Permanent Record

Snowden’s experience of government work differs from that of his parents. He writes that the “sincerity of public service had given way to the greed of the private sector” (89). Most NSA workers are now contractors, for whom the government is just another client. Contractors can supply distance (i.e., cover and deniability) between the government and quasi-legal actions like torture and murder, protecting intelligence officials from getting caught; they also enable the circumvention of federal hiring caps. He views the system as “governmentally assisted corruption” (91), lining the pockets of those who approve the budgets for private sector hires.

Snowden’s first post-clearance job is at the Center for Advanced Study of Language, where he studies how people learn languages and uses computers to make this process quicker and better. In time, his work will help the NSA process the huge swath of foreign language communications that they are collecting. When Snowden arrives, however, the office is still under construction. For the first few months, he is essentially a security guard. Working at night gives him more time to spend with Lindsay.

After the 2013 leaks, the government attempted to disparage Snowden by characterizing him as a disgruntled contractor. Contract-type arrangements, however, were typical of many intelligence workers at the time. Many private companies hire kids, Snowden writes, because kids are the only ones who know how the systems work. Snowden attends job fairs, looking to be hired by one of these companies.

Snowden is hired by COMSO, who has been contracted by BAE Systems, who has been contracted by the CIA. He works at CIA headquarters. Given the long commute to Virginia, he has to find a new apartment nearby. He finds a room in a lavish McMansion owned by a man named Gary. 

The CIA headquarters seen in the movies are not used by most workers. Snowden finds the New Headquarters Building much less aesthetically pleasing; he spends most of him time working in an underground, windowless room. Most of his fellow newcomers are “computer guys” like him, dressed up for their first real day of work. All have the green ID badge which designates them as contractors.

Snowden and his colleagues attend “Indoc,” which is short for “indoctrination.” During this training, he learns that intelligence community sees itself as having apolitical, expert solutions, based entirely on data, for every problem. They learn basic operational security practices (known as tradecraft) that help them keep their job a secret. They see examples of people who broke the rules—and who are now in prison.

When Snowden arrives at the CIA, the institution is “at the nadir of its morale” (99). The failures of 9/11 have led to a massive reorganization. A politician is put in charge and oversees a campaign of layoffs, forced retirements, and firings. Snowden works for the Directorate of Support, managing the CIA’s Washington-Metropolitan server architecture, which includes most of the internal networks and databases that transmit, receive, and store the Agency’s intelligence. Secure offices are called “vaults”; Snowden’s team’s vault stores the cryptography codes which secure all of the agency’s secrets. He takes pride in his new job, though later comes to believe that the process by which he was hired indicates that the system is broken.

After his initiation, Snowden moves on to the night shift. The building is empty and dark, and the job is relatively dull; he responds to any issues or errors as they occur. Snowden’s partner is a man named Frank, a personable libertarian and a voracious reader of mystery and thriller novels. Frank boasts about how little he knows about computers and how little work he does; he simply bounces complicated problems to the day shift. Frank’s one skill seems to be changing the ancient tape storage, the backup for all of the Agency’s data. Only Frank knows how to handle the proprietary tape format. Snowden has to deal with all the issues Frank skips over.

Snowden automates many of his tasks, which leaves him with a lot of free time to spend online. All online activity is monitored. He spends time on the internal agency sites, reading as much information as he can. It is like reading the news two days ahead of time. He realizes how little he has traveled, and he decides to get out of the private sector and into government work, hoping becoming a “govvy” will take him around the world.

Snowden swears an oath to defend the US Constitution. Before he begins his new job, he has to go back to school. 

Snowden’s first order as a govvy is to report to a dilapidated Comfort Inn in Virginia, where he stays while attending the Warrenton Training Center, also known as the Hill. He is to stay there for six months, attending classes and staying busy. The Hill is the heart of the agency’s field communications network and its most mysterious training facility.

Snowden is a member of class 6-06 of the Basic Telecommunications Training Program, which trains Technical Information Security Officers (TISO). These “commo guys” are “a one-person replacement for previous generations’ specialized roles of code clerk, radioman, electrician, mechanic, physical and digital security advisor, and computer technician” (110). They manage the technical infrastructure of overseas CIA operations, such as those hidden beneath American embassies. TISOs have to know how to fix everything on site, as well as how to destroy everything in the event of an emergency. TISO officers posted to smaller embassies tend to have the highest divorce rates of all CIA posts.

Aged 24, Snowden is no longer the youngest in the group. The classmates assign one another nicknames such as “Taco Bell” and “Flute.” Snowden is nicknamed “The Count” because he raises his forefinger before answering, just like the eponymous Sesame Street character. Their training includes the operation of Cold War-era machinery, a technique called Van Eck phreaking, and maintenance of the terminals that send “cables,” the secure diplomatic messages named after the actual cords and wires that once connected all of the network.

