Permanent Record

I thought I knew the scale of the surveillance that the NSA (the National Security Agency, a premier American intelligence agency) was conducting on its citizens (and through various alliances, any Web traffic that passed through its borders) - but to read about it in its full and chilling detail is astounding.
To give a brief background, Edward Snowden is famous (or depending upon your views on whistleblowers, infamous) for leaking, in explicit detail, how the US had built a massive surveillance program to spy on its own citizens, in the guise of ‘protecting the country from terrorists'. To put it simply, anyone who was deemed even slightly suspicious had a ‘marker' placed upon them (for example, a professor who applied for tenure in a university in Iran). This marker meant that everything - where you eat, where you go, who you meet with - was tracked. This was not even the most chilling fact - the cherry on the cake was the fact that everything that was tracked was permanently stored, and the aforementioned marker could be placed even if the person ‘could be suspected in the future' - hence the title of the memoir, ‘Permanent Record'.
Naturally, these revelations performed a furore. The United States revoked his passport midair, while he was enroute to Ecuador, where he was offered asylum. He has been in forced exile in Russia since he landed in the airport, in June 2013.
In the memoir, though, Snowden details how he became interested in programming, how he became a defense contractor working for various intelligence agencies, and why he actually became a whistelblower. Even putting aside the unsettling nature of the disclosures, this is a riveting read on its own, as Snowden details his own life in vivid detail, and how his experiences shaped him. A must read if you're curious about cybersecurity, privacy, or just in the mood of rich memoirs.

I have worked in and around the IT industry for over 15 years and grew up, similarly to Snowden, enamored with technology. I got my first PC, a XT clone, at around age 10 and started running my own BBS shortly after. I remember those first days of the internet, my first website, and the days before social media. None of what he exposed in 2013 really surprised me or people like me - at least not from a technological perspective. It was always an assumption that this stuff could happen. Taking over cameras, stepping through backdoors in routers, listening in on microphones, browsing private social media pages. Of course that's possible. What we didn't fully appreciate was the scope. The story Edward Snowden has to tell is an important one... and the book covers his life and the events surrounding his whistleblowing with great detail and emotion. It not only explains what he did, but he tries to tell the story of why he did it. It's a wonderfully crafted book that should be standard reading for any technologist.

That the US government is collecting data on such an enormous scale, passively, and storing it in perpetuity... that should frighten everyone, and it's enough to start making you paranoid of the things you do online. Of course, I'm just a middle aged white guy in Canada who lives a fairly standard, boring life. I'm not a juicy surveillance target. Or am I?

Hello?

...are you reading this?

Hello?

Un témoignage passionnant du lanceur d'alerte Edward Snowden, qui a révélé au monde entier le programme illégal et anticonstitutionnel de surveillance de masse de la NSA cautionné par le gouvernement américain.

Les premiers chapitres m'ont fait penser à Aaron Schwartz, avec cette passion pour l'informatique et cette découverte enthousiasmante de l'Internet des années 1990, quand cet outil laissait espérer une utopie technologique au service du savoir et du partage.

La suite est évidemment plus sombre, avec cette plongée dans les coulisses de la CIA et de la NSA et leurs contingents de sous-traitants, faisant du renseignement américain un terrain de jeu géant et une poule aux œufs d'or pour des compagnies privées.

L'exil d'Edward Snowden à Hong Kong puis à Moscou, après avoir révélé au public les agissements de la NSA et du gouvernement américain, clôture ce récit qui serait incroyable et semblerait tiré d'un roman d'espionnage si nous ne savions pas qu'il s'agit de la réalité.

Ce n'est pas forcément une grande œuvre littéraire sur la forme, quoique j'ai été surpris par la qualité de l'écriture et par une dose d'humour bien senti, mais c'est un livre captivant et utile.

A little slow and biography-like in the 1st half, leading into an incredibly strong 2nd half providing a detailed view into American government surveillance, insight into how government systems operate (technically, socially, politically), and a gripping tale digging into the gritty details of how he actually extracted the information and executed on the leak. I doubt there's another read like this. Huge appreciation for the transparency of this book.

Would also recommend Snowden's 3-hour long Joe Rogan podcast, packed with interesting viewpoints.

