Very few people had heard of Edward Snowden until early this year. He is – or was until recently – an Intelligence analyst working for the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US. Before that he worked for the CIA.

The NSA is an organization that monitors and examines communications data, both business and private, as well as the communications of state organizations. It is allowed to bug communications and do other acts in the interests of national security which, if carried out by a private firm, would be illegal. However, in 2013 Edward Snowden began leaking confidential information which showed that the NSA had gone much further in its activities than the general public realized. It appeared that the NSA was spying on private communications of Americans and foreigners alike, and seemed to be working with internet providers such as Google, though many claims of this kind were denied.

Snowden first made his concerns public through an interview with a journalist for the Guardian newspaper, Glenn Greenwald. In May 2013 he left the US and arrived in Hong Kong with a number of files of sensitive information on four laptops. He was interviewed (at first anonymously) while still in Hong Kong, and demanded the utmost secrecy about his exact whereabouts. He was also very cautious about making sure Greenwald and his fellow journalists weren’t carrying any tracking devices (due to his former profession, Snowden of course knew exactly what devices could be used).

From 5 June onwards, articles based on the interviews with Snowden began to be published in the Guardian. One of the most shocking revelations was about the PRISM program, run by the NSA and allowing it directly to access private data held by Google, Facebook and other companies. PRISM claimed that these companies had allowed NSA to have such secret access, something the companies themselves have denied. The discovery that the NSA was looking at the phone records of huge numbers of Americans was also a surprise. In addition, it soon became clear that the UK surveillance agency GCHQ was working closely with the US bodies on this and other matters involving exchange of personal data.

On 9 June Snowden decided to reveal his identity, though not his whereabouts. He announced at this and other times that, while not claiming that everything the security services did was wrong, he strongly felt that the amount of secret spying going on, and its implications for the future of society, were too dangerous and he must speak out.

The full interview was published on 8 July – you can see the video here.

Since then Snowden has claimed that he is in danger if he goes back to the US and has asked for political asylum in a number of countries. Most of them refused but now, for the time at least, he has been offered shelter in Russia. He spent some time in Moscow airport where he couldn’t be arrested, but has now left and is supposed to be somewhere in the country.

The Snowden revelations have greatly angered the American government, who have accused him of being a traitor (though Snowden himself says he acted out of patriotism, and many agree with him). They have alarmed many people who hadn’t realised just how much snooping was being done on their emails, website use, phone use etc and are now wondering exactly what use is being made of that data. Users of Facebook and other social media are becoming concerned about these companies efforts to gain ever more data from their users.

In one recent example, a couple received a visit from the police after searching for backpacks and pressure cookers on a computer; on a bigger scale, Germany has now announced it will no longer cooperate with the US and UK after learning through the Snowden leaks how much these countries spy on their own allies,