Permanent Record Hardcover – September 17, 2019

The revolution in communication and computing technologies which has continually accelerated since the introduction of integrated circuits in the 1960s and has since given rise to the Internet, ubiquitous mobile telephony, vast data centres with formidable processing and storage capacity, and technologies such as natural language text processing, voice recognition, and image analysis, has created the potential, for the first time in human history, of mass surveillance to a degree unimagined even in dystopian fiction such as George Orwell's  1984  or attempted by the secret police of totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or North Korea. But, residents of enlightened developed countries such as the United States thought, they were protected, by legal safeguards such as the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, from having their government deploy such forbidding tools against its own citizens. Certainly, there was awareness, from disclosures such as those in James Bamford's 1982 book  The Puzzle Palace , that agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) were employing advanced and highly secret technologies to spy upon foreign governments and their agents who might attempt to harm the United States and its citizens, but their activities were circumscribed by a legal framework which strictly limited the scope of their domestic activities.Well, that's what most people believed until the courageous acts by Edward Snowden, a senior technical contractor working for the NSA, revealed, in 2013, multiple programs of indiscriminate mass surveillance directed against, well, everybody in the world, U.S. citizens most definitely included. The NSA had developed and deployed a large array of hardware and software tools whose mission was essentially to capture all the communications and personal data of everybody in the world, scan it for items of interest, and store it forever where it could be accessed in future investigations. Data were collected through a multitude of means: monitoring traffic across the Internet, collecting mobile phone call and location data (estimated at five billion records per day in 2013), spidering data from Web sites, breaking vulnerable encryption technologies, working with “corporate partners” to snoop data passing through their facilities, and fusing this vast and varied data with query tools such as XKEYSCORE, which might be though of as a Google search engine built by people who from the outset proclaimed, “Heck yes, we're evil!”How did Edward Snowden, over his career a contractor employee for companies including BAE Systems, Dell Computer, and Booz Allen Hamilton, and a government employee of the CIA, obtain access to such carefully guarded secrets? What motivated him to disclose this information to the media? How did he spirit the information out of the famously security-obsessed NSA and get it into the hands of the media? And what were the consequences of his actions? All of these questions are answered in this beautifully written, relentlessly candid, passionately argued, and technologically insightful book by the person who, more than anyone else, is responsible for revealing the malignant ambition of the government of the United States and its accomplices in the Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) to implement and deploy a global panopticon which would shrink the scope of privacy of individuals to essentially zero—in the words of an NSA PowerPoint (of course) presentation from 2011, “Sniff It All, Know It All, Collect It All, Process It All, Exploit It All, Partner It All”. They didn't mention “Store It All Forever”, but with the construction of the US$1.5 billion Utah Data Center which consumes 65 megawatts of electricity, it's pretty clear that's what they're doing.Edward Snowden was born in 1983 and grew up along with the personal computer revolution. His first contact with computers was when his father brought home a Commodore 64, on which father and son would play many games. Later, just seven years old, his father introduced him to programming on a computer at the Coast Guard base where he worked, and, a few years later, when the family had moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC after his father had been transferred to Coast Guard Headquarters, the family got a Compaq 486 PC clone which opened the world of programming and exploration of online groups and the nascent World Wide Web via the narrow pipe of a dial-up connection to America Online. In those golden days of the 1990s, the Internet was mostly created by individuals for individuals, and you could have any identity, or as many identities as you wished, inventing and discarding them as you explored the world and yourself. This was ideal for a youth who wasn't interested in sports and tended to be reserved in the presence of others. He explored the many corners of the Internet and, like so many with the talent for understanding complex systems, learned to deduce the rules governing systems and explore ways of using them to his own ends. Bob Bickford