UNDATED, June 11: Edward Snowden dropped out of high school, tried Army Reserve training but quit after four months, and then became a security guard.
Now at age 29, Snowden has become known worldwide as the man responsible for exposing vast surveillance programs by the National Security Agency, one of the most secretive government agencies in the United States.
Snowden stepped from the shadows and admitted that he had exposed the US government’s top-secret surveillance programs to Britain’s Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post after working in Hawaii for a company under contract to the NSA.
Americans are debating whether he is a patriotic defender of civil liberties or the most unprincipled of traitors.
Snowden saw his role more clearly, saying the US government’s powers of surveillance have grown so immense and intrusive that he felt compelled to denounce them, even at great personal cost. He could have remained anonymous but said his message would resonate more powerfully if he revealed his identity.
“The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong,” Snowden told the Guardian in the 12-minute video introducing him to the world on Sunday.
Abandoning his life in Hawaii last month, Snowden went into hiding in Hong Kong, saying he feared he could be captured by the CIA, another foreign government or Asian organized crime gangs.
“That’s a fear I’ll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be,” he said in the video.
In his secretive dealings with the Washington Post, he took the codename Verax – Latin to describe a truth teller – the paper said.
“He’s very intelligent, calm, (but) always scared that someone would knock on the door and he’d be taken away,” said Ewen MacAskill, one of the Guardian journalists who worked on the story.
Snowden expressed some interest in seeking asylum in Iceland. He checked out of his hotel in Hong Kong yesterday and his whereabouts were not known.
In recent years, he had returned to the Washington suburbs of his youth, before taking his final assignment in Hawaii.
“He was quiet, shy, always walked around with his head down,” said Joyce Kinsey, a neighbor in Ellicott City, Maryland, who said Snowden moved into an apartment there about three years ago and that his mother soon followed. He later moved to Hawaii.
“They are a nice family. I feel really, really sorry for his mother. She always left her curtains open and you could see right in. But now since all these reporters showed up, she’s keeping the curtains closed. This whole neighborhood is shocked.”
QUIET SUBURBAN CHILDHOOD
Little from Snowden’s childhood could portend his future place alongside Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the so-called Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and Bradley Manning, the US Army private on military trial for providing WikiLeaks with documents, as one of the most important leakers of US secrets.
(agencies)
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