15 Things You Might Not Know About Edward Snowden

Image via Complex Original

According to his father, Snowden had missed several months of school due to an illness. So rather than go back, he just decided to get his GED at a local community college. You’re looking at 15-year-old high school dropout.

Snowden shared with The Guardian that he enlisted and entered a Special Forces training program in 2003, but was discharged for breaking his legs in a training accident. However, a report from POLITICO confirms he was in the Army Reserves as a Special Forces recruit a year later, with an Army spokesperson confirming he was released for not completing his training.

Working his way up the ranks, Snowden’s first job with the NSA was as a security guard for a covert facility at the University of Maryland.

His laptop features labels that support Internet freedom organizations such as the EFF and Tor Project. One even reads, “I Support Online Rights: Electronic Frontier Foundation”.

When living when his girlfriend in Hawaii, one neighbor claimed he wasn’t much of a friendly resident: “We occasionally saw him as he was coming or going, or checking mail, or getting the garbage. We would say ‘Hi, how’s it going? How are you?’ and he would just rush inside.”

Believing that President Obama “continued with the policies of his predecessor” while heading into the 2012 election, he gave his vote and political donations to Republican candidate Ron Paul.

In applying for his position with consulting firm Booz Allen, Snowden apparently said he took computer-related classes at Johns Hopkins University. Though a spokesperson for the education institution never found records of him attending the university.

Making an annual salary of $200,000, the scandalmonger was well compensated by the U.S. government and lived “a very comfortable life."

NBC reported that he stole his co-workers’ passwords to snatch the secretive NSA documents he leaked to the media. He did so by getting an employee with a higher security level clearance to log into their computer terminal, later retrieving the personal identification code and earning access to all classified information.

Calling it quits at the CIA in February 2009, he moved on to work as a private contractor for Dell inside an NSA facility on a U.S. military base in Japan, where he collected a check until early 2013.

Through his newfound fame, Snowden can be found in two video games: Data Dealer and Snowden's Leak: The Game. There’s even an action figure of him that goes for $100, with all proceeds going to the Freedom of the Press Foundation—an organization where he serves on the board of directors. 

Despite there being a number of active social accounts linked with his name, Snowden is not on Facebook or Twitter as The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald tweeted: “Any Twitter or Facebook accounts purporting to be Edward Snowden are fake.”

The man’s passage through Hong Kong inspired a group of amateur filmmakers to produce a five-minute film titled Verax for under $600. It details Snowden’s time hiding at the Mira Hotel, while being tracked by the CIA and China’s Ministry of State Security.