Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
The call of duty and a patriotic pedigree are given priority in Snowden's account of his motivations - and he warns of dangers ahead. Towards the end of Edward Snowden's memoir, he hands the narrative to his partner, Lindsay Mills, in the form of the diary she was keeping at the time he was "outing" himself as a whistleblower intent on revealing the most cherished secrets, and rampant ambitions, of the American and British spy agencies. "Ed, what have you done?" she wrote. "How can you come back from this?" Permanent Record is Snowden's attempt to answer these questions by doing something he finds discomforting and antithetical: breaching his own privacy, opening up what he calls the "empty zone that lies beyond the reach of the state". This is the space he has guarded for six years, but his account of the experiences that led him to take momentous decisions, along with the details he gives of his family background, serve as a robust defence against accusations that he is a traitor. It also offers a reminder that his disclosures of mass surveillance and bulk collection of personal information are as relevant now as they were in 2013. More so, he argues, given that private companies have become the new data behemoths. How did Snowden become a pathfinder into the secret caverns of this new technological age? Accidentally, it seems. He comes from a family of flag-waving, security cleared patriots. One grandfather was a rear admiral, his father ("my hero") worked for the US coastguard, and his mother had a senior backroom role with America's National Security Agency (NSA). "Mine is a family that has always answered the call of duty," he writes. Less surprisingly, young Eddie was a whip-smart supergeek. He was obsessed by his father's Commodore 64 home computer and when he saw the first wave of the internet, surfed it, spending every waking moment online, learning how to code, how to hack. In the aftermath of 9/11, he joined the US army because he "wanted to show I wasn't just a brain in a jar", and had he not suffered stress fractures during training, he would have become a special forces soldier. Snowden says his greatest regret was his own "reflexive, unquestioning support" for the decision to wage war after the attacks, and how it led to "the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars". He found out about this parallel world working for different intelligence agencies as a contractor tasked with upgrading their antediluvian IT systems. As the spies pivoted towards cyber espionage, the top brass missed something quite important: "The CIA didn't quite understand. The computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything." Snowden, it seems, was in a position to access their crown jewels. At first, it was the incompetence that bothered him. The NSA's security was pretty shoddy and it hardly bothered to encrypt anything. At the CIA, he spent his downtime reading intelligence reports and secret dispatches. If there was a moment of epiphany, it came when he was asked to put together a presentation on China's "utterly mind boggling" surveillance capabilities. As he did this, he says, he had "a sneaking sense I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America". He was determined to find out if his fears were true. When he embarked on his own covert mission, he was just 29 and living in Hawaii. The story of how he fled to Hong Kong and then to unintended exile in Russia is fleshed out in more detail than we have seen before. Angered by what he discovered, and the dissembling of US politicians, he copied documents about the most egregious data collection programs on to tiny sim cards, which he smuggled out of the NSA facility where he was working in his trouser pocket - having decided against sticking them on to the side of his Rubik's cube. Snowden didn't tell Lindsay what he was up to because he thought this would be cruel and he wanted to protect her. But leaving her was cruel and it didn't protect her - something he profoundly regrets. I would have liked to have heard more from Lindsay and how their relationship survived the fallout. They didn't see each other for more than a year. Two years ago, they married. Regret is a recurring theme. Snowden is not sorry for what he did, but he laments the death of the internet he grew up with, and warns of dangers ahead, as artificial intelligence is fused with surveillance capabilities. If he is angry at his own predicament, it doesn't show, but there is anger, and it comes in unexpected flashes; he describes Osama bin Laden as a "motherfucker". He also seems exasperated by people who don't try to understand the capabilities that can now be wielded against them. Snowden calls this the "tyranny of not understanding the technology" - a dig at anyone who uses a smartphone, or a computer, without wondering how the freedom it gives them might also make them vulnerable. In his own gentle way, perhaps Snowden is throwing down the gauntlet. He eventually decided his loyalties lay not with the agencies he was working for, but the public they were set up to protect. He felt ordinary citizens were being betrayed, and he had a duty to explain how. And Snowdens always answer a call of duty.
New York Review of Books Review
"Permanent Record" is a riveting account and a curious artifact. The book is unlikely to change anyone's mind about Snowden, but when it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes. For someone who worked in the intelligence community, the very idea of an autobiography feels uncomfortable. "It's hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification," he writes, "only to turn around completely and share 'personal disclosures' in a book."
Library Journal Review
Former intelligence agent for the CIA and the NSA Snowden shares how he personally helped design the sophisticated electronic monitoring system that made it feasible for the government to collect, store, and search at will through all the world's digital communications. When he began to realize how his own design became completely hidden from everyone, including most lawmakers, he decided to take action. After his release of hundreds of thousands of classified documents, Snowden became a fugitive, and he eventually ended up in exile in Russia where he remains to this day. Holter Graham's steady paced, clearly enunciated delivery nicely conveys the author's highly personal revelations about his historical decision. Snowden's critical work ignited hot debate about national security and individual privacy and influenced the 2015 passage of the USA Freedom Act, while American public opinion of what he did remains divided. He has been variously labeled a hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, a patriot, and a traitor. VERDICT Highly recommended for all libraries, with the qualification that libraries supplement Snowden's personal account with other important works on this story, including Luke Harding's The Snowden Files, Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide, and Phil Coleman's Edward Snowden.--Dale Farris, Groves, TX
