Snowden by Ted Rall

Snowden by Ted Rall

Edward Snowden is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subcontractor. His disclosures revealed global surveillance programs run by the NSA with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy. Some consider him a traitor and others a hero. This 2015 graphic novel is his story.
Ted Rall is a political cartoonist who has published similarly formatted graphic novels on Donald J. Trump (2016) and Bernie Sanders (2020). He has been the winner of the RFK Journalism Award twice and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
This book not only details the different aspects of the NSA's invasion of people's privacy, which is chilling in breadth and scope of what they are gathering, but he examines also, if so many people in the NSA, the CIA, and other security agencies knew how seriously the government was violating the Constitutional protections of privacy, why was Snowden the one person who decided to reveal this information to the world. In other words, who is Edward Snowden, and what makes him tick. While the book is an easy one-sitting read, there are 210 footnotes for readers who want to explore any of the points raised in greater detail.