Permanent Record (autobiography)

Permanent Record is an autobiography by Edward Snowden whose revelations sparked a global debate about surveillance .

It was on September 17, 2019 ( Constitution Day - Day of the American Constitution ) from the publisher Metropolitan Books (at Henry Holt and Company published properly).

The book describes Snowden's childhood, his career with the CIA and NSA, and his motivation for disseminating classified information from the US government in 2013 that sparked the global surveillance and espionage affair.

Summary

A Commodore 64 increased Edwards Snowden's childhood interest in computer technology

First part

Snowden tells how he in a patriotic military family in Elizabeth City , North Carolina , grew up and just before his ninth birthday by Crofton ( Maryland 's) pulled. In Crofton, his father served as chief warrant officer in the aeronautical engineering department at US Coast Guard headquarters and his mother with the National Security Agency (NSA). He was introduced to computer science by his father through a Commodore 64 home computer . From the age of twelve, he said he was obsessed with the Internet , used dial-up Internet access, and tried as much as he could to spend online. Eventually, he learned to program and began learning more about hacking , losing his focus on school, which was detrimental to his school grades. One day while he was in school, he discovered a security hole on the Los Alamos National Laboratory's website that allowed access to the internal network of the nuclear research facility. He called the lab to let them know and later received a call from a man who thanked them and offered a job when he turned 18. Near the end of his freshman year at Arundel High School , Snowden's parents divorced and sold their Crofton house. He moved to his mother's apartment near Ellicott City .

Early in high school, Snowden was diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis due to his fatigue . He missed four months of classes and was ordered to repeat his sophomore year. Instead, he decided to drop out of high school and enrolled at Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) two days a week . He later passed the General Educational Development Test at a high school near Baltimore; a promise he had made to himself after dropping out of school. Snowden started working as a freelance web designer for a woman in his Japanese class at AACC and wanted to advance his career and completed a Microsoft certification course .

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , Snowden joined the United States Army to show that he was (according to his attitude at the time) " not just a brain in a glass ". Snowden says that his greatest regret is his own "reflexive, unconditional support" for the War on Terror and the resulting "proclamation of secret politics, secret laws, secret courts and secret wars".

However, as a candidate for the United States Army Special Forces Command (Airborne) , he suffered a fatigue fracture at Fort Benning , Georgia.

Still wanting to serve his country, Snowden believed that he was taking his technological talent for granted and so began to take classes at Anne Arundel Community College again. He knew he was a top-secret - security clearance would need to work for a secret service, and looked for jobs that would support its approval. He joined the University of Maryland's Center for Advanced Study of Language , an NSA sponsored research center.

He eventually passed the polygraph test in the security clearance at the Friendship Annex (facility) of the NSA and achieved one of several high top secret clearances (TS / SCI) when he was twenty-two years old.

Around the same time, he met his then girlfriend Lindsay Mills on the profile review site Hot or Not .

Second part

After attending a job fair in 2006 at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner , Virginia , Snowden accepted an offer for the CIA and was assigned to the global communications department at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia . In March 2007, the CIA stationed Snowden with diplomatic cover in Geneva, where he was responsible for maintaining network security. In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA.

Shortly thereafter, Snowden accepted a job as a contractor for the NSA in Japan, but was officially employed by Perot Systems (which was taken over by Dell shortly after his arrival ). He worked at the NSA's Pacific Technical Center (PTC) at Yokota Air Base . His job there was "to help connect the system architecture of the NSA with that of the CIA". At one point, the PTC hosted a conference with briefings given by experts from the US Intelligence Community (US IC). The conference dealt with the alignment of Chinese intelligence services with the US and the question of how the IC could react.

