Who's he?
Born in a small town, Elizabeth City, on June 21, 1983, Edward Snowden is known as an intelligent and talented child. One of his family members remembers Snowden not being able to get away from the laptop screen, even at the dinner table.
In an interview, Snowden admitted, “I was very curious about how complex computer systems worked, so I fiddled with my laptop all day to find the answer.”
However, until he was 20, Snowden still did not have a permanent job. In 2001, the 9/11 tragedy occurred. The tragedy, he admitted, left a deep impression on him, making him feel called to help people who were persecuted.
Like many young Americans, Snowden decided to enlist in the army. He was registered as a candidate for US Army Special Forces in 2004. However, Snowden felt he did not understand most of the colleagues he met in training. It turns out he didn't find his calling to help others in the world of the military, which prioritizes national interests.
Plus the injury he suffered during the training period, Snowden had to give up his dream of becoming a soldier. However, like plot twists in films, his failure to become a soldier became a 'blessing' for him because he was looked at by the number one intelligence agency in the world, the CIA, as a computer engineer.
This is where the story begins.
What is he doing?
Without a bachelor's degree and special certification in the computer field, who dares to dream of working at the CIA? But, that happened to Snowden. As a computer engineer, Snowden's main job besides solving technical problems is maintaining system security.
This job resulted in Snowden being sent to many cities around the world, including Geneva, Switzerland, where he was given a diplomatic mission by the CIA. Snowden admitted that his work was enjoyable, but several internal conflicts with colleagues and superiors forced him to resign from the CIA.
After that, Snowden was recruited by partner contractors of the NSA, an intelligence agency that has a smaller scope than the CIA. While working at Dell, one of these contractors, Snowden was responsible for troubleshooting problems in computer systems that would later be used by NSA agents.
His high-flying hours and qualified skills made Dell promote him as a “sysadmin” or top administrator at NSA facilities. This is where Snowden discovered the bitter and terrible reality that the NSA was spying on almost all US people via their cell phones, computers, or laptops.
While working as a contractor at the NSA facility, Snowden leaked hundreds of thousands of documents related to secret US government programs. One of them is “Prism”, a program that allows the NSA to access emails, photos, videos, and almost all data of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Dropbox, and Apple users.
There is another "mobile phone intercepts" program, a program that allows the NSA to tap into employee cellphone communication networks at world telecommunications companies to find security gaps that can be exploited.
Eitss is not finished yet.
Snowden also leaked “Dishfire”, an NSA program aimed at collecting and analyzing data on hundreds of millions of short messages (SMS) from users around the world.
He then copied all the data and saved it on his personal laptop. Until one day he thought of sharing this secret information with the public. And that night, in a hotel room in Hong Kong, he finally met the journalists he had been waiting for.
Having been the number one fugitive in the US for up to eight years due to his actions which were considered dangerous to the US government, it is now known that Snowden has received political asylum from the Russian government and is living there.
Snowden's life story is really like something out of an action movie, isn't it, ladies?
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