Book Review by Michael Isenberg.
My liberal and libertarian friends say that Edward Snowden is a hero, who uncovered a dangerous government conspiracy to invade our privacy and curtail our liberty.
My conservative friends say that he’s a traitor, who seriously compromised the security of our nation and the ability of our government to fight terrorism.
The Edward Snowden who emerges from the pages of Permanent Record, his 2019 autobiography, isn’t so much either of these as something else entirely—a hacker.
Snowden’s affinity for hacking is what made him so valuable to his employers. But it was also what made him a risk to them.
Born in 1983, Snowden was ten years old or so when his father brought home the family’s first desktop PC. It was “a Compaq Presario 425,” he writes. “List price $1,399…and initially set up—much to my mother’s chagrin—smack in the middle of the dining-room table. From the moment it appeared, the computer and I were inseparable”—he often had to be sternly ejected when other members of the family wanted to use it.
This part of the book is a delightful trip down memory lane for those who lived ‘90s Internet culture—it captures the energy, the all-nighters, and the Wild West mentality that prevailed before Facebook and Google corporatized the web. Not to mention the noisy, slow-ass modems (“the computer would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of snakes”) which dropped your connection when some less computer-savvy, or simply spiteful, member of your family picked up an extension phone.
Snowden soon became enthralled by the vast opportunities for learning on the Internet. “A crash course on how to build my own computer led to a crash course on processor architecture, with side excursions into information about martial arts, guns, sports cars, and—full disclosure—softcore-ish goth-y porn. I sometime had the feeling that I had to know everything and wasn’t going to sign off until I did.”
He also became an avid gamer. Loom was a particular favorite. “The deep psychological appeal of games," he writes, "which are really just a series of increasingly difficult challenges, is the belief that they can be won.”
A bout with mono caused a substantial gap in his high school attendance, but he graduated via GED—right around the time of the September 11 attacks; his country was going to war. Wanting “to be part of something,” he enlisted in Special Forces training, but an injury prevented him from finishing the course.
Snowden had another idea, though: “I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world of asymmetrical conflict. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinken-lights, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes.”
Such jobs required a college degree and a security clearance, neither of which he had. But that was just another system to be hacked. Some courses at Anne Arundel Community College and a stint as a night watchman in a top secret government facility under construction got him what he needed, and Edward Snowden was launched on his career as an intelligence officer.
There followed a series of positions with the CIA and NSA, both as employee and contractor. As in his teen years, he had to know everything, and now, with a top secret clearance, it seemed he could. Classified information is supposed to be compartmentalized, parceled out on a need-to-know basis, “but the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything.”
An older colleague (quite a character in his own right) told him “the first things everyone looks up on the CIA’s internal networks are aliens and 9/11” and Snowden was no different. “For the record,” he says, “as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence. But al-Qaeda did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the Saudis.”
Of course it was not files about aliens that ultimately led Snowden to blow the whistle on the US government. It was the federales' mass surveillance capabilities.
Snowden first suspected their existence when he attended a conference about the Chinese government’s capabilities, and started to wonder whether Uncle Sam was working along similar lines. His suspicions were confirmed by accident in July 2009 when some “Exceptionally Controlled Information” was left on a system where it didn’t belong. It was Snowden’s job, as SysAdmin, to scrub it. “It” turned out to be a draft copy of the classified version of the Inspector General’s report on the President’s Surveillance Program.
The existence of this program had already been leaked to the public and there was outrage over the revelation that the Bush Administration had been conducting electronic surveillance of targeted individuals without obtaining warrants from the FISA court—the so called “warrantless wiretaps.” [As a matter fact, it was my own outrage over that which got me started as a blogger].
What Snowden discovered in the classified report was that the warrantless wiretaps were just the tip of the iceberg.
The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from targeted collection of communications to ‘bulk collection,’ which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance…the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past…a historic effort to achieve total access to—and clandestinely take possession of—the records of all digital communications in existence… It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and that if my generation didn’t intervene the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.
In other words, a permanent record.
For a while, Snowden was in a quandary as to what to do. “I was lost, and fell into a dark mood while I struggled with my conscience.” After much soul-searching, he remembered he had “sworn an oath of service not to an agency, not even a government, but to the public, in support and defense of the Constitution.” He resolved to reveal what he knew.
But he knew the government would try to paint him as a member of the tin-foil hat brigade. He had to do things in a way such that he would be believed. Which meant spiriting classified documents out of a top secret government facility, fleeing the country before the NSA caught on to him, and getting the documents into the hands of someone prominent enough that they couldn’t be ignored.
In other words, Edward Snowden needed the ultimate hack.
The part of the book in which he details how he did all that is absolutely thrilling. A real-life spy story.
Snowden’s decision came at great potential cost to his personal life. He was very much in love with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and their love story is as much a part of Permanent Record as the NSA is. In going public and leaving the country, he risked never seeing her again. After he bolted, the FBI absolutely raked Lindsay over the coals—we get all the details in Lindsay’s own words from a diary she kept. Snowden knew this would happen and had given Lindsay no inkling of what he was about to do. Thanks to this precaution, when the FBI interrogated her, she knew nothing and there was no crime they could charge her with. Snowden could only hope she would forgive him. Only a person who sincerely believed in what he was doing would put his whole life on the line like that.
And yet one can’t dispute that some part of Snowden was in it for the hack. In describing his arrival in Hong Kong with his stash of classified documents, he says, “I’d made it out of the NSA, I’d made it out of the country. I had beaten the game.”
He had arranged to meet documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald at his hotel. He told them how to find him. “Go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s Cube.”
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Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. He is the author of Full Asylum, a comedy about hacking, hospital gowns, and government surveillance. It is available on Amazon.com
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