Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, a rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA.
About Edward Snowden in brief
Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett, a rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard, became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. Snowden says he gradually became disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored. 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. In 2017, he married Lindsay Mills. On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. In September 2019, he listed Buddhism as his religion form, noting that choice of agnostic was “strangely absently” in interviews relating to his memoir. In October 2020, he was granted permanent residency in Russia. A U. S. federal court ruled that the US intelligence’s mass surveillance program, exposed by Edward Snowden, was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. In June 2013, he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill. His disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy.
He has defended his leaks as an effort “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that is done against them.” He has been variously called a traitor, a hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, and a patriot. He had no undergraduate college degree, he worked online toward a master’s degree 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 United States. He listed Buddhism on a military recruitment form, saying he had a basic understanding of Mandarin Chinese and was deeply interested in martial arts. He believed he believed in President Barack Obama’s promises, though he believed he was a third-party candidate, though President Obama was continuing policies espoused by George W. Bush. His father, Lonnie, was also an officer in the Coast Guard and his mother, Elizabeth, is a clerk at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D. C. His older sister, Jessica, was a lawyer at the federal Judicial Center for the District of Maryland. His parents divorced in 2001, and his father remarried. Snowden scored consistently above 145 on two separate IQ tests. In the early 1990s, while still in grade school, Snowden moved with his family to the area of Fort Meade, Maryland. He passed the GED test and took classes at Anne Arundel Community College.
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This page is based on the article Edward Snowden published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
