Эдвард Сноуден: Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition): How One Man Exposed the Truth about Government Spying and Digital Security

“Is that all, buddy?”

“Oh,” I’d say, “and also cement mixers and bulldozers and—”

My mother loved giving me math challenges. While shopping at Kmart or Winn-Dixie, she’d have me pick out books and model cars and trucks and buy them for me if I was able to add up their prices in my head. Over the course of my childhood, she kept escalating the difficulty, first having me round to the nearest dollar, then having me figure out the precise dollar-and-cents amount, and then having me calculate 3 percent of that amount and add it on to the total. I was confused by that last challenge—not by the arithmetic so much as by the reasoning. “Why?”

“It’s called tax,” my mother explained. “Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.”

“What do they do with it?”

“You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?” she said. “The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books.”

Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn’t match those on the cash register’s display. But once again, my mother explained, “They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent.”

“So now the library will get even more books?” I asked.

“Let’s hope,” my mother said.

When I wasn’t using my math skills in exchange for prizes, I’d often go to my grandmother’s house, which was a few streets over from us, and lie on the carpet beside the long, low bookshelves. My usual company was an edition of Aesop’s Fables and, perhaps my favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology . I was in awe of the hero of Greek mythology named Odysseus and liked Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena well enough, but the deity I admired most had to be Hephaestus: the ugly god of fire, volcanoes, blacksmiths, and carpenters, the god of tinkerers. I was proud of being able to spell his Greek name, and of knowing that his Roman name, Vulcan, was used for the home planet of Spock from Star Trek .

Once, I picked up an illustrated version of the legends of King Arthur and his knights and found myself reading about the fortress of a tyrannical giant named Rhitta Gawr, who refused to accept that the age of his reign had passed and that in the future the world would be ruled by human kings.

The giant lived on a mountain called Snaw Dun, which, a note explained, was Old English for “snow mound.” Today, Snaw Dun is called Mount Snowdon. I remember the feeling of encountering my last name in this context—it was thrilling—and the archaic spelling gave me my first sense that the world was older than I was, even older than my parents were.

Years later, I was obsessed with a new and different type of storytelling. On Christmas 1989, a Nintendo appeared in the house. I took to that two-tone-gray video game console so completely that my alarmed mother imposed a rule: I could only rent a new game when I finished reading a book. Games were expensive, and, having already mastered the ones that had come with the console—a single cartridge combining Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt —I was eager for other challenges. I started coming home from the library with shorter books and books with lots of pictures, including visual encyclopedias of inventions and comic books.

It was the NES—the janky but genius eight-bit Nintendo Entertainment System—that was my real education. From The Legend of Zelda I learned that the world exists to be explored; from Mega Man I learned that my enemies have much to teach; and from Duck Hunt —well, Duck Hunt taught me that even if someone laughs at your failures, it doesn’t mean you get to shoot them in the face.

Ultimately, though, it was Super Mario Bros. that taught me what remains perhaps the most important lesson of my life. Super Mario Bros. , the 1.0 edition, is perhaps the all-time masterpiece of side-scrolling games. When the game begins, Mario is standing all the way to the left of the legendary opening screen, and he can only go in one direction: He can only move to the right as new scenery and enemies scroll in from that side. He progresses through eight worlds of four levels each, all of them governed by time constraints, until he reaches the evil Bowser and frees the captive Princess Toadstool.

Throughout all thirty-two levels, Mario exists in front of what in gaming speak is called “an invisible wall,” which doesn’t allow him to go backward. There is no turning back, only going forward—for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown future.

One day, my much-used Super Mario Bros. cartridge wasn’t loading, no matter how much I blew into it. That’s what you had to do, or what we thought you had to do when a game would no longer load: You had to blow into the open mouth of the cartridge to clear it of the dust, debris, and pet hair that tended to accumulate there. But no matter how much I blew, the TV screen was full of blotches and waves, which were not reassuring in the least.

The Nintendo was probably just suffering from a faulty pin connection, but given that back then I didn’t even know what a pin connection was, I was frustrated and desperate. Worst of all, my father had just left on a Coast Guard trip and wouldn’t be back to help me fix it for two weeks. So I resolved to fix the thing myself. If I succeeded, I knew my father would be impressed. I went out to the garage to find his gray metal toolbox.

I decided that to figure out what was wrong with the thing, first I had to take it apart. Basically, I was just copying, or trying to copy, the same motions that my father went through whenever he sat at the kitchen table repairing other household machines that, to my eye, the Nintendo console most closely resembled. It took me about an hour to dismantle the console, with my uncoordinated and very small hands trying to twist a flat screwdriver into Phillips-head screws, but eventually I succeeded.

The console’s exterior was a dull, monochrome gray, but the interior was a mass of colors. It seemed like there was an entire rainbow of wires and glints of silver and gold jutting out of the green-as-grass circuit board. I tightened a few things here, loosened a few things there—more or less at random—and blew on every part. After that, I wiped them all down with a paper towel. Then I had to blow on the circuit board again to remove the bits of paper towel that had gotten stuck to what I now know were the pins.

Once I’d finished my cleaning and repairs, it was time for reassembly. Our dog, Treasure, might have swallowed one of the tiny screws, or maybe it had just gotten lost in the carpet or under the couch. And I must not have put all the components back in the same way I’d found them, because they barely fit into the console’s shell. The shell’s lid kept popping off, so I found myself squeezing the components down, the way you try to shut an overstuffed suitcase. Finally the lid snapped into place, but only on one side.

I pressed the power button—and nothing. I pressed the reset button—and nothing. Those were the only two buttons on the console. Before my repairs, the light next to the buttons had always glowed molten red, but now even that was dead. The console just sat there lopsided and useless, and I felt a surge of guilt and dread.

My father, when he came home from his Coast Guard trip, wasn’t going to be proud of me: He was going to jump on my head like one of the Goombas in Super Mario Bros. But it wasn’t his anger I feared so much as his disappointment. To his peers, my father was a master electronics systems engineer who specialized in avionics. To me, he was a household mad scientist who’d try to fix everything himself—electrical outlets, dishwashers, water heaters, and AC units. I’d work as his helper whenever he’d let me, and in the process I’d come to know both the physical pleasures of manual work and the intellectual pleasures of basic mechanics, along with the fundamental principles of electronics—the differences between voltage and current, between power and resistance. Every job we undertook together would end either in a successful act of repair or a curse as my father flung the unsalvageable piece of equipment across the room and into the cardboard box of things-that-can’t-be-unbroken. I never judged him for these failures—I was always too impressed by the fact that he had dared to hazard an attempt.