OMNI
SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #9,
Compiled by Dick
Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
(#1 July 9, 2013; #2 Nov. 1, 2013; #3 Feb. 15, 2014; #4 April 15, 2014;
#5 May 25, 2014; #6 Dec. 4, 2014; #7 August 15, 2015; #8, Sept. 18, 2016)
Thanks to Marc Quigley for entering all of these
newsletters in OMNI’s web site.
CONSIDER POSTING MY NEWSLETTERS ON YOUR FACEBOOK.
PERMANENT RECORD
Edward Snowden. Metropolitan Books, 2019.
BUY
THE BOOK
CONTENTS: OMNI’S SNOWDEN
NEWSLETTER #9, October 13, 2019
Publisher’s Summary
D.D. Guttenplan’s Comments
Excerpt from Book
Glenn Greenwald’s Commentary
Dick, “Permanent Record”
Contents of #8
Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Co. 352 Pages
Publisher’s
Summary (book jacket)
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.
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.THE
AUTHOR
OFFICIAL
SITES
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THE
NATION MAGAZINE , Oct. 7, 2019, 2 Articles
D. D.
Guttenplan, “Snowden Speaks.”
Edward Snowden Speaks: The
NSA whistleblower’s new memoir iS
essential reading. By D.D. GuttenplanTwitter
essential reading. By D.D. GuttenplanTwitter
SEPTEMBER
19, 2019
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Edward Snowden appears on
a live video feed broadcast from Moscow at an event sponsored by ACLU Hawaii in
Honolulu in February 2015. (Marco Garcia / AP)
To earlier generations
of Nation readers, the phrase “Speak for yourself,
John,” was what we’d now call a meme. In Longfellow’s “The Courtship of Miles
Standish,” it’s Mayflower passenger Priscilla
Mullins’s retort to John Alden, who courts her on behalf of his friend Standish
(while secretly in love with her himself). Though the story is likely
apocryphal, Mullins and Alden did marry, producing a host of descendants,
including Longfellow himself and, according to his new memoir—The Nation’s exclusive excerpt is in this issue—Edward Snowden.
Even for those of us who’ve followed the Snowden revelations
closely, Permanent Record is full of surprises. Far from
the low-level IT drone depicted in most early press accounts (and even further
from the naive, possibly traitorous Putin pawn trashed by his critics), the
narrator of this book is a thoughtful, painfully self-aware intelligence
professional who found himself forced to confront and expose the reality of
mass surveillance—and the immense powers of coercion it gave to authorities
who, thanks to technology he helped to create, are now able to strip the
personal privacy of anyone connected to the Internet.
RELATED ARTICLE
Edward Snowden
A deeply reluctant whistleblower,
Snowden also emerges as a peculiarly American patriot, with roots that go back
to Plymouth Rock on his mother’s side and some of the earliest Quaker settlers
on his father’s. The Snowdens, who arrived in Maryland in 1658, once owned all
of Anne Arundel County—including the land on which Fort Meade, home of the
National Security Agency, stands today.
The
elaborate security surrounding the release of this book is a reminder that,
despite his relaxed demeanor and normal-seeming life in Moscow, Snowden is
still not safe. But then, neither are we: As his memoir makes clear, all the
techniques he exposed in 2013 remain in place. For that renewed warning—and for
finally speaking for himself—he deserves our thanks. [Dick’s bold.]
D.D. GuttenplanTWITTER D.D. Guttenplan is editor
of The Nation and the author, most recently, of The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority (Seven
Stories)
Edward
Snowden. “Love at First Byte.”
An
excerpt from his new memoir, Permanent
Record, published by The Nation.
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In this excerpt from
his memoir, the NSA whistleblower describes his realization that no one
should have to “pretend to be perfect.”
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The failed effort to silence Edward Snowden
9-19-19
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11:08
AM (6 minutes ago)
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“Permanent Record” by Dick Bennett
What does the title mean? His publisher provides no Index. Snowden has no chapter entitled the
title. So one must read carefully. His first reference is on p. 56. When he was age thirteen, and learning how to
evade his school assignments, one teacher cautioned him to do his best because his
grades will follow him for the rest of his life. “You have to start thinking about your
permanent record.” Perhaps his main
theme—the meaning of a permanent record in individual and national life-- is thus
introduced so casually you might miss it.
Snowden writes this book like a novel.
The second time he refers to “permanent
record” is p. 96 during his recollections of “growing up online” and his account
of being interviewed for a government job that required a background check for
a security clearance. On the desk of the
official interviewing him was “a giant folder labeled PERMANENT RECORD.” Flashing through his mind were all his chat
logs and casual posts, all his “supremely moronic commentary” he’d written when
he was a kid, and he “wasn’t that kid anymore.”
What to do about being “so inextricably,
technologically bound to a past that I fully regretted but barely remembered,” becomes
inextricably bound to his “growing up online.”
On
p. 168, he makes his third direct reference to “permanent record,” in a
paragraph on “deduplication and constant improvements in storage technology” by
the National Security Agency. “. . .the
agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency—to store all of the files it has
ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.” “…until
it was useful” (my bold).
That’s all the direct references I found,
if I did watch for them as closely in the remaining 168 pp. Instead, Snowden’s examination of the NSA
broadened and deepened until entire chapters (22, 24) are devoted to understanding
the NSA and his reactions to the increasingly troubling discoveries about his
employer. If you were to “find out about
even a fraction of the malfeasance, you had to go searching. And to go searching, you had to know that it
existed,” you had to understand the system of mass surveillance.
This is the core drive of the second half
of Snowden’s story, in which other elements are intertwined. As he grows in knowledge of the surveillance
system, he grows in understanding the US political system and himself. And it’s a love story, for he enjoyed the
good fortune of a loving, loyal, and forgiving partner, Lindsay Mills.
The structure of the book is that of the Bildungsroman, a novel dealing with one person's formative years of intellectual and spiritual education. It’s a distinguished tradition, developing from the seventeenth eighteenth centuries, flowering in the nineteenth, and countless in the twenty and twenty-first.
The structure of the book is that of the Bildungsroman, a novel dealing with one person's formative years of intellectual and spiritual education. It’s a distinguished tradition, developing from the seventeenth eighteenth centuries, flowering in the nineteenth, and countless in the twenty and twenty-first.
My
first tech advice, thanks to Flint Woods.
Too many links will cause
Word to block your message. He advises
including no more than 20.
Contents: Snowden Newsletter #8, September 18, 2016
Oliver
Stone’s Film, Snowden
Review of Film
by Stephen Farber (Hollywood Reporter),
NADG (Sept. 16,
2016), and Dick’s Comments
2016), and Dick’s Comments
Greenberg’s
Critique of the Film, Dick’s Comments
Google Search
Greenwald
and Poitras on Snowden
Greenwald, No Place to Hide
Poitras, Citizenfour
Obama
Should Pardon Snowden?
Holder’s View
of Snowden 5-31-16
Democracy Now Debate in Two Parts: Should Snowden Be
Pardoned? Could
He Receive a Fair Trial under the Espionage Act?
He Receive a Fair Trial under the Espionage Act?
ACLU’s Ben
Wizner Interview, “A Pardon for Snowden” It Must Be
Whistleblowers
and Leakers for the Sake of
Honest, Just Government
Mark Hertsgaard’s
New Book, Bravehearts:
Whistle-Blowing in the Age of
Snowden.
Snowden.
Hertsgaard, The Nation, Pentagon’s Broken
Whistleblower System
Moyers’ Morning
Reads: “A Second Snowden,” Leaked
Documents Reveal
Drone Secrets
Drone Secrets
END SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #9, October 13, 2019
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