Edward Snowden continues to elude capture as a story
unveils that has all the makings of a fascinating political thriller/personal
drama. A lot of his support comes from people who believe he’s a hero and that
he sacrificed himself for a worthy cause. Others, myself included, are a little
more sceptical, mostly because of the countries he turned to for asylum. To
proclaim yourself an activist for human rights – in this case privacy and
freedom of speech – and then ask help from countries whose governments are
notorious for violating those rights doesn’t make sense.
Snowden must be very naïve if he believes these countries
would want to harbour an activist who has shown himself willing to break laws
and expose and betray his own country. And he's downright deluded if he thinks they care more about
human rights than about international relationships. They’ve already proved
that they don’t. They’ll use him if they can and spit him out if they can’t.
Who is Edward Snowden, anyway? What’s his background? There’s
not much information to be found about him. I guess he values his privacy. He
doesn’t mind exposing a government but he doesn’t want anybody to expose him. He’s
possibly also a little paranoid. NBC News reported that he covers himself and
his laptop with a red hood when entering his passwords. I can’t say whether
that information is true or not.
According to The Guardian, he comes from a middle class
family. He was born in 1983 in Wilmington, N.C., his father is a former Coast Guard
Officer and his mother is the chief deputy clerk for administration and
information technology at Baltimore federal court. He has one sister, an
attorney, who is older than him. He didn’t complete high school, but he’s mum
on why. He studied at a community college and got a general equivalency degree.
The Guardian learned that a student with his name and date of birth took
classes at the Anne Arundel Community College from 1999 to 2001 and in 2004 and
2005.
In 2004 he was recruited into the Army Reserves special
forces for a 14 week training course which he didn’t complete. Nor did he get
any awards. Snowden told The Guardian he broke both his legs in an accident and
that’s why he was discharged.
He then worked as a security guard with the NSA, from where
he moved onto doing IT for the CIA. He worked there from 2007-2009, when he
left to work for private contractors. He had been working for Booz Allen for
about 3 months when he let the cat out the bag. He had been making about $200 000
a year. By self admission he has been a spy almost all his life. Which doesn’t
quite fit with the facts. It’s very Hollywood, though.
Snowden told the Guardian that he was diagnosed with
epilepsy last year and used that as his excuse to take leave from Booz Allen.
He didn’t tell his girlfriend or his family where he was going or what he was
going to do. Nor did he apparently stop to think about
how his actions might impact on them. I guess big noble causes require people
to be sacrificed, whether they want it or not.
What I wonder is, why did he leave school? No kid does that
unless there’s provocation. And the accident with 2 broken legs? What happened
there? Snowden did say that he wanted to go to Iraq to protect the Iraqi people
but got disillusioned when he realized the special services were more about
killing Arabs.
Which is very understandable and commendable. But what did that do to him, I wonder? As for his home life, how
successful was his older sister and what was his relationship with her and with
his parents? And I’d be very interested to know when he first started
communicating with Julian Assange, or at the least how much he was influenced
by that man’s PR. I have the sense that, like poor Bradley Manning, who had
lousy self esteem and was lonely and easy prey, Snowden is now just so much fodder for Assange and his
personal quest to stay in the spotlight no matter what the cost to anybody.
