Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

A “whistleblower,” in my definition, is a person who through hard experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed in—and the loyalty owed to—the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable.

I was resolved to bring to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry.

Here was, to my mind, the corpus delicti—the plain-as-day corroboration of a crime, in a gigantic concrete bunker surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, sucking up a city’s worth of electricity from its own power grid in the middle of the Utah desert. And no one was paying attention.

Read, Write, Execute: this was my simple three-step plan. I wanted to burrow into the heart of the world’s most secure network to find the truth, make a copy of it, and get it out into the world. And I had to do all this without getting caught—without being read, written, and executed myself.

The agency had a not inconsiderable number of counterintelligence programs spying on the people who were spying on people, and if even one caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, it wouldn’t be a file that was getting deleted.

You know the feeling—the sheer hell of following the completion bar as it indicates 84 percent completed, 85 percent completed … 1:58:53 left … As it filled toward the sweet relief of 100 percent, all files copied, I’d be sweating, seeing shadows and hearing footsteps around every corner.

That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.

If we presume that an attacker takes one day to crack a 64-bit key—which scrambles your data in one of 264 possible ways (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique permutations)—then it would take double that amount of time, two days, to break a 65-bit key, and four days to break a 66-bit key. Breaking a 128-bit key would take 264 times longer than a day, or fifty million billion years. By that time, I might even be pardoned.

In my communications with journalists, I used 4096- and 8192-bit keys. This meant that absent major innovations in computing technology or a fundamental redefining of the principles by which numbers are factored, not even all of the NSA’s cryptanalysts using all of the world’s computing power put together would be able to get into my drive.

Was there anyone this machine could not surveil? Was there anywhere this machine could not go?

It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity.

You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed.

I didn’t type the names of the agency director or the president into XKEYSCORE, but after enough time with the system I realized I could have. Everyone’s communications were in the system—everyone’s.

Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself.

With my government having decided to charge me under the Espionage Act, I stood accused of a political crime, meaning a crime whose victim is the state itself rather than a person.

I didn’t particularly relish flying over a country like Poland, which during my lifetime has done everything to please the US government, including hosting CIA black sites where my former IC colleagues subjected prisoners to “enhanced interrogations,” another Bush-era euphemism for “torture.”

But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book.

All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer.

This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation—the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.

The year 2016 was a landmark in tech history, the first year since the invention of the Internet that more Web traffic was encrypted than unencrypted.

As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming the surveillance regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of my exile, but an encrypted smartphone might.

Today, no matter who you are, or where you are, bodily, physically, you are also elsewhere, abroad—multiple selves wandering along the signal paths, with no country to call your own, and yet beholden to the laws of every country through which you pass.

Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.

Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet.

And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control.