When the sole technical advisor could not be in attendance, Snowden was selected to replace her in assessing China's surveillance capabilities. He stayed up all night preparing his presentation. He searched top secret reports from the NSA network and the CIA network. He was amazed at the extent to which China was able to constantly collect, store and analyze the billions of daily telephone and Internet communications of its more than one billion inhabitants. However, Snowden began to believe that it was impossible for the US to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without doing the same things themselves. Snowden admits, however, that by the time he "suppressed" his discomfort and fully supported the defensive and targeted surveillance. However, he became suspicious of reading the public report on the President's Surveillance Program (PSP) around the same time . His suspicions led him to search for the secret report but could not find it. Only later, after he had stopped looking for it, did he accidentally come across that report on the secret Stellarwind component of the PSP. After reading the report, he felt disaffected and betrayed.

Snowden moved to Columbia, Maryland in 2011 and was still working for Dell. Now he was back in the CIA. He had moved into a sales position, a move he describes as a way to distract himself from his discomfort and start a normal life. However, the rise of cloud computing bothered Snowden. He started to express his concern to Lindsay. Around the same time, Snowden began to suffer from severe dizziness and eventually his first epileptic seizure . After a series of seizures, Snowden took a temporary leave of absence from Dell. The last chapter of Part 2, "On the Couch", describes his time relaxing on his mother's blue couch and his thoughts on authoritarian conditions and privacy in the context of the Arab Spring in 2010/2011.

third part

House rented from Edward Snowden in Waipahu , Hawaii

In March 2012, he began his work in Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Center ( The Tunnel ), a former aircraft factory of the NSA, which is under a pineapple field in Kunia on the island of Oahu , Hawaii is. He was working on a Dell contract for the NSA. Snowden moved to Hawaii to enjoy the relaxed lifestyle and less stressful duties of his new position to alleviate the triggers of his seizures. He was the only employee of the Office of Information Sharing , where he worked as a SharePoint system administrator . It was around this time that he began actively investigating the NSA's surveillance skills and abuses. As part of his work, Snowden developed a system called Heartbeat that created an automatic queue from the secret documents posted on the US Intelligence Community readboards . Heartbeat constantly scans for new and unique documents and creates a kind of aggregated news feed that is personalized for each employee based on their interests and security review. Heartbeat was extremely comprehensive, accessing the CIA and FBI networks and the Department of Defense's top secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System in addition to the NSA network . A copy of every document scanned was stored on Heartbeat's servers, enabling Snowden to "do the kind of intensive research that most agency managers could only dream of". According to Snowden, almost all of the documents he later passed on to journalists were received through Heartbeat.

In "Whistleblowing," Snowden discusses the United States Constitution, arguing that the intelligence community "hacked" it by cracking down on the executive, legislative and judiciary branches with impunity. He also discusses the history of whistleblowing , arguing that the terms “ leak ” and “whistleblowing” should not be used interchangeably as he believes that “leaks” are self-interest rather than the public interest.

When Snowden decided to go public, he realized he had to have records or else he risked being questioned. He chose not to post these himself to avoid getting lost among the madmen of the people who post secrets on the internet every day. He avoided WikiLeaks because he believed that the new strategy of posting leaks, if received, would be no different from the one he was posting himself. He was of the opinion that a document dump ( mere publication of raw data ) was not appropriate because it was too "complicated and technical". He pondered the New York Times , but was put off by the way Bill Keller deliberately delayed coverage of the George W. Bush- enacted Terrorist Surveillance Program until it was re-elected in 2004. He selected a number of journalists to contact, most notably messaging documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald . He communicated with them by email under the code names " Cincinnatus ", " Citizenfour " and " Verax ". To remain anonymous, he did wardriving ; while driving around Oahu in his car equipped with an antenna and magnetic GPS sensor , he dialed or hacked into unencrypted and encrypted local WiFi networks in order to communicate from there. In addition to the Kismet mapping software, he used the Tor network , which ran on a Tails operating system and made it possible for him to hide the MAC address of his laptop. Under the guise of compatibility testing, Snowden transferred documents from the Heartbeat server from his office to legacy Dell desktop PCs and then to SD cards after they were deduplicated, compressed and encrypted. He carried the SD cards out safely and alternately hid them in a Rubik's Cube , in his sock, in his cheek and in his pocket. At home, he transferred them to a single external hard drive , which he encrypted several times.