defines a hacker as “Any person who derives joy from discovering ways to circumvent limitations.” Hacking is not criminal, and it has nothing to do with computers. As his life progressed, Snowden would learn how to hack school, the job market, and eventually the oppressive surveillance state.By September 2001, Snowden was working for an independent Web site developer operating out of her house on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland, the home of the NSA (for whom, coincidentally, his mother worked in a support capacity). After the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, he decided, in his family's long tradition of service to their country (his grandfather is a Rear Admiral in the Coast Guard, and ancestors fought in the Revolution, Civil War, and both world wars), that his talents would be better put to use in the intelligence community. His lack of a four year college degree would usually be a bar to such employment, but the terrorist attacks changed all the rules, and military veterans were being given a fast track into such jobs, so, after exploring his options, Snowden enlisted in the Army, under a special program called 18 X-Ray, which would send qualifying recruits directly into Special Forces training after completing their basic training.His military career was to prove short. During a training exercise, he took a fall in the forest which fractured the tibia bone in both legs and was advised he would never be able to qualify for Special Forces. Given the option of serving out his time in a desk job or taking immediate “administrative separation” (in which he would waive the government's liability for the injury), he opted for the latter. Finally, after a circuitous process, he was hired by a government contractor and received the exclusive Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance which qualified him to work at the CIA.A few words are in order about contractors at government agencies. In some media accounts of the Snowden disclosures, he has been dismissed as “just a contractor”, but in the present-day U.S. government where nothing is as it seems and much of everything is a scam, in fact many of the people working in the most sensitive capacities in the intelligence community are contractors supplied by the big “beltway bandit” firms which have sprung up like mushrooms around the federal swamp. You see, agencies operate under strict limits on the number of pure government (civil service) employees they can hire and, of course, government employment is almost always forever. But, if they pay a contractor to supply a body to do precisely the same job, on site, they can pay the contractor from operating funds and bypass the entire civil service mechanism and limits and, further, they're free to cut jobs any time they wish and to get rid of people and request a replacement from the contractor without going through the arduous process of laying off or firing a “govvy”. In all of Snowden's jobs, the blue badged civil servants worked alongside the green badge contractors without distinction in job function. Contractors would rarely ever visit the premises of their nominal “employers” except for formalities of hiring and employee benefits. One of Snowden's co-workers said “contracting was the third biggest scam in Washington after the income tax and Congress.”His work at the CIA was in system administration, and he rapidly learned that regardless of classification levels, compartmentalisation, and need to know, the person in a modern organisation who knows everything, or at least has the ability to find out if interested, is the system administrator. In order to keep a system running, ensure the integrity of the data stored on it, restore backups when hardware, software, or user errors cause things to be lost, and the myriad other tasks that comprise the work of a “sysadmin”, you have to have privileges to access pretty much everything in the system. You might not be able to see things on other systems, but the ones under your control are an open book. The only safeguard employers have over rogue administrators is monitoring of their actions, and this is often laughably poor, especially as bosses often lack the computer savvy of the administrators who work for them.After nine months on the job, an opening came up for a CIA civil servant job in overseas technical support. Attracted to travel and exotic postings abroad, Snowden turned in his green badge for a blue one and after a training program, was sent to exotic…Geneva as computer security technician, under diplomatic cover. As placid as it may seem, Geneva was on the cutting edge of CIA spying technology, with the United Nations, numerous international agencies, and private banks all prime targets for snooping.Two years later Snowden was a contractor once again, this time with Dell Computer, who placed him with the NSA, first in Japan, then back in Maryland, and eventually in Hawaii as lead technologist of the Office of Information Sharing, where he developed a system called “Heartbeat” which allowed all of NSA's sites around the world to share their