Edward Snowden

Edward Joseph Snowden was born June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and grew up in the Washington D.C. area. He joined the CIA in 2006 and later worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency through Dell Inc. and then Booz Allen Hamilton. In May 2013 he traveled to Hong Kong with a cache of classified NSA documents. Beginning June 5, 2013, he authorized the publication of a series of disclosures through journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post that revealed the existence and scope of NSA's mass surveillance programs operating under the authority of the USA PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.¹

Disclosures

The Snowden disclosures revealed several major NSA programs:

PRISM was a program under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act through which NSA directly accessed servers of major American internet companies - including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple - to collect communications content. The companies were compelled to provide access under court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The disclosures triggered significant legal challenges and the companies' denials or minimizations of their participation, along with subsequent government clarifications about the court-compelled nature of the program.¹

XKeyscore was a global internet traffic analysis system that allowed NSA analysts to search communications content and metadata collected from surveillance equipment positioned at internet exchange points, ISPs, and foreign partner collection facilities. Internal NSA documents described it as the agency's widest-reaching collection system.¹

The Section 215 bulk telephone metadata collection program involved the NSA's collection, through an order to Verizon and other telephone companies, of metadata for virtually all domestic telephone calls in the United States - the numbers called, duration, and location of each call, though not the call content. The program was conducted under a broad interpretation of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act that the FISC had approved in secret.¹

MUSCULAR was a joint NSA-GCHQ program that collected data from the fiber-optic cables connecting Yahoo's and Google's data centers abroad, accessing the companies' internal network traffic outside their U.S. servers and thus outside the PRISM legal framework.¹

GCHQ and Five Eyes Dimensions

Snowden's disclosures provided documentary detail on the operational integration of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the broader Five Eyes signals intelligence arrangement. GCHQ operated ECHELON-related intercept facilities and had a particularly close relationship with NSA, sharing collection and analysis capabilities across multiple programs. The MUSCULAR program was a joint NSA-GCHQ operation. British law allowed GCHQ to share the product of mass collection with NSA in ways that circumvented restrictions on NSA collecting against American citizens directly.¹

Snowden's documents also revealed the scope of GCHQ's Tempora program, which intercepted internet and telephone data from fiber-optic cables landing in the United Kingdom, storing bulk content for 3 days and metadata for 30 days for access by both GCHQ and NSA analysts.¹

Flight and Legal Status

After meeting with journalists in Hong Kong in June 2013, Snowden attempted to travel to Ecuador via Moscow. He was stranded at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow when the United States revoked his passport. The Russian government granted him temporary asylum in August 2013, which was subsequently extended and in 2022 converted to permanent Russian citizenship. The U.S. government charged Snowden under the Espionage Act with unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified intelligence information to an unauthorized person. He has not returned to the United States.¹

Policy Consequences

The Snowden disclosures triggered significant legislative and judicial responses. The USA FREEDOM Act (2015) modified Section 215 to prohibit bulk telephone metadata collection and required the government to seek specific court orders for targeted collection from telecommunications companies. Federal courts found aspects of NSA's bulk metadata collection program unlawful. The NSA's programs were subjected to review by a presidential review group and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, both of which recommended reforms.²

Internationally, the disclosures damaged U.S. relationships with allied governments and populations who learned that NSA had collected communications of their leaders. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's personal mobile phone was disclosed to have been a monitored NSA target, producing a significant bilateral diplomatic crisis. Several countries began routing internet traffic away from U.S.-based infrastructure in response.¹