Whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted Russian nationality following a decree by President Putin, according to a Kremlin message published this afternoon.
Snowden, 39, is a former CIA operative and systems administrator for the NSA Secret Service. He provided journalists with highly confidential documents about covert espionage activities in 2013. He also explained how the NSA monitors online communications worldwide with a computer program.
In 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the arrest of Edward Snowden for espionage. At the time of his first revelations, Snowden was staying at a hotel in Hong Kong. When he threatened to be arrested there at the request of the US, he took a flight to Moscow.
Then Snowden accepted an offer of asylum by Venezuela; he was staying at the Moscow airport at the time, in the neutral transit zone. Partly because the United States withdrew its passport, however, a flight to South America became problematic.
After that, the whistleblower applied for and was granted asylum in Russia. That status eventually became permanent in 2020. Snowden married acrobat and blogger Lindsay Mills in Moscow. In December 2020 they had a son together. At that time, neither of them had Russian citizenship.
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