Born and raised in a middle-class family in North Carolina member of the first generation that grew up with the internet, and consequently part of the last that managed to see the world before it dominated all aspects of human life Edward Joseph Snowden is part of a lineage of civil servants, something very common in the United States his family has fought in every major federation conflict since the Revolutionary War, he was kind of raised to serve the American state but that hadn't become an issue for him for more than half of his life He learned to program on his own, frequented dozens of different forums even a teenager worked during the bubble. com and consumed anime and manga at a time when people didn't even know what that was. It was an absolutely normal life, until September 11 2001 on this fateful day he was at Fort Meade, headquarters of the NSA, working at his friend's house on a client's website.
The moment the north tower is reached, the fort is evacuated Thousands of US intelligence personnel are leaving their posts at a time when their country needed them most, as they felt that NSA headquarters was a potential target for terrorists. Snowden was yet another individual caught in a terrible traffic jam on the way out of the fort, and it's on the way home calling his family asking if any of them were in New York, it was on that day that he decides to change his life He was just one of millions of young Americans who rushed to army recruiting points to fight for their country and avenge the bloodshed of those three thousand Americans However, this plan ends up going down the drain, in another day of training Snowden breaks both of his legs and is reassigned by the army to an administrative sector of the organization where his skills as a programmer would be better used. Shortly thereafter, he lands a job at the CIA, where he begins his career in the intelligence community The 2000s were a period of transition the CIA was in the midst of its digitization process and needed skilled manpower at all costs.
A person in their 20s would never get a license to access the secret files of the biggest spy agency on the planet in the 1980s but those were different times, cyberwarfare was taking its first steps and men like Snowden were being fought over by government agencies and big techs Snowden describes his first day at the CIA as a process of initiation into a cult literally the first step in the career of every new agency employee is called INDOC or indoctrination, it's the moment the CIA tries to convince its new members that they are elite, they are special, they were chosen to have access to the darkest mysteries of the state, and that it was their duty to protect society from external enemies and the government's inconvenient truths. This was a process that always worked, after all a restricted group of people who were not elected had just been given full powers to interfere in society, possessing the knowledge of the true story behind the stories known to the peasantry. Combine this with the fact that computer experts have a much higher level of knowledge than much of the civilian population, is the recipe for them to consider themselves superior and start defending their secret little spy club at all costs And to ensure that even those who weren't convinced by this little brainwashing stayed in line, the CIA concludes the INDOC process by showing those who told the truth the fate of whistleblowers and all those who didn't follow the agency's rules the life imprisonment or death, is the only fate that those who talk too much are guaranteed.
For the next 7 years Edward Snowden helped build the largest spy apparatus in human history, he worked at the American Embassy in Geneva monitoring the UN and assisting field spies in their work, after which he was relocated to Japan this time as an NSA employee, to build the backup of the Agency, which until that moment in 2009 stored all the data collected on the internet on a single server in fort meade. The work in these agencies is like on a production line, an employee does not have the knowledge of all the processes, he only knows what is strictly necessary for the execution of his work, but at this point in his short career as a spy Snowden had already put together some pieces of this puzzle. In his biography he briefly cites a time in Geneva when NSA agents offer help to him, only the target's email was needed, that the NSA had the means to find out everything about this individual, this was the first warning sign of that something wrong was happening.
In Japan, snowden is impressed with the size of the server that was being built as a backup of the NSA, because an intelligence agency needed a structure comparable to the biggest technology companies of the time? Just to store collected data? The change in perspective about what his real job in American intelligence was took at least 5 years to happen Snowden realized that the purpose of the CIA and NSA had ceased to be the shield that protected American citizens from terrorism and other external enemies, and there was has become monitoring its own citizens, and running society as a whole from behind.
