Lindsay Mills, Edward Snowden's girlfriend, feels 'lost'

Lindsay Mills — the dancer and acrobat girlfriend Edward Snowden left behind — learned what her partner had done at the same time as the rest of the world.

On May 20, 2013, Snowden left their Hawaii home for Hong Kong, telling her it was a business trip. On June 6, NSA agents searched her home. On June 9, she found out — along with everyone else — that he was the whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history. (Wikipedia — Lindsay Mills)

The next day she wrote on her blog, lsjourney.com — subtitled "Adventures of a world-travelling, pole-dancing superhero":

"My world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me lost at sea without a compass. Surely there will be villainous pirates, distracting mermaids, and tides of change in this new open water chapter of my journey. But at the moment all I can feel is alone."

Then she wrote that she would be "refraining from blog posts for awhile" — and deleted every post within a day. Her blog went dark. (Wikipedia — Lindsay Mills)

Her world had "opened and closed" in a matter of days. He knew what he was getting into when he threw open the lid on the government's surveillance programs — she had been totally unaware.

What happened after

Mills left the United States to join Snowden in Moscow in October 2014. They married in 2017, and they now have two children. She has said little publicly since — a life lived quietly, far from the headlines that once consumed her blog. (Wikipedia — Lindsay Mills)

The surveillance he exposed — the mass collection of phone records under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, a provision civil libertarians had long warned could be used to demand library and bookstore records — eventually led Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act in 2015, curbing the bulk collection. The debate he started, and the personal cost it exacted from the woman he left behind, are both still part of the story.