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His life in the proles district makes him happy and feel safe and at home with Julia. He can eat real food and doesn't have to act a certain way for the telescreens and the government. He has more freedom here and if the government does find out he will be thrown in prison and most likely executed.

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The debate between if Goldstien is a hero or not because from Winston PoV  Goldstein is a hero but to most of the people in Airstrip 1 he is the enemy and must killed "Goldstein was hated and despised by everybody," Pg 13

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Winston goes to the proles district to get away from his life in Oceania because he has more freedom and can see Julia and he could try to go undercover and be a prole but that would end up bad unless he can out smart the Thought police and end up free in the proles district. If that doesn't work and he gets caught though he would be arrested and most likely killed for revolting to the lower status and trying to run away.

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Body Paragraph 3 Edward Snowden's life in Russia

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Body Paragraph 3 Edward Snowden's life in Russia

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"Over the past 12 months, while living at his undisclosed location in Russia, Snowden has spoken a few times with media. In February, he even zapped in via video link to a libertarian forum in New Hampshire."

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In the language of cyber-security, surveillance and spying, history is divided into two eras: pre-Snowden, and post-Snowden.

The break in the timeline happened in May 2013, when Edward Snowden, a then-30 year-old computer systems administrator with US security company Booz Allen Hamilton, copied a vast tranche of top-secret information, fled to Hong Kong, and passed much of it on to a couple of journalists.

His actions had several profound effects. They revealed the staggering extent of mass surveillance conducted, in particular, by the "Five Eyes" alliance of US, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British security agencies. They resulted in espionage charges that make him, easily, America's most wanted fugitive. They resulted in him receiving temporary asylum in Russia. They made him an instantly recognisable icon of popular culture.

And they made him a bridge across history. It is not a depiction he likes.

Screenshot of the encrypted video interview with Edward Snowden. Think Inc co-founder Suzi Jamil (bottom right) was the intermediary putting Fairfax Media's questions to the US whistleblower who is holed up in Russia.
Photo: Supplied

"I don't see myself as such a personally significant figure," he told The Age.

The journalists to whom he first passed his copied information, he said, were the truly important figures in the story, because they were "in contest with the government for what we should know, for what we should be allowed to know."

"I was simply the mechanism of disclosure," he added. "And I never published a single document."

In so saying he's being disingenuous, of course, but from whence does his elision spring? Is it from modesty, or humility, perhaps an understandable desire to keep his cards near his chest? Or is it, ironically enough, because these days Edward Snowden, the champion of free speech, needs to stick pretty closely to a script?

Over the past 12 months, while living at his undisclosed location in Russia, Snowden has spoken a few times with media. In February, he even zapped in via video link to a libertarian forum in New Hampshire. He will do the same in Australia in May, in a series of capital city talks put together by Sydney-based "edu-tainment" event organisers, Think Inc.

Like many aspects of Snowden's profile, however, these interviews invite differing interpretations. One is that they represent extensions of Snowden's continuing activism in the field of civil liberties. Another is that for a man charged with espionage by a country with a history of suspect rendition, black prison sites, enhanced interrogation techniques and covert assassinations, hiding in plain sight is a bloody good idea.

Certainly, it's crossed his mind that his biography might end early.

"If something happens to me tomorrow, if I get hit by a bus, or mysteriously fall downstairs, or simply disappear, that's obviously not something I'm hoping for," he said.

"But it's something I'm prepared to accept. The nature of liberty, of being truly free, is founded on a willingness to accept risk. Of course there could be a backlash. Of course, there could be some crazy person, or government, who tries to take direct action - but all they'll do is prove my own point."

Few people, if any, would call Edward Snowden "truly free", even given his oddly utopian assertion in a previous exchange in which he said his physical location was unimportant because he "lives on the internet". He relies on the largesse of Vladimir Putin for continued asylum. He has no US passport. Most countries to which he has applied for permanent asylum have refused. The charges he faces under the US Espionage Act carry prison sentences of up to three decades. The trial would be held in secret.

Talking to him involves a series of hoops and cut-outs. In the case of this interview, discussions between Snowden, his lawyer, and Think Inc started the process. Suzi Jamil, one half of Think Inc, then approached this reporter - by phone only; nothing was to be put in writing.

Interest was confirmed, but the timing remained open for weeks: the decision to talk was Snowden's and Snowden's alone. Questions were demanded in advance, drafted, and provided to Think Inc, which in turn sent them to Snowden and his lawyer. He would choose five, we were told - although in the event he answered 10, and talked for a generous 90 minutes.

On no account would he speak directly to the reporter. The questions had to be asked by a trusted intermediary.

The interview, with Jamil asking the questions and recording the results, took place via a Google Hangout (he refuses to use Skype). It can be assumed the call was rerouted through an anonymising service such as Tor. If the US National Security Agency or ASIO were listening in, the spooks would be unable to trace the contact back to his current place of residence.

Such a level of paranoia is understandable, whether or not one views his actions as admirable whistle-blowing or damnable treason. The bleak fate of Chelsea Manning and the parlous living arrangements of Julian Assange must serve as graphic examples of what can happen when you get on the wrong side of the American spy guys.

