Permanent Record
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4.6 • 409 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Permanent Record
Incredible account by an incredible person. We need more of those ...
Extremely important book if you only know what was reported
Hearing Edward Joseph Snowden’s story in his own words can only deepen your resolve to steadfastly challenge the authoritarian deep state.
I feel shame that a state I had supported at one time would do this to my fellow countryman. And I wish Mr. Snowden the happiest life he can possibly achieve.
Death of Privacy
Snowden in his memoir and tell all, points out a critical tipping point in American History that impacts the collective freedom of everyone everywhere. 9-11. A moment where we could focus on punishing the parties responsible and cementing democratic freedoms. We of course went the other way. The outcome of that decision is the mobilization of technology to erode privacy and freedom unbeknownst to the citizens subject to it.
What makes this account moving is that Snowden gives us a linear retelling of his life. Subsequently the events and influences that formed him and his decision to become the whistleblower on the NSA’s illegal and unwarranted surveillance of the world. Additionally, he pulls in historical precepts and the US constitution to illustrate the original intention of government and its recent perversion. An indictment more damning than anything the government could ever throw at him for his revelations.
The details explained in this memoir are intricately and slowly paced out so that we feel some of the slow erosion of confidence and faith in the current state of democratic freedoms that Snowden experienced over his decade of working behind the scenes. The style helps us better empathize with what must have been the hardest decision of his life. A decision that he knew would exile him and make him public enemy number one. Further deepening the divide on whether you support or oppose his decision.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Snowden offers us some optimism and tools for understanding how to take back freedoms. What’s more, he discusses the stance of companies like Apple, Signal, and WhatsApp to enforce encryption and scale back government corporation. But when you look at Snowden’s simpler reflections on his life you can tease out a thread that may hold the ultimate self determining pathway through a simple hack; a less unhealthy reliance on technology in our daily lives. Along with the idea that anonymity on the web should be the default state.