Here are 25 of my favourite quotes from Edward Snowden’s autobiography “Permanent Record”. It really is an excellent book, revealing much about his life, and the perils of the modern internet. It details how corporations and supposedly democratic governments have thoroughly corrupted our internet - through lies, greed, cowardice and incompetence. It’s no wonder those in power hate Snowden so much.
Each quote is preceded by the chapter title, and has been edited for my style of punctuation (closing quote mark before comma or full-stop within a sentence, space-hyphen-space instead of em dash).
To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.
Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face - and imagine they’re gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.
Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.
RUNNING IN UNIT formation, calling cadence - it lulls you, it puts you outside yourself, filling your ears with the din of dozens of men echoing your own shouting voice and forcing your eyes to fix on the footfalls of the runner in front of you. After a while you don’t think anymore, you merely count, and your mind dissolves into the rank and file as you pace out mile after mile. I would say it was serene if it wasn’t so deadening. I would say I was at peace if I weren’t so tired. This was precisely as the army intended. The drill sergeant goes unslapped not so much because of fear but because of exhaustion: he’s never worth the effort. The army makes its fighters by first training the fight out of them until they’re too weak to care, or to do anything besides obey.
It’s a scary proposition, to take an online relationship off-line. It would be scary even in a world without ax murderers and scammers. In my experience, the more you’ve communicated with someone online, the more disappointed you’ll be by meeting them in person. Things that are the easiest to say on-screen become the most difficult to say face-to-face. Distance favors intimacy: no one talks more openly than when they’re alone in a room, chatting with an unseen someone alone in a different room. Meet that person, however, and you lose your latitude. Your talk becomes safer and tamer, a common conversation on neutral ground.
By the time I arrived, the sincerity of public service had given way to the greed of the private sector, and the sacred compact of the soldier, officer, and career civil servant was being replaced by the unholy bargain of Homo contractus, the primary species of US Government 2.0. This creature was not a sworn servant but a transient worker, whose patriotism was incentivized by a better paycheck and for whom the federal government was less the ultimate authority than the ultimate client.
It was particularly bizarre to me that most of the systems engineering and systems administration jobs that were out there were private, because these positions came with almost universal access to the employer’s digital existence. It’s unimaginable that a major bank or even a social media outfit would hire outsiders for systems-level work. In the context of the US government, however, restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who didn’t really work for you was what passed for innovation.
I couldn’t help but think while I sat through this Indoc that the presenters were preaching to the choir. You don’t need to tell a bunch of computer whizzes that they possess superior knowledge and skills that uniquely qualify them to act independently and make decisions on behalf of their fellow citizens without any oversight or review. Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism.
This, to my thinking, actually represented the great nexus of the Intelligence Community and the tech industry: both are entrenched and unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. Both believe that they have the solutions for everything, which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose. Above all, they both believe that these solutions are inherently apolitical, because they’re based on data, whose prerogatives are regarded as preferable to the chaotic whims of the common citizen.
The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered aircraft. Today, the most meaningful diplomacy happens directly between ministries and ministers. Sure, embassies do still send the occasional demarche and help support their citizens abroad, and then there are the consular sections that issue visas and renew passports. But those are often in a completely different building, and anyway, none of those activities can even remotely justify the expense of maintaining all that infrastructure. Instead, what justifies the expense is the ability for a country to use the cover of its foreign service to conduct and legitimize its spying.
Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security in its every iteration, from the compartmentalization of information to data encryption. In Geneva, we’d had to haul the hard drives out of the computer every night and lock them up in a safe - and what’s more, those drives were encrypted. The NSA, by contrast, hardly bothered to encrypt anything.
One major irony here is that law, which always lags behind technological innovation by at least a generation, gives substantially more protections to a communication’s content than to its metadata - and yet intelligence agencies are far more interested in the metadata - the activity records that allow them both the “big picture” ability to analyze data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an individual person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior. In sum, metadata can tell your surveillant virtually everything they’d ever want or need to know about you, except what’s actually going on inside your head.
Japan was my atomic moment. It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and that if my generation didn’t intervene the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.
Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching - as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files - for evidence of a suitable crime.
Read your terms of service agreements for cloud storage, which get longer and longer by the year - current ones are over six thousand words, twice the average length of one of these book chapters. When we choose to store our data online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us, and can willfully delete any data they object to. Unless we’ve kept a separate copy on our own machines or drives, this data will be lost to us forever. If any of our data is found to be particularly objectionable or otherwise in violation of the terms of service, the companies can unilaterally delete our accounts, deny us our own data, and yet retain a copy for their own records, which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately, the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data. There is no property less protected, and yet no property more private.