In order to ascertain the moral legality of this undertaking before the data was published, Snowden wanted to experience the full extent of the surveillance in his practice. H. get a practical confirmation of the totalitarian surveillance claim of the secret services. To do this, Snowden changed his job on March 15, 2013 within the NSA by quitting his job at the NSA service provider Dell and becoming an employee of the NSA service provider Booz Allen Hamilton . He exchanged the position as system administrator for an operational position as "infrastructure analyst " at the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) in Honolulu. The NTOC is responsible for counter-espionage of the NSA and uses u. a. even the spy software XKEYSCORE . Colleagues at Snowden use XKEYSCORE to spy on current and past relationship partners in what is known as LOVEINT .

A key moment for him was when Snowden was once able to watch a man he did not know playing with his young son through his webcam, which had been hacked by the NSA. Between March and May 2013, Snowden was preparing to leave the country, empty his bank accounts, and wipe and encrypt his old computers. He researched his safest and most sensible travel destination and came across Hong Kong. The day after Lindsay went on a camping trip, Snowden took a leave of absence from work on the pretext of being unable to work ( epilepsy ). He took four laptops with him: one for secure communication, one for normal communication, a decoy, and an air gap . H. a computer that is never connected to the internet. He flew to Tokyo and then to Hong Kong on May 20, 2013, and paid cash on both occasions.

He was staying at The Mira Hong Kong Hotel, where Glenn and Laura met him on June 2, 2013. From June 3-9, Snowden was interviewed by Glenn and Ewen MacAskill (reporters for The Guardian ). Meanwhile, Laura filmed what later featured in her Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour (2014). On June 5, the Guardian Glenn's first story published about the arrest of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court , which Verizon asked the NSA to provide "telephony metadata" available a daily feed with. On June 6, The Guardian published Glenn's PRISM disclosure , and The Washington Post published the PRISM story of Laura and Barton Gellman on June 7. Snowden's identity was revealed on June 9th through a video interview with Laura posted on The Guardian's website. The US government brought charges against Snowden on June 14 under the Espionage Act and officially requested his extradition on June 21, Snowden's 30th birthday.

Accompanied by Sarah Harrison from WikiLeaks, Snowden tried to travel to Ecuador to seek political asylum there. They planned to fly to Havana via Moscow , from there to Caracas , and then to Quito , Ecuador, as they could not fly directly from Hong Kong and all other connecting flights traveled through the airspace of the United States. They arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow on June 23, but were intercepted and questioned by a man from the Russian Secret Service ( FSB ). The man asked Snowden to work for her, but Snowden turned down the offer, saying he had no intention of staying in Russia . The man informed Snowden that the US State Department had canceled his passport. He went on to ask Snowden to share information with them, but he refused. Snowden was detained in Sheremetyevo for forty days. During this time he applied for political asylum in twenty-seven countries , but none offered it. On August 1, the Russian government granted Snowden temporary asylum.

The penultimate 28th chapter of the book consists of entries from Lindsay Mill's diary from 2013. Snowden stated that no one but her had the experience or the right to tell this time of her life: "The FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the Press attention, online harassment, confusion and pain, anger and sadness. "

In the final chapter, "Love and Exile," Snowden shares his thoughts on the implications of his revelations, including the ACLU v. Clapper and the EU data protection regulation , as well as his hopes for the future of technology and data protection . He also discusses how to get used to life in Moscow with Lindsay. Finally, Snowden reveals that he and Lindsay got married in 2017.

Civil action

On September 17, 2019, the United States filed a lawsuit against Snowden in the Eastern District of Virginia District Court for alleged violations of nondisclosure agreements with the CIA and NSA. The complaint alleges that Snowden breached the pre-publication requirements related to the publication of his résumé. In the complaint, the publishers Macmillan and Holtzbrink are accused for their cooperation. Snowden himself referred to it on an episode of The Daily Show , pointing out that it was largely responsible for the increase in sales of the book through the Streisand Effect .

publication

The book was published on September 17, 2019 by Metropolitan Books , a reprint by Henry Holt and Company.

