Profile: U.S. Attorney Zachary Terwillger May Prosecute …

One of the most intriguing parts of the special counsel report on Russian election interference involves the role of WikiLeaks. Prosecutors are continuing to investigate the site and its founder, Julian Assange, who faces a conspiracy charge for an unrelated hack.

The man who may end up prosecuting that case has a long backstory at the Justice Department. Zachary Terwilliger started there as an intern during high school in 1999. Now, he is the U.S. attorney in the backyard of the intelligence community.

Justice Department veteran Zachary Terwilliger is the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and may end up prosecuting the WikiLeaks case. Justice Department via AP hide caption

Justice Department veteran Zachary Terwilliger is the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and may end up prosecuting the WikiLeaks case.

Veterans of the office in Alexandria, Va., remember that Terwilliger used to mop the floors and stack boxes in this office of 140 federal prosecutors.

"For me, this really is home," Terwilliger said.

He grew up around law enforcement. His father was deputy attorney general under former President George H.W. Bush. FBI agents attended his family barbecues. But Terwilliger said it was watching the trial of two gang members who stabbed a witness and left her to die on a riverbank that sealed his own fate.

"It was watching what the law could do to achieve justice for that victim, and frankly watching two people in court as assistant United States attorneys who just blew me away," he said. "And I just thought, 'If I'm going to work this hard to study the law and become a lawyer, that's where I want to put my efforts.' "

He did. Terwilliger went on to prosecute gang members himself. At the start of the Trump administration, he moved over to Justice Department headquarters. He expected to be busy. Then the president fired the FBI director. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein Terwilliger's boss appointed a special counsel.

Terwilliger spent a lot of nights on his office couch.

"Those were 18-to-20-hour days," he said. "And I had worked like that in lead-up to trials, but never in a sustained period. And you just learn to operate at a different level."

Terwilliger's current and former colleagues said he embodies a quality that is sometimes unusual in the Washington area: sincerity.

"First and foremost in my mind about Zach is, he's genuine," said Alice Fisher, who tried to hire Terwilliger when she ran the Justice Department's criminal division in the George W. Bush years.

"He really cares about his colleagues as well not only the mission, but who the people are and how their work environment is and about the things that really matter, not only in the work environment but the personal environment," Fisher said.

Eventually, Virginia's two Democratic senators recommended Terwilliger to serve as U.S. attorney there. In August 2018, he was sworn in to the historic post.

The top federal prosecutor's office in Alexandria dates to 1789. The first U.S. attorney there was John Marshall, who went on to become chief justice of the United States.

Neil MacBride was the chief prosecutor in the place he calls E.D.V.A. in the Obama years.

"E.D.V.A. has had a front-row seat in everything from Cold War espionage cases to post-9/11 terrorism cases to some of the biggest financial fraud and extraterritorial cases from threats around the world," MacBride said.

But the case getting the most attention these days involves Assange. About two weeks ago, American prosecutors finally unsealed their case against him. He faces a single charge: conspiracy to commit computer hacking.

On Monday, a federal appeals court turned back a bid by former Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning to be released from federal custody while she fights a subpoena in the case. Manning has refused to testify before a grand jury, despite a grant of immunity from prosecutors. Manning delivered sensitive diplomatic cables and war logs to WikiLeaks.

But authorities are continuing to investigate and could bring more charges in the next month or so. Experts say those new charges could cover the disclosure of secret CIA hacking tools or the 2016 election.

In a recent interview, Terwilliger didn't want to get into the specifics.

"The Justice Department and Lady Justice herself are patient, so we'll watch this process play out, but I for one am happy that it's starting," he said.

Terwilliger's office has also picked up other offshoots from the special counsel investigation of Russian election interference. He has indicted an accountant for the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm accused of attacking the 2016 race.

The Eastern District of Virginia is also prosecuting former business partners of onetime national security adviser Michael Flynn. That case is set for trial later this year.

As for what's next for Terwilliger, he said he can't imagine a better job than the one he has now.

"This is a dream come true for me," he said of an idea that started in high school, when he was mopping the floors of the office he now runs.

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Profile: U.S. Attorney Zachary Terwillger May Prosecute ...

Appeals court rejects Chelsea Manning’s effort to leave jail

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April 22, 2019, 3:37 PM UTC

By Associated Press

RICHMOND, Va. A federal appeals court has rejected a bid by former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to be released from jail for refusing to testify to a grand jury.

The unanimous decision issued Monday by the appellate court in Richmond rejects both Manning's argument that she was erroneously found in civil contempt and her request for bail while the contempt decision is litigated.

Manning has been jailed at the Alexandria Detention Center since March 8 after refusing to testify to a grand jury investigating Wikileaks.

Since her incarceration, criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange have been unsealed and U.S. officials have requested his extradition. Manning's lawyers argued that her testimony is unnecessary since Assange has already been charged.

Manning served seven years in a military prison for leaking a trove of documents to Wikileaks.

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Appeals court rejects Chelsea Manning's effort to leave jail

How Cryptocurrency Assets Are Becoming A New Battleground In …

Fighting over money is one thing; dealing with bitcoin and other types of cryptocurrency in a divorce is an entirely different story.

As cryptocurrency has surged in popularity, its become much more common for investors to carry shares in the largely unregulated market. For married couples looking to part ways, this means dealing with cryptocurrency as an asset could make for a difficult and lengthy divorce process.

Considering regulations and standards on digital currencies such as bitcoin are still being weighed by governments and financial regulators across the world, could the future of hiding assets during a nasty divorce be lying in its hands?

Cryptocurrency is virtual currency; it lives online and is traded on a blockchain, an encrypted ledger detailing transactions. Since each transaction is associated with a public and private key, its possible for each transaction to be traced back to a single individual.