THE INTERNET I’D grown up with, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing. And with it, so was my youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught ordeal. Self-expression now required such strong self-protection as to obviate its liberties and nullify its pleasures. Every communication was a matter not of creativity but of safety. Every transaction was a potential danger.
Meanwhile, the private sector was busy leveraging our reliance on technology into market consolidation. The majority of American Internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by an imperial triumvirate of companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and the American IC was seeking to take advantage of that fact by obtaining access to their networks - both through direct orders that were kept secret from the public, and clandestine subversion efforts that were kept secret from the companies themselves. Our user data was turning vast profits for the companies, and the government pilfered it for free. I don’t think I’d ever felt so powerless.
America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy. In the American system, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another. In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force - including lethal force. Among the most important of these restraints are the prohibitions against law enforcement surveilling private citizens on their property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant. There are few laws, however, that restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes the vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks.
Most of our lives, even if we don’t realize it, occur not in black and white but in a gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the recycling bin and recyclables in the trash, ride our bicycles in the improper lane, and borrow a stranger’s Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn’t pay for. Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.
I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that”, she said, “I’d be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.”
She was right. And she was right to be worried about me. She thought I was too tense, and under too much stress. I was - not because of my work, but because of my desire to tell her a truth that I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t tell her that my former coworkers at the NSA could target her for surveillance and read the love poems she texted me. I couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took - not just her public photos, but the intimate ones. I couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.
The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened concurrently with the development of digital technology, which made much of the earth American soil - whether we liked it or not. Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force. American politicians weren’t as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East. The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in “counterterror”: the panicked actions of a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unconcerned about upholding the rule of law. After 9/11, the IC’s orders had been “never again”, a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.
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. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor - or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling.
In this case, the technologies behind upstream collection did exist. As I came to realize, these tools are the most invasive elements of the NSA’s mass surveillance system, if only because they’re the closest to the user - that is, the closest to the person being surveilled. Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.
The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely. The agency was essentially making a claim that the amendment’s protections didn’t apply to modern-day lives. The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure”. Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party” - your telephone service provider - you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you may once have had. And it insisted that “search” and “seizure” occurred only when its analysts, not its algorithms, actively queried what had already been automatically collected.
The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity. I realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible - for anything. It was time to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how broken the process was, they were right. The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and they used that knowledge to their advantage.
They’d hacked the Constitution.
In organizations like the NSA - in which malfeasance has become so structural as to be a matter not of any particular initiative, but of an ideology - proper channels can only become a trap, to catch the heretics and disfavorables. I’d already experienced the failure of command back in Warrenton, and then again in Geneva, where in the regular course of my duties I had discovered a security vulnerability in a critical program. I’d reported the vulnerability, and when nothing was done about it I reported that, too. My supervisors weren’t happy that I’d done so, because their supervisors weren’t happy, either. The chain of command is truly a chain that binds, and the lower links can only be lifted by the higher.
A total exposure of the total apparatus of mass surveillance - not by me, but by the media, the de facto fourth branch of the US government, protected by the Bill of Rights: that was the only response appropriate to the scale of the crime. It wouldn’t be enough, after all, to merely reveal a particular abuse or set of abuses, which the agency could stop (or pretend to stop) while preserving the rest of the shadowy apparatus intact. Instead, 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.
These public initiatives of mass surveillance proved, once and for all, that there could be no natural alliance between technology and government. The rift between my two strangely interrelated communities, the American IC and the global online tribe of technologists, became pretty much definitive. In my earliest years in the IC, I could still reconcile the two cultures, transitioning smoothly between my spy work and my relationships with civilian Internet privacy folks - everyone from the anarchist hackers to the more sober academic Tor types who kept me current about computing research and inspired me politically. For years, I was able to fool myself that we were all, ultimately, on the same side of history: we were all trying to protect the Internet, to keep it free for speech and free of fear. But my ability to sustain that delusion was gone. Now the government, my employer, was definitively the adversary. What my technologist peers had always suspected, I’d only recently confirmed, and I couldn’t tell them. Or I couldn’t tell them yet.
If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine - and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example - then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.
Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
Last modified: 2021-11-12 07:12:16 UTC.