Edward Snowden
| Birthname | Edward Snowden |
| Date of Birth | June 21, 1983 |
| Birth Place | Elisabeth City, North Carolina |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Computer Professional |
| Biography | Best known for his leak of confidential NSA documents that revealed the unlawful practices of their security programs |
Contents
Life Before the Government Employment
Edward Snowden was born on June 21, 1983.[1] Edward Snowden was born in Elisabeth City, North Carolina, but grew up in the suburbs of Maryland.[2] Coincidentally, he did not grow up far from the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade. Snowden did not graduate from college or high school, but was enrolled in the Anne Arundel County public school system until he was forced to miss eight months of school due to a battle with mononucleosis. Snowden then enrolled in community college, and began to explore his passion in technology. At this point in time Snowden began to work for one of his friends that ran his own tech company.
Family Ties to Government Service
Snowden came from a family that was heavily involved in government affairs. In one of his extensive interviews with the magazine WIRED, Snowden says “Everybody in my family has worked for the government in one way or another.” (3Wired) Snowden’s family ties to Government Agencies go all the way back to his maternal Grandfather, who worked in the Pentagon(Wikipedia), continue through his parents and to his sister, Jessica, who was a lawyer for The Federal Judicial Center in Washington. Snowden found himself attracted to the idea of being able to serve his country. Inspired by the events that took place on 9/11, and the ensuing Iraq War on Terrorism, Snowden volunteered his services to the Army special forces in 2004. He passed aptitude tests, but was discharged after suffering two broken legs during a training exercise.(wired) After accepting and excelling at a job with the CIA, Snowden was then transferred to a job with the NSA. He worked for the NSA until he left the country, prior to leaking the Government documents that he had collected.
The Leak
Hoplites were infantrymen clad in metal body armor and helmets (fig. 4.2), and they constituted the heavy strike force of the citizen militias that had the main responsibility of defending Greek city-states in this period; professional armies were as yet unknown, and mercenaries were uncommon in Greece. Hoplites marched into combat shoulder to shoulder in a rectangular formation called a phalanx, which bristled with the spears of its soldiers positioned in ranks and files. Staying in line and working as part of the group was the secret to successful phalanx tactics. A good hoplite, in the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet Archilochus, was “a short man firmly placed upon his legs, with a courageous heart, not to be uprooted from the spot where he plants his feet”
Government Programs
In March 2014, Army General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures."[80] When retired NSA director Keith Alexander was asked in a May 2014 interview to quantify the number of documents Snowden stole, Alexander answered, "I don't think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don't have an accurate way of counting. What we do have an accurate way of counting is what he touched, what he may have downloaded, and that was more than a million documents."[81]
Ethical Implications
Group of peasant farmers. conquered people in the Peloponnese who had to endure enslavement as helots, a term derived from the Greek for “being captured.” Later ancient commentators described the helots as “between slave and free” (Pollux, Onomasticon 3.83) because they were not the personal property of individual Spartans but rather slaves belonging to the whole community, which alone could free them. Helots had a semblance of family life because they were expected to produce children to maintain the size of their population, which was compelled to labor as farmers and household slaves as a way of freeing Spartan citizens from any need to do such work. Spartan men in fact wore their hair very long to show they were warriors of high status rather than laborers, for whom long hair was an inconvenience.
WhistleBlowing
The god most frequently consulted about sending out a colony, as in the case of Cyrene, was Apollo, in his sanctuary at Delphi, a hauntingly scenic spot in the mountains of central Greece (fig. 4.1). The Delphic sanctuary began to be internationally renowned in the eighth century B.C. because it housed an oracular shrine in which a prophetess, the Pythia, spoke the will of Apollo in response to questions from visiting petitioners. The Delphic oracle operated for a limited number of days over nine months of the year, and demand for its services was so high that the operators of the sanctuary rewarded generous contributors with the privilege of jumping to the head of the line. The great majority of visitors to Delphi consulted the oracle about personal matters, such as marriage, having children, and other personal issues, but city-states could also send representatives to ask about crucial decisions, such as whether to go to war. That Greeks hoping to found a colony felt they had to secure the approval of Apollo of Delphi demonstrates that the oracle was held in high esteem as early as the 700s B.C., a reputation that continued to make the oracle a force in Greek international affairs in the centuries to come.
Surveillance Issues
In the modern era of global NSA surveillance, China’s Great Firewall, and FBI agents trawling the dark Web, it’s easy to write off Barlow’s declaration as early dotcom-era hubris. But on his document’s 20th anniversary, Barlow himself wants to be clear: He stands by his words just as much today as he did when he clicked “send” in 1996. “The main thing I was declaring was that cyberspace is naturally immune to sovereignty and always would be,” Barlow, now 68, said in an interview over the weekend with WIRED. “I believed that was true then, and I believe it’s true now.”
