{"id":12197,"date":"2020-08-06T12:53:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-06T16:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=12197"},"modified":"2020-08-18T15:11:59","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T19:11:59","slug":"edward-snowden-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/edward-snowden-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Snowden: Education Through Practical Training"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Where did Edward Snowden go to school? What was the Edward Snowden education background that led to his career in intelligence and technology? What was Snowden training to become?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Edward Snowden learned many of his technological skills from experience instead of formal education. For Edward Snowden, education was a targeted endeavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Learn about Edward Snowden\u2013education, background, and how it set him up for his career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>When Ed was nine, his family moved to Crofton, Maryland. Lonnie continued to work for the Coast Guard. Wendy took a new job at the NSA, the National Security Agency, making retirement arrangements for spies.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Edward Snowden: Education Through Hardship<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Ed had been popular enough and had good grades back in North Carolina, but he didn\u2019t fit in at his new school. He didn\u2019t like sports, he wore glasses, and his classmates mocked his Southern accent. He was so insecure about his accent that he taught himself to speak differently and didn\u2019t talk at school until he\u2019d ironed it out. Not talking affected his grades enough that his teachers thought he might have a learning disability. They got him to take an IQ test, which he scored very high on. This resulted in \u201cenrichment assignments.\u201d<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Education After Mononucleosis<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>In sophomore year, Ed came down with mononucleosis. He was so tired he couldn\u2019t go to school or even stay awake long enough to do more than play games on the computer. <strong>He eventually became too sick to even play on the computer and it was a dark time emotionally.<\/strong> He missed four months of school and then got a letter that told him he\u2019d have to repeat the year. He absolutely did not want to do this and it kicked him out of his slump. He looked for a hack.&nbsp;For Edward Snowden, education was a means to an end.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Education at Community College<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Ed discovered you don\u2019t actually need a high school diploma to get into college and got himself accepted at Anne Arundel Community College. <\/strong>He went to class two days a week, which was all he could handle as he was still recovering. It wasn\u2019t a very social experience\u2014the college didn\u2019t have much of a campus life, but Ed didn\u2019t mind. He was younger than anyone else, too sick to do much socializing anyway, and was fine with the anonymity. He liked his college classes better than his high school classes. (He did eventually get his GED.)<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Edward Snowden: Education on the Job<\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p>When Ed was attending college, he met Mae in Japanese class. Mae was a published artist who also owned a web-design business. Ed was infatuated with her and started working as a web designer for her company.  This gave Snowden training that was practical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mae was good at the business side of things, especially once Ed took over some of the web design work, and she\u2019d try to get jobs directly rather than going through the work portals. She was an illustrator so she could also offer logo design and branding services.<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ed enjoyed the job\u2014even though it was sometimes repetitive, he got to spend time with Mae\u2014but realized he needed to certify to go farther in the field. He got his MCSE certification from Johns Hopkins University.&nbsp;<br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Edward Snowden: Education and Training<\/strong> for TISO<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Ed went to the Hill to train to be a TISO. Ed, like other students, lived in a dilapidated Comfort Inn hotel during the six-month training period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ed\u2019s classes were about all things technology. For example, he once had to haul an eighty-pound suitcase of Cold War-era communications gear up the roof of a building. Then, using only a sheet of coordinates and a compass, he had to find CIA stealth satellites and send CIA headquarters a radio message. He also learned about Van Eck phreaking (mirroring someone else\u2019s monitor), how to service cables (physical cables connecting agency sites underground and underwater), and terminals (computers). Ed\u2019s was the last year that TISOs studied these older technologies. This robust program gave Snowden training to do the job well. It was also a launching pad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Where did Edward Snowden go to school? What was the Edward Snowden education background that led to his career in intelligence and technology? What was Snowden training to become? Edward Snowden learned many of his technological skills from experience instead of formal education. For Edward Snowden, education was a targeted endeavor. Learn about Edward Snowden\u2013education, background, and how it set him up for his career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,33],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-12197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-people","tag-permanent-record","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.3 (Yoast SEO v24.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Edward Snowden: Education Through Practical Training - Shortform Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"For Edward Snowden, education was a targeted endeavor. He learned many of his technological skills from experience instead of school. Read more now.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/edward-snowden-education\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Edward Snowden: Education Through Practical Training\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For Edward Snowden, education was a targeted endeavor. He learned many of his technological skills from experience instead of school. 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