Before leaving Hong Kong, he writes, he “wiped my four laptops completely clean and destroyed the cryptographic key,” which meant he could no longer access any of the documents.In the latter section of the book, he describes a gripping scene when Russian officials — presumably from the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB — whisk him into a room where they pressure him to cooperate. his desk in plain view of anyone who might enter.After assembling his collection of files, he began reaching out tentatively to journalists. “Our data wanders endlessly.”Snowden doesn’t point to any single moment when he crossed from conscience-wracked employee to — depending on your perspective — determined turncoat or whistleblower. Technological change and the calamity of 9/11 yielded Sweeping up phone records of Americans citizens, eavesdropping on foreign leaders, harvesting data from internet activity: For revealing these secret programs and more, Snowden was deemed a traitor by the Obama administration, which charged him with “Permanent Record” is a riveting account and a curious artifact. Book review: Edward Snowden explains how he pulled off one of the largest leaks in U.S. history.
Snowden berates himself for supporting the Iraq War, as if he somehow helped steer the country into that conflict. That spring, he emptied his bank accounts and shoved the cash into a steel box for the girlfriend he was about to abandon. (his grandfather), the Coast Guard (his father), the N.S.A. Snowden says he cut them off. It’s like a recursive loop of life imitating art imitating life; in Cohen’s “Permanent Record” weaves together personal intel and spycraft info, much of it technologically elaborate yet clearly explained. He told his employer — at that time he was working What entails effective “oversight” if the public is kept in the dark? Washington Post | Sep 23, 2019 at 3:38 PM . It becomes more energetic when he expounds on the architecture of sprawling computer systems that hoover up our personal data and the perils they pose to humanity.No matter where you are physically, “you are also elsewhere,” he writes in one of the book’s most evocative sections. “Whereas other spies have committed espionage, sedition and treason,” he writes, “ I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism.”In his acknowledgments, Snowden thanks the novelist Joshua Cohen for “helping to transform my rambling reminiscences and capsule manifestoes into a book.” (As the N.S.A. “This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race and age,” Snowden writes, “from the meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or cousin.”This is funny, but it’s ominous, too. One of this book’s greatest flaws is that it gives us almost no meaningful insight into that life of perpetual exile.Snowden describes how he was joined in Russia by his American girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and offers their marriage two years ago as a happy ending.But what is that existence really like? Without belaboring his points, Snowden pushes the reader to reflect more seriously on what every American should be asking already. He gave cubes as gifts to those he was seeking to dupe and gave them tips on how to solve them.
Some of the most gripping passages in the book center on his forays around Oahu in a car loaded with a laptop and technical equipment. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Revealing state secrets is hard, but revealing yourself in a memoir might be harder. As a teenager, Snowden learned how to hack school, examining the class syllabus to figure out how he could exploit its weaknesses; the goal was to do the least amount of work without flunking out.School was at best a distraction, he says, and at worst “an illegitimate system” that “wouldn’t recognize any legitimate dissent.” He preferred to spend time on “something new called the internet,” a “goddamned miracle” that was still distinctly human and profoundly weird, before monetization and surveillance set in. Airport in Moscow for what he expected to be a tense but temporary wait for a connecting flight on his way to asylum in Ecuador. It has been more than six years since Edward Snowden landed at Sheremetyevo As Edward Snowden puts it in the preface of “Permanent Record”: “The decision to come forward with evidence of government wrongdoing was easier for me to make than the decision, here, to give an account of my life.”Snowden, of course, is the former intelligence contractor who, in 2013, leaked documents about the United States government’s surveillance programs, dispelling any notions that the National Security Agency and its allies were playing a quaint game of spy vs. spy, limiting their dragnet to specific persons of interest. The internet of the 1990s was a liberating space, he says, where adopting and discarding different avatars could open up possibilities for more authentic expression and connection.“This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides,” he recalls, “or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations.” (In the 2014 book “The Snowden Files,” the British journalist Luke Harding describes online posts made in the early 2000s under the handle TheTrueHOOHA — identified by Harding as Snowden — that extolled “sink-or-swim views on Social Security” and “the joys of gun ownership.”)Galvanized by 9/11, Snowden eventually turned his technical know-how into a career in intelligence, obtaining a top-secret clearance at the age of 22 and bouncing around between different contractors before becoming disillusioned at some point during the Obama presidency. “I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me,” he writes. Book of the day Politics books.