Cryptocurrency has been around for about a decade, but it became more mainstream around 2017 when bitcoin skyrocketed to a price of $20,000 per coin and caught the public eye, before giving back much of its value in the time since.

In 2018, only 5 percent of the American population held cryptocurrency, according to a survey by the Global Blockchain Business Council. An additional 21 percent of respondents, however, said they were considering adding it to their portfolio.

As cryptocurrency grows in popularity, lawyers all over the world are beginning to face divorce cases with high-value disputes over these digital assets.

Jacqueline Newman, a New York-based matrimonial law attorney, represents all different types of clients, including those divorcing with cryptocurrency. She asks all of her clients to fill out a statement of net worth a comprehensive document detailing income, assets and debt of each party. She says her forms now ask parties to include cryptocurrency, too.

It hasnt gotten to the point where the court forms include it yet, but we have asked on ours and people list it under their general assets, Newman says.

Since bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are largely unregulated and encrypted, some might think its a perfect place to anonymously stash away funds.

But thats not necessarily the case.

Mark DiMichael, CPA, certified Financial Forensics accountant and fraud examiner, specializes in cryptocurrency. In one recent case, a husband didnt report $100,000-plus in cryptocurrency assets on his statement of net worth. During the discovery process, DiMichael closely analyzed his bank statements and was able to trace the crypto transactions through a crypto-trading platform.

DiMichael warns, however, that cases can get more complicated. The more knowledgeable someone is in crypto, the bigger the threat they pose to successfully hiding the assets.

Although he hasnt worked on a large number of cases involving cryptocurrency so far, DiMichael gives the example of a cybersecurity expert exchanging cash for bitcoin as payment. By conducting the transaction in person, there would be no proof of the transaction occurring making the asset-hiding much more difficult to reveal to the court.

Its really hard to trace if the individual knows what theyre doing, DiMichael says. An expert is going to know not to leave any evidence on their computer, and it can be much more difficult to subpoena.

Edward Davis, a Miami-based asset-recovery attorney and founding shareholder of Sequor Law, says cases of financial infidelity involving crypto are only going to become more frequent in the coming years.

In 15 to 20 years, Davis expects people with large sums of money to turn toward cryptocurrency as a way to hide their assets.

Its a real threat, Davis says. Its not going to come up in the average divorce of Joe versus Mary where they both have regular jobs and are a middle class family. But the wealthy and uber-wealthy who have access to this are going to use it to hide their value.

Matrimonial attorneys interviewed for this story say there arent currently any specific laws regarding cryptocurrency protection during a divorce process. Davis says these laws to protect consumers from fraudulent crypto activity are likely coming, but they will be slow to implement.

The legal infrastructure and regulatory infrastructure for this stuff is way behind, Davis says. If you look at some of the people sitting in Congress some of them are in their 70s and 80s they have no idea what this is. They dont even know what Snapchat is. Youre talking about a generational change [that] is going to [have to] happen before people are confronting this kind of issue.

Another issue for getting a hand on regulating crypto, Davis says, is that theres a wide misunderstanding of how blockchain technology works.

Whenever something new comes along, everyone tends to minimize it, Davis says. Predicting technology is a very hard thing. People who are intimidated or scared or dont understand technology tend to minimize it.

As interest and commonality surrounding crypto continues to increase, experts in the legal field are having to quickly educate themselves on the asset to keep up. Some experts say there isnt enough being done to inform and train legal counsel on the inner workings of the asset.

Most of what DiMichael knows about crypto is self-taught. In 2018, DiMichael published A Forensic Guide to Finding Cryptocurrency in Divorce Litigation. He created the guide after his own research found there werent many resources available on the matter.

Ive seen some courses for it, but I think there should be more training, DiMichael says. Uncovering crypto is fairly complicated, and that can be even harder for someone not trained in crypto.

Most accountants dont understand cryptocurrency, DiMichael adds. More complicated divorce cases involving cryptocurrency can be a lengthy and complicated process and for an accountant learning everything on the fly, this can mean longer hours and a higher bill for the client. DiMichael says that he currently charges $435 per hour.

Davis hasnt worked directly on a case recovering cryptocurrency assets yet, but he has noticed an upswing in industry-related conversations in the past two years. Lawyers, who he says arent technology-savvy by nature, should pay close attention to cryptocurrency and educate themselves on how to manage it in court cases.

The main concern about crypto is how little we understand it and how dangerous it is because its an unregulated, untethered currency, Davis says. This is a real threat and one we have to think about.

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How Cryptocurrency Assets Are Becoming A New Battleground In ...

Edward Snowden and the NSA files timeline | US news …

20 May Edward Snowden, an employee of defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton at the National Security Agency, arrives in Hong Kong from Hawaii. He carries four laptop computers that enable him to gain access to some of the US government's most highly-classified secrets.

1 June Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill and documentary maker Laura Poitras fly from New York to Hong Kong. They meet Snowden in a Kowloon hotel after he identifies himself with a Rubik's cube and begin a week of interviews with their source.

5 June The Guardian publishes its first exclusive based on Snowden's leak, revealing a secret court order showing that the US government had forced the telecoms giant Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans.

6 June A second story reveals the existence of the previously undisclosed programme Prism, which internal NSA documents claim gives the agency "direct access" to data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. The tech companies deny that they have set up "back door access" to their systems for the US government.

7 June Barack Obama defends the two programmes, saying they are overseen by the courts and Congress. Insisting that "the right balance" had been struck between security and privacy, he says: "You can't have 100% security, and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience."

The Guardian reports that GCHQ has been able to see user communications data from the American internet companies, because it had access to Prism.

