Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

My keys to the drive containing the disclosures resembled this arrangement, with a twist: while I distributed most of the pieces of the incantation, I retained one for myself. Pieces of my magic spell were hidden everywhere, but if I destroyed just the single lone piece that I kept on my person, I would destroy all access to the NSA’s secrets forever.

The program that enabled this access was called XKEYSCORE, which is perhaps best understood as a search engine that lets an analyst search through all the records of your life. Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages from the public Internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything.

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. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. 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. It was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the screen.

This led to the practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection—reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online.

I will never be able to explain what it meant to be given so much by those with so little,

If folks as fundamentally decent and selfless as these aren’t deemed worthy of the protection of the state, it’s because the state itself is unworthy.

On June 14, the US government charged me under the Espionage Act in a sealed complaint, and on June 21 they formally requested my extradition. I knew it was time to go. It was also my thirtieth birthday.

Despite my caution, I was in a difficult position, and as Hemingway once wrote, the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.

Exile is an endless layover.

Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets them positively identify you.

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