Book SummaryPermanent Record, by Edward Snowden

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Permanent Record

Edward Snowden is a whistleblower who revealed the existence of STELLARWIND, the US government’s mass surveillance program.

Ed’s Childhood

Edward, who’s referred to as “Ed” throughout the book, was born in 1983, the same year as the public Internet. Growing up, Ed was fascinated by technology. He first encountered video games when he was six and his family got a home computer when he was nine. By age 12, his goal was to spend as much time on the Internet as possible.

The Internet of Ed’s childhood was a different entity than it is today. The early Internet was mainly used by people (rather than governments or businesses), it wasn’t monetized, and it was anonymous. Ed—and everyone—had tremendous freedom online.

Ed’s Teenage Years

In Ed’s teenage years, he began to question authority and got into hacking. His most notable achievement was discovering a security hole on the website of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a US nuclear facility.

In freshman year of high school, Ed’s parents divorced, and in sophomore year, he came down with mononucleosis. He became too ill to even use the computer and missed so much school he was told he’d have to repeat the year. Ed absolutely did not want to do this, so he “hacked” the school system—he discovered he didn’t actually need a high school diploma to attend college, so he applied to Anne Arundel Community College and was accepted.

Ed enjoyed his college classes more than he’d enjoyed his high school ones. He made friends with a group of people in his Japanese class and one of them, Mae, owned a web design business. She hired Ed to work for her.

Ed was infatuated with Mae, even though she was older and married, and enjoyed working with her even though the actual work was sometimes repetitive. If he wanted to keep working in tech, he knew he’d have to acquire a professional certification, so he tested for his Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE).

Ed Joins the Army

September 11, 2001, changed everything for Ed (and for the US). Ed had never felt more patriotic or American and decided to serve. He didn’t have enough qualifications to be a hacker for an intelligence agency, and computers were easy for him and he wanted to do something harder. Therefore, he joined the army.

Ed injured his legs during basic training and had to leave the army. The army taught him that the military didn’t want its soldiers to think and that he’d have a better chance at defending democracy from behind a computer.

Ed’s Technologist Career

Ed’s first job as a technologist was for a company called COMSO that contracted services to the CIA. (Intelligence agencies rely so heavily on contracting that it’s easier to work for them as a contractor than as an employee.) Ed spent the next few years working at a variety of positions for the CIA and NSA in the US, Geneva, and Tokyo. Because Ed worked with computer systems, he had top secret security clearance and access to more documents than most individuals would, even those higher up in the agency.

Ed’s Discovery of the Mass Surveillance Program

When Ed was in Tokyo, three important things happened:

• Ed was asked to speak about China’s surveillance of its citizens at a conference. As Ed researched China, he learned that US intelligence knew a lot about mass surveillance, so much that he suspected they’d tried it.
• Ed built a system, code-named EPICSHELTER, to help the NSA store and back up data.
• The unclassified report on the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP) was released to the public. The PSP, created in response to 9/11, had allowed the NSA to wiretap without a warrant and had allegedly expired in 2007. Ed thought the report had holes.

Ed eventually found the classified version of the PSP report. This version revealed the US had been conducting mass surveillance on its citizens past the expiry of the PSP. It had details about the program, STELLARWIND, and explained how the NSA had gotten around legislation and the Constitution. A secret court had given the NSA a blanket warrant to...

Permanent Record Summary Shortform Introduction

In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked top secret documents to the media. The documents revealed that the US government was conducting mass surveillance on its citizens and nearly everyone in the world.

Permanent Record is Ed’s memoir. It was originally written in three parts and 29 chapters....

Permanent Record Summary Part 1: Growing Up | Chapter 1: Childhood

Part 1 covers the early years of Edward’s life, from childhood until college. Each chapter starts with a section about the context in which Ed was growing up, followed by a section about Ed’s life.

Birth

Context: The Internet

When we talk about the Internet, we tend to treat it like a single entity. In fact, “Internet” most broadly refers to the network of networks that connect computers all over the world. The computers connect via “languages” called protocols. There are many kinds of protocols. For example, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) allows computers to communicate about websites. There are so many different types of protocols that there are few things that can’t be digitized. Food, water, clothes, and homes are some of the only things that can’t go online.

The public Internet was created in 1983 by the US Department of Defense. The Department of Defense had a group of interconnected computers that they split in half. They kept half for their own use and named the network MILNET. The other half became the Internet.

**At the time of the book’s publication (2019), around three billion people—42% of the world’s population—used the...

Permanent Record Summary Chapter 2: Teenage Years

Ed would spend even more time with computers in his teen years.

