PERSON: Edward Snowden

Booz Allen Hamilton (until June 10, 2013)

System administrator

Edward Joseph “Ed” Snowden is an American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) to the mainstream media, starting in June 2013.

A former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), he later worked for Dell assigned as a contractor to U.S. National Security Agency facilities in the United States and inside an NSA outpost in Japan. In March 2013, he joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and worked as an infrastructure analyst inside the NSA center in Hawaii.

In June 2013, he came to international attention after disclosing to several media outlets thousands of classified documents that he acquired while working as an NSA contractor for Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden’s leaked documents revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many of them run by the NSA and the Five Eyes with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments.

A subject of controversy, Snowden has been variously called a hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, a patriot, and a traitor. His disclosures have fueled debates over mass surveillance, government secrecy, and the balance between national security and information privacy. Two court rulings since the initial leaks have split on the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata.

—Wikipedia