TIME Cover Story: The Geeks Who Leaked

Time magazine's June 24th cover, "Leaker," features at its center Edward Snowden, the leaker of the NSA's Prism program, with U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning, who leaked information to WikiLeaks, on the right, and Aaron Swartz, who was arrested for illegally downloading a large number of academic journal articles and later committed suicide, on the left. The cover asks: "Why a new generation of hackers feels driven to expose government secrets."

What guided Snowden is hacker thinking, a form of cyber-political philosophy that began in the message boards of the 1980s, developed in the chat rooms of the 1990s, and matured in contemporary online communities like Reddit and 4chan.

Snowden believes that the freedom of information should take precedence over everything, that privacy is sacred, and that he has a responsibility to protect both.