62 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
that the Obama Administration make
changes to the program, which, as they
also pointed out, had been almost en-
tirely ineffective, but they did not find
it to be unconstitutional. In 2014, after
the Times described Snowden as a whis-
tle-blower, some government officials
insisted that he wasn’t: because what he
exposed wasn’t illegal, he was merely a
leaker. This nicety is hard to take. Glenn
Greenwald, the reporter
who broke the Snowden
story, asked, “If disclosing
proof that top-level na-
tional security officials lied
outright to Congress about
domestic spying programs
doesn’t make one indis-
putably a whistle-blower,
then what does?”
In May, 2015, the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the
Second Circuit, upholding the earlier
opinion of a lower court, ruled that the
N.S.A.’s bulk collection of Americans’
telephone metadata violated the terms
of the Patriot Act. The next month,
Congress passed the USA Freedom Act,
which prohibited the N.S.A. from col-
lecting that metadata. Stanger argues
that before 2015 Snowden was a leaker,
but that after 2015 he was a whistle-
blower. It’s a Catch-22: if Snowden hadn’t
broken the law to point out that the
government had broken the law, what
the government had done wouldn’t have
broken the law.
E
dward Joseph Snowden was born
in North Carolina in 1983. When
he was six, he got a Nintendo for Christ-
mas and fell in love with the Legend of
Zelda, which, let me be clear, remains
the greatest of all Nintendo games. But
for Snowden, a lonely and seemingly
miserable kid, the Legend of Zelda was
much more than a game. Super Mario
Bros., he says, taught him about mor-
tality. Mario runs into bad guys; he falls
into pits; he gets crushed by spikes. There
are so many ways to die. Nintendo “was
my real education,” Snowden writes. “I
am being perfectly sincere,” he insists,
in a book loaded with I’m-not-a-dick
asides in which the author begs the
reader to believe him, and to like him.
Snowden came from a military fam-
ily—one of his grandfathers was a rear
admiral in the Coast Guard with an
office at the Pentagon—and his father
and mother worked for the government.
“Both my parents had top secret clear-
ances,” he writes, which is about the
most loving thing he says about either
of them. Soon he could beat his father
at Mario Kart, Double Dragon, and
Street Fighter. “I was significantly
better than him at all those games,”
Snowden writes. “Almost immediately,
I grasped the limitations
of gaming systems,” he
says of himself, at age
seven, jumping up a level,
leaving mere game con-
soles behind.
When Snowden was
eight, his family moved to
Maryland, near Fort Meade,
where the N.S.A. is head-
quartered, and his father
brought home a Compaq
Presario 425. “From the moment it ap-
peared, the computer and I were insep-
arable,” Snowden writes. A disconsolate
little boy began to shut out the real world.
Hitting Enter on his first computer is
the only encounter he describes as hav-
ing been worth his time. “No teacher had
ever been so patient, yet so responsive,”
he writes. “Nowhere else—certainly not
at school, and not even at home—had I
ever felt so in control.”
With the Compaq, he started going
online. “Internet access, and the emer-
gence of the Web, was my generation’s
big bang,” he writes. “From the age of
twelve or so, I tried to spend my every
waking moment online.” The offline
world was horrible. His parents’ marriage
was falling apart. He stopped going to
school. He stopped sleeping. Nintendo
had been his education; the Internet be-
came his everything. “The Internet was
my sanctuary; the Web became my jun-
gle gym, my treehouse, my fortress, my
classroom without walls.” This sounds
less like a childhood than like an exper-
iment in human deprivation.
He spent endless hours on gaming
sites looking for cheat codes for his fa-
vorite games, Doom and Quake. There’s
a thing in gaming known as “god-mode,”
where, temporarily, you can play invis-
ibly and even invincibly. But god-mode
conjures something more, a way of be-
ing outside the game, above the game.
Around puberty, Snowden appears to
have gone into god-mode and got stuck.
At least, the way he tells it, he has be-
lieved his whole life that he knows more
than everyone around him. His teach-
ers were idiots. His co-workers were id-
iots. His bosses were idiots. Idiots, idi-
ots, idiots. Delete, delete, delete. Game
over. Reset. New game.
The great passion of Snowden’s au-
tobiography is his anguished love for the
very early Internet. Online in the nine-
teen-nineties, he could be anonymous,
on bulletin boards, and on massively
multiplayer online role-playing games
like Ultima Online, which he played so
constantly that his parents installed a
second phone line so that he could have
unlimited access. On Ultima Online,
players choose an alternate identity, an
“alt”; you can be a wizard or a warrior or
a tinkerer or a thief. “I could toggle be-
tween these alts with a freedom that was
unavailable to me in off-line life, whose
institutions tend to regard all mutabil-
ity as suspicious,” Snowden writes. On-
line, he could be whoever he wanted to
be. And he could make the world be the
way he wanted it to be.
Disillusionment, in this life story, is
watching the wrecking of the Internet.
“To grow up is to realize the extent to
which your existence has been governed
by a system of rules, vague guidelines,
and increasingly unsupportable norms
that have been imposed on you with-
out your consent,” Snowden writes, offer-
ing a definition of adulthood that bet-
ter describes arrested development. He
left high school after a year. He went
to community college for a while. He
posted a lot of stuff on bulletin boards,
including a Japanese anime site where,
in April, 2002, when he was eighteen,
he uploaded a short autobiography called
“The Book of Ed,” illustrated with a
cartoon of himself, a bitmoji before they
were called bitmojis, wearing a T-shirt
that reads “I ♥ Me”:
I like Japanese, I like food, I like martial
arts, I like ponies, I like guns, I like food, I
like girls, I like my girlish figure that attracts
girls, and I like my lamer friends.
That’s the best biography you’ll get out of
me, coppers!... I really am a nice guy, though.
In the spring of 2004, Snowden joined
the Army reserves but, five months later,
washed out of basic training. Not long
afterward, on an early dating site called
HotOrNot, he met a twenty-year-old
photographer and pole dancer named