local information with others. It can be thought of as an automated blog aggregator for Top Secret information. This provided him personal access to just about everything the NSA was up to, world-wide. And he found what he read profoundly disturbing and dismaying.Once he became aware of the scope of mass surveillance, he transferred to another job in Hawaii which would allow him to personally verify its power by gaining access to XKEYSCORE. His worst fears were confirmed, and he began to patiently, with great caution, and using all of his insider's knowledge, prepare to bring the archives he had spirited out from the Heartbeat system to the attention of the public via respected media who would understand the need to redact any material which might, for example, put agents in the field at risk. He discusses why, based upon his personal experience and that of others, he decided the whistleblower approach within the chain of command was not feasible: the unconstitutional surveillance he had discovered had been approved at the highest levels of government—there was nobody who could stop it who had not already approved it.The narrative then follows preparing for departure, securing the data for travel, taking a leave of absence from work, travelling to Hong Kong, and arranging to meet the journalists he had chosen for the disclosure. There is a good deal of useful tradecraft information in this narrative for anybody with secrets to guard. Then, after the stories began to break in June, 2013, the tale of his harrowing escape from the long reach of Uncle Sam is recounted. Popular media accounts of Snowden “defecting to Russia” are untrue. He had planned to seek asylum in Ecuador, and had obtained a laissez-passer from the Ecuadoran consul and arranged to travel to Quito from Hong Kong via Moscow, Havana, and Caracas, as that was the only routing which did not pass through U.S. airspace or involve stops in countries with extradition treaties with the U.S. Upon arrival in Moscow, he discovered that his U.S. passport had been revoked while en route from Hong Kong, and without a valid passport he could neither board an onward flight nor leave the airport. He ended up trapped in the Moscow airport for forty days while twenty-seven countries folded to U.S. pressure and denied him political asylum. After spending so long in the airport he even became tired of eating at the Burger King there, on August 1st, 2013 Russia granted him temporary asylum. At this writing, he is still in Moscow, having been joined in 2017 by Lindsay Mills, the love of his life he left behind in Hawaii in 2013, and who is now his wife.This is very much a personal narrative, and you will get an excellent sense for who Edward Snowden is and why he chose to do what he did. The first thing that struck me is that he really knows his stuff. Some of the press coverage presented him as a kind of low-level contractor systems nerd, but he was principal architect of EPICSHELTER, NSA's worldwide backup and archiving system, and sole developer of the Heartbeat aggregation system for reports from sites around the globe. At the time he left to make his disclosures, his salary was US$120,000 per year, hardly the pay of a humble programmer. His descriptions of technologies and systems in the book are comprehensive and flawless. He comes across as motivated entirely by outrage at the NSA's flouting of the constitutional protections supposed to be afforded U.S. citizens and its abuses in implementing mass surveillance, sanctioned at the highest levels of government across two administrations from different political parties. He did not seek money for his disclosures, and did not offer them to foreign governments. He took care to erase all media containing the documents he removed from the NSA before embarking on his trip from Hong Kong, and when approached upon landing in Moscow by agents from the Russian FSB (intelligence service) with what was obviously a recruitment pitch, he immediately cut it off, saying,“Listen, I understand who you are, and what this is. Please let me be clear that I have no intention to cooperate with you. I'm not going to cooperate with any intelligence service. I mean no disrespect, but this isn't going to be that kind of meeting. If you want to search my bag, it's right here. But I promise you, there's nothing in it that can help you.”And that was that.Edward Snowden could have kept quiet, done his job, collected his handsome salary, continued to live in a Hawaiian paradise, and share his life with Lindsay, but he threw it all away on a matter of principle and duty to his fellow citizens and the Constitution he had sworn to defend when taking the oath upon joining the Army and the CIA. On the basis of the law, he is doubtless guilty of the three federal crimes with which he has been charged, sufficient to lock him up for as many as thirty years should the U.S. lay its hands on him. But he believes he did the correct thing in an attempt to right wrongs which were intolerable. I agree, and can only admire his courage. If anybody is deserving of a Presidential pardon, it is Edward Snowden.

