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Edward Snowden’s Girlfriend Has Been Living With Him in Moscow for a While

Remember Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend whom Edward Snowden left behind when he flew to Hong Kong to identify himself as the person who had been leaking NSA secrets to the Guardian? While most people probably assumed that Mills and Snowden’s relationship was over — and, who knows, maybe it was for a while! — the couple appears to have worked things out. 

Friday night marked the New York Film Festival premiere of CitizenFour, documentarian and frequent Snowden collaborator Laura Poitras’s film about the NSA leaker’s long journey from Hawaii to Moscow. As the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald noted in a blog post about the event

The film provides the first-ever character study of Snowden and his courageous whistleblowing, contains significant new revelations about all of these events, and will undoubtedly be discussed for years to come. But one seemingly banal — yet actually quite significant — revelation from the film is worth separately highlighting: In July of this year, Snowden’s long-time girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, moved to Moscow to live with him.

Greenwald goes on to cite Mills’s presence in Russia as proof that whistle-blowers can go on to lead good lives, despite what the United States government might want would-be secret-sharers to believe. But, at least to us, it seems mostly to serve as evidence that Mills is a very forgiving person. After all, Snowden is the guy who didn’t bother to tell her to delete her very personal blog before he disappeared without warning and, in the process, subjected her to massive public scrutiny. The things people do for love! 

Edward Snowden’s Girlfriend Moved to Moscow