PERMANENT RECORD by Edward Snowden (Henry Holt and Company, 2019)
Whether you regard Edward Snowden as a hero or villain, anybody who cares about privacy and freedom needs to read this book.
The recent ruling that profits of the memoir will go to the US government will, I’m sure, come as no great shock to its author. As is clear from the very first line of the book, the risks he took were not motivated by a desire for fame or money; he writes: “I used to work for the government, but now I work for the public.”
He sets out his mission statement for whistleblowing in equally lucid terms: “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.” To counter accusations that these actions were driven by self-interest, he states for the record: “what mattered wasn’t me, but rather the subversion of American democracy.”
The account of his life prior to being employed by the National Security Agency (NSA) present him as a highly intelligent loner whose life was transformed by the birth of the Internet. School, which he dismisses as a “benevolent tyranny”, held little interest. Instead, as a self-confessed geek, he spent most of his waking hours online.
Snowden acknowledges how such an obsession can turn people into outcasts by saying “there is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen”. However, there can be no doubt that his own selfless decision to expose the excesses of surveillance capitalism was conceived as a social act fired by the belief that the truth still matters.
The third part and final of this memoir detailing how he stole the secrets reads like a gripping espionage story and is all the more rivetting because you know this is a real life drama not a work of fiction.
Although often accused of threatening America’s security, it is important to note that Snowden has nothing against the principle of targeted surveillance. His claim, backed by compelling evidence, is that the NSA has routinely abused its powers, using technology as a tool for control rather than defence.
Snowden explains in layman’s terms how the collection of metadata reveals to the surveillant “virtually everything they’d ever want or need to know about you, except what’s actually going on inside your head.” This ubiquity of collection combined with permanency of storage prompts Snowden to liken mass surveillance to “a never-ending census,a memory that is sleepless and permanent”.
The collected data can be utilised for purposes that has nothing to do with state security. It can be, and frequently is, routinely used to sell us products we don’t need or to promote political candidates we don’t want. In more extreme cases, it can be used to further the systematic supression of legitimate protest. In short, the advances in technology have given the US government the Orwellian capacity to become what Snowden calls “an eternal law-enforcement agency.”
The game changing events of 9/11 and the 2008 banking crisis laid the foundations for the decline of persoanl liberty and the rise in populism. Snowden drily notes that these events show how “something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites.” He made a similar point during his Ted Talk in 2014 when he pointed out that “public interest is not the same as national interest.”
One common justification to the surveillance is to claim that the ends justify the means. The war on terror, it is argued, requires drastic measures to protect the innocent. Many say that the only people who should be concerned about their private lives being subject to scrutiny are those with something to hide. This argument would carry more weight if governments and corporate bodies always behaved morally and justly in the interests of the common good. History gives ample evidence that this has never been the case. As Snowden eloquently observes: “technology has made astounding progress, but the same could not be said for the law or human scruples that could restrain it.”
The fact that I downloaded a digital version of ‘Permanent Record’ and the writing of this blog post could, and most probably will, identity me as an enemy of the state in some eyes.
The American Heritage definition of ‘privacy’ is “the quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others” but it is also a concept, like ‘freedom’, that means different things to different people. It is worth quoting at length what Snowden has to say about this: “Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe.”
Ultimately, the point is strongly made that heightened awareness alone is not enough. Edward Snowden’s stand shows that concerted action is also needed to ensure authorities are constantly held accountable for their actions.
