Edward Snowden is being sued by the U.S. government, which seeks to profit from the sale of his books and lectures, including speeches on Bitcoin.
Snowden wants to buy Bitcoin.
Who’s Edward Snowden?
Edward Snowden is an American who leaked highly sensitive and classified information from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013.
Among the information were details about numerous global surveillance programs, many of them administered by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance.
Clearly, the leak generated a round of cultural debates and discussions about national security and individual privacy.
So, this week new information was revealed stating that Edward Snowden would have gotten at least $35,000 for giving virtual talks on Bitcoin. This according to the recently published court filing.
Edward Snowden challenges the CIA and launches a book of his memoirs
Conferences about Bitcoin
To be more precise, Blockstack paid him $20,000 to speak at Blockstack Berlin in March 2018. In fact, that interview can currently be heard on Blockstack’s YouTube channel.
Also, BTC Media paid him $15,000 to speak at Cryptosoft 2019. For those of you who don’t remember, this was a conference held in San Francisco in June 2019. You can also watch the interview on Bitcoin Magazine’s YouTube channel.
Image extracted from the published document where you can see the payments made by Edward Snowden for talking about Bitcoin.
Image taken from the document published where you can see the payments made by Edward Snowden.
Obviously, these lectures were given in an online format, since Snowden is currently in exile in Russia.
In this sense, the objective of this information is that the U.S. government says it is entitled to the income obtained from his speeches that is more than $1.2 million.
So the American Program Bureau gave the government a list of 67 conference commitments it had reserved for Snowden between September 2015 and May 2020.
The interesting thing is that this report includes only the “speaker’s fee,” that is, Snowden’s fee for speaking about Bitcoin. However, other possible costs are not included. Therefore, the amount paid for each of these conferences may be higher.
Will Snowden return from exile?
Recently, according to Reuters, U.S. President Donald Trump indicated that he would seek a possible pardon for Snowden.
In response to Trump’s comment, Snowden wrote the following on Twitter:
“The last time we heard a White House considering a pardon was in 2016, when the same Attorney General who once accused me admitted that, overall, my job in exposing the NSA’s unconstitutional mass surveillance system had been ‘a public service.
For the moment, Snowden remains vocal about Bitcoin and the Blockchain technology. Even in March of this year during “Black Thursday,” Snowden said he was considering acquiring Bitcoin.
