Prometheus, Hardbound
Books I’ve Read: Edward Snowden’s “Permanent Record”
Go your way. Forget Prometheus,
And all the woe that he is doomed to bear;
By his own choice, this vile estate preferring
To ignorant bliss and unfelt slavery.— Prometheus (Hartley Coleridge, 1820)
Permanent Record
By Edward Snowden
When the US Justice Department filed a civil suit against Edward Snowden upon the release of his new memoir, they instantly made Permanent Record into a best-seller (see: Streisand Effect). I must confess that if they hadn’t, I likely wouldn’t have learned about the book, its release, or really even thought about Edward Snowden again. 2013, the year an unknown NSA analyst released classified documents on the US’s domestic and foreign digital surveillance efforts, truly feels like it was a lifetime ago.
Once picked up, Permanent Record, was hard to put down. The thrilling tale itself is told in unassuming linear fashion. Starting with Ed’s youngest memories, military service, and first employment with the intelligence community (IC), through the actions that made him persona non grata #1 with the US Government, and up to his present-day exile in Moscow — the city where he ended up accidentally after the US canceled his passport as he was flying through Russia on his way to Ecuador. But it was revisiting, in-depth, the revelations of NSA’s monitoring internet activity and the sum of the costs paid by whistleblowers that most stuck out to me.
Above all, the book highlighted how the internet — arguably the single greatest provider of social equilibrium in our time — was allowed to be co-opted by major tech corporations and governments. To be used against friend and foe alike, and always with minimal ethical guidance. Permanent Record is as much about the formation of a twisted logic of the digital world you and I inhabit today, as much as it is about the logic behind the world views that turned an unassuming IT guy into the “Edward Snowden”.
Key Takeaways:
Memoirs of the Last 20 Years of US Geopolitics
Permanent Record’s greatest value is providing a rarely seen view of life insides the US military and surveillance economy immediately following the 9/11 attacks. With the authorization of the ‘Patriot Act’ and AUMF against the nebulous notion of “Terrorism”, the United States effectively approved the ability to stay at war, indefinitely. In doing so, it also created a highly profitable surveillance apparatus for private enterprises to provide contractors for the intelligence community and to outsource the world to the lowest (semi-qualified) bidder. They did so at a time where the internet was a wholly unsettled frontier, writing guidelines to strip its users of anonymity and freedom of information, ascribing unfair malicious intent to everyone —allowing them to monitor everyone regardless of whether a crime was committed… yet.
In the two decades since 9/11, Human Intelligence (HumInt) gathering has been largely sunset in favor of Signals Intelligence (SigInt) and in aggregate this has cost the American taxpayer over $500Bn, with record budget requests of $55Bn & $58Bn just in 2017 & 2018 respectively! Only after the disclosures made by Snowden via Glenn Greenwald, were elected officials forced to take even a cursory look at how much we pay our own governments to spy on us. The CIA and NSA’s goal of Bulk Data Collection efforts — be it through the PRISM or XKeyScore programs are designed to track everything a user does online before they ever commit a crime, to be used against them in the event they ever do. As an electorate, we’ve traded the free and open internet for convenience, the illusion of security, and a Minority Report-esque pre-crime contraption. Only now do some of us realize how badly we’ve been ripped off.
Shocking Normality of Snowden’s Upbringing
Ed Snowden is only a few years older than I am, but just that small age difference made him one of the first young people to embrace the earliest days of personal computing. The stories Snowden tells of his upbringing in the late 80s & 90s felt so familiar to me — though initially, they felt like non-sequiturs. After all, I picked up the book for the juicy details on government spying, not his love of early digital message boards, adventures in community college, or a brief stint in the Army basic training. But these stories are important in helping to highlight the shaping of his idealism.
Ed Snowden didn’t set out to be a hero. He didn’t have some kind of a personal crusade of justice. He was an idealist, who’s idealism like that of so many others, was co-opted in the months and years after 9/11 to wage global war. He became a realist who set out to use his then-unique skills with programming and network infrastructure to make money as a system administrator. The more he learned, the more he became a cynic and when that cynicism clashed with his sense of what was right, he spoke up. The next Ed Snowden could be anybody. The next Ed Snowden could be you.
The Price Paid By Loved Ones
The most heartbreakingly beautiful chapter wasn’t even written by Snowden but by his then-girlfriend, now-wife. Towards the end, titled “From the Diary of Lindsay Mills”, the entries begin on the day that Lindsay returns from a trip to find Snowden gone in her own words. It covers the agony, doubt, and harassment she faced in the weeks following Snowden’s reappearance in Hong Kong. In Snowden’s mind, he was sparing a loved one from incrimination/co-conspiracy, but without context, by being absent, and out of the reach of the US Government, he left those closest to him to take the full legal brunt of his actions. Whistleblowers don't become so for fame or fortune and the consequences both Ed and Lindsay faced elucidated this ever more clearly.
The Whistleblower’s Catch-22
Snowden claims he didn’t write the book to change the public’s minds but rather to give characters to a story that for so long was ignored by the public, given the dense and technically complicated nature of the material at hand. Here’s the thing: Edward Snowden is a hero, according to Edward Snowden’s book.
To his credit, he doesn’t dispute the fact that his actions did break the law. Giving classified materials under any circumstances is expressly verboten. But should it be? Be it Snowden, who disclosed the US mass data collection efforts, or his counterparts like Thomas Drake (unauthorized mass surveillance) or Daniel Hale (extra-judicial drone strikes), under the current system, there is no way for whistleblowers, who spoke up when the US government disobey its own Constitution, to get a fair trial. The question isn’t “Was the law broken?” (it was) but as Snowden himself asks “If the law was broken, was it justified?” Snowden’s actions helped to change digital privacy laws and forced some modicum of transparency by major technology corporations. And yet he remains unable to come back to the US.
I write this at a time where the executive branch is barreling down on principled dissent, as never seen before in the modern history of the US, dubbing it “corruption”, “espionage”, and “treason”. This at a time where at least two unnamed whistleblowers have stepped forward, sparking actual impeachment inquiries into Donald Trump’s actions. Today, as it stands, the US Government will not allow a jury to hear or consider testimony from whistleblowers inside the intelligence community on why they did what they did. This means Snowden will likely remain exiled in Russia until he is pardoned by a future President, or the Espionage Act and whistleblower laws are amended by the US Congress. Oof. желаю тебе удачи Comrade…
Lastly, to the NSA analyst(s) inevitably reading this, I’d like to say thanks for making it this far. I hope you learned something, and if you can, please do hit the clap button 👏 on your way out.
Parting Thoughts
One of my personal OKRs for 2019 was to double the number of books I read annually from 8 to 16 (gulp!). Definitely a “stretch goal” but I wanted something that would be difficult, yet doable. With any goal setting exercise, there needs to be structure, measurability, and communication:
- Read ~25 pages per day and mark a daily calendar with a (Y or N) when completed.
- Publish takeaways and overall observations in a brief post like this.
For transparency: Over the first 9 months of 2019, I’ve read at least 25 pages on ~29% of days and finished 6 books, so I’m pacing at around 10 books by year-end, putting me well short of my goal. Hoping to make up some of the gaps on cross-continental flights but 16 is unlikely to happen at this point
Up Next: The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Finished!)
Last Read: Destined For War: Can America & China Escape Thucydides Trap?
