"Someone portrayed him as a spy or a traitor, so you tell me, what exactly does he get out of it?" He chose to keep it public secret at a great cost and put himself at risk, wanting to let the public know that privacy had been violated. The elder Snowden had so furiously responded to those who had slandered his son.
In June 2013, Edward Thompson, a 29-year-old NSA outsourcing technician in the United States, said that he would not be able to do so. Snowden, leaking 58,000 confidential materials to the Guardian and four other media outlets, unveiled the scandal that the United States monitored public privacy through a series of programs such as "Prism", "Star Wind" and "Five Eyes".
U.S. surveillance not only affects ordinary people around the world, but even the call records of U.S. ally German Chancellor Angela Merkel are placed on the desk of then-US President Barack Obama.
Snowden's move not only allowed the world to see how far the United States had broken through the bottom line for the so-called "security", but also allowed a long-unmentioned Five Eyes alliance to resurface.
World public opinion was in an uproar, and the world condemned the United States, no matter how it talks about counter-terrorism, it cannot cover up its ugly act of monitoring public information.
The NSA, which is affiliated with the U.S. Department of Defense, has never had such a large-scale leak, and it is the case for Keith Lee, who is now the director of the NSA. Alexander left office, and Obama announced a revise of the surveillance program.
Why does Snowden, who seems to be full of books, dare to stand up to the world's most powerful intelligence agency? The world's evaluation of Snowden has also fallen into polarization, some people think that he is a hero who is not afraid of power, and others think that he is a traitor who does not abide by the principle of secrecy.
How should we evaluate Snowden, or start with the past and present life of the Five Eyes Alliance that he broke out.
In July 1940, the British ambassador to the United States, Philip Scott. Cole, who had proposed that Britain and the United States start an intelligence exchange mechanism, did not attract the attention of the United States.
At the end of 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States suffered a great loss before it put Anglo-American intelligence cooperation on the agenda, with Britain responsible for collecting German and Italian intelligence, and the United States responsible for monitoring Japan, and then sharing all intelligence.
On March 5, 1946, as the Cold War began, Britain and the United States signed the Anglo-American Communications and Intelligence Agreement, stipulating that all foreign communications except those under the jurisdiction of Britain and the United States would be within the scope of their intelligence investigations.
In the following years, Canada, Australia and New Zealand joined the agreement. Because the documents of the five countries' intelligence exchange have the words "AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY" ON THE FILE BAGS, OVER TIME, THE "Five Eyes Alliance" has become a synonym for the intelligence alliance organization.
The original main task of the Five Eyes Alliance was to secretly monitor the Soviet Union and its allies. Because the Five Eyes Alliance was always in a state of clandestine operation, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, many believe that the Five Eyes Alliance has long disappeared.
It was not until Snowden stepped forward that people were surprised to find that the Five Eyes Alliance had not only not been disbanded, but with the help of rapidly developing network technology, countless eyes had been born to monitor the world.
It turned out that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Five Eyes Alliance led by the United States did not feel at ease with the disappearance of the biggest opponent, but felt that potential opponents were everywhere, so in order to maintain their hegemonic thinking, they re-delimited the monitoring area. Among the dominant players is the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland, USA.
The predecessor of the NSA was the AFSA (Armed Forces Security Service), which was established in 1949 and was tasked with unifying communications intelligence for the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force.
However, at that time, the US Army, Navy and Air Force did not bird AFSA at all, and still went their own way, each managing its own intelligence. It was not until U.S. Commander MacArthur misjudged the intelligence provided by the AFSA in the Korean battlefield and put the United States into passivity that U.S. President Harry S. Truman decided to abolish the AFSA and establish the National Security Agency (NSA).
Since its founding in 1952, the NSA has evolved over 60 years and upgraded its authority, not only to issue directives to any unit in charge of intelligence in the United States, but also has 38,000 regular employees and 2.5 non-staff employees responsible for maintaining the operation of thousands of intelligence stations scattered around the world.
The NSA's eye-catching performance in the Gulf War not only provided a large amount of listening information for the US military, but also effectively guaranteed the security of US military communications, which was deeply praised by President Bush Sr. and was praised as "the unsung hero in the desert storm." ”
But it is a pity that the unsung hero in the eyes of the elder Bush overturned on September 11, 2001.
In fact, as early as the summer of 2001, the NSA's anti-terrorism analysts had found more than 30 dangerous signs, had a premonition of what would happen, but did not find out what those signs really meant until September 11.
