under omniscient parental supervision.”
He’d been finding the offline world an-
noying for a long time, and now the
N.S.A. had wrecked the online world,
too. He unsheathed Excalibur.
T
he U.S. government has collected
information about Americans since
the first federal census, in 1790. At every
point in American history when the gov-
ernment has stepped up those efforts,
clandestine or not, citizens have pro-
tested and resisted, some number of
Americans greeting each new regime as
marking the end of American freedom.
As the gifted historian Sarah Igo argues
in “The Known Citizen: A History of
Privacy in Modern America” (Harvard),
within this long fight lie the origins of
most modern ideas about both privacy
and citizenship, including the idea of the
“private citizen.” Americans complained
in the eighteen-seventies, when the fed-
eral government was found to be open-
ing people’s mail. They complained in
the nineteen-teens, after the founding
of the F.B.I., which spied on socialists
and African-American “subversives.”
They complained about draft-registra-
tion cards, drivers’ licenses, and every
other government-issued identification,
as forms of tracking and surveillance, in-
cluding, after 1935, Social Security cards,
a punch card for every American. By
1966, as the Senate Judiciary Commit-
tee reported, the federal government held,
in separate agencies, computer files con-
taining “more than 3 billion records on
individuals, including 27.2 billion names,
2.3 billion addresses, 264 million crimi-
nal histories, 280 million mental health
records, 916 million profiles on alcohol-
ism and drug addiction, and 1.2 billion
financial records.” That year, Americans
debated a proposal for establishing a Na-
tional Data Center, a peer to the Library
of Congress (which holds books) and
the National Archives (which holds man-
uscripts), to store all the data on a cen-
tral computer. Congress convened hear-
ings on “computers and the invasion of
privacy.” Critics warned of “data surveil-
lance.” “The citizen concerned about the
erosion of his privacy has until now had
some consolation in knowing that all
these records about his life have been
widely dispersed and often difficult to
get at,” Vance Packard wrote in the Times.
“But today, with the advent of giant so-
phisticated computers capable of stor-
ing and recalling vast amounts of infor-
mation, this consolation is vanishing.”
The proposed National Data Center
died. But data surveillance endured.
In 1971, Senate hearings on federal
data banks revealed the existence of avast program of domestic surveillance
conducted by the U.S. military. By 1974,
there had been so much documentation
of government-run and computer-stored
and processed surveillance of civilians
that Congress passed the Privacy Act,
which opened with this indictment: “In-
creasing use of computers and sophisti-
cated information technology, while es-
sential to the efficient operations of the
Government, has greatly magnified the
harm to individual privacy that can occur.”
Passed when Americans’ distrust of gov-
ernment was at a high point, given the
betrayals of Vietnam and Watergate, the
Privacy Act failed to protect individuals’
private data from corporations. Concern
about the capture of personal data seemed
to be directed only at the government.
(Bell Telephone Company, for instance,
had been collecting bulk data about its
customers to the best of its ability since
its founding, in 1877.) At Senate com-
mittee hearings in 1975, the Deputy As-
sistant Secretary of Defense was asked
whether ARPANET, the Pentagon-run
precursor to the Internet, was secretly
collecting information about American
citizens. “It is a marvel in many ways,”
he answered, but it “simply does not fit
the Orwellian mold attributed to it.”
But Snowden’s interest in the N.S.A.’s
surveillance program appears to have
had as much to do with the vanishing
Internet of his childhood as with the
overreach of the national-security state.
In 2011, after four years of living abroad,
Snowden returned to the United States.
“Contradictory thoughts rained down
like Tet r is blocks, and I struggled to sort
them out—to make them disappear,”
he writes. Working at Dell, under a
contract for the C.I.A., he felt that
Americans had become pitiful victims
of their own government. “The Inter-
net I’d grown up with, the Internet that
had raised me, was disappearing,” he
writes. “And with it, so was my youth.”
He was twenty-seven.
Snowden subscribes to the theory of
a Once Great Internet, a techno-utopia
in which boys and men could be free and
anonymous and undiscoverable and un-
governable. “Back then, being online was
another life, considered by most to be
separate and distinct from Real Life,” he
writes. “The virtual and the actual had
not yet merged. And it was up to each
“She’s a little sensitive to gluten.” individual user to determine for them-