8 June Another of Snowden's leaks reveals the existence of an internal NSA tool Boundless Informant that allows it to record and analyse where its data comes from, and raises questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

9 June Snowden decides to go public. In a video interview he says: "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong."

10 June Snowden checks out of his Hong Kong hotel.

12 June Hong Kong's South China Morning Post publishes the first interview with Snowden since he revealed his identity. He says he intends to stay in the city until asked to leave and discloses that the NSA has been hacking into Hong Kong and Chinese computers since 2009.

14 June The Home Office instructs airlines not to allow Snowden to board any flights to the UK.

16 June The Guardian reports that GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at the 2009 G20 summit.

20 June Top secret documents published by the Guardian show how US judges have signed off on broad orders allowing the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.

21 June A Guardian exclusive reveals that GCHQ has gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and is processing vast streams of sensitive personal information it shares with the NSA. The US files espionage charges against Snowden and requests that Hong Kong detain him for extradition.

23 June Snowden leaves Hong Kong on a flight to Moscow. In a statement, the Hong Kong government says documents submitted by the US did not "fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law" and it had no legal basis to prevent him leaving. Snowden arrives in Moscow. In a statement, WikiLeaks said it was assisting him, in part by providing adviser Sarah Harrison as an escort, and said he was heading to a democratic country, believed to be Ecuador, "via a safe route".

24 June Journalists board a flight from Moscow to Havana amid reports Snowden is about to board but he doesn't.

25 June Barack Obama vows to extradite Snowden while John Kerry, US Secretary of State, urges Russia to hand him over.

25 June Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claims Snowden never crossed the border into Russia. But Putin later says Snowden is at Sheremetyevo airport and is free to leave Russia.

26 June Putin says Snowden will not be extradited to America. He denies that his security services had contacted Snowden.

26 June Ecuador warns that it may take months to decide whether to offer Snowden asylum, pointing out that it took two months to decide whether to do so in the case of Julian Assange.

26 June Hong Kong claims, amid growing Sino-American tensions, that the US got Snowden's middle name wrong in documents submitted for his arrest.

27 June Obama declares he will not spend much geopolitical capital on apprehending Snowden. He also claims that he hasn't spoken to Russia nor China about extradition.

27 June Ecuador maintains its defiant stance, renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act it has with America. The country also offered the US $23m (15m) for human rights training.

28 June President Rafael Correa of Ecuador revokes Snowden's safe conduct pass amid irritation that Assange was taking over the role of the Ecuadorean government.

29 June Correa reveals that US vice-president Joe Biden asked him to turn down Snowden's asylum request.

1 July A consular official in Russia reveals that Snowden has applied for asylum there. WikiLeaks later reveal that he has applied for asylum in a further 20 countries, amongst them France, Germany, Ireland, China and Cuba.

1 July Snowden releases a statement through the WikiLeaks website in which he claims that he left Hong Kong because "my freedom and safety were under threat". He says it is hypocritical of Obama to promise no "wheeling and dealing" but then instruct Biden to encourage other nations to deny him asylum.

2 July Snowden retracts his request for Russian asylum after Putin says he must stop "bringing harm" to US interests. Meanwhile Brazil, India, Norway and Poland refuse Snowden asylum, while Ecuador, Austria, Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain and Switzerland say he has to apply from their countries.

2 July Lon Snowden, Edward Snowden's father, and his father's attorney, Bruce Fein, pen an open letter to Edward Snowden praising him, comparing him to Paul Revere and noting the US supreme court decision that "statelessness is not to be imposed as a punishment for crime".

2 July Bolivia throws its hat into the ring with president Evo Morales declaring on Russian television that he would "shield the denounced".

3 July Morales's plane, en route from Moscow to Bolivia, is forced to land in Vienna after other European countries refused it airspace, suspecting that Snowden was on board. Bolivian vice-president Alvaro Garcia says Morales was "kidnapped by imperialism".

3 July Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia denounce the treatment of Morales, who was held in Vienna airport for 12 hours while his plane was searched for Snowden. Bolivia files a complaint at the UN.

3 July UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon says that Snowden misused his rights to digital access and created problems greater than the public benefit of disclosure.

4 July Morales calls the rerouting of his flight an "open provocation" of "north American imperialism" and urges some European countries to "free themselves" from America.

4 July Ecuador distances itself from Snowden saying that he is under Russia's authority and would have to reach Ecuador before being granted asylum. Correa said the Ecuadorean consul acted without authority when it issued Snowden a temporary travel pass.

5 July The Washington Post, despite having published stories based on Snowden's leaks, now writes that he should be prevented "from leaking information that harms efforts to fight terrorism and conduct legitimate intelligence operations".

6 July Nicols Maduro, the president of Venezuela, says he has decided "to offer humanitarian asylum" to Snowden. Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega says he could accept Snowden's asylum request "if circumstances permit".

7 July Alexei Pushkov, chair of the Duma's foreign affairs committee, tweets that Venezuela's asylum offer may be Snowden's "last chance" to avoid extradition to the US.

8 July The Guardian releases the second part of its original video interview with Snowden. In this extract Snowden says he believes the US government "are going to say I have committed grave crimes, I have violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I have aided our enemies".

10 July Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who has written many of the stories based on Snowden's information, says that Snowden maintains he didn't give classified information to China or Russia, following erroneous claims from the New York Times on 24 June that China had been "draining the contents of his laptop".

July 20 Destruction of Guardian computer equipment after threat of legal action by the UK government.

12 July Snowden sends a letter to human rights groups asking them to meet him at Sheremetyevo airport and claiming there is "an unlawful campaign by officials in the US government to deny my right to seek and enjoy... asylum". At the meeting he says he will be applying for temporary asylum in Russia while he applies for permanent asylum in a Latin American country.

