In Permanent Record, he describes how he and Mills met when he was 22 on an internet site, Hot or Not, on which pictures were posted and rated. He gave her a 10 out of She gave him an eight. Seven years later, as he prepared to fly to Hong Kong, he said he did not tell her about his plans to turn whistleblower as this would have made her an accessory. He feels bad she did not know where he had gone. One of the surprises in Permanent Record is the inclusion of extracts from her diary.
When the police and FBI were first looking for him, one police officer was suspicious of her. He was looking around the house for his body. In the memoirs, he writes about his childhood and teenage obsession with computers and games, such as Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros.
As a teenager, he hacked into a nuclear facility and reported its vulnerabilities to the authorities. An official from the Los Alamos nuclear lab, where the atom bomb was created, phoned his mother to thank him. Permanent Record offers one of the most detailed accounts of what it is like to work inside an intelligence agency in the 21st century. There was no pivotal moment when he decided to turn whistleblower. He attended, by chance, a conference on the scale of Chinese surveillance of its own citizens.
That created a nagging thought that if China was doing it then so too might the US. He searched and found confirmation. Snowden neither confirms or denies it, knowing one day he may yet face prosecution.
He recalled how his plans almost came unstuck near the end. He had secretly hoarded documents on an abandoned computer, and was moving it. But that was exactly what he was doing. Snowden was, in fact, one of the young IT elite, deeply aware of the generational divide that helped put him in that role. In one passage from a period he spent working at a CIA data center, he describes, with conscious immodesty, his daily walk past an array of IT help desk staffers on his way into a more highly classified compartment of secrets inside the building.
So my very job was to know what sharable information was out there. At one point early in his NSA career, Snowden writes that he was asked to use his deep access to assemble a counterintelligence presentation on Chinese surveillance and internet control—one of the first moments when he began to wonder how exactly the equivalent US systems of internet surveillance might compare.
But on that point, Snowden remains a kind of First Amendment absolutist. That story climaxes in a tense meeting between Snowden and an officer of the FSB in the Moscow airport. The official does his best, briefly, to turn Snowden into a Russian intelligence asset.
Snowden writes that he interrupted to decline before the pitch was even finished, the better to avoid any unscrupulous editing of hidden recordings of the meeting. Snowden flatly denies that he has had any other interactions with Russian intelligence since.
After all, he never brought a single NSA document to Russia. If he has to spend the rest of his life in Russia, on the other hand, so be it, he says. He rents an apartment with his wife, Lindsay, whom he married in Moscow.
After he broke both his legs in a training accident, he was discharged. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents. That access, along with the almost three years he spent around CIA officers, led him to begin seriously questioning the rightness of what he saw.
He described as formative an incident in which he claimed CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment.
He said it was during his CIA stint in Geneva that he thought for the first time about exposing government secrets. But, at the time, he chose not to for two reasons. Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary. He left the CIA in in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan.
I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act. But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance.
As strong as those beliefs are, there still remains the question: why did he do it? Giving up his freedom and a privileged lifestyle? If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.
For him, it is a matter of principle. There is no public oversight. Another hails the online organisation offering anonymity, the Tor Project. Asked by reporters to establish his authenticity to ensure he is not some fantasist, he laid bare, without hesitation, his personal details, from his social security number to his CIA ID and his expired diplomatic passport. There is no shiftiness. Ask him about anything in his personal life and he will answer. He is quiet, smart, easy-going and self-effacing.
A master on computers, he seemed happiest when talking about the technical side of surveillance, at a level of detail comprehensible probably only to fellow communication specialists. But he showed intense passion when talking about the value of privacy and how he felt it was being steadily eroded by the behaviour of the intelligence services.
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