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Credit to Author: Andy Greenberg| Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 14:00:00 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n In a new memoir and interview, the world\u2019s most famous whistle-blower elucidates as never before why he stood up to mass surveillance—and his love for an internet that no longer exists.<\/p>\n Edward Snowden, arguably the world\u2019s most famous whistle-blower, is a man who lived behind plenty of pseudonyms before putting his true name to his truth-telling<\/a>: When he was first communicating with the journalists who would reveal his top-secret NSA leaks, he used the names Citizenfour, Cincinnatus, and Verax\u2014Latin for \u201ctruthful\u201d and a knowing allusion to Julian Assange\u2019s old hacker handle Mendax, the teller of lies.<\/p>\n But in his newly published memoir and manifesto, Permanent Record<\/a><\/em>, Snowden describes other handles, albeit long-defunct ones: Shrike the Knight, Corwin the Bard, Belgarion the Smith, squ33ker the precocious kid asking amateur questions about chip compatibility on an early bulletin-board service. These were online videogame and forum personas, he writes, that as a teenager in the 1990s he\u2019d acquire and jettison like T-shirts, assuming new identities on a whim, often to leave behind mistakes or embarrassing ideas he\u2019d tried out in online conversations. Sometimes, he notes, he\u2019d even use his new identity to attack his prior self, the better to disavow the ignoramus he\u2019d been the week before.<\/p>\n That long-lost internet, Snowden writes, offered its inhabitants a \u201creset button for your life\u201d that could be pressed every day, at will. And he still pines for it. \u201cTo be able to expand your experience, to become a more whole person by being able to try and fail, this is what teaches us who we are and who we want to become,\u201d Snowden told WIRED in an interview ahead of his book\u2019s publication tomorrow. \u201cThis is what\u2019s denied to the rising generation. They\u2019re so ruthlessly and strictly identified in every network they interact with and by which they live. They\u2019re denied the opportunities we had to be forgotten and to have their mistakes forgiven.\u201d<\/p>\n Snowden’s memoir revisits his youthful, freewheeling days on the internet. Buy on Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n No one has exposed more than Snowden how that individualistic, ephemeral, anonymous internet has ceased to exist. Perhaps it was always a myth. (After all, at least one trove of Snowden\u2019s chatroom musings<\/a> on everything from guns to sex advice, under the pseudonym TheTrueHooha, remained online after his rise to notoriety.)<\/p>\n But for the former NSA contractor and many of his generation, that idea of the internet is a foundational myth, enshrined in Neal Stephenson novels and in \u201cThe Hacker Manifesto<\/a>\u201d\u2014both of which Snowden describes reading as a teenager in a mononucleosis haze\u2014and John Perry Barlow\u2019s \u201cDeclaration of the Independence of Cyberspace<\/a>,\u201d which Snowden writes that he holds in his memory next to the preamble to the Constitution. The internet of the \u201990s, which Snowden describes as \u201cthe most pleasant and successful anarchy I\u2019ve ever seen,\u201d was his community and his education. He even met his future wife on Hotornot.com.<\/p>\n Snowden says documenting that prehistoric digital world and its disappearance was part of what drove him to write Permanent Record<\/em>, overcoming his own aversion to sharing details of his personal life. And in doing so, he may have also helped the world understand him better than ever before. \u201cThis is actually more than a memoir from my perspective,\u201d he says. \u201cThe way I got through it was by telling, yes the history of myself as a person, but also the history of a time and a change\u2014in technology, in a system, in the internet, and in American democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n The resulting autobiography is split roughly into thirds: Snowden\u2019s life before joining the world of spies, his whirlwind seven years in the intelligence community, and his experience as a whistle-blower and international fugitive. Against all odds, the first of these, a full hundred pages largely describing the very least unique part of Snowden\u2019s life\u2014a hyper-intelligent but relatively unremarkable high school dropout\u2014is not at all a waste of time.<\/p>\n Instead, this portrait of the whistle-blower as a young man provides perhaps the most understandable, human explanation yet for Snowden\u2019s ultimate decision to turn his back on his NSA colleagues, spill the agency\u2019s guts, and condemn himself to exile: It\u2019s the story of an ambitious geek smart enough to shoot up through the NSA\u2019s ranks while keeping intact ideals for the internet that were entirely opposed to those of his employer.