Permanent Record
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden was high on my to read list, as my need to know what the heck our government is up to grows with every passing day. This book was originally reviewed on YouTube on January 16, 2022, but is now available on Rumble and PodBean.
This book should be required reading in every high school in the United States. Like part of civics or current events teaching. Everyone should read and understand the implications of exactly what Snowden did for the American People, and why his continued persecution is wildly unjust.
Edward Joseph Snowden was born June 21, 1983 in Elizabeth City, NC to Lon and Wendy Snowden and he has one sister, Jessica. This book was written, incidentally, as a true autobiography, and he explain how his childhood and his fascination with computers laid the groundwork for his future life. And this was really well done because it made him completely relatable, especially to a Gen X-er like me, but probably also to millennials and some gen-Z.
He accurately captures the horror of 9/11. Like, everyone alive that day knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the first tower being hit, the news casts playing the video of the towers falling on repeat. Snowden was working as a programmer for the wife of a serviceman who was stationed at Fort Meade when she received the call, along with the news that another plane was off course and possibly headed to Fort Meade. This led to Fort Meade being evacuated, which was sheer pandemonium. UItimately, this was United Flight 93 which crashed into the field in Pennsylvania.
Snowden’s own family background was one of service to the country, his grandfather was an admiral in the US Coast Guard, his father was an engineer with the Coast Guard, so this family background of service, coupled with 9/11, made Snowden want to do something for his country, a sentiment that again resonated with me. This led to Snowden enlisting in the US Army.
However, during training, he ended up with microfractures of his tibia, which would have ultimately led to fracturing his legs entirely had he kept going. So the army offered him an out. We’ll administratively discharge you, but you’re on your own for medical regarding the injuries you’ve sustained. Or, you can seek treatment through medical and re-do basic training, but the slot in Ranger training you were promised may not be available next time through. You could end up company cook. Snowden took the discharge and returned to Maryland to heal and figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
I don’t think he intended to join the intelligence community originally. But he recognized the quickest way TO join the community was to get a clearance first, then get the job. This is not the case now, now you get the job first, then they sponsor your clearance. But he jumped through all the hoops involved and was granted a TS/SCI clearance with polygraph, which opened up all the doors he was hoping it would, and he became a government contractor.
Snowden began working as a night shift guard at a new building that was under construction, making sure no one came in and planted bugs when construction wasn’t going on at night, and when the building was completed, Snowden began working in IT at this location, working with a guy who was basically a Ron Swanson…happy to get the paycheck, but didn’t really trust the government that was signing those checks.
Snowden saw this job as a boring redundancy if he stayed there: Roaming the halls at night until he was promoted to a position of obsolescence, useful only because he knew how to do one thing. So he did a backward career track.
See, most people think the deep state stops at the unelected bureaucrats who run the country. Like OSHA or the DMV. But it goes so much deeper than that. See, the Federal government is limited in the number of employees it’s allowed to have. Not just talking about the 536 members of Congress, President, Vice President, and 9 justices of the Supreme Court. I’m talking about staff and actual federal agencies are limited in the number of employees they are allowed to have.
However, the Federal Government can hire however many contractors it wants to. And in the post-9/11 world, there were virtually no budgetary constrictions on the hiring of contractors. Contractors, as much as the unelected bureaucrats, are the deep state. It is MASSIVE. And he’s now one of them.
Now most people when they’re part of this community start on the government side, then once they achieve a level of expertise, will jump ship to the private sector, because there are actually caps to what you can make as a government employee, but no caps on the contractor side. He did it backwards. He started as a contractor, got the clearance, then applied for and was accepted as a technical officer for the CIA. Basically, he’d be in charge of tech and machines for an overseas CIA location.
During his training with the CIA, he started to get his first rumblings of….rot, let’s call it. Most companies, if you’ve ever had a job ever you know this, will tell you there is an open door policy. If you have any problems ever, talk to anyone in management and we’ll take care of it. The CIA is not like that. They do not have an open door policy. They have a chain of command…and you’d better respect that chain of command.
The training class was unhappy. They were in an unsafe environment, like a stairwell literally collapsed on them. No one was hurt, but still, unsafe. They were working a ton of overtime for which they had not been paid. And so Snowden was elected by his classmates to speak with the chain of command. He did, and nothing changed. So he went to his bosses boss, and the boss above that. Change happened, but not without repercussions. Snowden was denied the job posting he wanted and was sent instead to Geneva, Switzerland. Which might seem like a dream job, but was not the job he wanted.
Eventually, he landed in Tokyo, and this is where the true rumblings started. When he was in Tokyo, this time as a contractor with Dell and the NSA, he was tapped to give a briefing at a joint Intelligence Community Conference on American Digital Surveillance Capabilities. The original speaker had gotten sick, so Snowden was tapped. And while preparing his brief, it starts to sink in just how vast those capabilities are. And the first niggling of doubt started.
