The Snowden Case and Its Historical Background (2013)

The Snowden Case and Its Historical Background (2013)

The Snowden Affair, which came to light in 2013, greatly shook the international order at the beginning of the 21st century. The background is the "war on terror," which has expanded rapidly in the United States since the terrorist attacks of 2001. With the enactment of the Patriot Act, the National Security Agency (NSA) was given greater authority to intercept communications and collect data both domestically and internationally. During the Cold War, the Soviet threat was the primary focus, but after 9/11, intelligence-gathering activities went beyond the traditional diplomatic and military framework to cover everyday life in response to the "invisible threat of terrorists.

As a contract employee of the NSA, Snowden had access to a vast amount of classified documents, and he exposed how surveillance programs such as PRISM were collecting personal communications and search history via the data of IT giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The scale of the exposed documents, numbering approximately 1.5 million, far exceeded that of previous whistleblowers. This revealed that the U.S. government was monitoring the communications not only of its own citizens but also of the leaders of its allies, and in particular, the tapping of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone caused a serious rift in the U.S.-German relationship.

In terms of time, the early 2010s was a period in which the Internet began to function as a catalyst for political change, as symbolized by the "Arab Spring" and the spread of social networking services. The United States, while upholding freedom and democracy, was exposed as having built a massive surveillance system behind the scenes, leading to heightened criticism of global double standards. Within the U.S., the balance between citizens' privacy rights and national security was questioned, and outside the U.S., the concept of "digital sovereignty" attracted attention and led to the strengthening of data protection regulations, particularly in the EU.

This incident also cast a shadow over the "soft power" of the United States. After the Cold War, the U.S. was seen as the standard-bearer for promoting Internet freedom, but the Snowden incident brought into sharp relief the face of the U.S. as a surveillance state that seeks to gain "information hegemony" behind the scenes. As a result, authoritarian states such as China and Russia criticized the hypocrisy of the U.S. and used it to justify their own Internet restrictions. In other words, the Snowden affair was more than just a whistleblower story; it was an opportunity to shake up global power relations and the information order.