Permanent Record – Edward Snowden – Cliff Notes
Edward Snowden gives us a brief view of his childhood, his parents divorce, and his emerging genius in the way he short cuts or ‘hacks’ his life. Arguably born at the right time, with the right parents, he was able to maximise his opportunities by getting to know computers early and programming them when most of us were – not.
His experience in the military post US 9/11 acutely demonstrated the braun and the terror culture that lurked there. With two leg stress fractures he was benched and discharged, feeling the stigma that only those of us who are ‘unfit’ but really want to be ‘fit’ will understand.
Snowden decides that IT is the way forward and obtains his security clearances and qualifications in networking languages and computing. He began to work as a contractor and was introduced to the vast opportunities that contracting with government could bring him.
Snowden describes how in an effort for the government to look like they were being efficient, and the private sector to make obscene amounts of money from the bottomless pit of government, tasks began to be outsourced. Not just any tasks. Tasks that required specialisation in a rapidly changing world. IT was the land of Oz and was quickly filled by contractors who could ask for whatever price they wanted, (as Snowden found when he asked for a very moderate raise which he felt was unachievable at the time) and receive it from a black budget without limits.
Snowden however still felt the need to serve his country with his skills and crossed over from contractor to ‘govvy’ and became a fully fledged employee of the CIA. At the beginning of his training he swore allegience to protect the constitution of the United States from all enemies both foreign and domestic. This is a crucial distinction and one that explains his actions from then on. The constitution of the United States is not the people, but it serves the people. So he had no allegiance to an individual, government, or department in terms of his service to his country that he felt so strongly about after 9/11.
From here he describes how he took various positions across the globe working in multiple departments and for various organisations until we come to the main arena where he was tasked with setting up a network for the NSA and other government agencies.
He goes on to describe his various roles and the building blocks of the different systems that work within the government intelligent agencies and how, unbelievably, none of them talk to each other. So he was tasked with building a search engine of sorts so each agency could find intelligence from other agencies.
It is here he discovers the vast amount of surveillance that is taking place of ordinary citizens, all neatly hidden under the Patriot Act. He then decides that it is a matter of public interest that this surveillance be exposed and he goes about creating a system of encryptions to safeguard the information from exposure to the agencies, and then contacts some journalists to share the information with. He decides that Hong Kong will be the safest place for the handover and on June 3 2013, meets with the journalists and they begin to film what will later be known as Citizen Four.
From there, en route to Ecuador through a Russian layover, his passport is cancelled by the US Government while he is in flight, and he stays in limbo for 40 days and nights at the Russian airport, until they grant him ‘temporary asylym’ on 1 August 2013, after continued media pressure and restriction of Russian flights and forced landings of any flights by the US and its allies, that may be thought to be carrying Snowden.
In the final chapter Snowden highlights what has come from his exposing of the documents and the mass surveillance program. In 2013 President Obama opens the national dialogue into surveillance, a fact only known to the public from Snowden’s exposure of it to the American public, 2015 US Congress passed the Freedom Act prohibiting bulk collection of American phone records, in 2016 more traffic on the internet was encrypted than not and http was replaced with https to help prevent third party interventions.
It is this final quote that for me summed up his reasons and intent for what he did.
“We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest, collective conversation that’s necessary.
We can’t let the god-like surveillance we’re under be used to ‘calculate’ our citzenship scores, or to ‘predict’ our criminal ‘activity’ to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity, or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes.”
Pages 332 and 333 Permanent Record Edward Snowden
Snowden is currently (at the time of reading the book anyway) President of the Fredom of the Press Foundation which funds Signal, an ecrypted system which allows whistleblowers to transfer documents to key newspaper journalists. He is living happily with his wife Lindsay.
My Comments
I really believe, having listened to Snowden and now read his book that he is an uncommon genius and still, in my view, does not entirely understand this about himself.
For me the turning point in understanding him and his actions was his allegiance to the Constitution. Defending it, and not an individual or government, is perhaps the most important thing to come out of this. I’m not a Constitutional expert and not even a US citizen but I did study American History at university for a while. The Constitution is the United States. It was what it was founded on and allows the country to flourish. After 9/11 it was bent to suit the powers of the day and arguably abandoned altogether and this is what Snowden rang the alarm bell about.
Snowden is still a wanted criminal in the US and on re-entry will face charges for disclosing secret government documents, and the penalty is up to ten years per document. None of the good things that have beend done since the disclosure can be included as argument.
More on Snowden
Edward Snowden on Joe Rogan – Really worth the listen
Citizen Four – The documentary that started it all