Ongoing news reports in the international media have revealed operational details about the United States
National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners'
global surveillance of foreign nationals and U.S. citizens. The reports mostly emanate from a cache of
top secret documents
leaked by ex-NSA contractor
Edward Snowden, who obtained them while working for
Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest contractors for defense and intelligence in the United States. In addition to a trove of U.S. federal documents, Snowden's cache reportedly contains thousands of Australian, British and Canadian intelligence files that he had accessed via the exclusive "
Five Eyes" network. In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by
The Washington Post and
The Guardian, attracting considerable public attention. The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably
The New York Times, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
Der Spiegel (Germany),
O Globo (Brazil),
Le Monde (France),
L'espresso (Italy),
NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands),
Dagbladet (Norway),
El País (Spain), and
Sveriges Television (Sweden).