Edward Snowden: Why did he have to leave USA & go into hiding? Where is he anyway? Who is taking care of him? How does he earn money to survive? What is he doing?
Edward Snowden (or Eddy Snow) had to leave the USA and go into hiding after leaking classified information about global surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies[1][2]. He initially flew to Hong Kong and later traveled to Moscow, where he sought asylum in various countries but was eventually granted temporary asylum in Russia[3][4]. Snowden is currently living in Russia, where he supports himself through speaking fees, earning income from public speaking engagements about cybersecurity and surveillance[3][4]. He has stated that he does not receive any financial support from the Russian government and lives independently[3][4]. Snowden's actions as a whistleblower led to changes in laws governing intelligence agencies and technology companies regarding privacy and security standards[3].
He leaked a ton of gov't documents. Some on domestic spying things that had been known about for some time. This was a good thing. He also leaked a bunch of stuff about U.S. international spying. That was not good. He might have gotten away with leaking domestic stuff. Or lightly gotten away, who knows. But he was without a doubt going to jail for leaking international intel. And rightfully so. As said, he ran away to Russia instead of face the music. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
What parts are objectively bad? see a lot that’s subjectively bad for the US, but plenty of other people are glad to know that they had been spied on and plenty of other countries are happy to have the US lose some significant pr points.
It wasn’t just US assets that were uncovered in the leak.
The Chinese were able to decrypt much of it causing nations other than the USA to need to evacuate personnel for safety reasons.
Your feelings are one thing, seeing the USA with egg on its face always gets folks happy, rah rah USA bad we get it. That doesn’t change what happened.
Snowden isn’t the villain he is made out to be by the USA but goddamn did he do a stupid thing in a dumb way and isn’t the hero folks who like to see the USA fail make him out to be.
Chances are people in your country who work to keep you safe had their lives put at risk because of how he leaked what he leaked. Good still came out of it. It can be both.
He's in Russia now being used as a propaganda mouthpiece against the West, that's how he survives, by doing whatever Russian intel tells him to do.
This isn't totally a knock against him, he was caught between a rock and a hard place, and chose the "be used by dictators" route, rather than the "definitely go to prison for a while" route.
We just need better whistleblower protections and oversight here in the states, but if anything the spying on us has gotten worse since Snowden, while also still allowing for Internet Nazis to spread like a cancer with almost no pushback.
Your 1st paragraph, do you have actual proof of that? Serious question.
I think it makes sense given the situation, and would be completely unsurprising since it's Russia and they torture people. And his wife and child (multiple kids now?) are there with him. In his case I'd just do exactly as told out of fear.
But just curious if there's any tangible evidence of this or anything he's doing over there.
This blog post is kind of biased but it has good links to some of the articles about the times that Snowden has "toed the party line" for Putin's regime. So mamy articles coming up in those useless garbage we now call search engines just pull up where Snowden has sworn an oath to Russia and has been given citizenship so therefore he's eligible to go fight Ukraine now, rather than things more related to my search.
I'd say this is more than kinda biased, and is heavily biased. They link to a 2015 article that says only 2% of documents have been publicly disclosed through journalists, and then make the claim that Russia and China have the other 98% with no source at all for the claim.
I might be misremembering the timeline in Citizen Four, but I remember that he had given the journalists all the documents and made a point that he didn't have access to anything before leaving for Latin America.
It's unfortunate that Snowden's passport was revoked while he was in the Moscow Airport, and that he's stuck there now. For a guy who didn't want to go to jail or be executed for speaking out against the government, I don't blame him for not speaking up against Putin.
This doesn't really seem like OOTL and more like "I need someone to Google this for me." I usually hate snarky answers like the one I'm writing right now, but come on.
Snowden later made contact with Glenn Greenwald, a journalist working at The Guardian.[111] He contacted Greenwald anonymously as "Cincinnatus"[112][113] and said he had sensitive documents that he would like to share.[114] Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications, such as encrypting email, too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted