Permanent Record is a 2019 autobiography by Edward Snowden, whose revelations sparked a global debate about surveillance. It was published on September 17, 2019 (Constitution Day), by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. The book describes Snowden's childhood as well as his tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency and his motivations for the leaking of highly classified information in 2013 that revealed global surveillance programs. Snowden also discusses his views on authoritarianism, democracy, and privacy. The writer Joshua Cohen is credited by Snowden for "helping to transform my rambling reminiscences and capsule manifestoes into a book."
Upon release, Permanent Record has received mixed-to-positive reviews by critics, while the United States filed a lawsuit against Snowden for alleged violations of non-disclosure agreements with the CIA and NSA. The lawsuit did not aim to restrict the book's content or distribution, but to capture the proceeds Snowden earns from it. In December 2019, U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady ruled in favor of the U.S. government. Permanent Record has been censored in China, with the removed content including comments about authoritarian states, privacy-supporting technologies, and the right to privacy.
Summary Part One Snowden recounts growing up in a patriotic military family in Elizabeth City, North Carolina and moving to Crofton, Maryland, just shy of his ninth birthday. In Crofton, his father worked as a chief warrant officer in the Aeronautical Engineering Division at Coast Guard Headquarters and his mother at the National Security Agency (NSA). He was introduced to computers by his father, using his Commodore 64 home computer. From around the age of twelve, he became obsessed with the internet, using a dial-up Internet access and trying to spend his "every waking moment" online. He eventually learned computer programming and became a hacker as a teenager, taking his focus away from his schoolwork to the detriment of his grades. He recalls one instance of discovering a security flaw on the website of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He called the lab to notify them of this and later received a call from a man thanking him and offering a job once he turned 18.
Toward the end of his freshman year at Arundel High School, Snowden's parents were getting divorced and sold their Crofton house. He moved into his mother's condo near Ellicott City. At the beginning of his sophomore year, he was unusually fatigued and was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. He missed four months of classes, and was told he would have to repeat his sophomore year. Instead, he dropped out of Arundel High and enrolled at Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), taking classes two days a week. He also later passed the General Education Development (GED) exams at a high school near Baltimore, a promise he made to himself when he dropped out.
Snowden started freelancing as a web designer for a woman from his Japanese class at AACC. He wanted to advance his career further, taking a Microsoft certification course at the Computer Career Institute of a Johns Hopkins University satellite campus. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Snowden joined the United States Army to show he wasn't "just a brain in a jar" and was on track to become a Special Forces sergeant through the 18X enlistment option but suffered stress fractures during training at Fort Benning in Georgia. Snowden says his greatest regret was his own "reflexive, unquestioning support" for the war on terror and the resulting "promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars."
Snowden still wanted to serve his country and realized he had taken his talent for technology for granted, and began taking classes again at Anne Arundel Community College. Knowing he would need a high-level security clearance to work for an intelligence agency, he searched for jobs that would sponsor his application for the Single Scope Background Investigation. He became an employee at the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language, a research center sponsored by the NSA. Around the same time, he met his then-girlfriend Lindsay Mills through the site Hot or Not. He eventually passed the full-scope polygraph and successfully attained the TS/SCI security clearance, completing his final interview at the NSA's Friendship Annex when he was twenty-two years old.
Part Two After attending a 2006 job fair at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, Snowden accepted an offer for a position at the CIA and was assigned to the global communications division at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. In March 2007, the CIA stationed Snowden with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was responsible for maintaining computer-network security. In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA.
Shortly after, Snowden took a job as contractor for the NSA in Japan, but was officially an employee of Perot Systems (which was acquired by Dell soon after his arrival). He worked at the NSA's Pacific Technical Center (PTC), at Yokota Air Base. His job there was "helping to connect the NSA's systems architecture with the CIA's." On one occasion, the PTC hosted a conference featuring briefings given by experts from all the intelligence components. The conference concerned how the Chinese intelligence services were targeting the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) and how the IC could respond. When the only technology briefer was unable to attend at the last minute, Snowden was selected to replace them in assessing China's surveillance capabilities. He stayed up all night preparing his presentation, sifting through top secret reports off the NSA network and the CIA network.
He was stunned by the extent to which China was able to constantly collect, store, and analyze the billions of daily telephone and Internet communications of their over a billion citizenry. However, Snowden began to believe that it was impossible for the US to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself. Snowden, however, admits that at the time he "tamped down" his unease and fully supported defensive and targeted surveillance. He was further suspicious when he, around the same time, read the Unclassified Report on the President's Surveillance Program. His suspicion drove him to search for the classified report, but was unable to find it. It was only later, long after he had forgotten about it, that the classified version mistakenly appeared on his desktop.
After reading the report, he says he spent months in a sad, low daze:
Snowden moved to Columbia, Maryland in 2011, still working for Dell but now attached again to the CIA. He had switched to a sales position, a move which he describes as a way to distract himself from his unease and begin to have a normal life. However, the rise of cloud computing disturbed Snowden. He began expressing his concerns to Lindsay. Around the same time, Snowden began experiencing intense dizziness and, eventually, his first epileptic seizure. Following a series of seizures, Snowden took a short-term disability leave from Dell. The final chapter of Part Two, "On the Couch", describes his time spent recovering on his mother's blue couch as well his thoughts on authoritarian states and privacy in the context of the 2011 Arab Spring.
Part Three In March 2012, he began working at "the Tunnel", a former aircraft factory turned NSA facility located under a pineapple field in Kunia, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. He was working on a Dell contract for the NSA. Snowden moved to Hawaii for the more relaxed lifestyle and the less stressful duties of his new position, in an effort to lessen the triggers of his seizures. He was the sole employee of the Office of Information Sharing, where he worked as a SharePoint systems administrator. He began actively searching for the NSA's surveillance capabilities and abuses at this time. As part of his work, Snowden developed a system called Heartbeat which created an automated queue from the classified documents posted to the Intelligence Community's "readboards". Heartbeat would perpetually scan for new and unique documents and create a kind of aggregated newsfeed personalized for each employee, based on their interests and their security clearance. Heartbeat was highly comprehensive, accessing beyond the NSA's network into the networks of the CIA and the FBI as well as into the Department of Defense's top-secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. Heartbeat's servers stored a copy of each scanned document, allowing Snowden to "perform the kind of deep interagency searches that the heads of most agencies could only dream of." Snowden says that nearly all of the documents that he later leaked to journalists were received through Heartbeat.
In "Whistleblowing", Snowden discusses the Constitution of the United States and argues that the Intelligence Community have "hacked" it by acting with impunity from the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the judiciary branch. He also discusses the history of whistleblowing and argues that the terms "leaking" and "whistleblowing" should not be used interchangeably because he believes "leaking" is done out of self-interest, not out of public interest.
When Snowden decided to go public, he realized he would have to have documentation or he risked being doubted. He chose not to self-publish to avoid being "lost among the crazy" of people posting classified secrets to the Internet every day. He avoided WikiLeaks because he felt their new strategy of publishing leaks as they received them would be no different to him self-publishing. He felt a document dump was not appropriate as his leaks were too "tangled and technical". He considered The New York Times but was unimpressed with how Bill Keller intentionally delayed the reporting of the Terrorist Surveillance Program until after George W. Bush's 2004 reelection. He chose a number of journalists to contact, primarily messaging documentarian Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald. He communicated with them over e-mail under the aliases "Cincinnatus", "Citizenfour" and "Verax". To stay anonymous, he went war-driving, exploiting local Wi-Fi networks with an antenna and magnetic GPS sensor while driving in his car around Oahu. He used Tor and the Kismet mapping software, running on the Tails operating system which allowed him to easily spoof his laptop's MAC address.
Under the guise of compatibility testing, Snowden transferred documents from the Heartbeat server to outdated desktop Dell PCs from his office, then onto SD cards after deduplicating, compressing and encrypting them. He carried the SD cards out through security, hiding them inside a Rubik's Cube, in his sock, in his cheek, and in his pocket. At home, he transferred them onto a single external drive which he left out in the open on his desk.