A Guy Holding a Rubik’s Cube

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden.
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.

Even as a child, Edward Snowden never met a system he didn’t want to hack. To learn the rules by which it operates and find a way around them. Not just computer systems, like the Los Alamos servers he hacked as a teenager, but any sort of rule-based system: How to solve the Rubik’s cube. How to get around his mother’s rule that he had to read a book before he could rent a new game for his Nintendo. How to game the grading system at school to get a passing grade with the minimum amount of work.

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.

I have no doubt that Edward Snowden was motivated by a sincere love for our country, and for the ideals of freedom that make it what it is. His dedication to those ideals is evident throughout Permanent Record. He talks about liberty and the Constitution constantly, and the way he talks about them, it’s clear that they are not merely buzzwords to him. He demonstrates a keen understanding of the philosophical principle on which they’re based: “In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.”

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.”

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 Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): YouTube, Mike Mozart/FLICKR Commons

Any Resemblance to Trump is Purely Coincidental

The Plot against America by Philip Roth.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh—the hero aviator, first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, and idol of millions—gave a speech to a rally of the America First Committee in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a passionate appeal for the United States to stay out of World War II. He argued that the American people opposed entering the war, and it would be a non-issue except for the agitation of three groups of people: British propagandists, the Roosevelt Administration---and the Jews. Of this last group he said “their greatest danger in this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Classic anti-Semitic trope. The Jews control everything.

What if, instead of giving that speech in 1941, Lindbergh gave it a year earlier—before the 1940 election? And what if that, combined with his own enormous celebrity, propels him to the Republican nomination for president and, in a surprise to everyone, he defeats the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt in November?

That is the premise of Philip Roth’s alternate history novel, The Plot against America. The novel has been made into a mini-series starring John Turturro and Winona Ryder. It premieres on HBO next week. But as I always say, this is Nerds who Read, and so today I will review the original Philip Roth novel.

Once in the White House, Lindbergh signs an “understanding” with Nazi Germany to keep the US out of the war. But many people, especially Jews, fear he has a plan to impose fascism on America.

We see all this from the point of view a typical Jewish family of the time. Interestingly, it is Roth’s own family. The nine-year-old narrator is named Philip Roth, son of Herman and Bess Roth, brother of Sanford “Sandy” Roth, all residing at 81 Summit Ave, Newark, New Jersey, just as the real-life Roths did.

As in To Kill a Mockingbird, a child narrator puts an idyllic spin on the story, in which the great events often go on in the background, as Philip is engrossed in more pressing concerns. Especially how the latest news is going to affect the amount of time he has to spend with his downstairs neighbor Selden, a drippy boy who follows Philip around with a chessboard. Whatever he does, Philip can’t shake him.

One of the things that intrigues me about history is that it seems so much more confusing when you’re in the middle of it than when you’re looking back decades or centuries later. Today we all know the Nazis were some of the most despicable and evil thugs in history. But during their rise in the 1930s, it wasn’t so clear to many people. Sure there were some like Winston Churchill and J.R.R. Tolkien who saw right through them—and got dismissed as “warmongers” for their trouble. But many others were taken in. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson) visited Berlin in 1937 and met with Hitler—all smiles. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sat down with der Fuhrer in Munich in 1938 to carve up Czechoslovakia. He returned to England with a worthless piece of paper signed by Hitler and an announcement of “peace for our time”—less than a year before the outbreak of World War II.

Lindbergh himself made a number of trips to Nazi Germany, including attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, after which he wrote to a friend that Hitler “is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German people.” In 1938, at a dinner at the American embassy in Berlin, he accepted a medal, the Service Cross of the German Eagle, from senior Nazi leader Hermann Göring.

And so it is with the fictional Lindbergh Administration. The anti-Semitism of Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech turns out to be a one-off event, leading many people to believe that he didn’t really mean it. Perhaps he was just poorly advised. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh even has a close Jewish confidante, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf. By a remarkable coincidence, the rabbi marries Mrs. Roth’s sister Evelyn—a teacher and sort of younger version of Delores Umbridge. The marriage doubles as a convenient literary device by which the ordinary Roths, and therefore the reader, gain visibility into the inner workings of the White House.

