Covert Codes and Betrayal - The Decisions of NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden (2013)

Covert Codes and Betrayal - The Decisions of NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden (2013)

In 2013, the world was in the midst of an explosion of smartphones and cloud services: Facebook connected the personal information of people around the world, Google absorbed our daily searches and activity history, and the iPhone was a device that held the world in the palm of our hands. Behind the convenience, however, lurked a national surveillance system.

In June of that year, Edward Snowden, a contract employee of the National Security Agency (NSA), stunned the world by providing a series of secret documents to reporters from The Guardian and The Washington Post in Hong Kong. What was revealed was that secret surveillance programs such as "PRISM" were used by the NSA to acquire massive amounts of communications data from Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other companies in the name of counter-terrorism, collecting emails, search histories, and phone records of individuals around the world, including U.S. citizens.

In the background is the "security-first society" that has developed in the United States since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The USA PATRIOT Act was passed in the name of preventing the recurrence of terrorist attacks, and national security came to take precedence over individual freedom and privacy. Snowden's accusations were also an indictment of this extreme imbalance.

After his revelations, Snowden revealed his identity and went on the run. From Hong Kong to Russia and continuing his exile in Moscow, he was a "traitor" to the U.S. government and a "hero" to the many citizens who supported him.

Snowden's words, "I just gave the people back their right to know," highlighted a 21st century question: the power of the state, which has grown enormously with technological advances, and the moral courage of the individual to oppose it. His actions led the world for the first time to seriously confront the contours of the surveillance society and the fragility of democracy. Yet, a decade later, similar systems are still quietly and surely evolving.