Snowden and PRISM
A contractor walked out of an NSA listening post in Hawaii with a thumb drive of documents and a question the public had not been allowed to ask.
In early June 2013, the Guardian published a court order. It directed Verizon to hand over to the National Security Agency, on an ongoing daily basis, the metadata of every domestic phone call placed by every American customer.
The hotel room in Hong Kong
The source was Edward Snowden, a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton working inside an NSA facility in Hawaii. He had spent months copying classified material onto removable media, then flown to Hong Kong, then arranged in advance to meet journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras at the Mira Hotel.
The documents that followed over the next year described programs with names that became briefly famous — PRISM, XKeyscore, Boundless Informant, MUSCULAR — covering everything from direct collection from cooperating tech companies to the bulk interception of fiber-optic cables and the deliberate weakening of cryptographic standards.
A consequential exile
Snowden's American passport was cancelled mid-transit. He spent weeks in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport and ultimately accepted asylum in Russia, where he has remained. The legal status of his disclosures remains contested. The technical and policy consequences are not.
What the chronicle remembers
The Snowden disclosures forced a global conversation about the scale of state collection that had previously been the private knowledge of intelligence oversight committees. They also accelerated the deployment of end-to-end encryption across messaging and the web. Every default-HTTPS browser, every sealed-sender messaging app, owes a piece of its existence to a thumb drive that left Oahu in 2013.