<\/p>\n In Snowden\u2019s telling, it sounds for the first time less like a biography of a Black Swan than the experience of a generation: An extremely online<\/em> kid of the \u201990s who is only drawn to government service after the shattering experience of 9\/11. After an attempt to join the special forces\u2014he crashes out after breaking both legs in basic training\u2014he gravitates to the intelligence world, where he discovers that the agency he works for has transformed the internet into the opposite of the playground he idealized. Instead, it\u2019s a fundamental threat to that unobserved, unrecorded anarchy, a threat that someone will need to make an enormous sacrifice to stop.<\/p>\n Other than the fateful decision to actually become that someone, Snowden points out that the rest of his story could have belonged to practically any of thousands of geeks with similar experiences. \u201cI am ordinary. The thing I discovered in my own analysis of my past is how undistinguished I was,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cIf it hadn\u2019t been me, it would have been someone else. The Edward Snowden moment was inevitable, because you can only roll the dice on conscience for so long until somebody objects.\u201d<\/p>\n That decision has arguably led to real changes: The passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015<\/a> significantly limited the collection of phone records that had previously swept up the metadata of every American, perhaps the clearest illustration among Snowden's revelations of the mass surveillance he sought to expose. Congress is now considering whether to end the metadata collection program altogether<\/a>. But none of that has changed the deep bipartisan resentment of Snowden within the higher ranks of the US government: Democratic representative Adam Schiff has disputed that Snowden can even be called a whistle-blower<\/a>, while President Trump's secretary of state Michael Pompeo has called for Snowden's execution<\/a>.<\/p>\n "We\u2019ve been forced to live naked before power for a generation."<\/p>\n Edward Snowden<\/p>\n While the larger world has debated Snowden\u2019s role as a hero or a traitor over the six years since he became a household name, many in the cybersecurity community have instead dismissed him as a mere grandstanding IT guy\u2014a systems administrator who never really participated in the surveillance and hacking operations he\u2019d later expose. As it turns out, this is half true. Snowden was, even at the zenith of his ascendant career, the IT guy, responsible for managing what he calls a \u201cdopey poky\u201d Microsoft system for document sharing called SharePoint but also building systems known as EpicShelter and Heartbeat that de-duplicated and shared information more efficiently between NSA offices. Aside from one early incident as a teenager in which he describes finding and reporting a relatively simple vulnerability in a nuclear facility\u2019s website, there\u2019s not much evidence of Snowden\u2019s prowess as a hacker.<\/p>\n It turns out, however, that the IT guy, in an institution whose currency is information, is one of the most powerful people in the org chart. Snowden was, in fact, one of the young IT elite, deeply aware of the generational divide that helped put him in that role. In one passage from a period he spent working at a CIA data center, he describes, with conscious immodesty, his daily walk past an array of IT help desk staffers on his way into a more highly classified compartment of secrets inside the building. \u201cI was decades younger than the help desk folks and heading past them into a vault to which they didn\u2019t have access and never would,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Later, he describes his final position in the NSA\u2019s Hawaii office, based in a massive Cold War\u2013era tunnel under a pineapple field. \u201cI was the only employee of the Office of Information Sharing\u2014I was<\/em> the Office of Information Sharing. So my very job was to know what sharable information was out there.\u201d<\/p>\n In his review of that r\u00e9sum\u00e9 with WIRED, he laughed off the \u201cjust a systems administrator\u201d attacks. \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as just<\/em> a systems administrator,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cThe systems administrator is always the most powerful person on the entire network.\u201d<\/p>\n At one point early in his NSA career, Snowden writes that he was asked to use his deep access to assemble a counterintelligence presentation on Chinese surveillance and internet control\u2014one of the first moments when he began to wonder how exactly the equivalent US systems of internet surveillance might compare. But for the most part, his core role as an IT shaman and data distribution expert seems to have left him removed enough from the day-to-day surveillance mission to maintain the principled stand of an outside observer\u2014maximum access to information about the NSA\u2019s surveillance with a minimum of the complicity that keeps others silent.