In any case, nothing the Lindbergh Administration does is really that horrible, at least at first. Indeed Lindbergh seems to want to help the Jews become better integrated into American society. He sets up an Office of American Absorption (OAA), under Rabbi Bengelsdorf, which establishes the “Just Folks” program: Jewish children from urban areas are given an opportunity to spend a summer on a farm in the heartland. Sandy Roth is one of the first to sign up, over his father’s objections—which leads to a knock-down drag-out fight around the dinner table. Mr. Roth sees the sinister and intentional destruction of Jewish culture. You will be assimilated. “Just Folks was the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family.” Aunt Evelyn dismisses his concerns as the unfounded fears of “ghetto Jews,” a vile phrase which Sandy is soon imitating.

Aunt Evelyn wins the argument and Sandy goes off to a Kentucky tobacco farm and has a wonderful time. He comes back taller, more filled out—and thanks to the summer sun, blonder. The symbolism is not exactly subtle. The way he shows off his new agricultural vocabulary, words like “flyings” and “topping,” struck me as a very true-to-life portrait of a 13-year-old boy who has acquired some knowledge that the adults don’t share. Thanks to the machinations of Aunt Evelyn, he ends up as poster child for Just Folks with a string of speaking engagements. I can’t help wondering what the real Sandy Roth, who was still alive when the book was published, thought about his now-famous little brother casting him in the role of Collaborator.

The family quarrel over Just Folks turns out to be the first of many; they tear the family apart. The boys' father is still convinced that Nazi Germany is coming to America. Family and friends are skeptical. “Where are the Nazi Brown Shirts and the secret police?” they ask. “The Nazi criminals start with something small,” Mr. Roth warns, “and if they get away with it…” Still American boys aren’t dying on the battlefields of Europe. The stock market is going up and up. What’s not to like?

But amid all the debate over what Lindbergh has planned, and whether he is an anti-Semite, one thing is clear: he had emboldened less ambiguous anti-Semites to come out into the open. The Roths first encounter this on a sightseeing trip to Washington, D.C. As the descendants of victims of European pogroms, they know how much better off they are in America, and are passionately patriotic about it. They save for years so they can take their children to the nation’s capital and see all the monuments to great Americans. But Mr. Roth’s tendency to opine in an audible voice about how awful the Lindbergh Administration is, and how much better things were under Roosevelt, results in him being called a “loudmouth Jew” by more than one bystander. Further, when the manager of their hotel finds out they’re Jewish, he evicts them. They come back from sightseeing to find their bags packed and waiting for them in the lobby.

Sadly, these ugly incidents are merely a harbinger of much more terrible things to come.

My main criticism of the book was the ending (no spoilers, I promise). It was almost as if Author Roth got tired of it and just decided to wrap things up as quickly as possible. Some truly epic national events occur, but these are given rapid-fire in capsule format. Then we find out what the Roths were doing during these events, but since we already know the national outcome, there isn’t any suspense, and these pages really drag. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book. But had the national events been allowed to unfold at the pace of the rest of the novel, and the Roths’ lives intertwined with them in real time, as they had up to the final chapter, it could have been a much better one. Still, there’s a really clever twist near the end, which puts a whole new spin on the story, and which I won't spoil for you.

*           *           *

The celebrity president with the glamorous wife. No previous experience in elected office. Refuses to be a puppet to his handlers. The slogan, “America First.” The electoral upset. The polarization of Americans—even the polarization of families—as the president’s passionate detractors insist he’s a racist who is going to suspend civil rights and undermine the Constitution, while his supporters, equally passionate, claim it’s all fake news and everything he’s done is perfectly reasonable. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to President Trump.

Since The Plot against America was published in 2004, Mr. Roth obviously did not intend it as a Trump parable. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he didn’t have anyone in particular in mind other than Charles A. Lindbergh. He had heard that the Republicans had considered running Lindbergh in 1940, and he was intrigued and wanted to explore that idea. Of course, the intent of the makers of the upcoming HBO series is another matter entirely.

Whether the resemblance between the real-life Trump Administration and the fictional Lindbergh one is anything more than superficial, I leave as an exercise for the reader. Either way, The Plot against America is an intriguing story, with some vivid characters, and a timeless warning that, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

Magical Alt-History Tour

Once There Was a Way: What if the Beatles Stayed Together? by Bryce Zabel.
Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

This weekend, Yesterday will hit theaters, joining a club of major motion pictures that build their stories around the Beatles' song catalog. It’s a magical-realism dramedy in which a struggling musician wakes up in a world where seemingly the band The Beatles never existed. Now he has a short cut to the success bringing the world the music it didn’t know it was missing.