24 July Anatoly Kucherena, a lawyer advising Snowden, states that the NSA leaker's asylum status has not been resolved and he will stay at Moscow airport for now. Kucherena claims that Snowden "intends to stay in Russia, study Russian culture", implying perhaps that Snowden may live in Russia for good.

August 1 Guardian publishes the story of secret American funding of GCHQ.

August 18 David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, held at Heathrow airport.

August 21 Guardian reveals how and why its computer equipment was destroyed.

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Edward Snowden and the NSA files timeline | US news ...

Edward Snowden Alleged NSA Leaker: Snowden Predicts US …

Transcript for Snowden Predicts US Reaction to Leaks

We're going to get the latest on edward snowden, under pressure from the u.S. He may finally be ready to move out of the no-man's land in the moscow airport. But it's not stopped him from speaking out. A new interview with "the guardian" has been released. Brian ross is tracking his every move. Reporter: This could be the week that 30-year-old snowden makes his move out of the moscow airport. Diplomats in venezuela and russia, saying they've received his request for asylum. And it's up to him to choose a flight plan. This morning, snowden remains holed up somewhere near or in Out of sight. But a high-profile problem for the u.S. Now, "the guardian" newspaper has made public, another part of the interview with the one-time nsa employee, who accurately predicted how the revelations of the surveillance programs would be received by the united states. They're going to say i committed grave crimes. Violated the espionage act. They're going to say I've aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems. Reporter: And that is exactly the case the u.S. Has been making, with the latest salvo coming from the white house monday. Again warning other countries there will be serious repercussions for any nation that helps snowden. He's been charged with a felony or felonies. As such, he should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than travel that would result in him returning to the united states. Reporter: The u.S. Says snowden has seriously hurt efforts to fight terrorism, by revealing the methods used to listen in on and track terrorists. Snowden says he did not start out opposing the programs when he went to work in the u.S. Intelligence community. I don't want to live in a world where everything this i say, everything I do, everyone i talk to, every expression of love or friendship is recorded. Reporter: Snowden most likely passed out of russia to venezuela, via the five-time-a-week flight to cuba. That flight left about an hour ago. And he was not on it, according to the personnel staking him out. Even if he gets on one, it will go over u.S. Air space. It does. And president obama says he will not scramble jets to go after the hacker. But there are things the u.S. Could do. Thanks verymuch. To amy robach in for josh, with the rest of the morning's top stories. Good morning, everyone.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

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Edward Snowden Alleged NSA Leaker: Snowden Predicts US ...

How Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning became intertwined

It's been a little more than nine years since Chelsea Manning first contacted Wikileaks and provided Julian Assange's organization with hundreds of thousands of classified documents and a video of an Apache helicopter strike that killed Iraqi insurgents and two photographers working for Reuters.

Their life stories have been intertwined since the pair first contacted each other over the internet, but they have never met in person.

The story of how Manning and Assange began their relationship is laid out in great detail in the 35-page statement Manning read on Feb. 28, 2013 when she pleaded guilty. Assange's federal indictment released Thursday essentially lays out another layer of the cooperation between Manning and Assange that was not described in her guilty statement.

According to the newly unsealed indictment made public on Thursday, in early March 2010, Assange agreed to help Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, with cracking an administrative password to the military's classified internet system. Getting access to the password would have made it harder for investigators to track Manning as the source of the information being posted by Wikileaks.

None of this was mentioned in Manning's 2013 guilty plea statement though the password request was mentioned during the pre-trial hearings that preceded Manning's court-martial.

Manning's guilty plea statement also presented a narrative of how she came to contact Wilkileaks and eventually Assange.

In late 2009, Manning was a disillusioned Army private first class serving in Baghdad. Her secure work computer gave her access to files detailing the U.S. military's operations in the Middle East region including hundreds of thousands of battlefields reports known as "SigActs," or significant action reports, filed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq that contained descriptions of mundane military events and firefights.

Manning decided to download the SigActs and during a two-week leave back in the U.S. in late 2009 decided that news organizations needed to see what were in the battlefield reports. In her statement Manning described unsuccessfully trying to get the attention of The New York Times and The Washington Post. After perceiving little interest , though it's not clear Manning spoke to anyone of significance at each paper, the Army private first class decided to contact Wikileaks, an organization that had gained her attention.

Before returning to Iraq, Manning uploaded hundreds of thousands of SigActs to a Wikileaks dropsite, but never heard back. In the statement, Manning described becoming interested in classified State Department diplomatic cables about Iceland and again uploaded to the site. Within hours, the document was posted on the website. It was the first time Manning figured out that Wikileaks must have received the SigActs she had previously sent the organization. Manning then decided to send Wikileaks the Apache video she had come across after a work colleague mentioned its existence.

It was after the posting of that video that Manning was contacted by someone at Wikileaks who went by the name of "Nathaniel" and that was who Manning suspected was Assange. They began an almost daily correspondence over the Jabber networking site.

In March and April 2010, Manning sent Wikileaks 250,000 diplomatic cables, a video of an airstrike in Afghanistan killed civilians and hundreds of assessments about the detainees being held at Guantanamo.

In all, Manning provided Wikileaks with 400,000 Iraq SigAct reports, 90,000 Afghanistan SigAct reports, 250,000 State Department cables and 800 Guantanamo detainee assessment briefs.

Following the guilty plea, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in jail, but her sentence was later commuted by President Barack Obama to seven years.

Since early March, Manning has been held at a jail in Virginia for refusing to testify to a federal grand jury that was investigating Wikileaks.

