Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

In secret, it assumed the power of mass surveillance, an authority that by definition afflicts the innocent far more than the guilty.

The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called “liberty” and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”

privacy, which I regard—and the United Nations regards—as a fundamental human right.

didn’t hesitate for a moment to call me a Chinese double agent, a Russian triple agent, and worse: “a millennial.”

Haha

the last undigitized generation,

This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.

But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time—a stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence—the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people.

Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged.

the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.

You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities

“Master, Master, information wants to be free.”

After a while you don’t think anymore, you merely count, and your mind dissolves into the rank and file as you pace out mile after mile. I would say it was serene if it wasn’t so deadening. I would say I was at peace if I weren’t so tired. This was precisely as the army intended.

The army makes its fighters by first training the fight out of them until they’re too weak to care, or to do anything besides obey.

say what you want, say who you are, never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem.

I’ll try not to be too abstract here, but I want you to imagine a system. It doesn’t matter what system: it can be a computer system, an ecosystem, a legal system, or even a system of government.

Remember, a system is just a bunch of parts that function together as a whole, which most people are only reminded of when something breaks.

Over the course of my career, it became increasingly difficult for me to ask these questions about the technologies I was responsible for and not about my country. And it became increasingly frustrating to me that I was able to repair the former but not the latter.

for whom the federal government was less the ultimate authority than the ultimate client.

From the vantage of the corporate boardroom, contracting functions as governmentally assisted corruption. It’s America’s most legal and convenient method of transferring public money to the private purse.

It was particularly bizarre to me that most of the systems engineering and systems administration jobs that were out there were private, because these positions came with almost universal access to the employer’s digital existence.

I do recall, however, that my first major contracting gig was actually a subcontracting gig: the CIA had hired BAE Systems, which had hired COMSO, which hired me.

One of these was when I went down there to negotiate my salary and sign some paperwork. At CASL I’d been making around $30K/year, but that job didn’t have anything to do with technology, so I felt comfortable asking COMSO for $50K. When I named that figure to the guy behind the desk, he said, “What about $60K?” At the time I was so inexperienced, I didn’t understand why he was trying to overpay me. I knew, I guess, that this wasn’t ultimately COMSO’s money, but I only later understood that some of the contracts that COMSO and BAE and others handled were of the type that’s called “cost-plus.” This meant that the middlemen contractors billed the agencies for whatever an employee got paid, plus a fee of 3 to 5 percent of that every year. Bumping up salaries was in everyone’s interest—everyone’s, that is, except the taxpayer’s.

Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism.

Finally, the litany ended, the lights came down, the PowerPoint was fired up, and faces appeared on the screen that was bolted to the wall. Everyone in the room sat upright. These were the faces, we were told, of former agents and contractors who, whether through greed, malice, incompetence, or negligence failed to follow the rules. They thought they were above all this mundane stuff and their hubris resulted in their imprisonment and ruin. The people on the screen, it was implied, were now in basements even worse than this one, and some would be there until they died. All in all, this was an effective presentation. I’m told that in the years since my career ended, this parade of horribles—of incompetents, moles, defectors, and traitors—has been expanded to include an additional category: people of principle, whistleblowers in the public interest. I can only hope that the twenty-somethings sitting there today are struck by the government’s conflation of selling secrets to the enemy and disclosing them to journalists when the new faces—when my face—pop up on the screen.

and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google