Born in North Carolina in 1983, Edward Snowden worked for the National Security Agency through subcontractor Booz Allen in the NSA’s Oahu office. After only three months, Snowden began collecting top-secret documents regarding NSA domestic surveillance practices, which he found disturbing. After Snowden fled to Hong Kong, China, newspapers began printing the documents that he had leaked to them, many of them detailing invasive spying practices against American citizens. With the U.S. charging Snowden under the Espionage Act but many groups calling him a hero, Snowden remains in Russia, with the U.S. government working on extradition.

Government Work

Snowden landed a job with the National Security Agency as a security guard, which he somehow parlayed into an information-technology job at the Central Intelligence Agency. Snowden has said that in 2007, the CIA stationed him in Geneva, but in 2009 he left to work for private contractors, among them Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, a tech consulting firm. With Booz Allen, he was shipped off to Japan to work as a subcontractor in an NSA office before being transferred to an office in Hawaii. After only three months with Booz Allen, Snowden would make a decision that would change his life forever.

Blowing the Whistle

While working at the NSA’s Oahu office, Snowden began noticing government programs involving the NSA spying on American citizens via phone calls and internet use. Before long, leaving his “very comfortable life” and $200,000 salary behind, in May 2013, Snowden began copying top-secret NSA documents while at work, building a dossier on practices that he found invasive and disturbing. The documents contained vast and damning information on the NSA’s domestic surveillance practices, including spying on millions of American citizens under the umbrella of programs such as PRISM.

After he had compiled a large store of documents, Snowden told his NSA supervisor that he needed a leave of absence to undergo treatment for epilepsy, a condition recently diagnosed. He also told his girlfriend that he’d be leaving Hawaii for a few weeks, remaining vague about why.

On May 20, 2013, Snowden took a flight to Hong Kong, China, where he remained during the early stages of the fallout. This fallout began the following month, on June 5, when the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper released secret documents obtained from Snowden about an American intelligence body (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) demanding that Verizon release information “on a daily basis” culled from its American customers’ activities.

The following day, the Guardian and the Washington Times released Snowden’s leaked information on PRISM, an NSA program that allows real-time information collection, in this case, solely information on American citizens. A flood of information followed, and the American people, the international community and the U.S. government have since been scrambling to either hear more about it or have Snowden arrested.

Aftermath

“I’m willing to sacrifice [my former life] because I can’t in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” Snowden said after the fact, in a series of interviews given in his Hong Kong hotel room.

The U.S. government saw a different side of the issue, and on June 14, 2013, federal prosecutors charged Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified intelligence with an unauthorized person. The last two charges fall under the Espionage Act. (Before President Barack Obama (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. took office, the act had only been used for prosecutorial purposes three times since 1917; Since President Obama took office, it had been invoked seven times as of June 2013.)

Snowden remained in hiding for nearly one month, first asking Ecuador for asylum and then fleeing Hong Kong for Russia, whose government has denied the U.S. request to extradite him. By late June 2013, more than 100,000 people had signed an online petition asking Obama to pardon Snowden.

The following month, Snowden made headlines again when it was announced that he had been offered asylum in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Around the same time, it was reported that Snowden was “stuck in transit” in Moscow after the U.S. annulled his passport, and that he had not yet made a decision on where, of the countries offering him asylum, he would be relocating.

In late July, Snowden seemed to have made up his mind. He expressed an interest in staying in Russia. One of his lawyers, Anatoly Kucherena, gave an interview with CBS News. Kucherena said that Snowden would seek temporary asylum in Russia and possibly apply for Russian citizenship later. Snowden thanked Russia for giving him asylum and said that “in the end the law is winning.”  Putin was glad to accept Snowden’s citizenship, perhaps to offset criticism of horrible human rights abuses in Russia against gays and lesbians.  Snowden continues to leak information.  Edward Snowden is being called a lot of things right now. A heroic whistle-blower. A betrayer of his country. A modern-day Daniel Ellsberg. That last one — likening him to the famous leaker of the Pentagon Papers who is credited with helping turn public opinion against the Vietnam War — may be the most spot-on, because the Snowden and Ellsberg cases raise the same question: Where is the line between principled whistle-blowing and disloyal leaking?

Snowden’s defenders have rushed to brand him a hero, comparing him (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. to Ellsberg. Ellsberg himself told (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. the Daily Beast that “I think there has not been a more significant or helpful leak or unauthorized disclosure in American history ever … and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers.” Former Justice Department lawyer Jesselyn Radack argues (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. that Snowden should be protected by a federal whistle-blower statute, since he “said very clearly … that he was doing this to serve a public purpose.”

 

Snowden’s critics are defending the surveillance program — they say it helped thwart a 2009 plot (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. to bomb the New York City subway, and other terrorist threats — and they are demanding that he be charged under the Espionage Act. Republican Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee, said (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. that if Snowden “did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law.” The Justice Department says it is looking into bringing charges.

According to Time Magazine, It is tempting to think that the calls for Snowden to be prosecuted and put away for years are a product of these post–Sept. 11 times, and that we no longer have the respect for principled whistle-blowers that we had in Ellsberg’s day. But many people forget that after the Supreme Court ruled (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. that the New York Times could publish the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and faced (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. up to 115 years in prison. Charges were only dropped after revelations of extensive government misconduct in putting together the case

But there is a significant difference between Ellsberg and Snowden. The Pentagon Papers revealed that the government had ramped up the war in Vietnam and lied to Congress and the public about it, which is clearly wrong. But in Snowden’s case, it’s still unclear whether the NSA’s spying was in fact legal and if what Snowden did was simply leak classified information because he objects to how the government has chosen to defend national security. If the surveillance was legal, Snowden could still look like a conscientious objector (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., breaking the law because of his own moral imperatives, but he might not look like a whistle-blower. (Snowden’s defenders argue that the NSA’s spying goes beyond what the law allows.)

Ellsberg is also widely regarded as a hero today because history moved his way. There is general agreement now that it was high time we pulled out of Vietnam — and that there was little real damage to national security from the release of the Pentagon Papers. The more it appears that what the NSA has been doing is wrong, the more Snowden will look like a whistle-blower. History’s verdict on Snowden will turn on whether he got the balance right: whether it turned out that we were more at risk of becoming a surveillance state than we were of terrorism.