Little By Little; or, The Cruise of the Flyaway

Oliver Optic

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former United States National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor who leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programs. Born in 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, he attended a community college and later enrolled in a master's programme at the University of Liverpool without finishing it. In 2006, he started working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then moved to Dell in 2009, where he managed computer systems for the NSA. In 2013, he worked for two months at Booz Allen Hamilton, with the purpose of gathering more NSA documents. In May 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunications companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy. On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges…