Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

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.