A decade on, Edward Snowden remains in Russia, though U.S. laws have changed

From Moscow, former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden addresses a technology conference in Portugal in 2019. Snowden fled the U.S. in 2013 and revealed highly classified U.S. surveillance programs. He's been living in Russia for the past decade, and received Russian citizenship last year. (Armando Franca/AP)

Edward Snowden's family traces its role in national security to relatives who fought in the Revolutionary War. Snowden assumed he'd be engaged in similar work as well.

But as a contractor for the National Security Agency, working at an underground facility in Hawaii in 2013, he witnessed the mass collection of electronic data on American citizens, and he thought it was wrong.