A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that the U.S. government may collect any profits made by former NSA worker Edward Snowden through sales of Snowden’s book and paid speeches.
The Justice Department has sought to put Snowden on trial for espionage since 2013, when he exposed classified information on the NSA’s electronic surveillance program in what amiunts to the biggest security breach in U.S. history. Snowden has fled the country and currently resides in Moscow.
Judge Liam O’Grady ruled in federal court in Virginia that because Snowden did not submit his book to the NSA or CIA for approval, the former intelligence worker violated his contract obligations to U.S. government agencies and thus the government was entitled to royalties made by Snowden.
“The contractual language of the Secrecy Agreements is unambiguous,” O’Grady wrote in his ruling. “Snowden accepted employment and benefits conditioned upon prepublication review obligations.”
Snowden’s legal team criticized the decision.
“It’s farfetched to believe that the government would have reviewed Mr. Snowden’s book or anything else he submitted in good faith,” Snowden lawyer Brett Max Kaufman of the ACLU Center for Democracy told the Washington Post. “For that reason, Mr. Snowden preferred to risk his future royalties than to subject his experiences to improper government censorship.”
Snowden’s leak confirmed the existence of the NSA’s mass collection of data on Americans’ phone conversations including time, place and duration of calls, but not the content of the calls themselves. The NSA ended the program in 2015 after Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, banning the collection of metadata that reveals such information on phone calls.