Unlike Manning and Assange, however, Snowden says he doesn't find his new life difficult.

"My psychological strength is very strong," he said. "Of course I paid a price, though. I was living an extraordinarily comfortable and privileged life. Nobody in the world knew my name."

When he downloaded his explosive collection of secret documents he was living in Hawaii. Before that, he spent time as a CIA employee in Geneva, and then as an NSA operative in Tokyo. Throughout, he said, he was "extraordinarily well paid, for very little work."

"I was living with the woman that I loved, surrounded by friends, able to contact my family freely. And you have to ask yourself, when you have everything that you've ever wanted, what would it take, how bad would it have to get, for you to light a match and burn it all to the ground?"

It's plain that he has asked that question many times. When he answers himself, it has the ring of practised testimony.

"We all have a line, a level of incivility and inhumanity and injustice that we can tolerate," he said. "And there's that one step beyond to that point that we can't tolerate. I found my line.

"Despite that, despite the things that I've lost, I'm more connected today than I've ever been. My family supports me, and, despite the global manhunt, I'm still with the same woman. I can go to sleep at night proud of the work I did during the day."

"People ask me, would you do it again," he said, "and I say, yes, absolutely. Not only would I do it again, I regret I didn't do it sooner."
An Evening With Edward Snowden
Fri, May 20: Riverside Theatre, Perth

Sat, May 21: Adelaide Convention Centre, Adelaide

Sun, May 22: The Plenary, MCED, Melbourne

Fri, May 27: Courier Mail Piazza, Brisbane

Sat, May 28: Hordern Pavilion, Sydney

Sun, May 29: Llewelyn Hall, Canberra
When the whistle blew
July, 2010: Chelsea (then, Bradley) Manning, an intelligence analyst based in Baghdad, is charged by the US military, which alleges he provided classified documents to Wikileaks.

June, 2011: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange seeks refuge in London's Ecuadorean embassy, and requests asylum.

February, 2013: Manning pleads guilty to misusing classified information and is jailed.

June 5, 2013: The Guardian newspaper reveals that the US NSA has been secretly collecting millions of telephone records.

June 9, 2013: Edward Snowden, having fled to Hong Kong from Hawaii, outs himself as the source for the Guardian story.

June 14, 2013: The US charges Snowden with theft of government property and a warrant is issued for his arrest. Snowden attempts to flee to South America, but finds himself effectively trapped in Moscow Airport after the US cancels his passport mid-flight.

July, 2013: Vladimir Putin provides Snowden with a one year temporary residence visa. It is later extended to three years.

February, 2016: The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention rules that Assange has been arbitrarily detained, and calls for the UK to pay him compensation. David Cameron ridicules the judgment and refuses to guarantee the Wikileaks' founder's safe passage from the embassy, where he remains.

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Edward Snowden speaks about living in exile as America's most wanted

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In the language of cyber-security, surveillance and spying, history is divided into two eras: pre-Snowden, and post-Snowden. The break in the timeline happened in May 2013, when Edward Snowden, a then-30 year-old computer systems administrator with US security company Booz Allen Hamilton, copied a vast tranche of top-secret information, fled to Hong Kong, and passed much of it on to a couple of journalists.

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Body Paragraph 2 Edward Snowden is a hero or a villan

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Body Paragraph 2 Edward Snowden is a hero or a villan

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""Edward Snowden gives me hope. Here's a guy who sacrificed all to save us, and we the citizens of the world should be thankful."

Not everyone in the security industry agrees with Hypponen however. Earlier this year Eugene Kaspersky told IBTimes UK that he thought Snowden was a traitor and "belongs in the ninth circle of hell" "

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Not everyone agrees on what Edward Snowden's legacy will be.

Some view him as a traitor who has sold out his country for personal fame, while others view him as a hero who gave up everything to reveal what he felt was the illegal surveillance of US citizen.

Firmly in the latter camp is renowned security expert Mikko Hypponen. Looking back on the one year anniversary of the first report being published based on leaked documents from Snowden, the Finnish security expert told IBTimes UK:

"Edward Snowden gives me hope. Here's a guy who sacrificed all to save us, and we the citizens of the world should be thankful."

Not everyone in the security industry agrees with Hypponen however. Earlier this year Eugene Kaspersky told IBTimes UK that he thought Snowden was a traitor and "belongs in the ninth circle of hell" which, in the first part of Dante Alighieri's epic 14th century poem Divine Comedy, is said to reserved for traitors who who betrayed their lords and benefactors.

When Snowden stole the cache of highly secret documents he was working for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton as an "infrastructure analyst".
Did the right thing
Hypponen agrees that Snowden did breach the trust placed in him by his superiors, but says he did so for the right reasons:

"Not everything he did was technically right - he broke the trust of his employer and his NDA, but nevertheless he did the right thing."

Hypponen believes that while we now know a lot about the surveillance carried out by a select group of countries, it will take people like Snowden in other countries to reveal the full extent of government surveillance.

