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partner servers of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, throughout the EU,
UK, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China.
Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.
We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies detect us
in utero, and our data will continue to proliferate even after we die. Of course,
our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep, comprise
just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives—most of it
unconsciously, or without our consent—by business and government
surveillance. We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is
true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our
collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special
duty. We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us,
or turned against our children.
Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new
generation. Not yet born on 9/11, they have spent their entire lives under the
omnipresent specter of this surveillance. These young people who have known
no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s their
political creativity and technological ingenuity that give me hope.
Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able
to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped too—each successive
generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, subject to a
mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human
manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of the law but the limits of the
imagination.
Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the
first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is everyone,
especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of
ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behavior in

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order to extrapolate behaviors to come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only
slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. Once you go
digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is
calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and
fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells
you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James
Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a
mechanism of subtle coercion.
We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future.
We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be
sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the
journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the
honest collective conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let the godlike
surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to
“predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or
what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at
all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical
histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data
often assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic
information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to
victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in
the image of the technology that seeks its control.
Of course, all of the above has already happened.
E
XILE
: 
NOT A
day has passed since August 1, 2013, in which I don’t recall that
“exile” was what my teenage self used to call getting booted off-line. The Wi-Fi
died? Exile. I’m out of signal range? Exile. The self who used to say that now
seems so young to me. He seems so distant.
When people ask me what my life is like now, I tend to answer that it’s a lot
like theirs in that I spend a lot of time in front of the computer—reading, writing,
interacting. From what the press likes to describe as an “undisclosed location”—
which is really just whatever two-bedroom apartment in Moscow I happen to be
renting—I beam myself onto stages around the world, speaking about the
protection of civil liberties in the digital age to audiences of students, scholars,
lawmakers, and technologists.
Some days I take virtual meetings with my fellow board members at the

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Freedom of the Press Foundation, or talk with my European legal team, led by
Wolfgang Kaleck, at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights.
Other days, I just pick up some Burger King—I know where my loyalties lie—
and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use credit cards. One
fixture of my existence is my daily check-in with my American lawyer,
confidant, and all-around consigliere Ben Wizner at the ACLU, who has been
my guide to the world as it is and puts up with my musings about the world as it
should be.
That’s my life. It got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of
2014, when Lindsay came to visit—the first time I’d seen her since Hawaii. I
tried not to expect too much, because I knew I didn’t deserve the chance; the
only thing I deserved was a slap in the face. But when I opened the door, she
placed her hand on my cheek and I told her I loved her.
“Hush,” she said, “I know.”
We held each other in silence, each breath like a pledge to make up for lost
time.
From that moment, my world was hers. Previously, I’d been content to hang
around indoors—indeed, that was my preference before I was in Russia—but
Lindsay was insistent: she’d never been to Russia and now we were going to be
tourists together.
My Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who helped me get asylum in the
country—he was the only lawyer who had the foresight to show up at the airport
with a translator—is a cultured and resourceful man, and he proved as adept at
obtaining last-minute tickets to the opera as he is at navigating my legal issues.
He helped arrange two box seats at the Bolshoi Theater, so Lindsay and I got
dressed and went, though I have to admit I was wary. There were so many
people, all packed so tightly into a hall. Lindsay could sense my growing unease.
As the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, she leaned over, nudged me in the
ribs, and whispered, “None of these people are here for you. They’re here for
this.”
Lindsay and I also spent time at some of Moscow’s museums. The Tretyakov
Gallery contains one of the world’s richest collection of Russian Orthodox icon
paintings. The artists who made these paintings for the Church were essentially
contractors, I thought, and so were typically not allowed to sign their names to
their handiwork, or preferred not to. The time and tradition that fostered these
works was not given much to recognizing individual achievement. As Lindsay
and I stood in front of one of the icons, a young tourist, a teenage girl, suddenly

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stepped between us. This wasn’t the first time I was recognized in public, but
given Lindsay’s presence, it certainly threatened to be the most headline-worthy.
In German-accented English, the girl asked whether she could take a selfie with
us. I’m not sure what explains my reaction—maybe it was this German girl’s shy
and polite way of asking, or maybe it was Lindsay’s always mood-improving,
live-and-let-live presence—but without hesitation, for once, I agreed. Lindsay
smiled as the girl posed between us and took a photo. Then, after a few sweet
words of support, she departed.
I dragged Lindsay out of the museum a moment later. I was afraid that if the
girl posted the photo to social media we could be just minutes away from
unwanted attention. I feel foolish now for thinking that. I kept nervously
checking online, but the photo didn’t appear. Not that day, and not the day after.
As far as I can tell, it was never shared—just kept as a private memory of a
personal moment.
W
HENEVER
I 
GO
outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get rid of
my beard, maybe I wear different glasses. I never liked the cold until I realized
that a hat and scarf provide the world’s most convenient and inconspicuous
anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk, and, contrary to the sage
advice of my mother, I look away from traffic when crossing the street, which is
why I’ve never been caught on any of the car dashcams that are ubiquitous here.
Passing buildings equipped with CCTV I keep my head down, so that no one
will see me as I’m usually seen online—head-on. I used to worry about the bus
and metro, but nowadays everybody’s too busy staring at their phones to give me
a second glance. If I take a cab, I’ll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a
few blocks away from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks
away from where I’m going.
Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find
some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I
don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.
Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is
more patient and generous and kind.
Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here three
years ago, and two years ago today, we married.

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NOTES
1.
 Hawaii Police Department
2.
 Sandra’s mother

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