Edward Snowden
American whistleblower and former NSA contractor (born 1983)
Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs.
Born in 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, he attended a community college and later enrolled in a master's programme at the University of Liverpool without finishing it. In 2006, he started working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then moved to Dell in 2009, where he managed computer systems for the NSA. In 2013, he worked for two months at Booz Allen Hamilton, with the purpose of gathering more NSA documents.
In May 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunications companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden on two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. He stayed in Sheremetyevo International Airport in Moscow for a month before being granted asylum. He became a naturalized Russian citizen in 2022.
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.
“Edward Snowden” enters the record as american whistleblower and former NSA contractor (born 1983). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Edward, Snowden and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13424289. VIAF identifies the subject as 307157574. The Library of Congress control number is no2013111241. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1983, 2006, 2009 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Snowden” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.