Edward Snowden: Unveiling the Journey from Privacy Advocate to Whistleblower

The movie that largely stood out to my memory was CitizenFour – the documentary of Edward Snowden after he came forward about the NSA and Global surveillance programs on people around the world. I have been following this case for a long time and it is important in the way the world is continuing to progress in the sense of how important privacy is to people and more importantly, what is the government’s role in protecting privacy. This has to be understood and learnt from the lens of who is Edward Snowden and what he tried to do.

Edward Snowden grew up in a family with a long history of serving in the federal government.

From his grandparents being distinguished admirals and his siblings holding positions in law, it was inevitable that Snowden served in the area that was most important to him in terms of connections and experience. He did not graduate high school but instead completed his GED and then pursued a masters degree online (Snowden, 2019). We already see a tendency to be cross cultural and a supposed affinity for individualism and privacy. We can see this in his voting and political views. He disliked the statement of the Patriot Act (referenced in the documentary as well) by George Bush and further criticized Barack Obama when he appointed a politician to head over the CIA. He also had multiple criticisms of the weapons ban – all in all he prioritized individuality and freedom.

This is all alright in the context of him working to himself and keeping his affairs private however this would all have a consequential chain reaction and ripple effect once he ventured into the public realm with his work in the federal government. Like more outlined by Gurnow, 2014, in the wake of going to a 2006 activity reasonable concentrated on insight offices, Snowden acknowledged an idea for a situation at the CIA. The Agency appointed him to the worldwide correspondences division at CIA central command in Langley, Virginia. In May 2006, Snowden wrote in Ars Technica that he experienced no difficulty getting work since he was a 'PC wizard'. Snowden seemed to have again, progressed using his individuality and freedom to further his cause that it is of utmost importance that privacy and freedom are most supported. After separating himself as a lesser worker on the top PC group, Snowden was sent to the CIA's mystery school for innovation masters, where he lived in an inn for a half year while contemplating and preparing full-time.

We can see this continuous drain of Snowden’s life that he lived otherwise when he began these activities. For example, we see him having to submit to a lot more structure, discipline and dogma that does fine but I can imagine – as an individualistic and freedom loving citizen – that this would seem concerning and could develop a situation that warrants more insight into whether these situations should be brought to light to the American public.

Further, as Gurnow, 2014 outlines, in March 2007, the CIA positioned Snowden with strategic spread in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was answerable for keeping up PC network security. Assigned to the U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations, a conciliatory strategic U.S. premiums before the UN and other global associations, Snowden got a conciliatory identification and a four-room condo close to Lake Geneva. According to Greenwald, while there Snowden was 'thought about the top specialized and cybersecurity master' in that nation and 'was hand-picked by the CIA to help the president at the 2008 NATO summit in Romania'.

Snowden portrayed his CIA involvement with Geneva as developmental, expressing that the CIA intentionally got a Swiss broker alcoholic and urged him to commute home. Snowden said that when the last was captured, a CIA employable offered to help in return for the broker turning into an informant. Ueli Maurer, President of the Swiss Confederation for the year 2013, in June of that year openly contested Snowden's cases. 'This would imply that the CIA effectively renumerated the Geneva police and legal executive. With all due regard, I can't envision it,' said Maurer. In February 2009, Snowden left the CIA.

A previous NSA colleague said that in spite of the fact that the NSA was brimming with savvy individuals, Snowden was a 'virtuoso among masters' who made a generally executed reinforcement framework for the NSA and regularly indicated out security blemishes the organization. The previous partner said Snowden was given full overseer benefits with for all intents and purposes boundless access to NSA information. Snowden was offered a situation on the NSA's first class group of programmers, Tailored Access Operations, however turned it down to join Booz Allen. A mysterious source later said that Booz Allen's procuring screeners discovered potential inconsistencies in Snowden's resume yet at the same time chose to employ him. Snowden's list of references expressed that he went to PC related classes at Johns Hopkins University.

A representative for Johns Hopkins said that the college didn't discover records to show that Snowden went to the college, and recommended that he may rather have gone to Advanced Career Technologies, a private revenue driven association that worked as the Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The University of Maryland University College recognized that Snowden had gone to a mid-year session at an UM grounds in Asia. Snowden's list of references expressed that he evaluated that he would get a University of Liverpool PC security graduate degree in 2013. The college said that Snowden enrolled for an online graduate degree program in PC security in 2011 however was latent as an understudy and had not finished the program.