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.