The American intelligence community was fully confident that nothing would happen against them, this certainty was so great that high-ranking CIA officials almost openly spoke of carrying out mass surveillance on American soil. His arrogance was such that his surveillance methods had become even more invasive than before. In the days of Stellarwind during the Bush administration a few thousand Americans were monitored at all times by the NSA in the Obama era this number reached the millions, and the main programs used at that time to carry out this mass surveillance were PRISM, Upstream collection and Xkeyscore Each of these programs had its specific function, which complement each other, PRISM became the most famous in the media, because it directly reaches everyone anywhere on the conventional internet, it collected user data directly from the servers of the largest technology with your full consent, companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Apple and many other partners.
All metadata and data generated by users of the services of these companies were collected such as the video you watched on youtube, the emails sent by the services of microsoft, yahoo and google, each message, photo, like, sharing carried out on facebook each action done on an apple device, whether it be buying music on itunes or the simple action of downloading an app, or sending a good night message to your mother through Imessage, absolutely everything was collected and stored on the NSA servers through PRISM But obviously , for the PRISM to work to its fullest , the consent of the technology companies was necessary for the installation of this backdoor, but not everything on the internet revolves around bigtechs, so that the NSA had access to the internet as a whole they made use of the Upstream Collection. The NSA appealed to a secret interpretation of Section 215, the warrants issued by the FISA court against the largest telecommunications companies in America, such as Verizon and AT&T, required these companies to hand over any type of tangible information about terrorism or any other investigation. As far as foreign intelligence is concerned, the point is, the NSA used these warrants as a license to collect all imaginable metadata from these companies, this of course includes records of communications between US citizens on national territory.
Basically, the Upstream Collection collected metadata directly from the structures that support the private internet, the NSA intercepted global internet traffic, whether via fiber optic cables running across the ocean or satellites, to its servers. And this was only possible because the United States created the internet, and until today almost all communication in the world passes through the American infrastructure, because it is faster and has greater bandwidth capacity. But at that time, in the early 2010s, it was still impossible for the NSA to store all this information, no matter how much that was their ultimate goal so they created tools that filtered through all this plethora of data.
Using the internet is nothing more, nothing less than the act of requesting information from a server, for example, when typing a URL or doing a search either on google or duckduckgo, pressing enter this request will be sent and it will go out in search of the server. destination of the requested information. In the middle of this path is TUBULENCE, which is a program that is divided into two others, Turmoil and Turbine.
Starting with Turmoil, the NSA has secret rooms installed in every building that houses the servers of the main telecommunications companies in America and allied countries, it is in these rooms that traffic was intercepted, Turmoil served as a great filter that analyzes the metadata in search of red flags that the agency considered suspicious, and that ranged from keywords, specific email addresses, the destination and geographic origin of that metadata, to having opened and watched this video or researched any topic mentioned here, anything that the agency considered worthy of further scrutiny. And that scrutiny was carried out with Turbine, which would autonomously handle this data in search of anything the agency deems important, after which this information would be redirected to the NSA's servers, and there the algorithms would decide what kind of exploit. would be applied against you.
After this process, these chosen exploits were returned to TURBINE, which would inject these malware into the content you had previously requested. At that point your computer would be infected, and the NSA would have access to your metadata and data, your digital life was now in the hands of the US government, all without you having the slightest idea what was going on. This whole process took no more than 686 milliseconds, in 2013.
Okay, the NSA had all this stored on its servers, all the digital life of a good part of humanity was stored somewhere in the world, how to access this gigantic database of an efficient way? easy, they created XKEYSCORE, a search engine like google that allows an NSA analyst to type in anyone's name and receive absolutely everything the agency has stored about that individual, from emails, social media accounts, bank details, family photos, messages and phone calls and much more. In the first months of Stellar Wind the “everything” meant a few months of an individual’s digital life, in 2013, the year Snowden tells the truth, that everything already meant eternity, the NSA a decade ago had already conquered computing power to store all of humanity's digital life.
XKeyScore had no limitations, you could write the name of any living human, including heads of state like the president of the united states, and read their most secret conversations, and if your access level at the NSA was high enough, no one would ever find out. that you did it. The Americans have managed to create a mass surveillance network never seen before in the history of mankind, in an increasingly connected and internet-dependent world, the tools developed by American intelligence to spy on the entire planet, put them in a very favorable position in any situation.