On the day of the incident, 19 terrorists hijacked 4 US domestic flights. Two of the planes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the third plane crashed into the Pentagon.
There is also intelligence that the fourth hijacked plane will crash into Fort Meade. Thousands of NSA employees then left their jobs and drove away.
Snowden, who was only 17 years old at the time, worked part-time as a web designer at the Fort Meade base at the NSA headquarters, and witnessed this unprecedented panic.
The next day, the NSA became the culprit for failing to accurately anticipate the terrorist's plot. To prove itself, the N.S.A. submitted an application to the U.S. Congress to monitor the Internet, including civilian communications networks. Eager for revenge, then-President George W. Bush immediately gave the NSA all the powers it could think of.
Since then, the United States has divided the world into "outsiders" and "own family", in the eyes of the United States, "self-family" only includes the Five Eyes countries, even European countries with close friendship with the United States, but also become the need to monitor the "outsiders", even after World War II, the German prime minister who has a very iron relationship with the United States has been monitored by the United States for 10 years.
According to Snowden's disclosure, the NSA has a project called "special class", that is, to set up monitoring equipment in more than 80 US embassies and consulates around the world in order to monitor the communication information of the United Nations Secretary-General, the German Chancellor and other 35 leaders of various countries.
The mystery of the American listening equipment is in the building that resembles a white box on the roof of their embassies and consulates in various countries. In fact, those white attics without windows, the metal material of its appearance is the communication antenna, and the secret agent's office dedicated to monitoring is among them.
Such "white boxes" are all over Rio de Janeiro, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Berlin... For example, standing on the roof of the US Embassy in Germany, you can overlook the German Chancellor's Office Building in the distance, and it is easy to intercept the German Prime Minister's mobile phone signal.
After the US surveillance plan was exposed, Merkel called Obama and angrily asked: "It is impossible to accept the act of eavesdropping on friends, and now the Cold War is long over." ”
When Merkel visited the United States in 2014, she wanted to get a public apology from Obama and the NSA to release her former suspicions. However, the United States only did not give Germany treatment similar to the Five Eyes countries, but even stopped listening activities in Germany, and did not give a clear attitude.
If the Five Eyes surveillance program is only aimed at world leaders, it is estimated that Snowden will not step forward to expose all this.
Born in North Carolina, Snowden later moved to Maryland, where he lived not far from Fort Meade. Snowden had a high IQ but poor academic performance, only obtaining a high school equivalency and being very proficient in computer technology.
In 2003, Snowden enlisted in the Army. He hoped to fight in Iraq, but was dissatisfied with his trainers' encouragement to kill Arabs. Coupled with the fact that Snowden broke his legs in training, he resolutely chose to retire.
After that, Mr. Snowden worked as a security guard at a secret NSA facility at the University of Maryland and later worked in IT security at the U.S. C.I.A.
Although Snowden only had a high Chinese, he was quickly promoted for his talent for the Internet and computer programming. In 2007, Snowden was sent to Geneva, Switzerland, as an American diplomat, to maintain computer network security.
Snowden spent three years in Geneva. He has been with CIA intelligence officers, and what he has seen and heard has led him to seriously question the legitimacy of what he is doing.
Snowden once described the CIA, in order to obtain secret bank information from a Swiss banker, sent someone to deliberately intoxicate the banker and then encourage the banker to drink and drive. After the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the CIA people came forward to settle the matter, taking the opportunity to establish a relationship with the banker and recruit him for his own use.
Snowden has since been utterly disillusioned with what the United States has done. Mr. Snowden wanted to expose America's secrets, but for fear of endangering specific people, and the hope of reform from the election of Obama in 2008, he felt that perhaps something would change without revealing it.
In 2009, Snowden left the CIA and was hired by Booz Allen Consulting to work at the NSA's base in Japan. In 2013, Mr. Snowden moved to the NSA's National Threat Control Center in Hawaii.
The center has a surveillance system, like the search engine described in science fiction, where just by entering a person's name, all the information about that person left on the web is at a glance.
Snowden once wrote in his autobiography "Perpetual Record" that the NSA used six "nothing" to describe its surveillance stance, "omniscient, omniscient, collective, omnipresent, omnipresent, utilized, and all-encompassing."
Perhaps it was the NSA that obtained the amount of data through the surveillance network that made Snowden feel boundless guilt, and then became the last straw that crushed Snowden's spirit.
