Edward Snowden: From ‘Geeky’ Dropout To NSA Leaker

hide captionWhat motivated Edward Snowden to leak NSA secrets? Bryan Burrough, Suzanna Andrews and Sarah Ellison explore Snowden's background in an article for Vanity Fair.

What motivated Edward Snowden to leak NSA secrets? Bryan Burrough, Suzanna Andrews and Sarah Ellison explore Snowden's background in an article for Vanity Fair.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has revealed some of the group's most carefully guarded secrets.

The reporting on the documents he leaked won a Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post and The Guardian, announced on Monday.

But there's still a lot we don't know about Snowden himself and his motivation.

In a new article in Vanity Fair, Bryan Burrough, Suzanna Andrews and Sarah Ellison take a closer look at Snowden in an effort to explain how a high school dropout, a "seemingly aimless geeky kid from the Maryland suburbs," came to possess and expose secret NSA documents.

The trio spent six months researching their Vanity Fair article, "The Snowden Saga: A Shadowland of Secrets and Light." Burrough reflects on the article with Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

On Snowden's background

He dropped out of high school at 15. ... What ensued is, for me, one of the most fascinating periods of his life this period from the age of 15 to the age of 20 where he didn't have anything like an actual job, nor was he doing anything other than occasional community college classes. What he appears to have done is spent five years on his computers, on the Internet.

While I think if we didn't know what we know now we'd say, "Ah, he's a virtual slacker," in fact, it seems to be a period of incredible self-education in which he became an expert on systems, became an expert on so many things to do with navigating the Internet. The amazing thing is [that] it appears to be largely self-taught. And whatever you may say or believe about Edward Snowden, he is an invention of himself.

Link:
Edward Snowden: From 'Geeky' Dropout To NSA Leaker