At a time when encryption was nowhere near as common as it is today, and the public debate over digital privacy didn't even exist, the US government was omnipresent and omniscient, and it is certain that this status quo would be maintained for decades if Edward Snowden had not told the truth in 2013. No whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg has had a good life after his whistleblower, all of them have been sentenced to countless years in prison, many have been humiliated by the media, who have made use of degrading personal information, purposely leaked by government to poison the well, some were tortured like Chelsea Manning and several others were killed, but their stories we will never know. It's not an easy path to take, it's not a simple decision to make, Snowden took at least 5 years to become a Whistleblower, but this was by no means something he wanted, for all these years he waited for another agent took the initiative and leaked to the media everything criminal that the United States had been doing for more than a decade, but that person never came up.
In those years he ended up developing epilepsy thanks to stress, and on medical advice he was transferred to Hawaii in 2012, taking on a lower pressure role as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, and it was in that year that he finally decided to speak out. The process of collecting the NSA documents is almost comical, he didn't decide to end his life the moment he set foot in Hawaii, it took months of reflection, but in the meantime he kept doing his job of spying on the American population, and in his spare time he ended up creating a program called Heartbeat, which was simply a news aggregator. At all times on the NSA intranet, articles and documents are made available for agents to read and keep up to date with the latest agency movements, new programs and espionage methods, but each team had its own reading panel, with news relevant to their functions .
, what Snowden did was an automated news aggregator that collected documents from all NSA aggregators, of all levels of confidentiality, and then automatically made this feed available to agents with the most relevant news according to that individual's level of confidentiality. and their role within the agency. The Heatbeat server was down the hall from the room where Snowden worked, and only he managed it.
All news collected by the program was automatically copied, and only Snowden knew where these files were. Almost all documents that would later be released to the press had been collected by Heartbeat, which raises a very interesting question, these documents were secret, but not that secret, a simple feed collected the darkest secrets of the NSA right under their noses, without anyone wondering if it would be a risk, to centralize all secret information in one place. The NSA was sure that none of its agents would ever speak up, this had never happened in the agency's history, no NSA documents had been leaked to the press in its more than 60 years of existence.
The certainty that a Whistleblower would never leave was such that the NSA didn't even bother to encrypt its files and internal conversations. In the agency's view, the certainty that the whistleblower's life would end after any leak, together with the excellent remuneration given to its agents, guaranteed that no one would ever say anything. That didn't work for Snowden, he was an engineer, who made approximately $120,000 a year in Hawaii, more than double the average salary in the United States, and even then it was far less than Snowden could earn with his experience and skills.
inside the NSA. He had taken a huge pay cut to get rid of the stress and contain his epileptic seizures in a new job. He earned a lot for a little work, lived in paradise and had a wife who loved him and a family who supported him.
. . and yet he threw it all away to be honest.
Well, with the success of Heartbeat and the absurd amount of secret files stored on a secure server, Snowden spends the next few months copying these documents to micro sd cards, because they were smaller and easier to hide, the problem was that they took time. much to fill. At that time he worked the night shift, 8 long hours practically alone just doing this task in the dark.
He managed to fill some HD's with these documents, HD's that were encrypted and hidden in his house, but even so he didn't have all the pieces of this puzzle, he starts to apply for a vacancy in the strong meade, headquarters of the NSA, to complete this data collect. He manages, and collects the last necessary documents, they were precisely the files that detailed Xkeyscore, for a few weeks Snowden works directly with this program and learns from the analysts of the fort about the most diverse surveillance programs that the NSA was using, with the excuse that he was going to teach these techniques to his colleagues in Hawaii. He completes his research and returns home, and is faced with a new problem, how would he go about divulging this information.
