Edward Snowden rakes in speaking fees while hoping for a pardon

More than three years after fleeing the United States with a massive cache of top-secret documents, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden remains a federal fugitive, living in Moscow courtesy of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

But Snowden — who is the subject of a new Oliver Stone film  that hits movie theaters next month — is making the most of his exile: Over the past year, he has collected over $200,000 in fees for digital speaking appearances that have been arranged by one of the country’s elite speakers bureaus, according to a source close to Snowden who is intimately familiar with his business affairs. At least three of these paid speeches were hosted by public American universities, and documents obtained by Yahoo News highlight various concerns raised by college officials about paying Snowden.

The former intelligence analyst uses video chat technology to address audiences around the globe: In the last five months, a larger-than-life Snowden has appeared on giant screens to a sold-out audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, northern Europe’s largest music festival, a symposium on surveillance and civil rights in Tokyo, and Comic-Con in San Diego. In all of these cases, as with most of his appearances, sympathetic crowds greeted him with thunderous applause and praise for his decision to leak classified documents to journalists about U.S. surveillance programs.

“Arguing you don’t care about privacy because you’ve got nothing to hide is no different than saying that you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say,” Snowden, using one of his classic lines, last month told the Roskilde Festival  in Denmark. After the crowd — reportedly Snowden’s largest ever — sang “Happy Birthday,” the 33-year-old said: “Everyone, thank you. Really. You guys staying with me… is overwhelming. But this is not about me. This is about us.”