Age 12: The Internet

Context: Complete Separation of Online and Real Life

In the 90s, unlike today, your online persona was completely separate from your real self. This anonymity meant you were free to be as creative and open as you liked. You never had to worry about your reputation, or looking like a hypocrite, or if people would make fun of your tacky GeoCities site. People posted about whatever they liked, hoping to sway others to their opinion. Because the Internet was anonymous, you could easily change your mind and reinvent yourself anytime.

The Internet also encouraged creating new, separate identities via role-playing games, especially MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). To play these games, you had to create an avatar, or “alt.” You could be any of a group of stock medieval characters including a thief, wizard, or warrior. You could also have more than one “alt” and switch between them whenever you liked.

**Everything would change in the 2000s when the government and businesses started to link online personas to people’s real-life identities....

Permanent Record Summary Part 2: Army Career | Chapter 3: Service

Part 1 covered Ed’s childhood. Part 2 covers his brief stint in the army in 2004.

Context: Army Backgrounder

18 X-Ray

After 9/11, many US programs were changing. A new program called “18 X-Ray” screened incoming army applicants for Special Forces’ qualification courses at sign-up. Previously, to get into Special Forces courses, you had to already be in the army.

Injuries

The army has a stigma about injuries for a few reasons:

• The goal is to make soldiers feel invincible.

• The army doesn’t want to be liable for mistraining.

This results in injured recruits being seen as whiners or fakers, and it encourages people to hide injuries. For example, one recruit hurt his hip but ignored it. By the time he got it looked at a week later, he had to go straight into surgery—his hip was broken and the break was sharp enough to slice nerves.

Ed qualified for the X-Ray program based on his performance in his entrance exams. Before he could take any special...

Permanent Record Summary Part 3: Technologist Career | Chapter 4: Working for the University of Maryland

Part 3 covers Ed’s career as a technologist, from approximately 2005 to 2009.

Context: Careers in Technology

Career Options

Technologists have a few career options if they want to specialize:

• Software developers/programmers. These people write computer code.

• Network/hardware specialists. These people physically set up wires and servers.

• Systems technologists. These people work with the big picture of computing. They work with software, hardware, and networks. More specifically, the job titles are:

  • Systems administrators/sysadmins. These people are responsible for maintaining an entire system. When it breaks, they fix it, and they slowly make it better as a whole over time.

  • Systems engineers. These people solve a problem by inventing a new system to address it, or by massaging existing solutions into something custom.

Security Clearances

The federal government is the only entity that can grant a security clearance and they only clear people who are sponsored—people who have an offer for a job that requires clearance. Most private companies don’t want to hire uncleared people and pay them while they’re...

Permanent Record Summary Chapter 5: Working for the CIA

Context: CIA Backgrounder

Headquarters

Contrary to what you see in movies, CIA headquarters isn’t in the building in Langley, Virginia with the agency seal on the floor. That’s the Old Headquarters Building. The New Headquarters Building is in McLean, Virginia, and that’s where most CIA employees work.

Reorganization

9/11 was a massive intelligence failure and as a result, Congress and the executive branch reorganized the CIA and adjusted its powers. Previously, the director of the CIA was in charge of the whole American intelligence community. Congress reduced the director’s power to control of only the CIA, and forced out the existing director, George Tenet. They replaced him with Porter Goss, who was a former CIA officer but also a politician, a Florida Republican congressman.

The CIA was reorganized into five directorates, the Directorates of:

• Operations. The DO did the actual spying.

• Intelligence. The DI analyzed and synthesized the information gained from the DO spying.

• Science and Technology. The DST was like the Q character in James Bond films—they supplied, built, and taught spies how to use...

Permanent Record Summary Part 4: Discovering Government Mass Surveillance | Chapter 6: Relocation to Tokyo

Parts 1-3 covered Ed’s life until approximately 2009. Part 4 covers Ed’s life from 2009 until 2012, during which he learned about the US government’s mass surveillance program, STELLARWIND.

Context: Mass Surveillance

Historical Mass Surveillance

The pre-Internet version of mass surveillance is a census. In Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the census was used to collect information about people’s ethnicity and religion. Post-census, when the government wanted to discriminate against a group, they knew exactly who belonged to it.

The US census, however, hasn’t historically been used as surveillance. It’s used to reinforce democracy. The goal of the US census is to count how many people live in each state so that it can be proportionally represented in the House of Representatives.

President’s Surveillance Program (PSP)

After 9/11, George Bush came up with the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP). A major part of this program was that the NSA could wiretap phone and Internet communication between the US and abroad without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The justification was the threat of terror.

...

Permanent Record Summary Chapter 7: Return to the US

Context: Privacy and Clouds

Why Privacy Is Important

You may not think you particularly care about privacy. Maybe you think you don’t have anything to hide, or you don’t mind giving up some information about yourself for convenience. For example, you might think giving Google your location is worth getting driving directions.