In a statement issued Thursday, Manning's legal team said the newly unsealed charges against Assange support the view that Manning should not be in jail.

"The indictment against Julian Assange unsealed today was obtained a year to the day before Chelsea appeared before the grand jury and refused to give testimony," the statement said.

"Compelling Chelsea to testify would have been duplicative of evidence already in the possession of the grand jury, and was not needed in order for US Attorneys to obtain an indictment of Mr Assange," the legal team argued. "Since her testimony can no longer contribute to a grand jury investigation, Chelsea's ongoing detention can no longer be seriously alleged to constitute an attempt to coerce her testimony. As continued detention would be purely punitive, we demand Chelsea be released."

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How Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning became intertwined

Edward Snowden – biography.com

Edward Snowdenduring an interview in Hong Kong in 2013. (Photo by The Guardian via Getty Images)

One of the people Snowden left behind when he moved to Hong Kong to leak secret NSA files was his girlfriend Lindsay Mills. The pair had been living together in Hawaii, and she reportedly had no idea that he was about to disclose classified information to the public.

Mills graduated from Laurel High School in Maryland in 2003 and the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007. She began her career as a pole-dancing performance artist while living in Hawaii with Snowden.

In January 2015, Mills joined the Citizenfour documentary team onstage for their Oscars acceptance speech.

As of September 2017, Edward Snowden was still living in Moscow, Russia. However in February 2016 he said that hed return to the U.S. in exchange for a fair trial. In February 2017, NBC News reported that the Russian government was considering handing him over to the U.S. to curry favor with President Donald Trump, although Snowden remains in Russia.

In 2014, Snowden was featured in Laura Poitras' highly acclaimed documentary Citizenfour. The director had recorded her meetings with Snowden and Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald. The film went on to win an Academy Award in 2015. "When the decisions that rule us are taken in secret, we lose the power to control and govern ourselves," said Poitras during her acceptance speech.

In September 2016, director Oliver Stone released a biopic, Snowden, with Edward Snowden's cooperation. The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the lead role and Shailene Woodley playing girlfriend Lindsay Mills.

Edward Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on June 21, 1983. His mother works for the federal court in Baltimore (the family moved to Maryland during Snowden's youth) as chief deputy clerk for administration and information technology. Snowden's father, a former Coast Guard officer, later relocated to Pennsylvania and remarried.

Edward Snowden dropped out of high school and studied computers at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Maryland (from 1999 to 2001, and again from 2004 to 2005).

Between his stints at community college, Snowden spent four months from May to September 2004 in special-forces training in the Army Reserves, but he did not complete his training. Snowden told The Guardian that he was discharged from the Army after he broke both his legs in a training accident. However, an unclassified report published on September 15, 2016 by the House Intelligence Committee refuted his claim, stating: He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints.

Snowden eventually landed a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language. The institution had ties to the National Security Agency, and, by 2006, Snowden had taken an information-technology job at the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2009, after being suspected of trying to break into classified files, he left to work for private contractors, among them Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, a tech consulting firm. While at Dell, he worked as a subcontractor in an NSA office in Japan before being transferred to an office in Hawaii. After a short time, he moved from Dell to Booz Allen, another NSA subcontractor, and remained with the company for only three months.

During his years of IT work, Snowden had noticed the far reach of the NSA's everyday surveillance. While working for Booz Allen, Snowden began copying top-secret NSA documents, building a dossier on practices that he found invasive and disturbing. The documents contained vast information on the NSA's domestic surveillance practices.

After he had compiled a large store of documents, Snowden told his NSA supervisor that he needed a leave of absence for medical reasons, stating he had been diagnosed with epilepsy. On May 20, 2013, Snowden took a flight to Hong Kong, China, where he remained as he orchestrated a clandestine meeting with journalists from the U.K. publication The Guardian as well as filmmaker Laura Poitras.

On June 5, The Guardian released secret documents obtained from Snowden. In these documents, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court implemented an order that required Verizon to release information to the NSA on an "ongoing, daily basis" culled from its American customers' phone activities.

The following day, The Guardian and The Washington Post released Snowden's leaked information on PRISM, an NSA program that allows real-time information collection electronically. A flood of information followed, and both domestic and international debate ensued.

"I'm willing to sacrifice [my former life] because I can't in good conscience allow the U.S. government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building," Snowden said in interviews given from his Hong Kong hotel room.

The fallout from his disclosures continued to unfold over the next months, including a legal battle over the collection of phone data by the NSA. President Obama sought to calm fears over government spying in January 2014, ordering U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to review the country's surveillance programs.

The U.S. government soon responded to Snowden's disclosures legally. On June 14, 2013, federal prosecutors charged Snowden with "theft of government Property," "unauthorized communication of national defense information" and "willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person."

The last two charges fall under the Espionage Act. Before President Barack Obama took office, the act had only been used for prosecutorial purposes three times since 1917. Since President Obama took office, the act had been invoked seven times as of June 2013.

While some decried Snowden as a traitor, others supported his cause. More than 100,000 people signed an online petition asking President Obama to pardon Snowden by late June 2013.

Snowden remained in hiding for slightly more than a month. He initially planned to relocate to Ecuador for asylum, but, upon making a stopover, he became stranded in a Russian airport for a month when his passport was annulled by the American government. The Russian government denied U.S. requests to extradite Snowden.

In July 2013, Snowden made headlines again when it was announced that he had been offered asylum in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia. Snowden soon made up his mind, expressing an interest in staying in Russia. One of his lawyers, Anatoly Kucherena, stated that Snowden would seek temporary asylum in Russia and possibly apply for citizenship later. Snowden thanked Russia for giving him asylum and said that "in the end the law is winning."

