Permanent Record

7.2.2013
Everything got shipped today, except the futons and couch, which I’m just
ditching. All that was left of Ed’s stuff after the FBI raided the house fit into
one small cardboard box. Some photos and his clothes, lots of mismatched
socks. Nothing that could be used as evidence in court, just evidence of our
life together. Sandra brought some lighter fluid and brought the metal trash
can back around to the lanai. I dumped all of Ed’s stuff, the photos and
clothes, inside, and lit a book of matches on fire and tossed it in. Sandra and I
sat around while it burned and the smoke rose into the sky. The glow and the
smoke reminded me of the trip I took with Wendy to Kilauea, the volcano on
the Big Island. That was just over a month ago, but it feels like years in the
past. How could we have known that our own lives were about to erupt? That
Volcano Ed was going to destroy everything? But I remember the guide at
Kilauea saying that volcanoes are only destructive in the short term. In the
long term, they move the world. They create islands, cool the planet, and
enrich the soil. Their lava flows uncontrolled and then cools and hardens.
The ash they shoot into the air sprinkles down as minerals, which fertilize the
earth and make new life grow.

---

29
Love and Exile
If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment
over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search
engine—and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like
XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of
your own curiosity.
But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for
an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the
very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you
downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-
and-mortar store with a credit card.
All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely
intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more
than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world
needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique
identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer.
By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across every
available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence
Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of
your life.
And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had
proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your
communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning
the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or
“exploits,” they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your
words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device,
including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this
now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or

---

tablet, they can follow along and 
read you.
They can tell how quickly or slowly
you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip
around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up your nostrils and watching you
move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets
them positively identify you.
This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation—the final product
of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the
place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become
an open book.
I
F MASS SURVEILLANCE
was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life, then I
wanted the dangers it posed, and the damage it had already done, to be a
constant presence too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to make
this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world, could not
ignore.In the years since 2013, awareness has grown, both in scope and subtlety.
But in this social media age, we have always to remind ourselves: awareness
alone is not enough.
In America, the initial press reports on the disclosures started a “national
conversation,” as President Obama himself conceded. While I appreciated the
sentiment, I remember wishing that he had noted that what made it “national,”
what made it a “conversation,” was that for the first time the American public
was informed enough to have a voice.
The revelations of 2013 particularly roused Congress, both houses of which
launched multiple investigations into NSA abuses. Those investigations
concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the nature and efficacy
of its mass surveillance programs, even to the most highly cleared Intelligence
Committee legislators.
In 2015, a federal court of appeals ruled in the matter of