Born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, Edward Snowden first became involved with the United States government upon his enrollment in the Army Reserves in the spring of 2004.[10] Snowden claims to have left the program after a few months because he broke his legs in a training accident while a US House of Representatives report claims he had shin splints.[11] He then began working for the CIA in 2006 and was stationed with diplomatic cover at the embassy in Geneva, Switzerland in 2007. After nearly three years with the agency, Snowden resigned his position in February 2009 in order to begin working for a contractor with Dell for the NSA.
It was at this point in his career that Snowden could sense that his views were changing; "I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in ... [The NSA] are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".[12] In 2012, Snowden was reassigned from Yokota base in Japan to the Kunia Operations Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, working for Dell before serving as a consultant to Booz Allen Hamilton.[13] As an "infrastructure analyst" at the National Threat Operations Center, he monitored internet communication.[14]
In his own words, the longer he continued to work for the NSA, the more he "worked in to resist" his own feelings regarding the various programs in place at the agency.[15] He had served at the Hawaiian base for approximately 15 months prior to leaving the United States and thousands of classified documents. In 2020, Snowden is still living in exile in Russia and conducted three interviews, one with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight in April 2015 - one with NPR's Fresh Air segment[16] and one with Wired[17] prior to the release of his autobiography Permanent Record on September 12, 2019.
