The digital metamorphosis of the West by Maurizio Agazzi Edward Joseph Snowden was born on 21 June 1983 in the city of Elizabeth, North Carolina. On 11 September 2001 he’s only eighteen years old, and like his peers he watched the collapse of the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon live on the Internet. Shortly thereafter, Edward begins to study computer sciences; he won’t finish them, but it’s not much of a problem because he’s part of the digital generation that is “ready” for the long awaited change in the United States. After all, formal education couldn’t keep up with the fast paced developments in the fields driving the change, and it was far better to simply learn by doing. At that time, there wasn’t a single American who wasn’t convinced of the approaching Information Revolution and that this doctrine would then go on to Evangelize the world. And so it happened that – before the speculation bubble in the IT sector burst and the ensuing the stock market crash between 2000 and 2001 – even the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had seen IT as a strategic lever for US Intelligence, and began to move
