On June 6, 2013, the British newspaper The Guardian revealed shocking top-seeking information

that the NSA had been collecting the phone records of millions of American Verizon customers.

A subsequent article published the next day revealed a secret program Prism.

Prism allowed data collection of Americans browser search histories,

contents of their emails, file transfers, live chats, and much more.

The NSA got their data from massive companies too, like Microsoft, Yahoo,

Google, YouTube, AOL, and Apple, and people were stunned.

For years, the personal data on their private devices,

devices they've been using every day, their email, their phones, their credit cards, so much more,

have been collected by the US to surveil its own citizens.

Innocent citizens, not suspected of committing any crimes, were being spied on by their own government.

And the source of all this leaked information, Edward Snowden.

Off and on from 2006 to 2012, Snowden worked as a CIA analyst, a subcontractor for the NSA,

and several other positions that gave him access to classified NSA information

that enabled him to see the true scope of how the US was surveilling its own citizens.

Working on classified info for the US government, Snowden started to have doubts about the ethics

of what he was doing, what he was seeing, where these programs violating the fourth amendment

of the Constitution, which gave citizens the right to privacy.

Was the government behaving illegally? Did people need to know about these programs?

Snowden decided, yeah, yeah, they did.

Over several months in 2012 and 2013, Snowden secretly contacted journalists and delivered

a treasure trove of classified documents unlike anything they'd ever seen before.

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