"Now we know a lot about surveillance the Five Eyes countries [Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, US] are conducting. Other countries are spying as well, we just don't have concrete evidence about it yet because they haven't had their Snowdens. So I hope we get more Snowdens from other superpowers."
Changes

For Hypponen, the revelation that the UK spying agency GCHQ was monitoring people's webcam chats was the most surprising revelation from the last 12 months. "What in the world were they thinking?"

He adds that in the 23 years he has worked with F-Secure the company has never changed as much as it has the past year - something which is symptomatic of the whole industry.

For the consumer, Hypponen believes that while there has been some outrage, there has not been a major shift away from services offered by the likes of Google and Apple despite the revelations showing that the NSA has access to customer data.

For businesses however, there has been changes:

"Businesses are very much moving their data away from US clouds. They know that when they store data in US clouds, the US government has a right to look at that data, and they must take that very seriously."
Rise up
What the eventual legacy of the Snowden revelations will be is unclear at the moment, and as we move into the second year of Snowden leaks, it is unlikely that the revelations will get any less forceful.

Indeed Glenn Greenwald has promised to publish the name of every single US citizen that the NSA was spying on in the coming weeks and months, something which will likely bring the debate about privacy, government oversight and security back onto the front page again.

Ever since the first revelations a year ago, privacy advocates have been calling on people around the globe to rise up against their government's actions.

On Thursday the millions joined in the Reset the Net campaign which was supported by Google, Modzilla, Reddit and Imgur.

At the same time, major tech companies like Microsoft, AOL, Twitter, Facebook and Apple who are part of an alliance called Reform Government Surveillance, published an open letter to the US Senate calling for the approval and expansion of National Security Agency reform.
Advance digital freedom
While the US government has made some changes, Hypponen believes these are focused internally:

"Practically all the changes we've seen have been to improve the privacy of US citizens, not foreigners. Politicians have to keep their voters satisfied, and we foreigners won't be able to vote them out of their positions."

Hypponen is adding his voice to the campaign, calling on people to help draft the Digital Freedom manifesto, a crowdsourced document that will be used "to advance digital freedom in the world."

Anyone concerned about digital freedom and privacy can contribute their ideas and opinions - even if it's just a sentence. The manifesto is licensed under creative commons and is open for contributions until the 30 June.

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Mikko Hypponen: 'Edward Snowden Sacrificed Everything to Save Us'

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Not everyone agrees on what Edward Snowden's legacy will be. Some view him as a traitor who has sold out his country for personal fame, while others view him as a hero who gave up everything to reveal what he felt was the illegal surveillance of US citizen.

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Body paragraph one Edward Snowden returning home

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Body paragraph one Edward Snowden returning home

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"Kucherena said: “I won’t keep it secret that he ... wants to return back home. And we are doing everything possible now to solve this issue. There is a group of US lawyers, there is also a group of German lawyers and I’m dealing with it on the Russian side.”

US justice department officials added to the speculation, saying that it would welcome his return, but he would have to face criminal charges."

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If Edward Snowden could leave Russia, he would. Although he is grateful for the sanctuary the country has offered him, the NSA whistleblower responsible for one of the biggest leaks in intelligence history would much rather be in western Europe or, better still, back in the US.

Speculation that a deal with the US justice department might be in the offing was prompted by a comment by his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, in Moscow on Monday. Kucherena said: "I won't keep it secret that he ... wants to return back home. And we are doing everything possible now to solve this issue. There is a group of US lawyers, there is also a group of German lawyers and I'm dealing with it on the Russian side."

US justice department officials added to the speculation, saying that it would welcome his return, but he would have to face criminal charges.

Both statements are true. Snowden's lawyers would like to help negotiate his return to the US, and the US would like to see him return to face criminal charges. What would be a mistake is to interpret this as a hint that a deal is in the making behind the scenes. There were months of discussion between the justice department and Snowden's lawyers after publication of the first leaks in June 2013, but these have long since gone cold.

Snowden faces three charges under the Espionage Act. That would mean he would be tried in front of a judge, without a jury, and it would almost certainly mean he would end up in jail. The three charges alone could see him sent to jail for 30 years, but these might only be initial charges and he would be looking at a much longer sentence.

If he was offered the prospect of a jury trial, he would be likely to take it, but that is not on the table.

His best hope at present is to find a west European country to grant him asylum. He has reportedly applied to 21 European countries, all of which have turned him down. None are prepared to fall out with the US by offering him a safe haven.

Public support for him continues to grow in Europe, where he has become the figurehead for the privacy movement. He keeps popping up, an irritant to the US government. On Thursday, he will join a panel discussion in Geneva by Skype, organised by the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights.

Could public pressure eventually shift a European government? It seems a remote possibility, but not as remote as a US deal.

There are lots of optimistic theories, the favourite being a pardon by Barack Obama when he stands down in January 2017. Nothing Obama has said suggests such a possibility.

The realistic scenario is that he is going to be in exile in Russia for a long time to come.
Topics

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Edward Snowden: what would happen if he went home - pardon or prison?

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If Edward Snowden could leave Russia, he would. Although he is grateful for the sanctuary the country has offered him, the NSA whistleblower responsible for one of the biggest leaks in intelligence history would much rather be in western Europe or, better still, back in the US.