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

Here it comes , I thought—the direct solicitation.

He said, “If there is some information, perhaps, some small thing you could share with us?”

“We’ll be okay on our own,” I said. Sarah stood up next to me.

The man sighed. He turned to mumble in Russian, and his comrades rose and filed out. “I hope you will not regret your decision,” he said to me. Then he gave a slight bow and made his own exit, just as a pair of officials from the airport administration entered.

I demanded to be allowed to go to the gate for the flight to Havana, but they ignored me. I finally reached into my pocket and brandished the Ecuadorean safe-conduct pass, but they ignored that, too.

All told, we were trapped in the airport for a biblical forty days and forty nights. Over the course of those days, I applied to a total of twenty-seven countries for political asylum. Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure, with some countries refusing outright and others declaring that they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory—a feat that was impossible. Ultimately, the only head of state that proved sympathetic to my cause was Burger King, who never denied me a Whopper (hold the tomato and onion).

Soon, my presence in the airport became a global spectacle. Eventually the Russians found it a nuisance. The Russian government must have decided that it would be better off without me and the media swarm clogging up the country’s major airport. On August 1, it granted me temporary asylum. Sarah and I were allowed to leave Sheremetyevo, but eventually only one of us would be heading home. Our time together served to bind us as friends for life. I will always be grateful for the weeks she spent by my side, for her integrity and her fortitude.

As far away from home as I was, my thoughts were consumed with Lindsay. I’ve been wary of telling her story—the story of what happened to her once I was gone: the FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the press attention, the online harassment, the confusion and pain, the anger and sadness. Finally, I realized that only Lindsay herself should be the person to recount that period. No one else has the experience, but more than that, no one else has the right. Luckily, Lindsay has long kept a diary, using it to record her life and draft her art. She has graciously agreed to let me include a few pages, which can be accessed via the QR code or URL below. In the entries, all names have been changed (except those of family), some typos fixed, and a few redactions made. Otherwise, this is how it was, from the moment that I left Hawaii.

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—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 bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.

All you wanted to do was read. But that was more than enough. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked identifiers like your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store forever the data of your life.

And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you . They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. But what they really want is the data that lets them positively identify you.

This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.

If mass surveillance was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life, then I wanted the dangers it posed, and the damage it had already done, to be a constant presence, too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to make this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world, could not ignore. In the years since 2013, awareness has grown. But in this social media age, we have always to remind ourselves: Awareness alone is not enough.

Because of the revelations of 2013, both houses of Congress launched multiple investigations into NSA abuses. Those investigations concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the nature and efficacy of its mass surveillance programs, even to the most highly cleared Intelligence Committee legislators.

In 2015, a federal court of appeals ruled in the lawsuit ACLU v. Clapper , which challenged the legality of the NSA’s phone records collection program. The court ruled that the NSA’s program had violated the Patriot Act and, moreover, was most probably unconstitutional.

ACLU v. Clapper was a notable victory, to be sure. A crucial precedent was set. The court declared that the American public had standing: American citizens had the right to stand in a court of law and challenge the government’s officially secret system of mass surveillance. But it becomes ever clearer to me that an international opposition movement, fully implemented across both governments and private sector is what’s needed.

Apple has adopted strong default encryption for its iPhones and iPads, and Google followed suit for its Android products and Chromebooks. Perhaps the most important private-sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set about switching their website platforms, replacing HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) with the encrypted HTTPS (the S signifies security), which helps prevent third-party interception of Web traffic. 2016 was the first year since the invention of the internet that more Web traffic was encrypted than unencrypted.

The internet is certainly more secure now than it was in 2013, especially given the sudden global recognition of the need for encrypted tools and apps. I’ve been involved with the design and creation of a few of these myself, through my work heading the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering public-interest journalism in the new millennium. A major goal of the organization is to preserve and strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights through the development of encryption technologies.

In my current situation, I’m constantly reminded of the fact that the law is country specific, whereas technology is not. Every nation has its own legal code but the same computer code. Technology crosses borders and carries almost every passport. As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that changing surveillance practices and laws in the US won’t necessarily help a journalist in Russia, but an encrypted smartphone might.