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.” Continue reading
