A Babel Fish Bookshelf
Remember What’s Never Forgotten
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden
It’s curious that we’ve become so reconciled with the massive amount of state secrets we learned about when Edward Snowden worked with journalists to expose its vast extent and power in 2013. Since then, he’s lived in exile almost as long as he worked for the US intelligence services, helping to build a system that would capture, store, and make searchable the digital traces of communications of the entire world, an all-encompassing shift from targeted to mass surveillance. Yet we’ve become somehow used to the idea, defensively forgetting that nearly everything we do is not forgotten.
Snowden’s memoir, Permanent Record, doesn’t reveal any state secrets he hasn’t already selectively shared with the world. It doesn’t tell us anything about how he got those secrets out that hasn’t already been covered in Laura Poitras’s film, Citizenfour. It’s more personal and reflective. It explains how he became entranced by technology and the internet, how he ended up following a family tradition by working for the government, which meant in practice working for private companies, how he became alarmed by the systems people like him were building, and why he decided he had a moral duty to the country he served to share what he knew with journalists to get the word out. It’s a portrait of a young geek who grew up close to the beltway and in the shadow of 9/11, so he signed up to serve rather than become a silicon valley entrepreneur. After an accident sidelined him from the military before he was out of training, he decided to follow his parents’ footsteps and get a security clearance so he could apply his tech skills to government service.
He describes the anxiety around having his past scoured as he was vetted at age 22 as a way to explore the implications of all the traces we leave behind, juvenile beliefs long shed, jokes that aren’t funny anymore, now all part of our permanent record. But he passed easily and that not only gave him a chance to get a job with the government, it made him attractive to contractors. Those give the agencies a workforce by allowing them to circumvent legal caps on the number of government employees. (As in higher ed, it’s easier to get money to pay for commercial services than to hire people.) “It’s America’s most legal and convenient method of transferring public money to the private purse,” he writes. Soon after he got his clearance he realized he couldn’t serve his country unless he worked for the private sector, which is where high-level systems work is done. And it was being done by “computer dudes” like him. At an “indoc” orientation they were told they were special, the elite, which struck him as odd.
You don’t need to tell a bunch of computer whizzes that they possess superior knowledge and skills that uniquely qualify them to act independently and make decisions on behalf of their fellow citizens without any oversight or review. Noth