It was published on purpose on that day in order to taken up in the book Constitution Day (Day of the US Constitution to make) carefully.

On October 6, 2019, the book debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller for hardcover books and number two on the bestseller list for combined print and e-book non-fiction.

Snowden thanked writer Joshua Cohen for helping him turn his voluminous memories into a book. After the book was published, United States intelligence agencies filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden for violating confidentiality agreements .

Reviews

Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Snowden's book is unlikely to change the opinion of its critics, but it makes a strong case for his efforts."

Publishers Weekly criticized the book for not having a strong argument that NSA surveillance "inevitably leads to suppressive control".

Greg Miller of The Washington Post praised Snowden's "clear and persuasive language" about the surveillance network architecture he revealed.

The Economist called the book "well-written, often funny" but concluded: "Regardless of his relationship with the Russian authorities and whenever it began, everything he writes on Permanent Record - about himself and about America - must says being seen through the prism of its dependence on the Kremlin. "

National Public Radio : "In 2015, Congress passed the Freedom Act, which bans the collection of phone records from American citizens in large quantities. Now the government must get a court order to view individual phone records."

The New Yorker : "But Snowden concluded that the forces that ruined the Internet of his childhood were less than the forces of libertarianism that left businesses unchecked and provoked endless forms of capture, persecution, mining and manipulation Forces from government that, under the expansive authority of the Patriot Act of 2001, made the Internet a place where it is impossible to be unknown and autonomous. "

See also

• Citizenfour , documentary by Laura Poitras about the global surveillance and espionage affair exposed by Edward Snowden

Individual evidence

1. ^ Cat Zakrzewski: Analysis | The Technology 202: Here's what Edward Snowden thinks about Trump's whistleblower (en-US) . In: Washington Post , October 1, 2019. 
2. ^ Alison Flood: Edward Snowden memoir to reveal whistleblower's secrets (en-GB) . In: The Guardian , August 1, 2019. 
3. ^ Edward Snowden: Permanent Record . Henry Holt and Company, September 17, 2019, ISBN 978-1-250-23724-8 .
4. ↑ United States Files Civil Lawsuit Against Edward Snowden . In: Department of Justice, US Attorney's Office, Eastern District of Virginia , September 17, 2019. 
5. ↑ United States of America v. Edward Snowden . In: Department of Justice , September 17, 2019. 
6. ^ Trilby Beresford: Edward Snowden on How Getting Sued by the Government Resulted in a Best-Selling Book . In: The Hollywood Reporter , September 19, 2019. Retrieved October 4, 2019. 
7. ^ Concepción de León: Edward Snowden's Memoir Is Coming in September . August 1, 2019. Retrieved October 7, 2019.
8. ↑ Hardcover Nonfiction Books - Best Sellers . October 6, 2019. Retrieved October 4, 2019.
9. ↑ Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction - Best Sellers . October 6, 2019. Retrieved October 4, 2019.
10. ↑ Jennifer Szalai: In Edward Snowden's New Memoir, the Disclosures This Time Are Personal (en-US) . In: The New York Times , September 13, 2019. Retrieved September 22, 2019. 
11. ^ Permanent Record by Edward Snowden . September 17, 2019. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
12. ^ Nonfiction Book Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden . September 17, 2019. Retrieved September 18, 2019.
13. ^ Greg Miller: Edward Snowden explains how he pulled off one of the largest leaks in US history . September 13, 2019. Retrieved October 4, 2019.
14. ^ Edward Snowden's memoir reveals some (but not all) . September 13, 2019. Retrieved October 9, 2019.
15. ↑ Greg Myre: In 'Permanent Record,' Edward Snowden Says 'Exile Is An Endless Layover' ( en ) September 12, 2019. Retrieved October 2, 2019.
16. ^ Jill Lepore: Review: Edward Snowden and the Rise of Whistle-Blower Culture in "Permanent Record" (en) . September 16, 2019. Retrieved October 2, 2019.