In Edward Snowden’s new memoir, the disclosures this time are personal

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Revealing state secrets is hard, but revealing yourself in a memoir might be harder

. As Edward Snowden puts it in the preface of “Permanent Record”: “The decision to come forward with evidence of government wrongdoing was easier for me to make than the decision, here, to give an account of my life.”

“Permanent Record” is a riveting account and a curious artifact. The book is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Snowden, but when it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes. For someone who worked in the intelligence community, the very idea of an autobiography feels uncomfortable. “It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification,” he writes, “only to turn around completely and share ‘personal disclosures’ in a book.

Born in 1983 in North Carolina, Snowden comes from a family whose service includes the FBI , the Coast Guard , the NSA and the Army . He remembers the first thing he ever hacked was bedtime, changing all the clocks in the house so that he could stay up later on his sixth birthday. As a teenager, Snowden learned how to hack school, examining the class syllabus to figure out how he could exploit its weaknesses; the goal was to do the least amount of work without flunking out.

Galvanized by 9/11, Snowden eventually turned his technical know-how into a career in intelligence, obtaining a top-secret classification at age 22 and bouncing around among contractors before becoming disillusioned at some point during the Obama presidency.

Julian Assange wanted Snowden to release the information through WikiLeaks, but the site’s “total transparency,” Snowden says, wouldn’t allow for proper authentication and curation of such incendiary material. Snowden emphasizes that the distinction was important to him — not that the government would see it that way. “Whereas other spies have committed espionage, sedition and treason,” he writes, ” I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism.

 

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we all know we are under surveillance...it is part of government.. he did this to himself for nothing..no avail.

No 'whistleblower' he.

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