The man who revealed the massive nature of the NSA surveillance, providing documents to the media showing the amount of private information the U.S. government is collecting with it's secret court orders on Internet companies, phone companies and more, and the lack of transparency by the very secret nature of the FISA court orders, is Edward Snowden.
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
Mr. Snowden is hiding in Hong Kong, hoping to find a safe haven from the long arm of the U.S. government, in Iceland where they champion Internet privacy, according to Snowden, and he tells The Guardian that he has no regrets.
He specifically talks abut the difference he sees in what he did by revealing the extent of the domestic surveillance upon Americans from Bradley Manning who is being tried for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret documents to WikiLeaks.
Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden's leaks began to make news."I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets."---Edward Snowden
"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."
The video below allows us to meet Mr. Edward Snowden.
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