Events
Edward Joseph Snowden is BornSnowden attends public school in Anne
Arundel County, south of Baltimore.Edward Drops out of high school
at the beginning of his soft more yearSnowden begins to develop a
love for computers and the internetSnowden starts to attend a
community collageSnowden passes a General
Educational Development
test to receive a high school
equivalency credential.Snowden is hired by the CIA as a
technical/IT expert and receives a
top-secret clearance.Snowden is posted to Geneva,
Switzerland, under diplomatic
cover as an IT and cyber security
expert for the CIASnowden’s supervisor at the CIA placed a
critical assessment of his behavior and
work habits in his personnel file and voiced
the suspicion that he had tried to “break
into classified computer files to which he
was not authorized to have access,”Snowden leaves the CIA soon after his
supervisor’s criticism and begins work as
a NSA contractor assigned by Dell -- one
of 854,000 contractors with top-secret
clearance working for the federal government.Over the next several years, he switches
between assignments with the NSA and
CIA for Dell, including a stint at a NSA
facility in Japan that lasts until March 2012.Snowden moves to Hawaii to work at a NSA
facility there as a Dell employee. He moves
into a blue-and-white house in Waipahu,
where he is joined by his girlfriend,
Lindsay Mills, a 28-year-old performance
artist.Snowden reaches out to Glenn Greenwald,
a lawyer and columnist for The Guardian.Snowden reaches out to Laura Poitras,
a documentary filmmaker.He seeks a new contractor job with Booz Allen
Hamilton at the same NSA facility in Hawaii to
get additional access to classified documents
he intends to leak.Snowden begins sending some documents
to Poitras, Greenwald and to Barton Gellman
of the Washington Post.He tells his NSA supervisor that he needs to
take some time off to undergo treatment
for epilepsySnowden arrives in Hong Kong from Hawaii.Greenwald and Poitras arrive in Hong Kong.First revelations arising from the documents
provided by Snowden are published in a
Guardian article about the NSA’s collection
of domestic email and telephone metadata
from Verizon as part of what is later revealed
to be an even broader collection effort.The Guardian and the Washington Post each
publish an article about the NSA program
PRISM, which forces biggest US internet
companies to hand over data on domestic
users.The Guardian publishes NSA slides on
Boundless Informant, which shows NSA
collected nearly 3 billion pieces of
intelligence inside the U.S. in February 2013 alone.The Guardian reveals Edward Snowden
as the source of the NSA leaks.Snowden is fired by Booz Allen Hamilton.
In a statement, the company says, “News
reports that this individual has claimed to
have leaked classified information are
shocking, and if accurate, this action
represents a grave violation of the code
of conduct and core values of our firm.”The U.S. Justice Department charges
Snowden with theft, “unauthorized
communication of national defense
information” and “willful communication
of classified communications intelligence
information to an unauthorized person”Snowden leaves Hong Kong for Ecuador,
with a planned stopover in Russia. But he
is stranded at Sheremetyevo International
Airport in Moscow after U.S. authorities
rescind his passport. He spends the next
month living in limbo in the airport’s transit center.He is granted temporary asylum by
Russian authorities as they consider
his application for permanent political
asylum.The Guardian publishes an article detailing
NSA funding for British intelligence because
U.K. can collect data that would illegal for NSA
to do, based on documents provided by
Snowden.At a Senate hearing on the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper tells lawmakers that
Snowden’s leaks have aided America’s enemies
and “done great damage” to its allies. “People’s
lives are at risk here because of data that Mr.
Snowden purloined,” he says.The Washington Post reports on documents
revealing that the NSA collects over 250 million
email inbox views and contact lists a year from
online services like Yahoo, Gmail and Facebook.U.S. District Judge Richard Leon rules that the
NSA’s gathering of data on all telephone calls
made in the United States appears to violate
the Constitution’s protection against
unreasonable searches. But Leon, an appointee
of former President George W. Bush, puts his
ruling on hold to allow the government to appeal.Another federal judge, U.S. District Judge
William Pauley III in Manhattan, appointed by
former President Bill Clinton, reaches an
opposite conclusion, ruling that the NSA’s
collection of phone data is legal.In a speech on government mass surveillance
revealed by Snowden,President Barack Obama
orders Attorney General Eric Holder to study
possible reforms of the program. But he also
defends NSA employees and attempts to assure
Americans they are "not abusing (their)
authorities to listen to your private phone calls
or read your emails."Based on Snowden documents, NBC News
reports that British cyber spies demonstrated a
pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in
which they were able to monitor YouTube in
real time and collect addresses from the billions
of videos watched daily, as well as some user
information, for analysis. At the time, they were
also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.NBC News reports, based on Snowden
documents, that British spies have developed
“dirty tricks” for use against nations, hackers,
terror groups, suspected criminals and arms
dealers that include releasing computer viruses
spying on journalists and diplomats, jamming
phones and computers, and using sex to lure
targets into “honey traps.”The Pentagon might need to spend billions to
overcome the damage done to military security
by Snowden's leaks of intelligence documents,
Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells members of Congress
at a hearing on the defense budget.In a teleconference appearance from Moscow,
Snowden tells a crowd at the South by
Southwest music and technology festival in
Austin, Texas, that the NSA and its counterparts
are "setting fire to the future of the Internet,"
and urges technologists in attendance to “help
us fix this.”Snowden appears via webcam on Russian
television to ask President Vladimir Putin about
whether Russia conducts mass surveillance of
civilians. The softball setup — Putin replied with
a resounding "no," adding that he is against
spying on his peopleNBC News’ Brian Williams interviews Snowden
in Moscow. Key pieces of the interview will be
broadcast in a one-hour Prime Time special on
Wednesday at 10 p.m. Eastern/9 p.m. Central.Snowden released short youtube video
introducing him self and explaining what the
NSA does to spy on people and why he decided
to leak millions of documents
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