60 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
Snowden has been called a patriot and a traitor. In his memoir, he’s a gamer.
BOOKS
KNOW IT ALL
Edward Snowden and the culture of whistle-blowing.
BY JILLLEPORE
ILLUSTRATION BY MATT CHASE
O
ne of Edward J. Snowden’s earli-
est memories is of sneaking around
the house and turning back the time on
all the clocks in the hope of tricking his
parents into letting him stay up late to
watch more TV. Another is of the day
his father brought home a Commodore
64 and how exciting it was, that very
first time, to hold a joystick. Snowden’s
new autobiography, “Permanent Record”
(Metropolitan), is the autobiography of
a gamer, pale and bleary-eyed and glued
to his screen, longing for invincibility.
Some people write memoirs; other peo-
ple craft legends. Snowden, who once
aspired to be a model and is in some
quarters regarded as a modern messiah,
is the second kind. As a kid, he read
about King Arthur, and his family name
comes from Snaw Dun, a mountain in
Wales on top of which the legendary
ruler is said to have slain a terrible giant
by sticking a sword in his eye. Snowden
makes a lot of this Tolkien-y sort of
thing—avatars, portents of destiny, signs
of greatness.
“Permanent Record” offers less than
what most readers will want of the John
le Carré-meets-Jason Bourne stuff: why,
at the age of twenty-eight, while work-
ing for a defense contractor, Snowden
decided to smuggle top-secret computer
files from the U.S. government and give
them to reporters at the Guardian and
the Washington Post; how he did it; and
what his life has been like since then.
In dozens of interviews, Snowden, who
lives in exile in Russia, has fielded and
dodged a lot of questions about those
parts of his life. Critics charge him with
evasion and distortion; supporters see a
becoming honesty and the nobility of
an unimpeachable integrity. Readers will
split over his book, too, without actu-
ally learning much, except about the
mind of a gamer. Most of the book
chronicles not Snowden’s disclosures
and their consequences but his child-
hood, adolescence, and early adulthood,
game by game, from the Nintendo En-
tertainment System to the National Se-
curity Agency.
“I used to work for the government,”
Snowden begins, “but now I work for
the public.” In 2013, Snowden’s disclo-
sures proved that the N.S.A. had been
conducting surveillance on the entire
U.S. population, by way of a series of
top-secret programs staggering in their
scale and intrusiveness, including the
bulk collection of telephone records in
the form of metadata that was acquired
from telecommunications companies.
The scale of Snowden’s heist was also
staggering. The N.S.A. claims that he
stole 1.7 million classified documents.
Snowden disputes this number, but, even
if the actual number is quite a lot smaller,
it’s likely that he stole more documents
than he was able to read.
Snowden is a controversial figure,
and whistle-blowing, which is how
Snowden describes what he did, is a
contentious subject, especially when it
concerns intelligence operations. Much
of the controversy, in Snowden’s case,
divides along what can appear to be
merely a matter of opinion: Is he a pa-
triot or a traitor? Obama’s Justice De-
partment charged him with treasonous
federal crimes under the 1917 Espio-
nage Act. Snowden’s defenders view
these charges as wrongheaded; his crit-
ics suggest that he ought to face trial,
even though, since the material he stole
was classified, any proceeding would be
closed to the public, a condition that,
as a rule, makes a fair trial awfully un-
likely. People who consider Snowden a
patriot argue that exposing the N.S.A.’s
mass-surveillance program was both a
public service and an act of heroism.
People who consider Snowden a traitor