On Snowden's desk there were 3 different ways to leak the information he had collected, the first would be to simply create a website, and post everything there. and hope someone from the media reads it and doesn't consider it just a conspiracy theory, the second option would be to deliver these HD's to WikiLeaks, and they would do practically the same thing as the first option, they would publish all the documents without modifying or explaining anything at all , as had been done with the documents leaked by Chelsea Manning a few years earlier, and the third option was to seek out a credible journalist and trust his judgment to publish this material. The third option is obviously the most difficult of them all, to find a credible journalist in 21st century America, a journalist who would not pay homage to the US government, let alone feel cornered when the monopoly of state violence began to persecute him, this is certainly harder than resurrecting a mammoth, but Snowden did it, and his name is Glenn Greenwald.
Lawyer and Journalist, for more than 10 years Greenwald has attacked the US government in a dozen different situations, he was one of the most vocal journalists during the 2005 spy scandal that involved the Bush administration. He openly criticized the Patriot Act at a time when American society was experiencing a patriotic frenzy, and was considered persona non grata by the obama government from the first day of his term, he fit like a glove for Snowden's needs, but, the problem would be how to contact him. Not everyone in 2012 was concerned about their digital security, the concept of end-to-end encrypted chats was still an alien concept to most people, and this was a big issue for an individual who was intent on publicizing in the media.
thousands of secret documents from the most secret intelligence agency on the planet, he in no way wanted to be discovered. The contact process between Snowden and Glenn begins on December 1, 2012, and lasted months, the first step was the purchase of a notebook that Snowden took with him in his car, he spent hours driving around the island he lived in Hawaii using different Wifi's, but never followed a logical pattern, all this to mislead the NSA. He had sent emails to Greenwald and to documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was making a series of films about post-9/11 America, she was like Glenn, she had not bowed her head to the American government, even though she suffered harsh reprisals from Washington.
In his first contacts Snowden asked Glenn to adopt the PGP encryption standard, so that they could establish a secure conversation, which Greenwald did not do, he had recently been hired by The Guardian, and as a result had received a large load of work that didn't allow him to waste time on this sort of thing, especially because of the vagueness of the first e-mails sent by Snowden, which ensured that this new contact with the “biggest scoop of the 21st century” was not just another crazy conspiracy. And for months things went like this, Snowden with the biggest secret of the American government stored on a hard drive in his house, at serious risk of being discovered, arrested, tortured and even killed without anyone ever knowing about his findings, trying his best to way to convince a journalist to use encryption in their conversations to finally reveal what that news was about. Finally Laura Poitras trusts Snowden's word and asks Glenn to come to New York immediately, they needed to talk.
In New York Laura reveals the content of the messages she exchanged with Snowden in recent months, and Glenn realizes that he was talking to the same person, if the story told by this informant were true, this would surely be the biggest surveillance scandal. of the story. Glenn returns to Brazil, the country he had lived in since he married the now deputy David Miranda, prepares his computer with the help of friends to finally establish contact with this NSA informant.
After a few days of talks between Glenn and Snowden, it's time to finally throw all the shit on the fan, Edward asks Glenn and Laura to meet him in Hong Kong, remembering that until that moment no concrete evidence had been given to journalists to guarantee that this informant was really telling the truth, until that point the only basis of support for this whole story was the word of Snowden, who obviously had not identified himself, that is, he was an anonymous person telling an absurd story asking you to travel to the other side of the world to meet, and yet Laura and Glenn went. After confirming the trip Snowden sends a file to Glenn and Laura, 25 documents that detail the operation of PRISM, and it drops like a bomb, it was all true, for the first time in history an NSA document leaks and proves that the government was spying on innocent American citizens . Laura Poitras ends up sending a copy of this file to her colleagues at the New York Times, a fact that infuriated Snowden and almost throws this whole operation in the trash, after all, the Times had been the newspaper that embargoed the Bush administration's spy scandal for more than a year.
in 2005, it would be natural for them to try to do it again and Snowden knew that, he got in touch with Poitras and Greenwald precisely because they are practically independent journalists but with contacts in the traditional media. But things eventually calm down and the two travel to Hong Kong. During the trip Laura delivers a flash drive with other files from Snowden to Glenn, and among these files contained a court order from the Court of Fisa, one of the most confidential institutions of the government, it is possible that Poitras and Greenwald were the first people outside the government who have read a document from the Fisa Tribunal.