That October, Snowden stated that he no longer possessed any of the NSA files that he leaked to the press. He gave the materials to the journalists he met with in Hong Kong, but he didn't keep copies for himself. Snowden explained that "it wouldn't serve the public interest" for him to have brought the files to Russia, according to The New York Times. Around this time, Snowden's father, Lon, visited his son in Moscow and continued to publicly express support.

In November 2013, Snowden's request to the U.S. government for clemency was rejected.

In exile, Snowden remained a polarizing figure who has remained outspoken about government surveillance. He made an appearance at the popular South by Southwest festival via teleconference in March 2014. Around this time, the U.S. military revealed that the information Snowden leaked may have caused billions of dollars in damage to its security structures.

In May 2014, Snowden gave a revealing interview with NBC News. He told Brian Williams that he was a trained spy who worked undercover as an operative for the CIA and NSA, an assertion denied by National Security Adviser Susan Rice in a CNN interview. Snowden explained that he viewed himself as a patriot, believing his actions had beneficial results. He stated that his leaking of information led to "a robust public debate" and "new protections in the United States and abroad for our rights to make sure they're no longer violated." He also expressed an interest in returning home to America.

Snowden appeared with Poitras and Greenwald via video-conference in February 2015. Earlier that month, Snowden spoke with students at Upper Canada College via video-conference. He told them that "the problem with mass surveillance is when you collect everything, you understand nothing." He also stated that government spying "fundamentally changes the balance of power between the citizen and the state."

On September 29, 2015, Snowden joined the social media platform Twitter, tweeting "Can you hear me now?" He had almost two million followers in a little over 24 hours.

Just a few days later, Snowden spoke to the New Hampshire Liberty Forum via Skype and stated he would be willing to return to the U.S. if the government could guarantee a fair trial.

On September 13, 2016, Snowden said in an interview with The Guardian that he would seek a pardon from President Obama. Yes, there are laws on the books that say one thing, but that is perhaps why the pardon power exists for the exceptions, for the things that may seem unlawful in letters on a page but when we look at them morally, when we look at them ethically, when we look at the results, it seems these were necessary things, these were vital things, he said in the interview.

The next day various human rights groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International launched a campaign requesting that Obama pardon Snowden.

Appearing via a telepresence robot, Snowden expressed gratitude for the support. "I love my country. I love my family," he said. "I don't know where we're going from here. I don't know what tomorrow looks like. But I'm glad for the decisions I've made. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined, three years ago, such an outpouring of solidarity."

He also emphasized that his case resonates beyond him. "This really isnt about me," he said. "Its about us. Its about our right to dissent. Its about the kind of country we want to have."

A day later, on September 15th, the House Intelligence Committee released a three-page unclassified summary of a report about its two-year investigation into Snowdens case. In the summary, Snowden was characterized as a disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers, a serial exaggerator and fabricator and not a whistle-blower.

Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests they instead pertain to military, defense and intelligence programs of great interest to Americas adversaries, the summary of the report stated.

Members of the committee also unanimously signed a letter to President Obama asking him not to pardon Snowden. We urge you not to pardon Edward Snowden, who perpetrated the largest and most damaging public disclosure of classified information in our nations history, the letter stated. If Mr. Snowden returns from Russia, where he fled in 2013, the U.S. government must hold him accountable for his actions.

Snowden responded on Twitter saying: "Their report is so artlessly distorted that it would be amusing if it weren't such a serious act of bad faith." He followed with a series of tweets refuting the committee's claims and said: "I could go on. Bottom line: after 'two years of investigation,' the American people deserve better. This report diminishes the committee."

Snowden also tweeted that the release of the committee's summary was an effort to discourage people from watching the biopic Snowden, which was released in the United States on September 16, 2016.

In April 2014, well before becoming president, Donald Trump tweeted that Edward Snowden should be executed for the damage his leaks had caused to the U.S.

Following President Trumps election, in November 2016, Snowden told viewers of a teleconference in Sweden that he wasnt worried about the government increasing efforts to arrest him.

I dont care. The reality here is that yes, Donald Trump has appointed a new director of the Central Intelligence Agency who uses me as a specific example to say that, look, dissidents should be put to death. But if I get hit by a bus, or a drone, or dropped off an airplane tomorrow, you know what? It doesnt actually matter that much to me, because I believe in the decisions that Ive already made, Snowden said.

In an open letter from May 2017, Snowden joined 600 activists urging President Trump to drop an investigation and any potential charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for his role in classified intelligence leaks.

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Edward Snowden in popular culture – Wikipedia

Edward Snowden

Snowden in Moscow, October 9, 2013

Edward Snowden in popular culture is part of the reactions to global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. His impact as a public figure has been felt in cinema, advertising, video games, literature, music, statuary, and social media.

Snowden's passage through Hong Kong inspired a local production team to produce a low-budget five-minute film titled Verax. The film, depicting the time Snowden spent hiding in the Mira Hotel while being unsuccessfully tracked by the CIA and China's Ministry of State Security, was uploaded to YouTube in June 2013.[1][2]

A dramatic thriller, Classified: The Edward Snowden Story, was released on September 19, 2014. This feature-length film, which was crowdfunded and offered as a free download, was directed by Jason Bourque and produced by Travis Doering. Actor Kevin Zegers played Edward Snowden, Michael Shanks played Glenn Greenwald and Carmen Aguirre played Laura Poitras.[3]

In 2014, film director Oliver Stone bought the rights to Time of the Octopus, a forthcoming novel based on Snowden's life and written by his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena. Stone said he would use both Kucherena's book and Luke Harding's nonfiction The Snowden Files for the screenplay of his movie, which began production later in 2014.[4] Stone's biopic Snowden, which was released in September 2016, had Snowden portrayed by American actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with a short appearance by Snowden himself in the last few minutes of the film. Shortly before release, Stone said that Snowden should be pardoned, calling him a "patriot above all" and suggesting that he should run the NSA himself.[5]

Snowden appears briefly as a character in the 2018 comedy-thriller The Spy Who Dumped Me, in which he is played by British actor Tom Stourton.

