For Snowden,a life of ambition,despite the drifting

Instead of merely opting out of surveillance work,Snowden embraced their example,delivering hundreds of highly classified NSA documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. His act may have been a spectacular unintended consequence of the leak crackdown itself.

It may also have reflected his own considerable ambition,disguised by his early drifting. From Snowdens friends and his own voluminous web postings emerges a portrait of a talented young man who did not finish high school but bragged online that employers fight over me.

Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history, he wrote online at age 20. Snowden,who has taken refuge in Hong Kong,has studied Mandarin,was deeply interested in martial arts,claimed Buddhism as his religion and once mused that China is definitely a good option career wise.

For role models,Snowden,an introspective man who spent his formative years in the rebellious technogeek counterculture,could look not only to young Army private Bradley Manning,lionized by a global following,but also to dissenters at his own agencies.

From NSA,there was Thomas A Drake,who since his 2010 leak prosecution has denounced the agency as Big Brother on the lecture circuit. From the CIA,there was John Kiriakou,who rallied supporters with his assertion that his prison term for leaking was payback for speaking out about waterboarding.

If Snowden wished to draw similar attention,he has succeeded. Along with denunciations in Congress as a traitor and a manhunt by the FBI,he has already won public acclaim from a diverse group of sympathizers.

Snowden lived with his mother,Elizabeth,a court administrator,divorced in 2001. Snowden and his friends built personal computers from parts ordered over the Internet. They created a website called Ryuhana Press.

Toward the end of 2003,Snowden wrote that he was joining the Army,listing Buddhism as his religion.

A colleague of Snowden in Geneva said he was already experiencing a crisis of conscience of sorts around 2007-2009.

In 2009,Snowden joined the NSA as a contract employee at a military facility in Japan.

In April last year,he moved to Hawaii,according to a Twitter post from his girlfriend,Lindsay Mills. She joined him in June. Neighbors described the couple as aloof but not unfriendly.

This March,consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton hired Snowden as a systems administrator at the NSAs Threat Operations Center.

He asked for a medical leave in May to get treatment for epilepsy. On May 20,he left for Hong Kong,carrying four computers,according to The Guardian,and digital copies of the secret documents.

The Justice Department is considering an array of charges against Snowden. For his part,Snowden told South China Morning Post last week,My intention is to ask the courts and people of Hong Kong to decide my fate.

Microsoft,Facebook release details of NSA data requests

Washington: American tech giants Microsoft and Facebook have disclosed the number of requests they had received from the NSA to reveal details including internet usage of their consumers. Facebook said in the last six months of 2012,its requests totaled between 9,000 and 10,000,and covered issues like local law enforcement investigating a child abduction case all the way through investigations into terrorist threats. Microsofts total was about 32,000 accounts over the same six month period ending December 31,2012. PTI