The System Administrator

Edward Joseph Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in 1983. The son of a family serving in the US Coast Guard, his fascination with computers began at a young age. Taking apart a computer and reassembling it was like an ordinary game for him.

He left school without finishing high school, but this gap did not prevent his passion for technology. He taught himself programming. He spent hours studying computer security. This curiosity would eventually carry him to the heart of the world's most powerful surveillance mechanism.

In 2004, he joined the US Army. The Iraq war was ongoing. Snowden trained for special forces. However, after an accident seriously injured both his legs, his military career was cut short.

After leaving the army, his skills in information technology led him down a different path. First, he worked as a systems administrator at the CIA. There he specialized in network security, data flow, and classified communication systems.

In 2007, he was assigned to Geneva, Switzerland. Under diplomatic cover, he managed CIA computer networks. Snowden observed firsthand that Western intelligence services were collecting information not only on enemy countries but also on allies. He later said this experience showed him that what was done in the name of security actually harmed diplomacy.

After leaving the CIA in 2009, he began working with the NSA. First as a contractor through Dell, then at a private security company called Booz Allen Hamilton. At this point, Snowden's role reached a critical dimension. Booz Allen provided external support to America's most classified cybersecurity projects.

Snowden was part of the team managing the infrastructure of global surveillance programs at an NSA facility in Hawaii. He had unlimited access. Phone records. Internet traffic. Data flowing through fiber optic cables.

It was at this point that the conflict in Snowden's mind began to grow. According to official statements, this data was only for finding terrorists. But in practice, the daily communications of millions of innocent people were being collected without any court order.

Not just foreign citizens. American citizens' emails, phone calls, even search engine records were being monitored. Snowden considered a state observing its own people on this scale to be unconstitutional.

The NSA's most well known program was PRISM. Launched in 2007, this system established direct connections with the world's largest technology companies. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo. Users' emails, photos, chats, and file transfers from these companies' servers were transmitted to the NSA.

Although official documents presented this access within a legal framework, court oversight was often only symbolic. Another tool was XKeyscore. In Snowden's words, a search engine that allowed an analyst to monitor any target's emails, visited websites, and even every word they typed in real time.

This system looked like Google, but it was actually the center of global surveillance. Billions of communication records were at the fingertips of analysts.

The third layer was Tempora. This program worked in cooperation with British intelligence. Fiber optic cables passing through British shores were copied directly by the state. Every day, millions of phone calls, billions of emails, social media posts, and credit card transactions flowed through these lines and reached the archives.

Tempora covered not only terrorists but also journalists, diplomats, and corporate executives.

The documents also revealed the existence of a system called Boundless Informant. This software visualized how much data was collected from which country on a global scale. According to 2013 data, the US collected 13.5 billion metadata records per month from Pakistan, 12.5 billion from Afghanistan, and even more than 500 million from Germany.

In other words, no distinction was made between friend and foe.