On October 10, 2014, Citizenfour, a documentary about Snowden, received its world premiere at the New York Film Festival.[6] Earlier that year, director Laura Poitras told Associated Press she was editing the film in Berlin because she feared her source material would be seized by the government inside the U.S.[7] The two-hour film was shot in various countries, tracing Snowden's time in Hong Kong and Moscow.[8] The film was released in the U.S. and Europe to wide acclaim from critics,[9] and won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.[10] Snowden declared in a February 2015 Reddit AMA ("Ask Me Anything") that he had no commercial interest in the film.[11]

In October 2014, Killswitch, a film that features Snowden as well as Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu, received its world premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Editing. It has since played alongside Citizenfour at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and has continued an international film festival run. The film probes the efforts of big business to control the Internet, the efforts of government to regulate it, the efforts of hacktivists to free up information worldwide and the consequences.[12][13][14]

A second Snowden documentary, titled Snowden's Great Escape, coproduced by Germany's Norddeutscher Rundfunk and Denmark's DR TV, was released in 2015. Filmed in Moscow, it incorporated two new interviews with Snowden and was awarded first prize in the documentaries category by Deutsche Fernsehakademie.[15]

In June 2018 as part of the anniversary of the revelations from Snowden, the documentary "Edward Snowden: Whistleblower or Spy", produced by Signpost Film Productions [16] and GTV, [17] was released on Norwegian, Danish and Dutch Television and is continuing its further international release. The documentary presents interviews with participants and witnesses, some of whom have never before spoken on camera, and aims to incorporate the wide variety of views on the revelations. The documentary had a Festival release on the 4th of October 2018 at the Fraud Film Festival [18] and was shown at the Cyber Security week also on the 4th of October 2018, both in The Netherlands [19].

In the District of Columbia, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), a free speech advocacy group, crowdfunded an ad saying "Thank You Edward Snowden" that was featured on the sides of a D.C. city bus for four weeks in late 2013.[20][21] The PCJF said they received enough support from around the world to sponsor partial ads on five more buses in 2014.[22]

Snowden has been featured in video games[23][24] and has an action figure made in his image. Although not endorsed by Snowden, proceeds from the $99 doll are donated to Freedom of the Press Foundation, where he serves on the board of directors.[25][26]

In May 2014, Beyond: Edward Snowden, a graphic novel by Marvel Comics writer Valerie D'Orazio, illustrated by Dan Lauer, appeared in both print and digital editions as part a new series from Bluewater Productions, which the publisher said would reveal secret and suppressed stories.[27][28]

On February 9, 2015, electronic pop producer Big Data released a song called "Snowed In" that featured vocals from Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo from his debut album, 2.0. The song's lyrics, inspired by Snowden, are told from the perspective of the NSA, alternating between inner dialogue and statements made to the press.[29]

In 2016, Snowden provided the vocals for a track titled "Exit" by digital composer Jean-Michel Jarre. The track interspersed a beat and a few notes with a recorded monologue by Snowden expressing views about digital privacy. Business news publication Quartz described it as "not exactly music" and part of a "gimmicky new wave of political audio".[30]

In 2016, the rock band Thrice released a song titled "Whistleblower" off of the album To Be Everywhere Is to Be Nowhere. The song is written from the perspective of Snowden.[31]

In 2017, Australian Metalcore band Northlane released the song 'Citizen' off of the album "Mesmer". The song's lyrics discuss whisteblowers exposing governments' surveillance of the general population, and ends with the lyric "Thank you Mr. Snow", directly referring to Snowden.

On the April 5, 2015, episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John Oliver interviewed Snowden in Moscow.[32][33][34] The next day, activists briefly attached a bust of Snowden to the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, New York City, before being taken down by city officials.[35][36] Hours after the statue was removed, it was replaced by an ephemeral hologram image of Snowden.[37][38][39] Authorities later returned the statue to its artists.[40]

On May Day 2015, an art installation by Italian Davide Dormino titled Anything to Say? was placed in Berlin's Alexanderplatz. It featured bronze sculptures of Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning standing on chairs beside a fourth, empty chair meant as a platform for public speaking.[41][42]

Snowden opened a Twitter account on September 29, 2015, amassing over a million followers in the first 24 hours; he followed only the NSA. His first tweet received 121,728 retweets and 117,750 favorites.

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Edward Snowden in popular culture - Wikipedia

WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange smeared "his faeces on our …

London -- Ecuador revoked Julian Assange's asylum status because he smeared his feces on the walls of the country's embassy, Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno said.

In an interview with CBS News' partner BBC News, Moreno said Assange "even attacked some of the guards, something that definitely can't be tolerated."

"He exhausted our patience and pushed our tolerance to the limit," Moreno said.

The WikiLeaks founder was arrested by British police earlier this month. Ecuador had granted him asylum in 2012 and he spent seven years living in the country's London embassy under its protection.

"He is an informational terrorist," Moreno told the BBC. "He does not give out the information he has. He selects them conveniently and according to his ideological commitments."

Assange is now awaiting sentencing in Britain for skipping bail and the United States is seeking his extradition. The Justice Department has charged him with taking part in a hacking conspiracy, accusing him of conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a government computer.

