Snowden, who revealed in 2013 with leaked documents that the US was conducting wiretapping activities around the world with British intelligence, has been living in Russia with a permanent residence permit since that year.
The documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA also eavesdropped on foreign government buildings and kept records through secret units organized by the US in overseas missions.
On September 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Russian citizenship to former US National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden, born 1983, security expert who previously worked for the CIA and Dell companies, was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, a subcontractor to the NSA.
After a while, Snowden explained that he thought the listening and watching programs he participated in were ethically unacceptable and he tried to discuss this internally, but his objections were not taken into account.
Finally, in May 2013, Snowden quit his NSA job in Hawaii and moved to Hong Kong.
In June, he shared thousands of secret NSA documents he had copied with the Guardian and the American Washington Post.
Some of the leaked documents by Snowden, which became the subject of the world's agenda with the reporting of these intelligence documents, were later reported in other media, including the German Der Spiegel magazine and the American New York Times.
Snowden's passport, which the US Department of Justice immediately sued in June on charges of stealing government documents and espionage, was also revoked. The former intelligence officer moved from Hong Kong to Moscow two days later and has since been living in Russia, which granted him asylum.
Snowden released his autobiography, Permanent Record, in 2019.
The US Department of Justice filed two more book-related charges against Snowden on the day it was published.