Edward Snowden's Invasion Of Privacy

In the summer of 2013 an English newspaper, The Guardian, revealed the largest leak of government secrets in history. The repercussions of this information slip can still be felt today as the US government tries to deal with the fallout and arrest the man who initiated it all. Edward Snowden was a high school dropout that attended Anne Arundel Community College to study computers on two separate occasions. It was after his second time attending the college that he received his job as a security guard with the National Security Agency, which then turned into a job at the CIA with an information-technology job. He left the CIA two years later to work for both Dell and Booz Allen as a private contractor and subsequently in both places as a subcontractor …show more content…
Snowden felt that the U.S. citizens, and the world, should know what he felt to be the NSA invading the privacy of its citizens. He noticed the NSA was collecting metadata of both the internet and phones. This information includes, the numbers called, the length of the call, how many times that number is called, email and IP addresses, websites visited and so on. He then began collecting documents about the methods and practices the NSA used to collect this data that he found an invasion of privacy. By the time Snowden contacted reporters he had amassed thousands of documents about the domestic surveillance programs of the NSA. One example was PRISM, which allowed the collection of internet information from at least nine of the major internet companies in the US. Using his recently diagnosed epilepsy as an excuse for an extended absence, Snowden traveled to Hong Kong where he remained for the beginning of the backlash his whistleblowing would bring forth. It was from there he contacted Glenn Greenwald the Guardian reporter and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, to give them his cache of top secret files not keeping copies for