Edward Snowden, born in 1983 in Elizabeth, North Carolina, was the son of an electronics engineer in the Coast Guard and a NSA worker, but was not in charge of intelligence work, but as an agent who handled insurance for NSA employees.
When Snowden was 6 years old, the family bought him a Nintendo game console, and as a boy, Snowden liked this game console very much every day, but after playing for a long time, the disc was a little poor, and his father was on a business trip. So, 6-year-old Snowden opened the game console and decided to repair it himself, there is no legendary story here, he did not repair the game console, the story developed here, the boy who had a complete childhood should understand that after his father returned, he must have taught him to be a man again, but Snowden's father did not do this, he came back and was very patient with Snowden to explain the parts and operating principles of the Nintendo game console.
His father believes that understanding a piece of scientific and technological equipment and checking in the correct way when it is broken, trying to repair it is the most basic responsibility of a person to technology, can not casually perfunctory technology, and now people and things are broken, they will throw away and replace it directly, resulting in no one caring about the operation principle of a piece of equipment, and over time people will be eaten by technological products.
Just like us in front of the screen, do you really understand how it works or if you download an app now, do you really want to see what permissions it has acquired and its contract terms? When you don't care about this matter, it is equivalent to agreeing to the tyranny of technology, letting it take, and finally when your equipment is working normally, you are also working normally, and when your equipment fails, you will also follow the failure, in other words, the items you own have in turn have you, and when the vast majority of people are like this, they are unwilling to understand, and the whole society will be kidnapped together.
In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, like many enthusiastic young people, Snowden also enlisted in the army to serve the country, but less than six months after enlistment, he was dissuaded from a pressure fracture of the tibia due to a long period of military training. After being persuaded to resign, he found that he was not suitable for serving the country with his body, so he decided to use his mind to do his part for the country, and with his professionalism in computers, entering the intelligence unit was his best option.
To enter the intelligence units of the United States, you must first go through a series of personal investigations, obtain different degrees of security clearance, and then assign you a specific work unit according to the level of security clearance. There are three levels of security clearance in total, from low to high, secret, confidential, top secret, and in order to enter the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and other units must have top secret qualifications, this qualification process alone will take a whole year, the National Background Investigation Bureau will thoroughly investigate your life, interview your relatives, friends and teachers, and even your colleagues who go to work may be interviewed.
This series of surveys does not mean that you must be completely innocent, good character and excellent talent to qualify, the focus of the survey is whether you are honest, because before the investigation they will first conduct interviews, this survey is to see if you have 100% honesty about your past, whether what you say is consistent with what they investigated, and after the investigation will also be a polygraph identification.
After a series of investigations Snowden at the age of 22, he successfully passed the appraisal and qualified. He first entered the CIA, but he wasn't technically a civil servant, but an employee of a contractor at the CIA, and yes, some of the CIA's intelligence work was outsourced. However, the place where he works is still at the headquarters of the CIA, just like many companies, just started to work is in the pre-job training class, the first day of work began to take classes, the content of the course is very simple, mainly to warn everyone, can not disclose their identity and do things.
His job task is to manage the CIA server in Washington, is the core of the CIA server in the United States, so you can access all kinds of secret intelligence, although working in the CIA sounds cool, but as a newcomer Snowden is responsible for the night shift work, every day from six o'clock in the evening to six o'clock in the morning, three days off two days, his work content is very simple is on duty, when the server has a problem, the departments will call, he will go to fix the server problems.
Not long after Snowden started working, he wrote most of the problems he would encounter as a program and automated it, and gradually he had a lot of free time at night, and he would hang out on the Internet in his spare time. The CIA had its own internal website, its own search engine, and even its own internal departmental website, and he soon discovered that everyone who used the internal search engine for the first time searched for aliens the most, but basically couldn't find anything, at least on the surface, the aliens had not yet visited Earth. Another thing that has attracted more attention is the conspiracy theory of the United States to land on the moon, and the internal website shows that the United States has indeed landed on the moon. In short, Snowden, who had just joined the company, was very idle.
But Snowden was not satisfied with this, he hoped to do more, he saw a lot of information from other countries on the CIA website, he decided to become a resident overseas, but this position can only be held by real public officials, so he switched from a contractor's employee to a civil servant to apply for NSA technical work overseas.
In 2009, he applied for a job as a technician stationed in Japan, and once he was going to make a report on counterintelligence and cyber intelligence. He believed that the technology currently in the Hands of the United States could be used to monitor the United States and even the world, and after collecting more information, he found something that surprised him.
As for how the US government's network surveillance is implemented, this all stems from george W. Bush's "presidential surveillance plan" after the 9/11 incident, which authorized the NSA to legally collect people's communication records, but the original secret plan was exposed in the New York Times in 2005, and later the entire incident was also reported by the US government, and since 2009, it has been declassified by the government itself, and the name of this report is called "Presidential Surveillance Plan Disclosure Report".
But Snowden was surprised to find that there were actually two versions of the report, one was an encrypted version within the government, and the other was a declassified version for everyone to see, and in this encrypted version of the report, he found that in order to legalize the collection of public communication records, the Bush Administration played a word game and redefined the words "obtained" and "obtained" as: Only when the NSA "searched and obtained" information from the database, this information can be considered "obtained" or "obtained", in other words I first collect a large number of communication records of all people, this act is not called "obtaining" and "obtaining", only when I want to use this information, I go to search for it This action is called "obtaining" and "obtaining".
After opening the door to mass collection, the government can collect people's communication records at will, and Snowden believes that this should not be called mass collection at all, but should be called "mass surveillance".
