A Surveillance Story
Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden, New York: Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Co.), 2019, 352 pages, hardcover.
In 2013, Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA and other government agencies confirmed what many had long suspected: The United States government had — for more than a decade — been building a massive program of surveillance and was using it to spy on all of us. Snowden’s 2013 disclosures to journalists revealed much of the apparatus and techniques the government used to build what can only be called the Surveillance State. His new book, Permanent Record, picks up where those disclosures left off and reveals even more of the intelligence community’s illegal spying activities.
Permanent Record — released on September 17 (Constitution Day) — is surprising in at least two ways. First, it is well written and makes for a compelling and enjoyable read. While many technologists are very capable of writing about technology so long as their audience is other technologists, a technologist who can write in a style that is both informative and enjoyable to the average reader is a rarity. Snowden personifies that rarity. His book is so compelling and readable that it is easy to get lost in it and forget that you are reading. The story almost comes to life for the reader. Second, when Snowden made his initial disclosures, he told journalists, including Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, that he was not the point of the story, the disclosures were the point — this book is a reversal of that position. Before Permanent Record, little first-hand information was known about Ed Snowden. Permanent Record, by contrast, is a look inside the mind of the man who — by revealing the size and scope of government surveillance — changed the world while remaining largely in the background until now.
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