Snowden recalled that during the surveillance of suspicious elements, he was most impressed by an Indonesian young boy. The boy's father, just an ordinary engineer, was screened by the N.S.A. as a suspect target related to an international organization just because he had sent a cover letter to an Iranian university.
As an analyst, Snowden's daily task is to look through the personal information of these suspects' chat records, email addresses and so on. One day, the engineer's father sat in front of the computer holding his son, who was still wearing diapers, and the little boy smiled and tapped on the keyboard while staring at the camera.
Snowden never found anything wrong in the engineer's browsing history. So when he and the little boy looked at each other across the camera, he suddenly felt suffocated, so he immediately turned off the listening device and went straight to the bathroom.
Snowden once believed that the Internet was one of the most important inventions of mankind, but when he saw that the value of the Internet, as well as the most basic privacy of the public, was destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance devices, he had a strong resistance in his heart, unwilling to live in a world without even privacy.
Not only did Snowden have a stable job with an annual salary of $200,000, but he also had a girlfriend who was about to get married for four years and a parent who loved him deeply.
But perhaps from the perspective of defending his own interests, perhaps out of moral understanding, Snowden still resolutely decided to expose the American deception at all costs.
The reason why Snowden did not choose to report it was because a number of NSA employees had previously reported similar problems, all of which were suppressed and blocked by the US government. Snowden was reluctant to implicate his family, so he flew alone to Hong Kong, China, without his parents and girlfriend.
Snowden stayed in the Miramar Hotel in Hong Kong, fearing being monitored, he used a pillow to block the door of the house, and even when entering the computer password, he covered his entire head and laptop computer with a red cloth.
These behaviors may seem strange to others, but the United States knows that the United States has the ability to do everything to spy on it.
In order to make the large number of secrets he holds effectively public, Snowden carefully selected two brave media people: one was the Guardian reporter Greenwald, who had firmly supported WikiLeaks founder Assange; One is Laura, a documentary actress who makes the U.S. military feel tricky.
The eye-catching headline, the mysterious content exposed by Snowden quickly spread around the world, the most surprising thing to the American people was that the United States collected phone records through 9 network technology companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo, including not only foreigners, but also the American people.
As the incident fermented, Snowden's disclosure of his identity became the focus of global media attention. The U.S. government then indicted Mr. Snowden on multiple charges and was eager to extradite him for trial.
Knowing that he would not be able to get a fair trial when he returned home, Snowden hoped to find a country that would grant him political asylum. Just when Snowden did not know where to go, Assange sent his right-hand man Harrison to help Snowden leave Hong Kong.
Ecuador, which had sheltered Assange, extended an olive branch to Snowden, and the public thought Snowden would go to Latin America. Harrison cleverly used media speculation to pretend to book a ticket for Snowden to Latin America, but in fact booked a flight for Snowden to Russia three days later.
On his way to Russia, Snowden's passport was cancelled by the United States to become an unidentified figure. As a result, not only could Snowden not only transfer to other countries, but even Russian airports could not get out, so he had to hide in a capsule hotel in Terminal F of Shejdemelier.
It was a short stay, and the desperate Snowden had to apply to Russia for temporary asylum. Fortunately, the Russian Immigration Service issued Snowden with a temporary asylum certificate numbered 0011330 for one year.
Snowden officially entered Russian territory. After the expiration of one year, Russia extended the period of Asylum for Snowden for 3 years. In 2020, Russia granted Snowden permanent residency. On September 26, 2022, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Snowden Russian citizenship.
Snowden's years of flight to Russia finally had an official identity, and the topic of him returned to the public eye. As for whether Snowden is a hero who pays a salary for everyone or a traitor who betrays the United States, I believe that everyone has his own judgment in his heart.
After the Prism Surveillance Plan was exposed, the Five Eyes Alliance did not relent, but instead joined hands and more bluntly gave the intelligence agencies they docked more authority, giving them the right to ask the telecommunications department to provide the telephone, email and other information of their own users.
At the time of Snowden's difficult refuge, the Five Eyes Alliance not only developed the second-level intelligence of the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, France and other countries to share the Nine-Eyes Alliance, but also pulled the three-level intelligence sharing Fourteen Eyes Alliance of Germany, Spain, Sweden, Belgium and Italy.
But even if the Five Eyes Alliance develops more eyes, it is no longer the era when the Five Eyes Alliance blinds the world and allows them to run amok. Perhaps this is the meaning of Snowden's desperate abandonment of a favorable living environment.
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