Edward Snowden, a former U.S. intelligence contractor who exposed vast U.S. surveillance programs, has been awarded Russian citizenship.
Nine years after he revealed the scope of the National Security Agency's (NSA) covert monitoring operations, President Vladimir Putin on Monday (Sept. 26) gave Snowden Russian citizenship.
When Snowden exposed in 2013 that the NSA, where he worked, had engaged in extensive domestic and foreign surveillance operations, he was forced to leave the country and was granted refuge in Russia.
He has been wanted by U.S. authorities to return home for years so that he can stand trial for espionage. Snowden's name surfaced in a Putin proclamation granting citizenship to 72 people who were born abroad without any Kremlin response. Later, Snowden put out a message-basically an updated version of a tweet from November 2020-in which he expressed his desire for seclusion and the continuation of his family.
Prior to Mr. Snowden's disclosure of evidence to the contrary, top US intelligence officials had publicly maintained that the NSA had never intentionally acquired data from private phone records.
After the information became public, officials claimed that the NSA's surveillance program had been crucial in the fight against domestic terrorism, leading to the convictions of Basaaly Saeed Moalin, Ahmed Nasir Taalil Mohamud, Mohamed Mohamud, and Issa Doreh of San Diego for aiding al-Shabab militants in Somalia.
Five days after Putin declared Russia's first public mobilization since World War II to support its faltering invasion of Ukraine, the news led some Russians to humorously wonder if Snowden would be called up for military service.
According to Anatoliy Kucherena, Snowden has never served in the Russian army and will not be called up as part of the partial mobilization announced by President Putin last week, according to state-run news outlets in Russia on Monday. He declared that Lindsay Mills, Snowden's spouse who gave birth to a son in 2020, would also submit an application for citizenship.
In 2020, Russia granted Snowden the ability to live there permanently, opening the door for him to apply for citizenship. In the same year, a U.S. appeals court determined that the program Snowden had revealed was illegal and that the U.S. intelligence officials who had publicly defended it was lying.
Snowden, who maintains a low profile while residing in Russia, was wrong to disclose US secrets, but he wasn't a traitor, according to Putin, a former Russian espionage head, who made this statement in 2017.