This court order required Verizon, one of America's largest telecommunications companies, to turn over all records of calls between the United States and foreign countries, calls made within the United States including local calls. Basically a confession that the government was monitoring at least a few million Americans without them knowing. It was at this point that Greenwald realized that the situation was even more serious than he had imagined, and it was on the plane that he began writing the first story that would be published about the Snowden Affair a few days later.
Snowden didn't choose to flee to Hong Kong by chance, he knew he would be hunted by the US government the moment he heard rumors of an alleged NSA leak through the corridors of the White House, so all US allies were crossed off the list. , this basically includes the entire European Union and most of Latin America, all African nations were also cards out of the deck as Americans cared little for the nation states of that continent, and would look for snowden in their country regardless of their consent or not, the options ended up being funneled to just two, Russia and China, and Snowden knew that if he went to either of those two countries his information would be tainted with a narrative that he was a foreign spy, Hong Kong becomes the only viable option. First, because it was part of China, because of that it would take some time for the Americans to get their extradition, second, Hong Kong was an island of freedom in the middle of a communist dictatorship, they had until that moment great autonomy and freedom of the press.
, and didn't care much for Beijing's orders, it was almost a no man's land. But of course, Snowden had no hope that he wouldn't be captured by the Americans, the only thing he wanted was time to pass all the necessary material to the press, and after that didn't matter, he knew he would be imprisoned for the rest of his life. , he assumed that reality the moment he started copying files in Hawaii with Heartbeat.
He stays at a luxury hotel in central Hong Kong and for the next few days begins to catalog the files, placing them in separate folders and detailing all the material so that the press won't have great difficulty understanding this content. . .
and he hopes looking forward to the arrival of Greenwald and Poitras. The first meeting of the three takes place in the lobby of the Hotel, and Greenwald's first impression of Snowden is one of confusion, he was expecting an agency veteran, in his 60s with some terminal illness, who out of a heavy conscience decides to become a whistleblower, it had never crossed his mind that a 29-year-old would throw his life away for an ideal. This confusion quickly turns to respect, they go upstairs to Snowden's room and work immediately begins.
Laura starts recording her documentary, which would later be titled Citizenfour, winner of the 2014 Oscar for best documentary and which tells in detail these 10 days in Hong Kong. Their work routine for a whole week was basically this, Snowden would transfer documents from their hard drives to the laptops of Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, veteran journalist for The Guardian, and they would write articles about these documents, after a few days they should be published by The Guardian. But things were not so easy, before the weight of the monopoly of state violence fell on Edward Snowden's head, the fourth power had put itself in front of these matters, The Guardian was very afraid of the reprisals that would suffer so much from the US and UK government.
Unlike the American constitution, the Anglos do not have the first amendment to protect the work of journalists, at any time the British government can censor and close newspapers without notice, even though The Guardian is the most traditional newspaper on the planet with more than 200 years of history, he was not immune to attacks by the British government. In view of the quasi-alleged relationship of the British to the Americans, it was easy to conclude that any American government attack against The Guardian would come from the British, and that was a gigantic risk that the newspaper's directors bravely accepted to take. On the 6th of June 2013 the first story is published, regarding the court order issued by the Fisa Court against Verizon… and… chaos, that was the only matter covered by the global media that day, and things were only going to get worse for the american government, for 7 days new stories about the Snowden documents were published, and the debate about digital privacy and the crimes that the american government was committing became a world agenda, snowden's main objective had been achieved.
But obviously no one was happy about it, the US government obviously didn't want the eyes of the planet to be turned to their biggest secret, especially when allied governments discovered that they were also targets of NSA spying, like Angela Merkel's hacked cell phone and the espionage carried out in the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the mess was colossal. The geopolitical chessboard had been turned inside out, meanwhile within national territory the anger gestated by the American population since the 2008 crisis, a few years before, had turned to hatred for the government with this leak, and the way in which the obama administration handled it. with this crisis far from showing any regret, he put his lackeys in the press to attack Snowden and Greenwald in the most cowardly way possible.
