It was a quiet and bright morning in Hong Kong as his plane descended onto the city. Edward knew there wasn’t much time left before everything would unfold. His plan would begin and end here, and in the following days he would become a man pursued by the world’s most powerful country. The clock for his revelations was ticking by hours, minutes, seconds.
Edward Snowden was once an agent of the very people he exposed – the National Surveillance Agency, the NSA. He has harboured a desire to bring them to light for years. It was as early as January of this year that he contacted journalists under the codename “Verax”, which is Latin for truthful. The material he communicated would then be published after Snowden took flight from Hawaii and fled to Hong Kong.
This information included details of the (amongst others) PRISM project, in which the US government would directly cooperate with internet providers to spy via their servers. Effectively, they would know most of what you do. Your Facebook is set on private? That’ll stop them (not). Google Mail, Youtube, private blogs and public blogs; your texts and telephone calls, they see it all. This does not take place just in the USA. In the UK, the GCHQ is doing the exactly the same thing, as Snowden revealed. Perhaps they’ve put you on a watch list for reading this (you might be a terrorist after all).
In 2012 you’d call that a conspiracy theory. Today it’s a fact. Snowden showed the world that we are in fact all being spied on. Always.
Mr. Snowden paid a great price for revealing mass scale government spying. It wasn’t long after the leak that the USA sent an extradition request to bring him back and to trial him for espionage, ironically. Knowing that his life and freedom was on the line here, Snowden made over twenty asylum requests to different countries from his safe house in Hong Kong. Perhaps the governments of the world did not like him, or perhaps the US government interfered and pressured them, and all the applications were ignored or denied. Meanwhile, Hong Kong was considering whether to send him back to the USA in shackles, or whether to stand up to them (Hong Kong happens to be partly integrated with China, which is not a big fan of the USA.)
What exactly would happen to Snowden if he was tried? Another whistle blower – by the name of Bradley Manning 
who revealed war crimes committed by the United States has been (and still is) on trial. His detention included degradation and psychological torture – Manning was forced to remain in a tiny, windowless cell whilst naked 24 hours a day for many weeks. During this time, there was no human contact. This complete isolation technique is known to be able to drive a man mad.
Snowden knew all about that, so when the White House promised not to kill or torture him if he returned to be prosecuted, he didn’t really believe that. There was however, a little bit of ironic truth to the promise. The US military considers waterboarding, a technique which is used to stimulate drowning, not torture but rather “enhanced interrogation”.
Edward was now under heat – he knew that any time he could be dragged out of his safe house. On the advice of several lawyers, he decided to change his location. It was a close call – for he left on the exactly the same day as the USA revoked his passport, but still managed to use a plane in its last hours of validity.
For a few hours, the world went mad with speculation as the news of the flight took off. Some thought that he headed for Iceland, a country dangerously close to the USA, but one that Snowden thought to be friendly to him. He had a different plan. He went somewhere where the White House (maybe) wouldn’t dare to attempt to assassinate him – or bomb him with their drones. He left for Moscow, Russia.
It was there that his passport’s invalidity finally caught up. Snowden got – rather literally – stuck inside a Moscow airport, not quite on Russian soil, not quite on it either. It was there that he would spend over a month, making even more asylum requests in hope to evade the US, including one to Russia itself.
Weeks passed, and Vladimir Putin commented that Snowden is “like an unwanted Christmas gift”. Mr. Putin is in fact Russia’s president, a man with military past, sharp tongue and rumours of fraud surrounding his latest re-election. Out of all the countries and leaders in the world – Putin is certainly the one who could resist the bullying of the USA, who has broken and disregarded several international laws in their pursuit of Snowden, which is not to say Putin wouldn’t break them either.
It was five weeks since he arrived in Moscow that Snowden was finally blessed. Russia agreed to give him one year of political asylum, which could be extended indefinitely. He left the airport soon after to an unknown location, and the White House didn’t wait to express its disappointment and criticized Russia’s anti-gay laws, with Obama threatening to boycott the 2014 Winter Olympics. The horror.
It seems that the US’ pursuit of Snowden got shut down – hard, and all they could do was to throw some mud at Putin. However, there is an important question left – why did Russia grant Snowden asylum? Truthfully, he may have become nothing but a bargaining chip in the hands of the Russians, only to be exchanged for something the Russians want. Perhaps not, maybe Putin simply wants to stick it to Obama. Last Friday the two leaders were set to meet and talk. Obama cancelled the plan to express his outrage over the asylum grant. For now, Edward Snowden is somewhere in Russia, learning their language and (maybe) safe from the claws of the USA. Meanwhile however, nobody is doing anything with the knowledge he gave the public.
It would seem we are okay with being spied on.
