBC News, Snowden accused the U.S. government of trying to use one position here or there in his career to distract from the totality of his experience, downplaying him as a "low-level analyst." In his words, he was "trained as a spy in the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas—pretending to work in a job that I'm not—and even being assigned a name that was not mine." He said he'd worked for the NSA undercover overseas, and for the DIA had developed sources and methods to keep information and people secure "in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world. So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading." In a June interview with Globo TV, Snowden reiterated that he "was actually functioning at a very senior level." In a July interview with The Guardian, Snowden explained that, during his NSA career, "I began to move from merely overseeing these systems to actively directing their use. Many people don't understand that I was actually an analyst and I designated individuals and groups for targeting." Snowden subsequently told Wired that while at Dell in 2011, "I would sit down with the CIO of the CIA, the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical branches. They would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my job to come up with a way to fix them."
During his time as an NSA analyst, directing the work of others, Snowden recalled a moment when he and his colleagues began to have severe ethical doubts. Snowden said 18- to 22-year-old analysts were suddenly:"...thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility, where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of necessary sense—for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation. But they're extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker ... and sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people." Snowden observed that this behavior happened routinely every two months but was never reported, being considered one of the "fringe benefits" of the work.
In May 2014, U.S. officials released a single email that Snowden had written in April 2013 inquiring about legal authorities but said that they had found no other evidence that Snowden had expressed his concerns to someone in an oversight position. In June 2014, the NSA said it had not been able to find any records of Snowden raising internal complaints about the agency's operations. That same month, Snowden explained that he had not produced the communiqués in question because of the ongoing nature of the dispute, disclosing for the first time that "I am working with the NSA in regard to these records and we're going back and forth, so I don't want to reveal everything that will come out."
Social Network
Snowden is active on social media platforms, including Instagram, where he engages with followers and promotes his work and advocacy projects.
At the time of his departure from the U.S. in May 2013, he had been employed for 15 months inside the NSA's Hawaii regional operations center, which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea, first for Dell and then for two months with Booz Allen Hamilton. While intelligence officials have described his position there as a system administrator, Snowden has said he was an infrastructure analyst, which meant that his job was to look for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world. An anonymous source told Reuters that, while in Hawaii, Snowden may have persuaded 20–25 co-workers to give him their login credentials by telling them he needed them to do his job. The NSA sent a memo to Congress saying that Snowden had tricked a fellow employee into sharing his personal private key to gain greater access to the NSA's computer system. Snowden disputed the memo, saying in January 2014, "I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers." Booz Allen terminated Snowden's employment on June 10, 2013, the day after he went public with his story, and 3 weeks after he had left Hawaii on a leave of absence.
The exact size of Snowden's disclosure is unknown, but Australian officials have estimated 15,000 or more Australian intelligence files and British officials estimate at least 58,000 British intelligence files were included. NSA Director Keith Alexander initially estimated that Snowden had copied anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 NSA documents. Later estimates provided by U.S. officials were in the order of 1.7 million, a number that originally came from Department of Defense talking points. In July 2014, The Washington Post reported on a cache previously provided by Snowden from domestic NSA operations consisting of "roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts." A DIA report declassified in June 2015 said that Snowden took 900,000 Department of Defense files, more than he downloaded from the NSA.
According to Snowden, he did not indiscriminately turn over documents to journalists, stating that "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over" and that "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists ... If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country." Despite these measures, the improper redaction of a document by The New York Times re
Education
Snowden attended Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland but did not graduate. His career trajectory was heavily influenced by his self-taught skills in computer security and his work with government agencies.
Born in 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, he attended a community college and later enrolled at a masters programme of the University of Liverpool without finishing it. In 2006, he started working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then for Dell in 2009 where he was managing computer systems of the NSA. In 2013, he worked two months at Booz Allen Hamilton with the purpose of gathering more NSA documents.
In May 2006, Snowden wrote in Ars Technica that he had no trouble getting work because he was a "computer wizard". Snowden was sent to the CIA's secret school for technology specialists, where he lived in a hotel for six months while studying and training full-time.