The NSA can monitor everyone's communication records, including the phone model you use, your location and time, the recipient of the mail, they all know it, and after reading the report, Snowden was in a trance for several weeks, and he began to question the content of his work, only to find that he was defending not the United States from beginning to end, but the United States government.
In 2012, Snowden was transferred to Hawaii as a position called document management manager, this job is simply to manage who can see what documents, who can have the permission to edit, the right to send and receive this document, etc. This work is very boring for Snowden, he spent a few days to write all the work into the program to achieve automation, then the rest of the time, he used to look at the NSA's internal website bulletin board, he originally wanted to back up the entire bulletin board, However, due to the allocation of storage space for each employee, if he did this, he would soon run out of his storage space, so he could only read them one by one, and he felt that important files were downloaded, but after a long time, the space was not enough.
At this time, he had a clever move, proposed to the supervisor, he wanted to create a personalized selection of announcement system for employees on the internal website, so that each employee can see the documents related to their work content, rather than in a bunch of documents to find themselves, and can automatically match the reading permissions of each employee, the supervisor thinks that you are really a genius, he fully supports Snowden to do it, but in fact, his intention of doing the bulletin board is to give him a reason to back up all the files on the bulletin board. Even after obtaining documents that he did not have access to, he further studied the bulletin boards of the CIA and the FBI, which he called a "heartbeat," and a large part of the information he later revealed to reporters was obtained through this system.
One of the most famous plans in the U.S. government surveillance hit is the "Prism Project", which means that the U.S. government can regularly collect information from some large enterprises, including your emails, upload photos, call content, web browsing records, etc.: the other is "upstream collection", which is more terrifying, which refers to the network infrastructure, such as converters and routers through global network traffic, through satellites, submarine cables directly to grab data, which sounds a bit difficult to understand.
In layman's terms, when you open the browser and click on a WEB address, this action is actually a request, this request will go to its destination server, that is, where this web page is stored, but before this request reaches the destination, it will first pass through a system called "turbulence", "turbulence" system is divided into two parts "chaos" and "turbo", "chaos" is responsible for passive collection of information, that is, all requests will pass it, copy and record the request, if " If chaos thinks your traffic is suspicious, it notifies "Turbo", "Turbo" will forward your request to the NSA server, where the NSA will use algorithms to select a malicious program suitable for you to monitor you, he will send this malicious program back to "Turbo", and then "Turbo" will send it back to you along with the website you requested, and the final result is that you get the website you want to go to, and also get this malware that monitors you, all of which happens in less than a second. And you don't know.
"Read", "write", "execute", this is Snowden exposed the US government's three-step plan to monitor the people, the first is to "read" is to find a way to get the files copied by the "heartbeat" system he built, the NSA is not a fool, Snowden's own work also has limited file access, if he directly uses the "heartbeat" to search and open the files he does not have permission to read, he will be directly arrested. So he took a fancy to a bunch of discarded computers that were idle in the corner of the office, which were old and slow, but still belonged to the NSA's system and could not be tracked closely, so he used the excuse of doing compatibility tests to see if the "heartbeat" on the old system could work, so he moved one to his office.
The second stage of "writing" is to find a way to copy the file back into his own hard disk, he uses a micro SD card, sometimes he will hide in the socks, sometimes even hidden in the mouth, so as not to touch the metal detector, after making sure that the old computer is not connected to the Internet, he uses the SD card to start copying information, but the speed is very slow, to fill an SD card it takes nearly 8 hours, so he will change to the night shift, every night he secretly copies the file.
The third stage of "reading" is to bring out the file, he has to find a way to give it to the reporter, but at the same time can not reveal his identity, for the extreme understanding of the NSA, he understands that this is almost impossible, once the news is handed over will definitely lock him up immediately. As a result, Snowden decided that it would be better to expose it publicly.
Generous and frank about his identity, and staying in place waiting to be caught are two different things, Snowden still finds a way to contact the reporter in a way that is not tracked, give the file to them, he modified his car, turned it into a mobile WIFI sensor, he installed a special operating system on the laptop, as long as the computer is turned off, all the information will automatically disappear without leaving a trace, and he uses an anonymous onion router to access the Internet, he drives around to contact reporters, Slowly, he broke the news of his stolen information to reporters and before the media could make it public, he made an appointment with reporters to conduct interviews at a hotel in Hong Kong, and after the interviews he began to flee.
He originally planned to go to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, but there was no direct flight from Hong Kong to Quito, and he had to make three connections in the middle, and as a result, to the first secondary school in Moscow, Snowden was stopped when he crossed customs, and it turned out that on his way to Moscow, the NSA had already found that something was wrong and had tracked down Snowden, and the US Secretary of State had ordered Snowden's passport to be invalidated, and he was stranded at the Airport in Moscow.
The news of Snowden's detention spread all over the world as he broke the news, and finally the Russian government promised to give Snowden political asylum, from June 23, 2013 Snowden landed on the ground he stayed at the Moscow airport for more than a month, on August 1 he finally left the airport and entered Moscow, until now he is still in an apartment in Moscow, he has to wear makeup when he goes out, and then wear a big hat to go out on the street, passing the monitor to bow his head, Walking on the road he also did not look at the car at all, he should be afraid of being photographed by the dashcam. But he doesn't regret such an exile, he thinks he has adhered to principles, even if he sacrificed his life, he also believes that someone should stand up and expose these things done by the US government.
He firmly believed that only respect for the rights of people could measure the freedom of a nation.