Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.

In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it.

Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250772909
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/01/2020
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	52,791
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

Edward Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and grew up in the shadow of Fort Meade. A systems engineer by training, he served as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, and worked as a contractor for the National Security Agency. He has received numerous awards for his public service, including the Right Livelihood Award, the German Whistleblower Prize, the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal from the International League of Human Rights. Currently, he serves as president of the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Part 1

1 Looking Through the Window 11

2 The Invisible Wall 19

3 Beltway Boy 33

4 American Online 39

5 Hacking 51

6 Incomplete 61

7 9/11 69

8 9/12 77

9 X-Rays 83

10 Cleared and in Love 93

Part 2

11 The System 105

12 Homo contractus 111

13 Indoc 121

14 The Count of the Hill 137

15 Geneva 149

16 Tokyo 163

17 Home on the Cloud 187

18 On the Couch 203

Part 3

19 The Tunnel 213

20 Heartbeat 219

21 Whistleblowing 227

22 Fourth Estate 241

23 Read, Write, Execute 255

24 Encrypt 265

25 The Boy 275

26 Hong Kong 287

27 Moscow 299

28 From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills 311

29 Love and Exile 325

Acknowledgments 337

Editorial Reviews

Permanent Record is a riveting account and a curious artifact. The book is unlikely to change anyone's mind about Snowden, but when it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

09/23/2019

The notorious and celebrated whistleblower---who divulged top-secret documents revealing the mass surveillance of citizens' phone calls, emails, and internet activity by the U. S. National Security Agency and other intelligence organizations---recounts his battle with the system in this impassioned memoir. Snowden, a former systems engineer and NSA contractor and now board president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation from his Moscow exile, presents himself as animated by a combination of idealism and covert nonconformity, someone who subverted the rules as a civic duty from middle school history class to his CIA training program. (As a teenager he hacked classified files at Los Alamos National Laboratory, then pestered lab officials into fixing the security flaw.) Snowden's well-observed portrait of intelligence work reveals spooky Langley night shifts, spies pilfering nude selfies from private online accounts, and his own intricate, suspenseful operation to steal documents using byzantine encryption and tiny storage cards smuggled past guards. His somewhat paranoid brief against the surveillance state is less convincing; he envisions the government permanently recording every communication, movement, misdemeanor, and sin, subjecting citizens to "oppression by total automated law enforcement," but he cites no cases of serious harm from NSA surveillance and doesn't make a strong argument that it leads inevitably to oppressive control. Still, Snowden's many admirers will find his saga both captivating and inspiring. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

A riveting account... Reads like a literary thriller... Snowden pushes the reader to reflect more seriously on what every American should be asking already.”
—The New York Times

“Gripping... Snowden demonstrates a knack for explaining in lucid and compelling language the inner workings of [CIA and NSA] systems and the menace he came to believe they posed.”
—The Washington Post

“Snowden eventually decided his loyalties lay not with the agencies he was working for, but the public they were set up to protect. He felt ordinary citizens were being betrayed, and he had a duty to explain how.... His account of the experiences that led him to take momentous decisions, along with the details he gives of his family background, serve as a robust defense against accusations that he is a traitor."
—The Guardian

“Even for those of us who’ve followed the Snowden revelations closely, Permanent Record is full of surprises.... A deeply reluctant whistleblower, Snowden also emerges as a peculiarly American patriot, with roots that go back to Plymouth Rock.... As his memoir makes clear, all the techniques he exposed in 2013 remain in place.”
—The Nation

“Well-written... Snowden’s descriptions of the real impact of the various surveillance systems he disclosed—stripped of abstract concepts and technical jargon—are some of the most disturbing parts of the book.... Offers a useful reminder of the god-like omniscience that digital data can bestow on those with the power to collect it all.”
—The Economist

“Snowden’s book is straightforward, admirably so.... Having gazed through the windows of the panopticon, he experienced that rarity, a moment of vision: The world must be told these things I know. Against absurd odds, he delivered his knowledge to us.”
—Jonathan Lethem, The New York Review of Books

“An extraordinary book... A riveting blend of spycraft as Snowden painstakingly figures out how to confirm his suspicions without tipping off his bosses, and a brilliant ethical treatise as Snowden reveals the reasoning that took him from each step to the next... The best proof yet that Snowden is exactly what he appears to be: a gung-ho guy from a military family who believes deeply in service and the values embodied by the US constitution, who explored multiple avenues of squaring his oath to uphold those values with the corrupt and illegal practices he saw around him, and worked out a breathtakingly bold and ambitious plan to do what no one else had ever managed: to expose wrongdoing in a way that provoked sustained interest and sparked action.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

From the Publisher

10/11/2019

In 2013, American journalist and whistleblower Snowden (president, Freedom of the Press Fnd.) released, to sympathetic journalists, classified documents describing a U.S. mass-surveillance program capable of interfering with the lives of every person on earth. Here, he shares his experiences mostly working for international corporations that contracted with the Central Intelligence and National Security agencies. Snowden also relates his unorthodox childhood; by age 12 his obsessions with computer hacking and gaming replaced friends, school activities, and family relations. Following the 9/11 attacks, the author was determined to serve his country, which he did through computing skills, following a medical discharge during army basic training. Tediously lengthy and complex stories of his assignments will be most meaningful to computing professionals, as the most fascinating passages probe the concerns that drove him to release the top-secret report; how his life and that of his now wife was uprooted; and his life in Russia, which granted him asylum. VERDICT For those fascinated by electronic spying or impassioned by the issue of privacy rights, Snowden's memoir casts an enlightening view of the U.S. intelligence community despite sometimes being marred by cumbersome jargon.—Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Library Journal