Edward Snowden earned $35,000 for talks about Bitcoin

Edward Snowden earned $1.27 million between 2015 and 2020 as a speaker and moderator of various virtual conferences, including $35,000 for cryptocurrency-related talks. This follows from documents filed in the Justice Department’s suit against the former National Security Agency employee (NSA).

According to DeCrypt, the department aims to recover a portion of these earnings, as well as a share of the fee from the publication of the memoir “Permanent Record”, released in 2019. The civil suit is separate from the criminal one brought against Snowden for allegedly disclosing classified NSA information.

In the document provided by the publication, it is stated that Snowden earned $20,000 for participating in a conference organized in March 2018 by the Berlin-based startup Blockstack. He then gave a comment to the head of Coin Center’s research department Peter Van Valkenburgh.

The $15,000 fee Snowden received came from the organizers of the Bitcoin 2019 conference in San Francisco in June of that year, for an interview with BTC Media CEO David Bailey.

Both events were held virtually, as Snowden has been in Russia for seven years. This arrangement allows him to avoid arrest by US authorities.

American Program Bureau (APB), which served as Snowden’s booking agency, disclosed Snowden’s earnings. The court ordered it to testify as a witness in the U.S. Department of Justice’s case against the former NSA employee.

APB provided a list of 67 appearances by Snowden organized by it from September 2015 to May 2020. The table does not include booking-agent commissions, so payments from Blockstack and BTC Media could have been higher.

In December 2018, U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady ruled in favour of the government. Then he постановил that the authorities have the right to proceeds from the memoirs and Snowden’s income from speaking engagements.

In March 2020, amid the Bitcoin price slump, Snowden said that the thought of buying had come to him.

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