Snowden Announces Plans To Become Russian Citizen

Surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden is applying for Russian citizenship in preparation for his son’s birth.

Snowden and his wife, Lindsay Mills, revealed the pregnancy last week. Today, Snowden announced that he and Mills are applying for dual citizenship. He tweeted: “Lindsay and I will remain Americans, raising our son with all the values of the America we love—including the freedom to speak his mind. And I look forward to the day I can return to the States, so the whole family can be reunited.”

Snowden famously took refuge in Russia, essentially forced there to escape espionage charges from the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama. Snowden pulled the curtain back to expose the vast extent of domestic digital surveillance that the National Security Agency (NSA) had implemented after the passage of the PATRIOT Act. Internet and phone records of millions of Americans were being collected, stored, and accessed without our knowledge, all on the insistence that it would help the government catch terrorists. It did not—not that such a massive end run around the Fourth Amendment would have been acceptable if it had.