A groundbreaking, compelling investigation that convincingly challenges the popular image of Edward Snowden as hacker-turned-avenging angel, while revealing how vulnerable our national security systems have become. In the wake of the scandal that emerged after details of American government surveillance were made public by WikiLeaks in 2013, Edward Snowden, formerly an employee of an outside contractor at the NSA facility in Hawaii, became the controversial center of an international conversation about the limits of power and privacy. Had the U.S. government overstepped important boundaries in its anti-terrorism efforts? Was Snowden's theft of information legitimized by the nature of the secrets being kept from the American people? We learn in How America Lost Its Secrets that Snowden stole a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance. He also stole secret documents from the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their monitoring of adversaries. He then transported these state secrets to an adversary country, Russia, without authorization. Which raises the question: Who is Edward Snowden--hero, traitor, whistle-blower, spy? Edward Jay Epstein brings a lifetime of journalistic and investigative acumen to bear on this question and more. Retracing Snowden's steps from disgruntled tech worker to international notoriety, he seeks to understand both how we lost our secrets and the man who took them. Along the way, we discover Snowden's sometimes troubling pseudonymous writing on the Internet, as well as aspects of his private and public life previously elided.

"In this book, Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, chronicles three important legal privacy battles that have defined the digital age and shaped the internet we have today"-- Provided by publisher.