Icons From the Age of Anxiety: Edward Snowden

From Wikipedia:

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is a former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who leaked details of top-secret American and British government mass surveillance programs to the press.

Working primarily with Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian (London), which published a series of exposés based on Snowden's disclosures in June 2013,

Snowden revealed information about a variety of classified intelligence programs, including the interception of US and European telephone metadata and the PRISM and Tempora Internet surveillance programs. Snowden said the leaks were an effort "to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."

On June 14, 2013, US federal prosecutors filed a sealed complaint, made public on June 21, charging Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorized person; the latter two allegations are under the Espionage Act.

Snowden's leaks are said to rank among the most significant breaches in the history of the NSA. Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said disclosures linked to Snowden have "confirmed longstanding suspicions that NSA's surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew."

The Charlton Action Heroes

According to comics lore, in 1983, for about $30,000 plus royalties, DC Executive Vice President Paul Levitz acquired the Charlton Action Hero titles as a gift for Dick Giordano, who by then had returned to DC. Then, after 40 years of steady but mostly mediocre production, Charlton Publishing closed their comic book publishing operation in 1985. The following year, the Charlton Action Heroes served as the template for Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s critically acclaimed Watchmen series.

 In epitaph to the missed opportunities of the Charlton era, former editor-in-chief Dick Giordano said, “If they had wanted to go head-to-head with DC Comics, quality of the artwork, quality of the stories, quality of the printing and distribution, they probably could’ve done it at two-thirds the cost that DC was paying. And if they had done that, they really could have turned the comic book publishing business on its ear. But they chose to be junk dealers, they really did”