In a matter of days since these stories began, the ruling media had shifted the debate from “the US government is spying on the American population, tearing up the fourth amendment to the constitution” to “Glenn Greenwald should be arrested for releasing secret government documents. ” ? ”.
The main issue of this debate was being misrepresented to take the public's attention from the crimes committed by the government, this situation was so absurd that in an interview given by Greenwald for one of the most kiss-ass programs of the government called Meet The Press, the host of the David Gregory asks Greenwald why he shouldn't be criminally indicted for simply fulfilling his role as a journalist. This type of attack was made by the entire press subservient to Washington, and the funniest thing was that this same press that condemned the work of Greenwald, Poitras and Snowden was using confidential information leaked by the government itself to try to support a narrative, David Gregory after accusing greenwald of committing the crime of journalism, cites in detail the judicial opinion of Fisa, on the order issued against Verizon, and these details had not been disclosed by Greenwald, the original document had not been published. David Gregory on national television had leaked confidential government information, while advocating the arrest of a journalist who did the same thing as him, the only difference being that Gregory received the information directly from the government, while Greenwald did not.
The North American media is rotten, until 2016 all past administrations had a great relationship with the press, regardless of whether the government was republican or democrat, the press never criticized the government in an incisive way, and vehemently attacked all those who did on the contrary, Greenwald was always despised by the American media, several press vehicles called him a blogger to minimize the damage of the articles he had published. But to the dismay of the Obama administration and mainstream media, the American population and the rest of the planet believed Snowden's allegations, and that was all he wanted. But while all this chaos in the media was going on, the time of freedom that Snowden had was running out, 7 days after the stories started to be published, the famous interview filmed by Laura Poitras is carried by The Guardian, and her face was on the cover.
of every newspaper on the planet. He never believed he could remain anonymous, someone in the government would inevitably find out who was the whistleblower who had leaked the NSA's darkest secrets, knowing that he decided to expose himself from the beginning, it was the best way to go, he he could tell his version without the government creating a pre-caricature to destroy the information he had shared. One day after the release of this interview, journalists from all over the world who were in Hong Kong found out which hotel Snowden was staying at, it was a matter of hours before the US government managed to kidnap him, and announce to the whole world that Edward Snowden had surrendered.
. UN lawyers offered help to Snowden, both legal and humanitarian, his situation was the worst imaginable, he was accused of the crime of espionage and his face was exposed on every television on the planet. First of all, he needed to be taken out of that hotel, in the center of Hong Kong, with all the press, Chinese police and intelligence agencies in the world monitoring who enters and who leaves that building.
And he does, Glenn Greenwald attracts press attention for an interview as Snowden sneaks out the back with UN lawyers and rushes straight to the organization's island headquarters. From that moment on, he lost contact with all the journalists who had worked with him in the previous 10 days, while the world was chasing him. He receives shelter from a very humble family on the poor side of the city, people who, like him, had been exiled by their governments for persecution, and saw in Hong Kong a chance to start over.
For a few days Snowden remained hidden while the dust settled, but of course the Americans were not going to give up, he needed to go into exile somewhere that would guarantee his safety. The curtailment of his freedom was not an issue, he knew he had committed a crime, he was willing to pay for that crime, the only thing he wanted was a fair trial, in which he presented the reasons that led him to leak these confidential government data, but he knew this request would never be granted, so he fled. The UN lawyers began a pilgrimage in search of a safe country so that Snowden could escape, but no one wanted him for fear of retaliation from the Americans, until the government of Ecuador accepts this request.
In 2013, latin america as a whole was in the midst of a phenomenon in which the left had taken power in almost every country on the continent, and with ecuador it was no different, relations between Rafael Correa and Washington have always been terrible, they are getting worse. much in 2012 when Julian Assange is housed in the ecuador embassy in London, while all western powers allied with the Americans demanded his arrest immediately. Accepting Snowden's asylum was just one of Rafael Correa's many displays of contempt for the Yankees.