This is a Great book as both Republicans and Democrats Hate it .Having been in the whistleblower position myself. It does not surprise me that some people give this a one star. If you live a simple life without any challenges, and you failed to challenge the system itself you will never see the dark side exists. Furthermore most people do not realize that whistleblowing does not have its rewards. Most the time it destroys a life for a very minimal disrupts for years to come.I was born and raised in what is now known as Silicone Valley, I saw the rise of technology that most elsewhere in the United States was unknown at the time. Wafers and punch cards were a sign of things to come. My mom worked on Skylab to help develop chips ever used. Most people do not realize how early on in our technological growth we were using advanced technology . This book makes clear what I've always known throughout my life that there was much more going on in the technological areas and was known to the public. Living in the San Francisco Bay area one is subjected to technology and military influences. Well into the 1990s this technology walked hand-in-hand with our Armed Forces. I probably had more access than Edward Snowden did technology as it was right at my front door. I could ride my bike no more than a half a mile or so and be at the closest electronic firm where we would dumpster dive and learn from what was being tossed out. Back then everyone throughout everything and nobody cared what they were throwing away.Edward Snowden is example of the most extreme whistleblowing. He is also paying a heavy price which I do not think most people realize who are reading this book and give it a low score. I understand his perspective very much so having seen very similar activities in my own personal life. And looking beyond those who knew me ever clueless as to what life really has in store. His perspective is you an idea that he is what we might call a very common individual, that had some interesting highlights in his life and sharing them to give you a perspective. Feminist perspective also helps us understand he is not simply a spy that was infiltrating the United States in espionage and technological gathering. More so it appears he was a person that battle with his own employment in future and doing the right thing. I know exactly what that feels like because I personally have been in that position and still dealing with the repercussions of my own actions being a whistleblower.The book, is written very well. He tells it as if he was narrating a movie, but he's actually telling us how he came to be where he was. I am happy that he did not disclose any information that would discredit the United States in this book. I think many are expecting to see the secrets that are hidden behind his acts. Unless you are living under a lock most of us understand that operating systems all have access, that everything that we use has access. Going back to the very first operating systems that existed there've always been ways to gather and reverse engineer that information making it possible to gather with the user and was doing all unknown to the individual. This is nothing new however we all look of line I did not realize the level that exists. Edward Snowden, has lost all his existing life. Many of us look for adjustments in our lives when things happen but reading this book you can tell that there is a separation of who he is now in who he once was so fast is that chasm, that even when he's writing this book you can tell he's not even sure who he is at this particular point. Not trying to do a psychological evaluation, but I do not think most people understand what losses on this level. Many of us lose loved ones, or have lost a valuable job, or have been forced to move thousands of miles away to another job. All these things are disruption to ourselves in the list of what is disruptive is amazing. But very few people likely in this world know what it's like to lose their country. Not just the country changing under them. The losing the country completely. Edward Snowden is no longer a citizen of the United States. Most of us reading this if you are in United States live under that comfort and blanket that we have knowingly our citizens here and we have the right to cherish that remarkable blanket that we have. The writer of this book has no such identity. It appears by reading the book that he still after all these years sees himself as a temporary permanent guest of Russia.If you want a book, it gives you the perspective and analogy of an individual that commits the act of whistleblowing on a international scale of consequences. This is a good book to read. If you're looking for top-secret information, I'm feeling espionage and cloak and dagger you will not see it here . This is actually one of the few books I have read with the individual tells about his own life story that I found interesting. Most people are too scared to get the information that I see in this book they don't want to reveal themselves, and they want for themselves in a better light than they are. Edward Snowden does not pull any punches in this book, and he makes it very clear about his position is. And that he does love the country that he left. I don't doubt that his intentions were done for good reasons that he saw. But it was careless on my own opinion for him to think that what he knew, and what he would reveal would not be adjusted and covered back up within a very short amount of time. One thing people should know about our government and most people do they just don't talk about it. Is we are very good about redirection in this country. It's what we do really well on all aspects and levels. It's not a negative type thing it's a poor sort of way our country solves the initial problem they are having.In closing I normally do not give to you like this, usually it's very statistic, and analogically placed. This one I had to give a personal point of view myself so what I was thinking. Edward Snowden is one of those people that would be great to sit across the table have a cup of coffee with them and just really talk about what's going on. Because this book does do a good job about that but I still have a couple of questions after reading it. And the questions have nothing to do with national security a more likely have to do with the fact that he had to of known that even revealing the information, that information would be short-lived if it was exposed. I think many of his superiors are looking at this also and wondering what he thought would change. Nothing would change in a very short amount of time this exposure would allow our nation to go even deeper keeping this information more readily available to its employees.Why did I say: This is a Great book as both Republicans and Democrats Hate it ? Because, when this was first revealed, both sides of the aisle wanted to take credit, and blame the other side with this security breach that allowed the information to be exposed. I found it interesting on the automatic misdirection, and redirection is done by our politicians immediately after this taken place. Meaning both sides hated the fact of what he did and knew that major damage control at the time would have to be enacted. And both sides wanted to be the hero.Definitely a five-star book and worth reading.