<\/p>\n More than in other descriptions of his revelations, Permanent Record<\/em> makes clearer than ever that Snowden\u2019s central concern, and what drove him to his life-altering decision to digitally disembowel his employer, is not any specific surveillance abuse. (Though he does note plenty of instances of \u201cLoveInt\u201d in the agency, in which staff spied on romantic interests and ex-partners.)<\/p>\n Instead, he writes that it\u2019s the building of a potential<\/em> panopticon\u2014what he has called turnkey tyranny\u2014with every tool in place to record everything about everyone, to turn any individual\u2019s secret life against them at the whim of the powerful, that he sought to expose and devote his life to fighting. \u201cThe construction of the system was<\/em> itself the abuse,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve been forced to live naked before power for a generation.\u201d<\/p>\n Specific examples of human rights abuses, like the growing use of surveillance tools<\/a> by agencies like Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to enforce the Trump administration\u2019s cruel vision of immigration policy, he argues, are just a symptom of that larger systemic change. \u201cDonald Trump isn\u2019t the problem. He\u2019s the product of the problem,\u201d Snowden says.<\/p>\n Snowden\u2019s nostalgia for a less-policed, anonymous, and anarchic internet, of course, doesn\u2019t seem to account for the troll armies and alt-right \u201cfree speech\u201d brigades widely seen as the real online force behind Trump\u2019s rise. But on that point, Snowden remains a kind of First Amendment absolutist. \u201cThat\u2019s the price of admission to a free society,\u201d he says. \u201cThe best response to the worst person is not to fear them but to correct them, not to silence them but to challenge them, to make them better than they were.\u201d<\/p>\n Aside from Snowden\u2019s origin story and motives, the last act of Permanent Record<\/em> documents in more detail than ever before the process of Snowden\u2019s leaks, from \u201cwardriving\u201d around Hawaii with his laptop to break into vulnerable Wi-Fi networks as a means to cover his digital tracks to his escape across the globe from Hawaii to Hong Kong to Moscow, including fresh details about the underreported role of WikiLeaks\u2019 Sarah Harrison as his protector and guide. That story climaxes in a tense meeting between Snowden and an officer of the FSB in the Moscow airport. The official does his best, briefly, to turn Snowden into a Russian intelligence asset. Snowden writes that he interrupted to decline before the pitch was even finished, the better to avoid any unscrupulous editing of hidden recordings of the meeting.<\/p>\n Snowden flatly denies that he has had any other interactions with Russian intelligence since. After all, he never brought a single NSA document to Russia. \u201cAll I have is what\u2019s in my head, and I wasn\u2019t willing to give that to them,\u201d he says. He speculates that the Kremlin is satisfied enough with his involuntary role as a living embarrassment to the United States, an American human rights defender forced to seek asylum in Putin\u2019s Russia rather than the other way around.<\/p>\n As for his endgame, Snowden says he has none\u2014that he hasn\u2019t, in fact, had much of a plan for his long-term survival since he left Hawaii. He has said repeatedly that he\u2019s ready to return to the US to stand trial if he\u2019s allowed to mount a defense based on the motivations for his whistle-blowing\u2014which means he isn\u2019t ready to return to the US anytime soon: Snowden faces charges under the Espionage Act, which treats leaks of classified information to a journalist as no different from selling secrets to a foreign government. Trump\u2019s friendliness with Putin, meanwhile, has raised questions about whether he might at some point be handed back to the US as a diplomatic gift, a possibility that Snowden says he puts out of his mind as an uncontrollable element of his fate.<\/p>\n If he has to spend the rest of his life in Russia, on the other hand, so be it, he says. He rents an apartment with his wife, Lindsay, whom he married in Moscow. He can find most of the same American fast food in Moscow that he loved in Hawaii and Maryland. He continues to act as president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation<\/a>, beaming into his colleagues' computer screens like Max Headroom\u2014and occasionally into a mobile telepresence robot<\/a>\u2014to lead a team of programmers and engineers focused on building tools designed to improving journalists' digital security.<\/p>\n Regardless of where he might live, above all else he remains a creature of the online world, an "indoor cat," as he calls himself. \u201cMy life has always been mediated by a screen. What difference does it make whether I\u2019m looking at a screen in New York or Berlin or Moscow?\u201d Snowden says. \u201cIt\u2019s all the same internet.\u201d<\/p>\n When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n