His maternal grandfather, Edward J. Barrett,[8][9] was a rear admiral in the U.S. Coast Guard who became a senior official with the FBI and was at the Pentagon in 2001 during the September 11 attacks.[10] Snowden's father Lonnie was also an officer in the Coast Guard,[11] and his mother Elizabeth is a clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.[12][13][14][15][16] His older sister, Jessica, was a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, D.C. Edward Snowden said that he had expected to work for the federal government, as had the rest of his family.[17] His parents divorced in 2001,[18] and his father remarried.[19] Snowden scored above 145 on two separate IQ tests.[17]

In the early 1990s, while still in grade school, Snowden moved with his family to the area of Fort Meade, Maryland.[20] Mononucleosis caused him to miss high school for almost nine months.[17] Rather than returning to school, he passed the GED test[21] and took classes at Anne Arundel Community College.[14] Although Snowden had no undergraduate college degree,[22] he worked online toward a master's degree at the University of Liverpool, England, in 2011.[23] He was reportedly interested in Japanese popular culture, had studied the Japanese language,[24] and worked for an anime company that had a resident office in the U.S.[25][26] He also said he had a basic understanding of Mandarin Chinese and was deeply interested in martial arts. At age 20, he listed Buddhism as his religion on a military recruitment form, noting that the choice of Agnostic was "strangely absent."[27]