Permanent Record

September 23, 2019
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.

October 11, 2019

In 2013, American journalist and whistleblower Snowden (president, Freedom of the Press Fnd.) released, to sympathetic journalists, classified documents describing a U.S. mass-surveillance program capable of interfering with the lives of every person on earth. Here, he shares his experiences mostly working for international corporations that contracted with the Central Intelligence and National Security agencies. Snowden also relates his unorthodox childhood; by age 12 his obsessions with computer hacking and gaming replaced friends, school activities, and family relations. Following the 9/11 attacks, the author was determined to serve his country, which he did through computing skills, following a medical discharge during army basic training. Tediously lengthy and complex stories of his assignments will be most meaningful to computing professionals, as the most fascinating passages probe the concerns that drove him to release the top-secret report; how his life and that of his now wife was uprooted; and his life in Russia, which granted him asylum. VERDICT For those fascinated by electronic spying or impassioned by the issue of privacy rights, Snowden's memoir casts an enlightening view of the U.S. intelligence community despite sometimes being marred by cumbersome jargon.--Karl Helicher, formerly with Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

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