![]() ![]() ![]() The first surprising fact about Permanent Record is what a good a writer Snowden is. In a latter section of the book he describes reading a hard copy – made of physical paper, glue and staples – of the US Constitution in his office cubicle, to the puzzlement of his NSA and CIA colleagues. Both of his parents had top secret clearances in the course of their careers. Snowden takes pains in the first 100 pages to explain his deep roots in America and his family’s history of government service. He claims to serve the interests of people and the ideals of the US Constitution. His exposure of state secrets about official surveillance methods and programs, Snowden claims, was in the interest of serving something larger than the laws of the state. ![]() He fled to Hong Kong, and later landed in Russia, where he remains in exile today. In 2013 Snowden broke the law and his professional oath by exposing to select journalists secret documents of the US Deep State, secrets drawn from the server archives of the NSA and CIA, where he had worked as a systems engineer for seven years. Snowden is perhaps the most polarizing figure of the third millennium in the United States. Although Snowden’s subject is mostly government data collection on civilians, it dovetails with what I think is the major story of 2019, the rise of private-sector data collection about our personal lives. As the year came to a close last week, I read the most important book of 2019, Permanent Recordby Edward Snowden. ![]()
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