In May–June 2013, NSA infrastructure analyst Edward Snowden — a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor stationed at the agency's Hawaii regional operations center — flew to Hong Kong and leaked thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill, exposing the global mass-surveillance apparatus operated by the NSA and the Five Eyes alliance. Investigators estimated Snowden exfiltrated between 50,000 and 200,000 documents, the bulk copied earlier while he worked for Dell starting in April 2012; he had taken the two-month Booz Allen job in March 2013 specifically to gather more material. Disclosures revealed programs including PRISM, XKeyscore, BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, MUSCULAR, and Tempora, and an NSA memo to Congress alleged he tricked a colleague into sharing a private key to escalate access. On June 21, 2013 the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed two Espionage Act counts and a theft-of-government-property charge against him; the State Department revoked his passport, and after a month inside Sheremetyevo airport he received Russian asylum, later being naturalized as a Russian citizen in 2022. On September 2, 2020 a federal appeals court ruled in United States v. Moalin that the bulk-metadata program he exposed was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, cementing the leak's lasting legal and policy impact.

Sources

• -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
• -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_disclosures