Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition)

PREFACE

My name is Edward Joseph Snowden. I used to work for the United States government, but now I work for you, the public. It took me nearly three decades to recognize that there was a distinction. I spend my time trying to protect the public from the person I used to be—a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA).

The reason you’re reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a man in my position: I decided to tell the truth about my country’s secret regime of mass surveillance. A system of near-universal surveillance had been set up not just without the American public’s consent, but in a way that deliberately hid every aspect of its programs from our knowledge. In other words, the government sworn to protect its citizens was also spying on them.

When the program was first created—when I helped build it—I didn’t realize that engineering a system that would keep a permanent record of everyone’s life would turn out to be a tragic mistake. But over time, I came to understand that American citizens were being surveilled in a way that went against not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society. The public had never been granted a chance to voice our opinion about this surveillance.

I love my country, and I believe in public service—my whole family, my whole family line for centuries, is filled with men and women who have spent their lives serving this country and its citizens. I had sworn an oath of service to the public, in support and defense of the Constitution, whose guarantee of civil liberties had been blatantly violated. I realized that coming forward and disclosing the extent of my country’s abuses was critical. I therefore decided to become what’s known as a whistleblower.

In 2013, I collected internal Intelligence Community documents that gave evidence of the US government’s lawbreaking and turned them over to journalists, who vetted and published them. In doing so, I knew I could—and would—be charged with crimes by the US government under the Espionage Act. The penalty for disclosing top secret documents, whether to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years imprisonment per document. As a result, I have lived in exile in Moscow, Russia, a country I did not choose, for more than seven years.

This book is about what led up to that decision, the moral and ethical principles that informed it, and the impact that mass surveillance and data collection continues to have on all of us.

It’s also about my life.