Permanent Record

–Edward Snowden

★★★★★ 4/5

Early last year, I was reading the fascinating but fictitious story of a man imprisoned in a hotel in Moscow (Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow). I started this year reading the equally fascinating story of another man, a real one, stranded in Moscow: Edward Snowden’s autobiographical Permanent Record. I loved both—for very different reasons, obviously.

Ed Snowden has largely faded from people’s memories—most remember few details of the bombshell exposé of classified docs that made global headlines in 2013 showing the vast and often unconstitutional mass surveillance of US citizens perpetrated by the NSA. The book itself does not have any new shocking revelations of intelligence malfeasance and so does not add to information released earlier—don’t read it looking for never before revealed classified information, unless you count tidbits like:

For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven't contacted US intelligence. But Al-Qaeda did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the Saudis, a fact that the Bush White House worked suspiciously hard to suppress as we went to war with two other countries.

Rather, he tells the story of 

  1. His childhood and development of his fascination with computers 
  2. How he came to be in the position he eventually did of having access to the level of classified information that he leaked, 
  3. How he eventually reached the decision to become a “whistleblower” knowing fully well the consequences of his actions and finally 
  4. His escape from the US and life in the aftermath of his leaks.

It should be clear to anyone familiar with the events of 2013 and after, that Mr. Snowden is an idealogue—strongly convinced of the righteousness of his actions. What surprised me reading the book, and this is to his credit, is that at no point does he come across as self-righteous. Neither does he come across as bitter having been forced into exile without massive popular support to pardon him, esp. from those in government. Even though it is his story, he doesn’t make the book all about himself. He makes a calm and compelling case for his own actions and motivations. I am left convinced of the genuineness of his intentions, newfound respect for the maturity of his thinking and the courage shown in the actions taken when he was just twenty nine years old and since. His is not the story of a self obsessed, attention seeking twenty something year old (there are too many of those!), but that of a self aware young man calling out, at great personal cost, the violation of the rights of his fellow citizens.

The 2008 crisis...helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.

The book is well written with care given to the level of detail, making for engaging and interesting reading through all sections: childhood through exile. While there are no new revelations, there’s plenty to learn about the intelligence apparatus. For example, the government has repeatedly downplayed the credibility of his story as that of a low level contractor, but Mr. Snowden explains how he went from being employed by the CIA to becoming a contractor, and the critical roles contractors play and how that came to be:

“Those contractors are never counted by the government, not even in the Black Budget, because to add their ranks to the contracting total would make one disturbing fact extraordinarily clear: the work of American Intelligence is done as frequently by private employees as it is by government servants.“

Has anything actually changed as a result of Edward Snowden’s actions? What exactly is his legacy? To my surprise, he doesn’t devote much attention to these questions in his book. His actions clearly spurred plenty of needed debate on privacy and surveillance. There have been some but no radical changes to the laws on information the government can legally collect. Perhaps the biggest impact has been on tech companies: Google, Apple and Facebook and how they protect their users’ data, frantically plugging backdoors the NSA had built into their systems.

So is Snowden a hero or traitor? Opinions have varied widely especially with time, though the establishment has consistently and painstakingly painted his disclosures as treasonous, setting US intelligence back by decades, aiding terrorists and not US citizens. Could he have achieved his objectives through other means?—a more limited release of documents than thousands he ended up leaking? Perhaps. Though on the balance, I believe people are better off knowing what their governments did and more importantly are capable of: we are now disabused of the idea that democratically elected governments are incapable of mass surveillance. And in our post 9/11 privacy vs. security tradeoff debates, for those who choose to question the need for privacy itself, Snowden has this to say:

The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens ... Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.

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