I always enjoy meeting someone in their ideal career and hearing all the twists and turns in their story. The things that perfectly prepared them for their current role (career paths are rarely linear). This is very much the story Edward Snowden tells about his early experience with computers, the original Internet, and programming. It's fascinating from a career trajectory standpoint, but mostly because he seems to be the only one to see the big picture. His conviction and preparation to give up everything are unbelievable. I also appreciated hearing about his girlfriend and what she went through, as that was something I thought about often at the time.

I'm surprised by how much I already knew about him (well, maybe not the fact that he was a SharePoint administrator at one stage :) ). I would have like it to focus more on what prompted him to become a whistleblower (at a deeper, more philosophical level) and what could your average Joe do about fighting the system as well as the more important existential dilemma of trading privacy for convenience. At the same time, it's his life story, I applaud his courage and sacrifice and I hope that more people become aware of this less-known side of the internet and of the world we live in.

There was entirely too much personal history in this for me. Even though it was fun to hear how nerdy he was as a kid, a lot of the stories and the narrative voice made me partially dislike the guy. All the factual content is great though. His realization about what the NSA was up to, his meticulous and borderline-paranoid planing on how to report on it (is it still paranoia if you for a fact know all the paranoia is warranted?) and then his escape to HongKong to go public and subsequent forced exile. I also found it very interesting when he talked about whistle-blowers vs leakers, and what fundamentally differentiates democracies from dictatorships, how in the former people concede power to the government, while in the latter the government concedes power to the people. His story also makes you think how complex it gets with national laws in an international arena like the internet. Similar as Snowden got land-locked in Moscow while trying to get to South America, our internet traffic travels through servers and routers hosted all over the world, more often in countries like China with very different privacy laws.

Highly recommend reading this autobiography if you want to learn more about Edward Snowden, America before and after 9/11, and how the CIA works. After reading this, I think that Edward Snowden deserves to be pardoned and that the American government deserves to be much more transparent with what they're doing to harm and help other countries. Amazing read and you won't regret it.

Consider, for a moment, living in the feudal age. Your respect and power would've been derived from the amount of land you have. Or, in a capitalist system, it is the money or credibility. Now, consider our time. It is still capitalism. However, a capitalism which is ever-increasingly depending on technologies, most importantly information technology. This is the actual currency for this age. The amount of information you can and have massed and crunched gives you power and wealth according. And, unless you are part of the top-tier of the governments or leading tech industries, you are the mine or the factory of data. All our virtual assistants, IoT devices, smart devices, websites we visit, digital services we buy are sending our data without our consent to the vendors, and often to the government.
Do you find this unethical? Well... if you do, then meet Edward Snowden (you may probably already have), a martyr of the information age.
Yes, he is alive. He's a martyr in the sense that for his ethical action, a cruel punishment awaits in his country, and the country has tried to disenfranchise and defame in every possible way. To a patriot to the marrow of his bone, a person who found his allegiance to the people of his country opposed to the ever-eavesdropping government, this exile is maybe more than being murdered in many ways.
Permanent Record is Snowden's autobiography. However, more than an autobiography, this book is about the things that define him. In his own word:The reason you're reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a man in my position: I decided to tell the truth. I collected internal IC documents that gave evidence of the US government's lawbreaking and turned them over to journalists, who vetted and published them to a scandalized world. This book is about what led up to that decision, the moral and ethical principles that informed it, and how they came to be—which means that it's also about my life.
His prose is mature, concise, to the point yet emotional. So much so that, apart from the content, it has a very high level of literary value. The clarity of his thought, the amount of conviction he holds, I think, is the most important aspect of this book. He can actually make you see things from his position, feel what he felt, his moment of truth, his anxieties and fears, his courage and sacrifice - willing yet shaking his very core.
Content-wise, this book is invaluable. It allows readers a peek into the large mechanism, through which big brother is watching you. Apart from the technicalities, you may find Snowden's views on personal freedom, privacy, democracy, authority and human rights very accurate and logical.

Absolute must read! I've ran much longer runs because I didn't want the book listening to end. Maybe there's too much of his “life story” and too little of his “uncoverings”, but it's a phenomenal book nonetheless. World is in a better place because of him, but we're still far off from good.

Fav quote goes something like: saying we don't need privacy because you've got nothing to hide is like saying we don't need free speech because you've got nothing to say.