52 pages • 1 hour read
Edward SnowdenPermanent Record
Edward SnowdenNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Mass Surveillance
In 2013, Snowden the extent to which the American intelligence agencies—assisted by those abroad—were surveilling almost every single citizen and recording their most intimate data. Although mass surveillance terrifies Snowden, his coworkers do not share his feelings. When he tries to discuss the issue with his fellow NSA workers, they react with mild indifference. This issue reaches its nadir when Snowden visits a facility and finds the workers spying on women, collecting (and sharing) their nude photographs. This abuse leads him to conclude that the immorality of mass surveillance has become so toxic, and has permeated so much of the agency, that he has no choice but to reveal it to the world.
Snowden likens the NSA’s mass surveillance to that conducted by the SS in Nazi Germany and the KGB in the Soviet Union. He views it as a tool of totalitarian oppression, and even though the US government may have undertaken the program with the best of intentions, he sees his colleagues’ behavior as evidence that power has begun to corrupt those good intentions. He believes the collective guilt intelligence agencies felt after 9/11 caused them to abandon the Fourth Amendment. Unlike the open mass surveillance that Orwell envisioned in 1984, the NSA program operates in secret. The program has virtually no oversight—the NSA lies about its existence—and the public has grown indifferent to trading individual privacy for the illusion of safety.
One of the greatest dangers of mass surveillance is the gathering of metadata. Unseen, passive, and unknown to the majority of citizens, it allows governments to track citizens’ actions and whereabouts by tracking not the content on their devices, but each device’s location and activity—what sites the user visited, whom they called, for what terms they searched. Snowden fears he cannot explain the complexities and dangers of metadata harvesting to the general public. Yet as the massive scale of the globe-spanning surveillance becomes apparent, Snowden feels he must act. He feels such conviction about the problem that he utterly destroys his life to let the world know.
Morality and Technology
Practically raised by his computer and his internet connection, Snowden has been extremely online from a young age. To him, this technology is amoral: It can be used for good purposes, which he experienced as a young man, and bad purposes, like mass surveillance of the entire population of the United States. Technology, then, is a tool that derives its morality from the user. It becomes a blank slate onto which humans project their moral compass.
In the aftermath of 9/11. Snowden takes an unnuanced view of what the US must do to combat terrorism. After his discharge from the Army, the nationalist fervor begins to seep away, and he develops a more complicated moral outlook. When he begins to work for the intelligence services and sees how the government corrupts the machines that he has grown to love, he begins to question America’s moral certitude, realizing that the morality of the technology is only as strong as those who wield the tech.
Snowden’s concerns become even more relevant today, as automation, enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning, take over human supervision of many technological functions. Just as the NSA’s mass surveillance program had little oversight, the U.S. government does little to supervise the use of artificial intelligence, exposing millions to the consequences of amoral, machine-driven decision making. Snowden believes those wielding the most powerful tech in the world seem to be operating without a moral compass at all. He cites the examples of Nagasaki and Hiroshima as evidence of the horrors that technology, wielded with ambiguous morality, can heap onto a population. He becomes a whistleblower, hoping to return technology to a position of positive morality.
At the same time, by knighting himself as the sole determiner of whether the program is and isn’t moral, he demonstrates remarkable self-assurance, to the point of arrogance. He chooses to break the law rather than trying to go through the proper whistleblowing channels. As such, his revelations have a limited impact: The EU’s GDPR is positive, but not much changes back home. Immorality didn’t defeat immorality, and public indifference to mass surveillance continues, as does the risk of technology being exploited for evil purposes.
Anonymity
To Snowden, anonymity is an important cornerstone of internet culture. Having spent so much time online, he revels in the ability to drift in and out of an identity, to hack the malleable persona that perpetual anonymity provides. Unless people have the option of not being identified online, he suggests that the internet, and people as a whole, will never truly be free. To Snowden, being anonymous online is an essential choice, a freedom which should never be surrendered.
Snowden describes his earliest online experiences in excruciating detail. He lists the mistakes he made online while noting anonymity always protected him. No matter what stupid argument he was dragged into or what naïve post he made on a computer forum, begging for help, he was always able to ditch his identity for an entirely new one. These forays are formative experiences for Snowden: Anonymity becomes the arena in which he can fail without fearing repercussions. Later, he operates beneath the cloak of anonymity as he executes his plan, only jettisoning it when he has to ask others to help him reveal it to the public.
In the present day, online anonymity is rapidly vanishing. People post massive amounts of personal data on social media, which businesses—and sometimes nefarious actors—mine for not only advertising but also disinformation and psychological warfare. The government’s collection of metadata means that, no matter what identity a user has adopted, anonymity is gone. Snowden presents the Tor browser as an important tool for fighting back, and he launches his own Tor server to help those living under authoritarian governments access some form of anonymous browsing.
Snowden’s role as the whistleblower means the end of his own anonymity. He tries to seize control of the moment, recording his own unmasking video and surrendering his anonymity to ensure that his message is heard. An anonymous NSA contractor has become one of the world’s most notorious fugitives, yet his quest had limited success. Few people safeguard their personal data, and in many countries—the EU’s “right to be forgotten” notwithstanding—people still have no ownership over their data and no say in how it’s stored and used.
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