The Mira Hotel

June 5, 2013. The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald publishes the first of the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Joseph Snowden, twenty-nine, a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor working at the NSA's Hawaii facility. The story discloses the existence of a secret court order under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act compelling Verizon to hand over metadata for all of its customers' phone calls. Over the next eight weeks Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman publish dozens more stories — PRISM, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR — that reveal the architecture of the post-2001 American intelligence-collection apparatus. Snowden flies from Hong Kong to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport on June 23, 2013 with the intention of transiting to Quito. The U.S. State Department cancels his passport. He remains in the Sheremetyevo international transit zone for thirty-nine days. He is granted Russian asylum on August 1, 2013. He has been in Russia ever since.

Daniel Asher's biography opens earlier — in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, where Snowden was born in 1983 to a Coast Guard officer and a federal court clerk — and follows the arc through the Maryland childhood, the Anne Arundel Community College non-degree, the brief Army Reserve special-forces training that ended in shin fractures, the long CIA Geneva tour, the NSA Tokyo and Hawaii postings, the 2013 documents-selection process, the Hong Kong Mira Hotel sequence, the Moscow transit zone, the long Russian asylum, the Permanent Record memoir of 2019, the September 2022 Russian citizenship, and the long Moscow quiet of the post-2022 invasion years.

What emerges is a portrait of the twenty-nine-year-old NSA contractor whose 2013 disclosures rewrote what the American public knew about the post-9/11 surveillance state — and the twelve-year Russian exile that the same disclosures produced.