Remember, Snowden was an actual employee of the federal government, through his time at the CIA. Which means he took the oath, the one that swears to protect and defend the Constitution, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. It is the Constitution they swear to uphold. It is an important distinction.
The worst, most exaggerated fears we all have about the government spying on us barely scratches the surface of the depths of it. It’s all true. They are spying on all of us. They were and probably still are. Snowden goes into grim, autistic detail about the depths of the information they have access to, and just how far reaching is the scope of what the government has on each and every one of us. There is no going off grid where they can’t find you. Every thing you do online is logged and tracked by the intelligence community.
The NSA argued that they don’t need a warrant to collect the information, only to access it. So far, the courts have supported them in this interpretation. Basically, our own government has failed us at every step from 9/11 on.
And it gets so much worse.
In July 2009, the office of the inspector general of like five intelligence community agencies released a report called the Unclassified Report on the Presidents Surveillance Program. Snowden went looking for the classified version of this same report. At first, he could not find it, and he eventually just forgot about it. Until one day it literally just fell in his lap.
He was working as a system admin, which means he basically had access to everything. Well, you have to have full access to do the job. The designated file, name is in the book but I’m not going to spell it out cause it’s like a random string of letters and numbers, but the designation on the file was such that only a few dozen people in the world had authorization to look at it. And because he was the system admin, he was one of them. The only thing this report had in common with the unclassified copy was the title. The American Public were spoon fed a bunch of lies, and we ate it up because hey….they’re keeping us safe from another 9/11.
Gradually, the idea begins to form that We the People need to know about this. He didn’t want to just release it to a website. He didn’t want to do a wikileaks thing, because then his own credibility would be shot. He’d be lumped in with UFO nuts and second gunmen conspiracy theorists, with the added bonus of spending the rest of his life in federal prison. So the idea dawned on him to contact a few select journalists.
And almost immediately this idea becomes concerning to him, as he starts researching who might be a good journalist to contact, who would follow through on it, and he found a piece by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen for the New York Times written in 2004 about Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, and it was quashed by the New York Times at the request of the US Government, citing national security concerns. So well done, New York Times. Way to fail at your job. Again. What a bastion of journalistic integrity.
The ultimately published in 2005, when Risen contacted them and said hey, I’m going to put this in my book so you might as well publish anyway, which they did. But far too late to effect the 2004 elections, and Bush was elected for a second term, and the warrantless wiretapping continued unabated. And lest you all think Obama is any better, he definitely was not. Snowden released this information in 2013, during Obama’s second term. Obama had had FOUR YEARS to put a stop to this, and he did not. And I’m quite sure Trump didn’t either, because he didn’t pardon Snowden.
They’re all rotten to the core. But rest assured our government is fully complicit in violating our rights.
Now, everything Snowden released was not released to the enemies of the people. He released it to us…to We the People. He didn’t go to China. He went to Hong Kong. He met the journalist in Hong Kong, which at the time was definitely an independent state. He wasn’t trying to go to Russia, he was headed to Ecuador and ended up in Russia by default. That’s where the plane was when the US revoked his passport. But he gave nothing to Russia either. He spent like forty days living in a Russian airport before being granted asylum in Russia.
Three months prior to releasing this information, everything he provided, and I mean literally everything, was condensed into a thirty minute presentation and released for free by a government sanctioned individual at a tech show that was open to the public. Tickets were $40. Ira Gus Hunt was the chief technology officer of the CIA. He appeared as a special guest speaker at a tech event in New York called Gigacon structure data conference.
We’re basically under surveillance 24/7. If you have a smart phone, it’s going to tell the government everything the government wants to know about you. That’s basically all Snowden released. He just released the documentation to prove it. And he took those documents from the government that proved it. And THAT was the crime, as far as the government is concerned.
Just prior to his data dump, Snowden transferred jobs again, this time taking a position as Sys Admin with Booz, Allen, Hamilton. He had to go to Fort Meade for his onboarding, and while there, he learned just how broad and deep the surveillance state has grown. And this is a direct quote from the book:
“It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen as science fact. An interface that allows you to type in anyones address, telephone number, or IP address and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases, you could even play back recordings of their online session to that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the internet for the day.”
That shit made my blood run cold. Snowden spends a lot of time on the importance of encryption, weaving the necessity of it into his story. It’s because he was so very careful with his own use of encryption that he is now living in Russia, and not a cell in Fort Leavenworth.
He does explain, in detail how he was able to get the information out of the facility where he was working, although I will not share that here. If you want to know, read this book. It was excellent. And terrifying. Don’t just buy the book and put it on a shelf to be read someday. I was serious when I said this should be taught in civics courses in high school. It should also be taught in college. It could be taught in philosophy, ethics, history, the US Constitution. There are multiple lessons in this book. Snowden is a fucking hero, with giant brass balls and nerves of fucking steel.