Critics have said Assange's work was journalistic and his detention is a violation of press freedom, but others have accused him of working with Russia to, among other things, influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

"If we look back a little at the countries that he selectively revealed," Moreno said, "information about (Russia) was not among them."

WikiLeaks tweeted a response on Wednesday.

"WikiLeaks refutes President Moreno's grotesque lies about Assange," it said. "They are a crude attempt to distract from Moreno's own corruption scandals in Ecuador and the cowardly expulsion of our publisher into the reach of US authorities."

Moreno has accused Wikileaks of hacking his own devices and publishing, among other things, a photo showing him in bed with lobster as austerity measures were being rolled out in Ecuador.

"That was my birthday," Moreno said. "I was watching soccer in bed."

On Wednesday, demonstrators clashed with police in the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, protesting Moreno's treatment of Assange, the government's taking of an International Monetary Fund loan, and its firing of state workers, The Associated Press reported.

But Moreno said the decision to revoke Assange's asylum status was made because Ecuadorians had enough of his behavior.

"I think all Ecuadorians are relieved," he said, of the fact that Assange was no longer residing in the country's embassy. "He did not behave the way an asylee should, with respect for the country that has warmly welcomed him, sheltered him, and given him food."

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WikiLeaks Has Officially Lost the Moral High Ground | WIRED

What the heck is going on at WikiLeaks?

In the last two weeks, the font of digital secrets has doxed millions of Turkish women, leaked Democratic National Committee emails that made Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign look bad but also suggested the site was colluding with the Russian government, and fired off some seriously anti-Semitic tweets.

It's...weird.

WikiLeaks is always going to be releasing information some people don't like. That is the point of them. But lately the timing of and tone surrounding their leaks have felt a little off, and in cases like the DNC leak, more than a little biased. At times, they haven't looked so much like a group speaking truth to power as an alt-right subreddit, right down to their defense of Milo Yiannopoulos, a (let's be honest, kind of trollish) writer at Breitbart. But the way WikiLeaks behaves on the Internet means a lot more than some basement-dwelling MRA activist. "WikiLeaks' initial self-presentation was as merely a conduit, simply neutral, like any technology," says Mark Fenster, a lawyer at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law. "As a conduit, it made a lot of sense, and had a lot of influence, immediately. The problem is, WikiLeaks is not just a technology. It's humans too."

WikiLeaks has endangered individuals before, but their release of the so-called Erdogan Emails was particularly egregious. The organization said that the infodump would expose the machinations of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan immediately after the attempted coup against him, but instead turned out to be mostly correspondence and personal information from everyday Turkish citizens. Worse, it included the home addresses, phone numbers, party affiliations, and political activity levels of millions of female Turkish voters. That's irresponsible any time, and disastrous in the week of a coup.

The incident exposed gross negligence, though it's true that lots of publications (including WIRED) made things worse by failing to vet the leak's content and linking to the documents in their coverage. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (herself of Turkish descent), wrote an essay criticizing WikiLeaks and Western media outlets for endangering Turkish citizens, and WikiLeaks and their supporters turned on her, hard. "Within five minutes they called me an Erdogan apologist, which speaks volumes to their lack of research," Tufekci says. "And then they blocked me. So much for hearing something they don't like."

The provenance and truth of the DNC emails looks more solidbut those sketchy ties to Russia make the whole thing seem like a foreign government trying to influence the US presidential election. It's a little weird (tinfoil hat alert) that Julian Assange, WikiLeaks' founder, has a show on RT, a Russian government-funded (read: propaganda) television network. And a little off that the DNC leak whodunnit seems to point to a pair of Russian hackers thought to be affiliated with the Russian intelligence agencies FSB and GRU, respectively.

And then, inexplicably, the WikiLeaks official Twitter account also dove straight for naked anti-Semitism. (The triple parenthesis around names is code for "Jewish" in antisemitic circles.)

First they denied the tweet was anti-Semitic at all. Then they deleted it, and defended the deletion like this:

Which as rebuttals go, is about as convincing as "I know you are, but what am I?"

But that's not what's really important here. WikiLeaks and Assange say they have no responsibility for the content they leak, and that no one has evidence that the sources of the DNC leak are Russian. But these leaks and tweets damage WikiLeaks' credibility. If they're not scrutinizing their own leaks on the base level of their content, it's not hard to imagine that WikiLeaks could unwittingly become part of someone else's agenda (like, say, a Russian one). "If you are a legitimate leaker, why go with WikiLeaks? You go with The Intercept or the New York Times, like they did with the Panama Papers" says Nicholas Weaver, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley who studies the organization. "Wikileaks is a pastebin for spooks, and they're happy to be used that way."

WikiLeaks isn't necessarily the big bad hereif the FSB wants to leak some DNC emails as part of an effort to install Trump as a "Siberian Candidate," (don't look at us; that's the New York Times' joke) they're going to do it. But WikiLeaks' actions could have effects that run counter to their own ideals. "This has done more damage to the fight for free and open internet than anything Erdogan could do," says Tufekci. "If you expose people's private information, and then the Western media publicizes it, they are going to withdraw from the Internet."

Fundamentally, WikiLeaks was supposed to be better. Assange openly said he hoped the DNC leak damaged the Clinton campaign. "There was the hope that in the wake of WikiLeaks' emergence, a thousand WikiLeaks would bloom, in the same way that the Arab Spring was a really romantic ideal of the effect that digital communication can have on geopolitics," says Fenster. "But the ideal of WikiLeaks as an information conduit that is stateless and can serve as a neutral technology isn't working. States fight back." WikiLeaks' moral high ground depends on its ability to act as an honest conduit. Right now it's acting like a damaged filter.

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WikiLeaks Has Officially Lost the Moral High Ground | WIRED