THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 65
selves where one ended and the other
began. It was precisely this that was so
inspiring: the freedom to imagine some-
thing entirely new, the freedom to start
over.” This is the anarchists’ Internet,
promoted by countercultural figures, in-
cluding Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth
Catalog, and John Perry Barlow, the for-
mer Grateful Dead lyricist, and advanced
by libertarians and anti-antitrust conser-
vatives led by Newt Gingrich and George
Gilder. Their Internet isn’t the Internet
we lost; it’s the Internet we got, under
the terms of the 1996 Telecommunica-
tions Act, a Gingrich-and-Gilder trav-
esty, signed by Bill Clinton, that shielded
the Internet from government regula-
tion and made it a commercial free-for-
all. Google, Facebook, and Amazon know
far, far more about most Americans than
the N.S.A. does. But Snowden came to
believe that the forces that ruined the
Internet of his boyhood were less the
forces of libertarianism that left corpo-
rations unchecked, giving rise to endless
forms of capture, tracking, mining, and
manipulation, than the forces of govern-
ment that, under the expansive author-
ity of the 2001 Patriot Act, made the In-
ternet a place where it was impossible to
be unknown and ungoverned. He wanted
to end that game. Reset. New game.
In 2012, after taking a disability leave,
Snowden moved to Hawaii to work as
a contractor at an N.S.A. facility in Oahu.
He was determined to know everything
about how the agency was trying to know
everything. He wrote a program to flag
any unusual documents that were mov-
ing through the traffic of the Joint World-
wide Intelligence Communication Sys-
tem. In 2013, he took a lower-paying job
working for Booz Allen Hamilton, in
order to gain access to more classified
information. He writes, “I was resolved
to bring to light a single, all-encompass-
ing fact: that my government had devel-
oped and deployed a global system of
mass surveillance without the knowledge
or consent of its citizenry.” He neared
the eye of the giant.
On his desk, Snowden kept a pocket
U.S. Constitution, propped up against a
Rubik’s Cube. He stored the files he stole
on micro SD cards, smaller than postage
stamps. He’d pry off a square of his Ru-
bik’s Cube, tuck an SD card inside, jam
the square back on, and walk out the door.
This move did not end the game.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Last Witnesses, by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Rus-
sian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Random House).
In this sweeping oral history of life during the Second World
War, interviews with men and women who were children at
the time coalesce into a haunting picture of how life is mu-
tilated by war. First published in 1985, in the Soviet Union,
and appearing now in English for the first time, the book
documents the terrible swiftness with which modest plea-
sures—going to the cinema, relishing a lilac’s bloom—were
swept aside by brutality. Children often witnessed horror
without comprehending it: a seven-year-old boy hears human
bones cracking “like ripe pumpkins,” and a girl in a German
camp, remembering a friend who died while they were there
together, thinks, “I wanted to tell her about my angel.”Fashionopolis, by Dana Thomas (Penguin Press). The collapse,
in 2013, of the Rana Plaza, in Bangladesh, was the deadliest
garment-factory disaster in history. Beginning with that event,
this investigation into the fashion industry’s manufacturing
practices proceeds to indict its exploitation of workers and
its cavalier attitude toward environmental damage. “Fast fash-
ion” behemoths, with their landfill-choking wares and de-
pendence on sweatshops, feature in the most alarming sec-
tions, but Thomas, a longtime fashion journalist, also inspects
the unsustainable offshoring and cost-cutting habits of smaller
companies. Detours into the efforts of firms attempting to
produce their goods through gentler methods offer a glimpse
into how consumerism, slowed to a less ferocious pace, might
be reconciled with sustainability.Night Boat to Tangier, by Kevin Barry (Doubleday). Two aging
Irish drug smugglers sit in a Spanish ferry terminal trading
absurd jokes and quasi-philosophical banter in this tautly
written novel. As they desultorily touch on the calamities of
our time, including the refugee crisis, the men prepare for
another kind of drama—the estranged daughter of one of
them may be making her way through the port that night.
Dreamlike snippets of their louche and violent youths give
depth to a portrait of the pair, who must reckon with the re-
mains of dissolute years spent passing between Ireland and
Spain. “There comes a time,” one of them says, “when you
just have to live among your ghosts.”Dominicana, by Angie Cruz (Flatiron). At the age of fifteen,
the narrator of this poignant novel embarks on a marriage to
a much older man, who promises to move her (and, one day,
the rest of her family) from the Dominican Republic to Amer-
ica. When the young woman arrives in New York, she con-
fronts a loveless relationship and a frighteningly foreign city,
but currents of desire eventually take shape, and compel her
to fight for her autonomy. In nimble prose, Cruz animates
the simultaneous reluctance and vivacity that define her main
character as she attempts to balance filial duty with personal
fulfillment, and contends with leaving one home to build an-
other that is both for herself and for her family.