Why speak up? If you sit by and see a system engaged in wrong-doing, and you do nothing, even if you don’t participate in it any longer, even if you resign, you are perpetuating a system of wrong-doing. You have become not only part of the wrong-doing but party to it. And for me when I looked at this, this was affecting the country that I loved, this was affecting the internet that I grew up with that was practically part of my family at this point. And then we extrapolate how we got involved in sort of this over-reaching state to begin with, the national security state, and step by step, bit by bit accept it and after acceptation these extraordinary and narrow authorities become permanent and perpetual.
And bit by bit as the domain of government expands, the territory that is claimed to the people narrows and this became such a concern to me that I was willing to risk a great deal to tell people about it and see if they agreed or if I was just crazy.
~Edward Snowden
On June 5, 2013, British daily newspaper The Guardian broke news of US National Security Agency (NSA) documents that showed an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) that required Verizon to hand over phone call metadata from millions of Americans to the FBI and NSA.
On June 6, 2013, The Guardian and The Washington Post reported the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers under a top secret court order granting the government unlimited authority to obtain communications data for a three-month period. Furthermore, another program dating back to 2007 codenamed PRISM allows NSA to extract the details of customer activities–including audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and other materials–from computers at Microsoft, Google, Apple, and other internet companies.
On June 9, 2013, The Guardian and The Washington Post disclosed Edward Snowden as the source for the disclosures. Snowden spoke from Hong Kong to explain his actions.
On June 11, 2013, the EU demanded US assurances that Europeans’ rights were not being infringed by the newly-revealed surveillance programs. Booz Allen Hamilton said it had fired the infrastructure analyst for violating its ethics code.
On June 12, 2013, The South China Morning Post published an interview with Snowden in which he said that US intelligence agents have been hacking networks around the world for years.
On June 17, 2013, during a live online chat, Snowden insisted that US authorities had access to phone calls, emails, and other communications far beyond constitutional bounds.
On June 18, 2013, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce argued that the PRISM program had helped stop a number of alleged terrorist attacks.
On June 21, 2013, federal prosecutors unsealed a complaint filed in US District Court in Virginia on June 14, 2013, charging Snowden with espionage and theft of government property.
On June 22, 2013, a senior US administration official said that the United States had contacted authorities in Hong Kong to seek the extradition of Snowden.
On June 23, 2013, Snowden flew to Moscow from Hong Kong. Russian President Vladimir Putin later verified that Snowden was in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.
On June 23, 2013, the US government revoked Snowden’s passport.
On June 30, 2013, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that classified leaks by Snowden detail NSA bugging of European Union offices in Washington and New York, as well as an EU building in Brussels.
On July 1, 2013, Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported Snowden’s asylum request.
On July 12, 2013, Snowden met with human rights activists and lawyers. He confirmed he was requesting asylum from Russia while awaiting safe passage to Latin America.
On July 16, 2013, Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told CNN that Snowden had applied for temporary asylum in Russia.
On July 24, 2103, Russian news media reported that Russia had approved documents that would allow Snowden to enter the rest of the country while his temporary asylum request was considered.
On August 1, 2013, Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told CNN that Snowden’s application for political asylum for a year had been approved, and that he had left the Moscow Airport.
This timeline serves as a refresher for the events that led up to Snowden’s asylum in Moscow where he remains today. At the time, Edward Snowden was tried in the court of public opinion and largely found guilty of being a traitor and risking US national security.
But was he really a traitor? Or was this just the official narrative that was pushed out from the media to cover up the illegal activities of a corrupt government?
I’m rethinking a lot of things these days.
What was happening was a change in technology from the old internet that was sort of non-commercial, very individual and pretty simple. It was crude. Everything was kind of cobbled together to this larger, more corporatized network. All of our communications, interactions, all of our relationships, all of the things that we read and like online are being passed to us through a Facebook, or a Google, or an Apple, and in secret these companies had basically gone far beyond what the law required of government to join programs where they would share information with the NSA through the front door of the FBI and it continued for years without the individual warrants and legal process that we expected, that we had become accustomed to, that we’re told in the Constitution is how our government works. And so, for me, when you ask, ‘what was the lie?’ the lie was not any one particular part of these programs, it was not any particular detail.
It was the fact that there was a breath-taking sweep of intentional, knowing deception by people at the level of the Senate, by people in these different intelligence agencies, and then in the White House itself, even from the President, President Barak Obama, at the time, who campaigned on ending the warrantless wire-tapping that he had criticized so heavily in the Bush Administration but had, in fact, in secret extended and embraced these authorities and these programs to a level that I began to feel had really narrowed the boundaries of our rights.
~Edward Snowden