However, not caring about your personal privacy also has an impact on everyone else’s. If you don’t value your privacy, then you’re assuming that no one else should either. There are plenty of things such as medical history and religion that people have good reasons to want to keep to themselves.

Privacy is a right. People shouldn’t have to defend why they want it; the government should have to justify why it’s allowed to violate it.

Clouds

In 2011, clouds—servers that are accessed via the Internet—were becoming popular both with the intelligence community and the public. Public clouds were available through sites such as Amazon, Apple, and Google. Clouds solved the problem of limited storage on a personal computer—clouds had lots of free or inexpensive space. Clouds can also be used as a backup for information...

Permanent Record Summary Chapter 8: How to Blow the Whistle

Context: Whistleblowing and Legislation

The History of Whistleblowing

The first whistleblowers were sailors on the Warren in 1777. Their Warren was commanded by Commodore Esek Hopkins, who refused to fight in the Revolution, treated prisoners badly, and in general wasn’t fit for command. (He was also the Continental Navy’s commander in chief.) Ten sailors from the Warren wrote to the Marine Committee, the highest level in the chain of command, letting them know what Hopkins was doing. Hopkins took legal action—a criminal libel suit—against two of the officers who had written to the Marine Committee.

Before the trial started, another sailor brought the issue to the Continental Congress. The Continental Congress was horrified by the idea that someone could dismiss a serious complaint as libel and enacted a law to protect whistleblowers. If someone in the government was misbehaving, authorities wanted to know about it—speaking up was a duty.

The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.” Computers didn’t exist at the time of the writing, but **the...

Shortform Exercise: Protect Your Data

Encryption is one of the only ways to protect yourself against surveillance.

What programs, apps, and devices do you use on a regular basis?

Permanent Record Summary Part 5: Blowing the Whistle | Chapter 9: Revealing Mass Surveillance

Parts 1-4 covered Ed’s life until approximately 2012. Part 5 starts on May 20, 2013, the day Ed left the US to blow the whistle, and continues until 2019, when Permanent Record was published.

Preparing to Leave the US

In spring 2013, Ed made preparations to meet the journalists outside the US. He had a hard time setting up meetings with them because he couldn’t give them a time or date too far in advance, and they didn’t even know who he was. Ed also had trouble finding a place to meet them. He eventually settled on Hong Kong because it had unrestricted Internet and was independent enough to resist the US.

Ed made preparations to leave. He took out cash for Lindsay, so the government couldn’t seize the money in his accounts, and he erased and encrypted his computers. He also encouraged Lindsay to go camping for a weekend and invited his mother to visit immediately after, so that they could support each other after he’d left

Leaving

The morning Ed left, May 20, 2013, he still couldn’t tell Lindsay anything. She noticed he was being unusually affectionate but believed him when he said he was sorry that he’d been so busy with work lately. The moment she left, he...

Permanent Record Summary Chapter 10: What Happened to Lindsay

Almost right after Lindsay returned from her camping trip, Ed’s mother Wendy arrived for a visit. At first, Lindsay was annoyed that Ed had left while his mom was visiting, but as time went on, both Lindsay and Wendy started to think something was wrong. It had been normal for Ed to be called away during some of his previous jobs, but not since they’d been living in Hawaii. Additionally, the other times he’d been away he was always in touch. Wendy thought he was on medical leave. Lindsay was more worried he might be having an affair.

On June 7,...

Permanent Record Summary Chapter 11: Changes

Context: Aftermath of the Leak

Changes

The author’s disclosures resulted in:

• National conversations about surveillance. The US president and attorney general admitted that talking about mass surveillance publically was important. Now that people knew about the surveillance, they could have an opinion on it.

• Investigation of the NSA. Congress launched investigations into the NSA and discovered that the NSA had lied about their work.

• Court cases, notably the 2015 American Civil Liberties Union’s challenge to the NSA about collecting phone records. The federal court of appeals ruled that the program was likely unconstitutional and had violated the Patriot Act. This case also set the precedent that US citizens could challenge the government about mass surveillance.

• Redefinition of “relevant.” The Patriot Act allows the NSA to collect data that might be “relevant” to terrorism or foreign intelligence. The NSA justified mass surveillance by defining “relevant” to mean anything that might, at some unknown point in the future, be relevant. The federal court of appeals ruled that this definition was inappropriate. This decision may be used...

Shortform Exercise: What Does Your Data Say About You?

Everyone’s data reveals information about them.

What data do you consciously create and share publicly with the Internet? For example, you might post a profile photo on a social media site.