As they near the end of training, they fill in “dream sheets” that ask them where—of all the CIA’s worldwide stations—they would most like to work. Snowden’s first choice is the Special Requirements Division in Virginia, from which he would be sent on “periodic tours of all the uglier spots in the sandbox” (114). When the stairs of the dilapidated Comfort Inn collapse, rumors of disgruntlement and perhaps even unionization begin to circulate. Snowden is chosen to represent the group, and he compiles an email of complaints. The next meeting, he is called in and offered something between a threat and a bribe. He and his classmates are asked to deal with the issues for just 12 more weeks. This bothers Snowden, who writes another email and sends it higher up the chain of command. A few days later, a front-office secretary interrupts their class and announces that unpaid overtime will no longer be required, and the students will soon move to a nicer hotel.

The thrill of victory does not last long; Snowden is told that the CIA does not tolerate insubordination. They want Snowden at the agency, but they want to know that they can count on him. He will not be sent into the desert, but he also will not get his first-choice position. Instead, he is sent to Geneva, one of the positions all of the other students had coveted, which will cause the other students to think Snowden has either been rewarded or bought off by the management.

Snowden moves to Geneva, and Lindsay joins him a few months later. To pass the time, he reads Frankenstein, which is set in the city and tells the tale of a scientist whose innovations outpace his moral, ethical, and legal restraints, leading him to create an “uncontrollable monster.” In intelligence circles, this is named “the Frankenstein effect”: when policy decisions intended for good end up causing irreparable harm. Perhaps the most relevant example is the manner in which the American government secretly restructured the world’s communications, including part of a new network based in Geneva.

HUMINT (human intelligence) has been the traditional method of spycraft, involving human agents collecting information on the ground. SIGINT (signals intelligence), which is rapidly replacing HUMINT at the time, involves intercepted communications. The tension between the two creates a healthy rivalry. With so many important organizations headquartered in Geneva, the city is ground zero for SIGINT work. The advent of the internet means that physical access to a computer is no longer necessary for those who want to read the information stored in the machine. One weak spot, however, occurs when human agents search for information on the public internet. Foreign intelligence services can track such searches, and the CIA’s current solution is expensive, slow, and cumbersome.

Snowden introduces his case officers to Tor, a free and open source state creation which is “one of the few effective shields against the state’s surveillance” (124). It enables anonymous browsing by routing internet traffic through randomly generated Tor servers around the world, a process named onion routing. Hence the acronym: The Onion Router.

HUMINT remains important, however, and even Snowden is called into action, though his most memorable operation ends in failure. He is invited by case officers, who hope that Snowden’s natural geekiness will help them target scientists, to meet a target at an embassy function. At the party, he sits next to a Saudi man and engages him in conversation. The man is happy to talk: He loves Geneva, plays laser tag, and works in private wealth management for mostly Saudi accounts. Snowden informs the relevant case officer and returns to the party. Over the coming months, the case officer fails to recruit the Saudi man despite a great deal of effort and is recalled back to America.

Later, Snowden talks to friends from the local NSA office. They suggest that, next time he has a good target on the line, to simply inform them. By 2008, however, as the global financial systems crash, Geneva begins to seem overly extravagant. The city flourishes while the rest of the world seems to be collapsing, which Snowden sees as evidence of the global system's rot.

The internet is an American invention, and so is much of its infrastructure. As a result, more than 90% of the world’s internet traffic passes through technologies developed by the American government or American businesses. Additionally, computer software, hardware, chips, routers, modems, and web services are typically American. This Americanized internet allows for America to surveil large swathes of the world’s population. For years, Snowden says, the US government denied this, and most people believed them.

In 2009, Snowden moves to Japan to work for the NSA as a systems analyst. It is a dream job, though he is technically a contractor again, working for a company quickly acquired by Dell. Snowden and Lindsay live in Fussa, a city on the edge of the Tokyo sprawl. He is immediately impressed by the NSA’s advanced technology but worries about their seeming lack of vigilance with regard to security: Hardly anything is encrypted, and their backup systems are abysmal. Snowden is tasked with solving these issues.

Snowden works to eliminate duplicated data, which wastes time and resources. In his new system, every fragment of every file is checked for uniqueness; only new data is transmitted back to headquarters. This efficiency, coupled with constantly improving technology, helps the NSA store more and more data for longer times. They aim to keep everything in perpetuity: to create “the permanent record” (133). The randomly generated codename for this is EPICSHELTER.

While developing the system, Snowden attends a conference about China, where all intelligence agencies give expert briefings. At the last moment, Snowden is asked to give a presentation. Up all night preparing, he researches everything he can about China and the intelligence community. The sheer scale of the Chinese government’s data collection and analysis astonishes him, so much so that he almost forgets to consider the morality of the spying apparatus. He surmises that, if the Chinese are capable of this, then the American government probably has the technology to match. He decides to tamp down his unease; indeed, he decides that he fully supports “defensive and targeted surveillance, a ‘firewall’ that didn’t keep anybody out, but just burned the guilty” (137). After the conference, however, he cannot help but keep researching the matter.

At the beginning of his work with the NSA, Snowden is aware of President George W. Bush’s executive order that expanded warrantless wiretapping in the aftermath of 9/11. Because President Barack Obama, upon taking office, does not call for a congressional investigation into this NSA overreach, the change in president does not signal a change in policy. Snowden reads through an anodyne report issued by the government, which contains little of note beyond references to undefined “other intelligence activities.” He becomes increasingly concerned, particularly when certain government officials mumble their misgivings about the abuse of power by the intelligence agencies.