But now a new problem arises, how would Snowden go to Ecuador? He could not pass through the airspace of any US allied country on this trip, because it is certain that this plane would be forced to land and Snowden would be captured. There was only one safe route, with two stopovers, from hong kong he would go to Moscow, where he would have to wait for more than 20 hours until he took the next plane to Havana, and from cuba he would go to Quito, that was the way, and American intelligence knew it too.
To help him on this journey, journalist Sarah Harrison, editor of WikiLeaks, goes to Hong Kong at the request of Julian Assange, he didn't want the same thing to happen to Edward that happened to Chelsea Manning, this was the chance Assange had to try to to redeem. Sarah had a lot of knowledge about exiles and political asylums, she was the best person to help Snowden in this escape, and once they are in Hong Kong their journey begins. The boarding and beginning of the trip between China and Russia did not present any problem, one of the necessary skills for any intelligence agent is not to get confused at customs or check in, being the most normal of the normal ones.
But that tranquility was running out of time, Snowden's passport was canceled mid-flight, he no longer had a homeland in Russian airspace. He discovers this when he arrives in Moscow, when Snowden delivers his documents at the passport control booth he is escorted away by two security guards. In an empty lobby he and Sarah talk to an FSS agent, who would be like the federal police here in Brazil, who explains the whole situation to Snowden and non- explicitly makes a proposal for cooperation, if he had something there to offer the Russian government maybe there was some alternative for snowden to get to the equator.
But Edward promptly denies any proposal offered by the Russian agent, after all it is certain that this agent was recording this conversation and any opening that Snowden gave, it could appear that he was considering the proposal. Russo does not insist on this negotiation and leaves. And for 40 long days Snowden and Sarah are stuck at Moscow's international airport trying to resolve their delicate situation, they have contacted more than 27 different countries that out of fear or impossibility have denied Snowden political asylum.
In the meantime, the US government has tried in every way to capture Snowden, even threatening other heads of state. During this more than a month in Russia the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, made a state visit to the country, on his return home he passed through NATO airspace his plane was ordered to land so that an inspection could be carried out, obviously snowden was not there, but this was yet another American-led international scandal that only served to heighten international tensions. But finally, on August 1, 2013, Russia grants Snowden temporary asylum.
In the almost 9 years since the world discovered the truth about mass surveillance in the United States, a lot has changed, the patriot act ceased to exist and much stricter laws were written, such as the Liberty Act of 2017, to somehow try to contain it. the curiosity of the NSA. But deep down everyone knows that the only thing that has really changed are the methods in which governments around the world monitor their populations, some are explicit, like the millions of cameras spread across china and their social credit, while other methods are more subtle, but that story is for another time.
The internet as a whole became more secure, encryption was widespread and the risk of being hacked reduced, the introduction of HTTPs helped a lot to prevent the interception of internet traffic by tools such as upstream collection. But in exchange for this security, our privacy was sold to big techs, which have seen their power grow exponentially in the last decade. The fight for privacy and freedom is coming at a critical moment, the government is slowly ceasing to be the main enemy, giving space for the big technology companies to assume this role, but this is also a story for another time.
Laura Poitras has worked on more than a dozen documentaries since the release of Citizenfour in 2014, mostly as an executive producer. Edward Snowden has been in exile since 2013, and a few years ago he became a Russian citizen. Now living with his wife and children somewhere in Moscow, he has become one of the leading voices when it comes to digital security and continues to work in cryptography.
Glenn Greenwald continues to be a thorn in the side of the American and Brazilian government, he founded the newspaper The Intercept in 2014, with the intention of continuing to beat the world's governments without any editor putting a dirty finger on his articles, by irony of fate he leaves the company he founded in October 2020, because The Intercept's editors were censoring his criticisms of the Biden administration. Today he is an independent journalist and his fight for unrestricted freedom of expression continues to irritate rightists and leftists around the world.