To coincide with this little thought experiment, I thought it would be fun to take a look at a story based on the opposite premise: not a world where The Beatles never existed, but one where they never broke up.

Once There Was a Way is a captivating contra-history, more popularly known as alternate history, written as a retrospective of the long and winding road of The Beatles...after the tumultuous year of 1970.

Now we’ve touched on works of alternate history before here at Nerds who Read, but I don’t think we’ve discussed it as a sub-genre in and of itself so I wanna hold your hand through a brief overview.

The alternate history subgenre of modern fiction is usually traced as far back as the early 1800’s (although there are examples in antiquity and into the Renaissance) with authors and historians spinning ever more elaborate stories of what might have been if history had gone awry. What if the library of Alexandria hadn’t burned? Or Columbus couldn’t get funding to sail west? What if the Nazis won World War 2? Or a famous German rocket scientist didn’t build V-2 rockets? What if half the moon was back in the USSR. Alternate history is a great jumping off point if you want to be a paperback writer. Take a point in history and just imagine if things had just played out a little differently, how there could be monumental changes. And history has already given you a cast of public domain characters.

Alternate history tends to be conjoined to science fiction/fantasy in fandom, authorship, marketing, yet slightly distanced from historical fiction (even though conventions of well-written historical fiction are what make a well-written alternate history novels). Some would even argue that certain genres such as diesel punk or my beloved steampunk usually use the pretense of existing in an alternate universe to explain their aesthetic flourishes.

Alternate history typically focuses on what-if scenarios based around military history as points of divergence to create a universe and then has lots of fun coming up with new maps and flags, as well as character arcs for historical figures that may or may not align with the history of our own world. Given this obsession with refighting decades- or centuries-old military events, a book that focuses on monumental events in pop culture as its divergence point was a breath of fresh air for the genre, even winning the 2017 Side Ways Award for excellence in alternate history literature.

Committed to the conceit that this is a non-fiction book, Bryce Zabel writes in the style of a celebrity biography covering the Beatles in the tumultuous 1970’s...before their seeming permanence well into the 21st century (always tailed by rival newcomers the Rolling Stones).

No, the point of divergence isn’t a certain John Lennon skipping a gallery opening and thereby not meeting a certain avant garde artist...

Rather, the point of divergence in this tale is that the 1968 interview with John Lennon and Paul McCartney that Johnny Carson tried to arrange in real life, only to have it fall through, actually happened in this alternate universe. After their set on The Tonight Show, John and Paul join Johnny and Ed for a night on the town, where the two veteran showman provide the world-weary and feuding musicians with a bit of advice about maintaining a working relationship in show biz.

While this pep talk helps, not everything is strawberry fields forever for the boys from Liverpool. They struggle with their egos, differing artistic directions, familial pressures, and turning Apple Records from a 1960’s counterculture hangout into an actual business. I was surprised to learn how many of the stories of the chaos at Apple Records’ early days, chiefly flushing money down the toilet by a supposed wunderkind producer, as well as invasion by the Hell’s Angels biker gang, actually happened.

However, despite all the helter skelter around their new business, Paul McCartney and John Lennon took Johnny Carson’s and Ed McMahon’s advice about “showing up for each other” and the pair manage to check their egos sufficiently to overcome the challenges that come at the Fab Four, and even take on greater challenges.

Instead of cutting the album Abbey Road in 1969 and taking a quick picture of the band strolling outside of the titular London Studio, their next album is called Everest and the cover art is the band boldly strolling...onto the stage at Woodstock.

From here on the plot creates a fictional Beatles career path by using the solo individual Beatles’ careers and song books with hypothetical Beatles projects to weave a world in which Beatlemania never ended.

The personalities and tensions of the real world group are still there but moving from crisis to crisis (like working under the tender mercies of Stanley Kubrick to star in and score a Lord of the Rings adaptation, or a rough and tumble recording trip to Nigeria at the insistence of Paul) it seems that the Beatles can only get by with a little help from their friends...each other.

So if you sometimes wonder what if the Beatles didn’t just let it be with their last album and kept on writing and performing music together, check out Once there Was A Way.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.