This has been a riveting read. I fell straight into the "I'll just read one more chapter, then I'll get back to work..." trap.Obviously the initial pull to read the book is the NSA stuff, and the great chase which culminates in Snowden's refuge in Russia. But the book is so much more than that. His recounting of his childhood, and the joys of dial-up modems and irritating siblings, is wonderful nostalgia but always laced with his discomfort and struggle with the social structures around him.The book's natural progression of explaining how the internet has changed in function, as he lived through those changes, unrolls as a beautifully written discussion of how we've reached the state of the Net we have today. It's easily light enough for non-techies to understand, but the insight and narration really opens up the questions of what we (society) demanded of the internet, and what it's done to us.The book doesn't meander. There's no padding. But by the time you reach the releasing of the files and the round the world escape, it's very natural. Reading it, the chase is as engrossing to read as his thoughts on the Commodore 64. It's a great book, perhaps made all the greater if you can nod along with remembrances of life before 24/7 smartphones. Above all, it's hopeful of a better future.(Couple of notes as a UK reader: The book is written in universal English, there's no bewildering US slang used. The book doesn't go into American politics or deep into American terms. There are a couple of pages of US history, mainly early on about Snowden's family tree, but it's not a diversion. It doesn't read like an American book, aimed at American readers, and leaving everyone else bewildered.)

As an expert in the information technology industry. If transparency is what your are seeking then this book is all you need. A full deep dive into the life of a normal person who has been branded as this villain. Why not find out directly from the person. Very well written and highly recommended

Unlike Edward Snowden, I don’t accept axiomatically that it’s wrong for a well-meaning government to collect my data. Rather, I hold that belief for some of the same reasons I don’t like the death penalty: first, I don’t want to have to trust my government with infallibility; second, it freaks me out that, once it’s established the government can do it, the private sector might get a look-in (which for data it already does, of course; possession is nine tenths of the law)Either way, there’s no doubt in my mind that Edward Snowden will one day be recognised as an American hero. He has the Constitution firmly on his side, besides.“No Place to Hide” I read as soon as it came out, and I even caught the Oliver Stone movie on the plane, but horse’s mouth turns out to be better than both.My first reaction when I read the Greenwald book was “omigod, a 29-year-old with no college education can look up all data on the planet; the Russians must have their pick from 10,000 underpaid Federal agents to find out anything they want” and as the CIA went on to lose all its agents in China I allowed myself to think we might come to our senses and turn the whole thing off.I was wrong on all counts, it turns out. First of all, duh, we ain’t turning it off. But the better part of the story, the one I came to appreciate by reading “Permanent Record,” (and yes, I know, the movie made the same point, but not as well, so I did not “buy” it) is that Edward Snowden is a rather unique guy.So yeah, it’s true he had clearance to look at all information ever created on planet Earth, and it’s true he never went to college, but somebody’s got to have the clearance and you could not want for a better candidate: leaving his undisputed technical skills to one side, he’s Mayflower stock, his parents both served in the intelligence community, he wrote to the CIA as a kid to tell them he’d hacked their website, he enlisted as a private after 9-11 and, hell, he’s a patriot.So I’m relieved. And I was entertained. His life may not have been remarkable or exciting, but you’re invited to find out about it through the eyes of a kid that loves to examine everything and hack everything and loves to brag about how he did it (a quality he sees in others but fails to identify in himself, incidentally).Bottom line, the book would be worth reading even if it wasn’t about the whistleblower who uncovered the biggest and most unconstitutional government secret of the past half-century.Except it is, and that makes it a total must-read.Come on Elizabeth Warren, pardon the man. I really hope his chances are better than he intimates on page 271!

