Eric Snowden Whistleblower

Edward Snowden – WhistleblowerStudent’s Name
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Edward Snowden is accused of leaking particulars of the wide-ranging internet and phone surveillance done by the American intelligence. He is a former contractor of the CIA. He worked at the CIA as the systems analyst. According to Jeffreys-Jones (2017), Snowden is also linked with leaking UK surveillance programmers. The scandal was exposed in June 2013 when the Guardian newspaper published a story that the US national security agency (NSA) had continuously collected the telephone records of a majority of Americans (Harding, 2016). The report included a secret court order that was given to Verizon, which a telecommunication company is requiring it give all of its telephone data to NSA on a continuous basis. The report was accompanied by other disclosures by the Washington Post and the Guardian that NSA was drawing straight into the servers of nine internet companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others to trail online communication.Edward Snowden was charged in the United States with stealing of government property, voluntarily revealing classified communication intelligence and unauthorized communication of national defense information (Gardner, 2016).
Before becoming a whistleblower, Edward Snowden served in different positions in the US intelligence. He worked as a secret agent for the CIA in the international sphere. When he revealed the documents regarding NSA’s large surveillance programs to the American public, they were operating with a lack of public oversight and outside the limits of the US constitution.

Snowden was charged by the US government with three charges based on the espionage act. Every charge, the sentence has a minimum of 10 years in prison (Higgins, n.d.). However, Snowden lives in Russia where he was given three years officially to reside in the country due to the US seeking his extradition. Journalists continue to publish more secrets that are revealed by Snowden regarding the peculiar systems of contemporary worldwide surveillance used in the US and UK (Greenwald & Overdrive Inc. 2014).
References
Gardner, L. C. (2016). The war on leakers: National security and American democracy, from Eugene v. Debs to Edward Snowden.
Greenwald, G., & Overdrive Inc. (2014). No Place to Hide. S.I.: Henry Holt and Co.
Harding, L. (2016). The Snowden files: The inside story of the world’s most wanted man.
Higgins, M. (n.d.). Edward Snowden: NSA Whistle-Blower. New York: ABDO Digital.
Jeffreys-Jones, R. (2017). We know all about you: The story of surveillance in Britain and America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.