Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US
government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first
time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that
system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.
In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when
he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed
that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to
collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result
would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the
ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six
years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to
build this system and why he was moved to expose it.
Spanning the bucolic
Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA
postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the
extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a
man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s
conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching
candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital
age and destined to be a classic.