What an excellent memoir by Snowden. This is my 3rd book I read in my entire life. Incredible Valor. Cannot imagine what he is going through for the sacrifices he made and yet the govt which he hoped will be held accountable still continue to do the things he exposed with impunity. Reading this book makes me think that Snowden was mostly let down by people not standing up for him. The book reveals how much he tried to raise this issue within the NSA and why he chose to go to Journalists atlast. If govt (& their propagandists) call him puppet, make no mistake that implies people are Enemies.

As I close my Kindle -- perhaps sending some signals to Amazon's servers, and the various secret services surveilling it -- I'm deeply touched by this book, and think to how I first came across Snowden. It was after the NSA's schemes were made public, but before his name was revealed. Following Glenn Greenwald and his immensely interesting Guardian journalism, I had deciced to donate money to Glenn's partly crowd-financed endeavours. To my surprise, shortly thereafter, my Mastercard was blocked, without me ever learning the reason. To this day I don't know if it was a random fluke (it never happened before, or since), or a sign of the Secret Powers That Be in action. But maybe that's the dark beauty of the Chilling Effect -- whether or not we are observed, we surely feel like it, and we may consciously and sub-consciously adjust our actions.This book is an important masterpiece. We already knew Ed was extremely brave and extremely smart. Now we also know he's an extremely good writer. The words flow on the page with conciseness and emotion, and it's hard to put the book down once started. I can only imagine how many future whistleblowers it might inspire. How many tech experts it makes stop and think, "What am I doing? And who am I doing it for?"But maybe we shouldn't be too surprised. The type of principled stand Ed took is deeply rooted not just in love, but also a humanist background. He had his head on screwed right before society's more evil parts could corrupt his wallet and make it think for him, as it often does.This book is currently under attack by the US government. They try to sue to get his royalties. We always worry about the Chinese credit system ranking and blocking humans (as we should), but somewhat more rarely do we worry about how the financial system itself can be used to block us. (Incidentally, Ed's credit cards have been blocked too, as he's living his life in exile.) But to give back to Ed's sacrifice, perhaps money isn't even that important. Making his sacrifice not have been in vein is.I do wonder if technology's progress can ever be stopped, though, in a kind of "Curb the company's reach for power through laws" type of ways. And then I wonder if delving even more deeply into that progress may instead be the answer -- to have counter-technology to recreate a power balance. One the one hand, by evolving tools that better encrypt our communication (or would I just become a higher-priority target by installing Ed's suggested messenger, Signal? Ah, the Chilling Effect!). On the other hand, by perhaps increasing transparency -- surveillance? -- of the secret services themselves. Would the intelligence worker, crouching over their latest iteration of XKEYSCORE or another illegal spying program, perform the same searches if they themselves had a camera on them -- watched by millions across the globe, shining light into the darkest corners of the tech cave?Thank you, Ed, for doing just that -- shining light. May you and your wife and friends live a happy life in exile. My own country, Germany, was too cowardly to consider a safe harbor for you. But know you have the support from many of us citizens here. Love & peace!