The Man Who Told the Truth

On June 5, 2013, Glenn Greenwald published the first story. The NSA was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers — every call, every day, in bulk.[1] The source was a 29-year-old systems administrator named Edward Snowden, sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong with four laptops and the most consequential intelligence leak in American history.

What He Revealed

Over the following months, journalists published document after document. The architecture of global mass surveillance came into focus:

PRISM — direct access to user data from Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other tech companies. Emails, chats, photos, videos, file transfers, login activity.[2]

XKeyscore — a search engine for virtually everything a person does on the internet. An NSA analyst could enter an email address and retrieve the content of every message, every browsing session, every chat — in real time, without a warrant.[3]

Upstream collection — the NSA was tapping undersea fiber optic cables, capturing internet traffic as it flowed between continents. The British partner agency GCHQ, under a program called TEMPORA, was buffering all internet traffic entering the UK for up to 30 days.[4]

“I don't want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
— Edward Snowden, June 2013

What Changed

The revelations triggered the largest public debate about surveillance in a generation. In 2015, Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which officially ended the bulk phone metadata program exposed in the very first Snowden story.[5] Tech companies began implementing end-to-end encryption by default. Apple and Google encrypted smartphone storage. WhatsApp turned on Signal Protocol for a billion users.

But the deeper programs — the ones collecting internet content, tapping cables, and compelling tech companies to hand over data — remained largely intact. Section 702 of FISA, the legal authority behind PRISM and upstream collection, was reauthorized in 2018 and again in April 2024, with expanded powers allowing the government to compel any company with access to communications equipment to assist with surveillance.[6]

What Didn't

Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then to Moscow — where he remains. The U.S. government charged him under the Espionage Act of 1917, a law originally designed for spies, not whistleblowers. Under the Espionage Act, Snowden cannot argue in court that his disclosures served the public interest. The law does not recognize a public interest defense.[7]

In September 2020, a federal court ruled that the bulk phone surveillance program Snowden exposed was illegal — and that the intelligence community had lied about it to Congress and the public.[8] No one was prosecuted. No official was fired. The program had already been quietly replaced by other collection methods.

In 2022, the EU's top court struck down the US-EU data transfer framework, citing ongoing NSA surveillance of European citizens — a direct consequence of Snowden's revelations. The ruling threw transatlantic data flows into legal chaos until a new framework was hastily negotiated.[9]

Exile

Snowden was granted Russian citizenship in 2022. He has never returned to the United States. Multiple human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and the ACLU, have called for his charges to be dropped. President Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, said in 2016 that Snowden had performed a “public service.” Obama did not pardon him.[10]

The surveillance apparatus Snowden revealed is still running. It has been legalized, expanded, and normalized. The public debate he ignited lasted about two news cycles. The infrastructure is permanent. The man who exposed it cannot come home.