After putting the issue to one side, Snowden encounters the classified version of the same report, which “pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed to read” (140). It has been sent to Snowden by mistake, but it confirms his worst fears. It is also so classified that anyone leaking the report would be immediately identified, and the activities it describes are so criminal that no government would allow its release. It describes the NSA’s mass surveillance of the public, justified because the outdated laws did not apply to modern technology. The initiative is code-named STELLARWIND, and it is the deepest secret in the report. The initiative redefines private internet communications between members of the public as potential signals intelligence. The NSA needs no warrant to collect this data, and data is not considered “acquired” or “obtained” until retrieved by the agencies.

According to Snowden’s interpretation of the report, the US government is less interested in communications content and more interested in “metadata” or “data about data.” Records of what people do on a device, such as the date, time, duration, and numbers involved in a phone call, enable the NSA to track, monitor, and surveil US citizens every minute of the day. Metadata tells the intelligence agencies who, what, and when to surveil. In some ways, it is more important than the content itself, and people have little control over the metadata they produce. After reading the report, Snowden is in a daze. He feels like a fool who has been used by the intelligence agencies: At the same time that he feels entirely illiterate and lost, struggling to assimilate into Japanese culture, his government knows everything about him.

Japan, Snowden says, is the moment when he realizes that he had to act to protect his country from mass surveillance. Reflecting on his time there, Snowden regrets not visiting Nagasaki and Hiroshima, holy sites which memorialize technology’s amorality. He mentions the first two states to attempt mass surveillance: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany; both attempts ended disastrously. A modern smartphone contains more computing power than both of those countries combined. Although technology has made astounding advances, human morality has not. 

By 2011, Snowden has returned to America and still works for Dell, though he is now attached to the CIA once more. He notices that he has a mailbox and remembers his mother teaching him not to open other people’s mail. At this point, he is rich and successful, though he still lives in denial. After four years away, America feels like a changed country. He feels pity for his fellow citizens, who do not know about mass surveillance.

Snowden switches to the sales side of Dell’s business, devising solutions for the CIA. One of these solutions is a private cloud, which consolidates the agency’s processing and storage while making data accessible for the right people, anywhere in the world. With the right solution, an agent in Afghanistan has access to the same data as a person in the CIA headquarters. As a branding term, “the cloud” becomes just as appealing for consumers as it does for the CIA; even the word “cloud” makes “everyone think of heaven” (153).

Despite his newfound wealth, Snowden does not like spending money, especially with traceable credit cards. His neighbors, however, seem to be enjoying the benefits of what he sees as a post-9/11 spending spree. While shopping for appliances, Snowden encounters an internet-enabled “smart fridge.” He thinks about how the manufacturer can monetize the massive amounts of data it collects, considers the consumer versions of the cloud products he is developing for the CIA, and feels astonished that people willingly put so much of their data online. Data no longer belongs to users; it is controlled by companies who can use it however they please, protected by intelligible and impenetrable user service agreements that users never read.

Once a liberating, adventurous experience, going online now feels like a dangerous ordeal. Snowden begins to notice surveillance tools everywhere; few laws protect citizens from surveillance while on public property, for instance, allowing law enforcement to use CCTV as they please. Snowden begins to conceive of a terrifying future in which every citizen is monitored constantly, where laws are enforced by computers without leniency or forgiveness. It would be a future in which “everyone was a criminal” (157).

Lindsay notices Snowden’s struggles, but he cannot tell her what he knows: that her entire life is under surveillance and the government has access to her most intimate, most compromising information. His depression manifests physically, making him clumsier and more distant. One day, his sense of dread becomes so overbearing that he falls unconscious. Lindsay finds him curled up on the floor after he has suffered an epileptic seizure. After being diagnosed with epilepsy, Snowden feels defeated, betrayed by his country, the internet, and his own body.

On May 1, 2011, 10 years after 9/11, Snowden learns that Osama bin Laden has been killed. He reflects on what the last decade has witnessed and worries that he has wasted his life. He concludes that “fear was the true terrorism” (162), permitting the deployment of mass surveillance.

Snowden continues to suffer from seizures and becomes increasingly depressed. He cannot drive, and he worries for his job. He takes medical leave and stays on his mother’s couch, where he watches the news and thinks that the violence he sees across the Middle East exceeds his own troubles. He feels guilty as he watches the Arab Spring unfold. The protesters are demanding an end to censorship and oppression, demanding a free and just society. They reject authoritarianism, leading Snowden to ruminate on the difference between authoritarian and liberal democratic societies, as well as the fundamental importance of the right to privacy.

Snowden wants to help but he does not know how. He sets up a Tor relay, attempting to provide some internet service to the censored people of Iran. He thinks of the man who martyred himself in Tunisia, whose death was the catalyst for the Arab Spring. If that man could die for his beliefs, Snowden says, then he can “certainly get up off the couch and press a few buttons” (166-7).