Edward Snowden’s breaking point

What immediate circumstance led Edward Snowden to leak classified government information? Why did he become a whistleblower?

What pushed him over the edge? Was there one awful secret about the National Security Agency that led him to expose them?

Edward Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency. By late 2012, he secretly contacted reporter Glenn Greenwald anonymously, offering to reveal “sensitive documents.” Soon Snowden also contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. He had decided that the two of them might help him, because Greenwald had published an article that described how Poitras’s films had made her a “target of the government.”

Having left a facility of the NSA in Hawaii, Snowden flew to Hong Kong in late May 2013 to meet secretly with Greenwald and Poitras.

Thus Greenwald interviewed Snowden. Greenwald remarked that people would be most interested in knowing how “there came some point in time when you crossed this line of thinking about being a whistleblower to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower.”

Snowden replied that as a systems administrator for the intelligence community he saw such gross abuses that he told his peers about it, but they did nothing. The more he talked about it, the more they ignored him, until finally he realized that the American public had to know.

Snowden revealed hundreds of thousands of classified documents showing how the NSA collected personal information from American citizens including telephone calls, intercepted emails, and instant-message conversations, even hundreds of pages long.

On January 2014, Snowden was interviewed for a German TV channel. That interviewer too asked him whether there was a “decisive moment” or just a long period of events that led Snowden to decide to leak NSA documents.

Snowden replied: “the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie on oath to Congress” in March 2013. Having seen the head of the intelligence community blatantly lie meant for Snowden that “there was no going back.”

Director Clapper had told the U.S. Congress that the NSA does not collect any data on millions of Americans. He lied.

In another interview, Snowden detailed the key moment. On March 13, 2013, he was sitting at his work-desk as usual in front of many computer screens and then “read the story that convinced him that the time had come to act.” It was a news account of Clapper’s denial. Snowden recalls: “I think I was reading it in the paper the next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this shit?” Again he told them, but they just accepted it with “the banality of evil.”

Utterly alarmed, Snowden felt compelled to act. He remarked: “It’s really hard to take that step—not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I’m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.”

Therefore, in June 2013, Snowden revealed that the NSA had collected data from 120 million Verizon subscribers.

It was a stunning disclosure. Hundreds of news organizations echoed the story. Consequently, Senator Justin Amash accused Director Clapper of criminal perjury and demanded his resignation. Senator Rand Paul suggested that Clapper deserved to be imprisoned. Then twenty-six senators denounced Clapper.

Snowden’s disclosures contributed to making Greenwald’s articles in The Guardian earn that newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.

In an interview with Jane Meyer, Snowden recalled that along with Director Clapper, General Keith Alexander—the Director of the NSA—had also lied to Congress.

Snowden said that “when it gets to that level of severity—when the consequences for our democracy are so great, somebody has to step forward.”

Snowden’s decision was so abrupt that he recalls that “there wasn’t a plan,” his mission then was just to urgently get the information out to the public.

He felt he had to keep an oath that was more important than his employee non-disclosure agreement. He decided to keep his oath to the U.S. Constitution instead: “That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

Thus Edward Snowden became a whistleblower and a fugitive, living in hiding.