The Nation - 07.10.2019

I

was just shy of my ninth birthday when my

family moved to Maryland. We lived in Crofton,

halfway between Annapolis and Washington, DC,

where the developments all have quaint names

like Crofton Towne, Crofton Mews, The Ridings.

Crofton itself is a planned community fitted around

the curves of the Crofton Country Club. (The fact

that a country club is at the center tells you everything.)

Our street was Knights Bridge Turn, a broad, lazy loop of

split-level housing, wide driveways, and two-car garages.

I had a Huffy ten-speed bike and delivered The Capital,

a venerable newspaper published in Annapolis, whose

daily distribution became distressingly erratic, especially

in the winter, especially between Crofton Parkway and

Route 450, which, as it passed by our neighborhood,

acquired a different name: Defense Highway.

For my parents this was an exciting time. It took my

father just forty minutes to get to his new posting as a

chief warrant officer in the Aeronautical Engineering Di-

vision at Coast Guard Headquarters, at the time located

at Buzzard Point in southern Washington, DC. And it

took my mother just twenty minutes to get to her new

job at the National Security Agency, whose boxy futuristic

at his military discount, and initially set up—much

to my mother’s chagrin—smack in the middle of the

dining-room table. From the moment it appeared, the

computer and I were inseparable. If previously I’d been

loath to go outside and kick around a ball, now the very

idea seemed ludicrous.

This Compaq became my constant companion—my

third parent, second sibling, and first love. It came into my

life just at the age when I was first

discovering an independent self

and the multiple worlds that can

simultaneously exist within this

world. That process of exploration

was so exciting that it made me

take for granted and even neglect,

for a while at least, the family and

life that I already had. Another

way of saying this is I was just

experiencing the early throes of

puberty. But this was a technol-

ogized puberty, and the tremen-

dous changes that it wrought in

me were, in a way, being wrought

everywhere, in everyone.

My parents would call me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them. They’d

call me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them. And whenever I was

reminded that the computer was a shared computer and not my personal machine, I’d

relinquish my seat with such reluctance that as my father, or mother, or sister took

their turn, they’d have to order me out of the room entirely lest I hover moodily over

their shoulders and offer advice.

I’d try to rush them through their tasks, so I could get back to mine, which were

so much more important—like playing Loom. As technology had advanced, games

involving Pong paddles and helicopters had lost ground to ones that realized that at

the heart of every computer user was a book reader, a being with the desire not just for

headquarters, topped with

radomes and sheathed in

copper to seal in the com-

munications signals, forms

the heart of Fort Meade.

It was soon after we

moved to Crofton that my

father brought home our

first computer, a Compaq

Presario 425, list price

$1,399 but purchased

From the

moment it

appeared, the

computer and

I were insep-

arable. Going

outside to kick

around a ball

now seemed

ludicrous.

ILLUSTRATION BY PHILIP BURKE

In this excerpt from his new

memoir, Permanent Record,

published exclusively

in The Nation, the world’s

most famous whistleblower

describes his first

adventures in cyberspace.

EDWARD SNOWDEN

Excerpted from

Permanent

Rec ord by Edward

Snowden, published

September 17,

2019, by Henry

Holt and Company.

Copyright © 2019

by Edward Snowden.

All rights reserved.

Edward Snowden

worked as a

contractor for the

CIA and NSA.

Currently, he

serves as president

of the board of

directors of the

Freedom of the

Press Foundation.

The Nation.

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