edwardsnowden

The western world was sent into a brief paranoid frenzy when whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked government information about the surveillance of the National Security Agency (NSA). I say brief, because it seems to have been forgotten by a large number of people; it seemed like it was just more news. The revelations, and more that followed, showed how the NSA record phone calls and data and more controversially; that they use information from emails and social networking sites.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has become a person of extreme interest in recent days, but thus far he's managed to avoid photojournalists' cameras fairly well. The same cannot be said of the empty airplane seat which was supposedly going to take him from Russia to Cuba this past weekend.

In an airplane full of disappointed photojournalists, the conspicuously vacant Seat 17A became in short order the most photographed empty airplane seat in the world.