Permanent Record

partner) to nations of the European Union. Germany, which has done much
to reckon with its Nazi and Communist past, provides the primary example
of this disjunction. Its citizens and legislators were appalled to learn that the
NSA was surveilling German communications and had even targeted
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s smartphone. At the same time, the BND,
Germany’s premier intelligence agency, had collaborated with the NSA in
numerous operations, even carrying out certain proxy surveillance
initiatives that the NSA was unable or unwilling to undertake on its own.
Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its
citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any elected government that
relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards
surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a
democracy. Such cognitive dissonance on a geopolitical scale has helped to
bring individual privacy concerns back into the international dialogue
within the context of human rights.
For the first time since the end of World War II, liberal democratic
governments throughout the world were discussing privacy as the natural,
inborn right of every man, woman, and child. In doing so they were harking
back to the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose
Article 12 states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with
his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor
and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against
such interference or attacks.” Like all UN declarations, this aspirational
document was never enforceable, but it had been intended to inculcate a
new basis for transnational civil liberties in a world that had just survived
nuclear atrocities and attempted genocides and was facing an unprecedented
surfeit of refugees and the stateless.
The EU, still under the sway of this postwar universalist idealism, now
became the first transnational body to put these principles into practice,

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establishing a new directive that seeks to standardize whistleblower
protections across its member states, along with a standardized legal
framework for privacy protection. In 2016, the EU Parliament passed the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the most significant effort yet
made to forestall the incursions of technological hegemony—which the EU
tends to regard, not unfairly, as an extension of American hegemony.
The GDPR treats the citizens of the European Union, whom it calls
“natural persons,” as also being “data subjects”—that is, people who
generate personally identifiable data. In the US, data is usually regarded as
the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of
the person it represents, which allows it to treat our data subjecthood as
deserving of civil liberties protections.
The GDPR is undoubtedly a major legal advance, but even its
transnationalism is too parochial: the Internet is global. Our natural
personhood will never be legally synonymous with our data subjecthood,
not least because the former lives in one place at a time while the latter lives
in many places simultaneously.
Today, no matter who you are, or where you are, bodily, physically, you
are also elsewhere, abroad—multiple selves wandering along the signal
paths, with no country to call your own, and yet beholden to the laws of
every country through which you pass. The records of a life lived in Geneva
dwell in the Beltway. The photos of a wedding in Tokyo are on a
honeymoon in Sydney. The videos of a funeral in Varanasi are up on
Apple’s iCloud, which is partially located in my home state of North
Carolina and partially scattered across the partner servers of Amazon,
Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, throughout the EU, UK, South Korea,
Singapore, Taiwan, and China.
Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.
We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies
detect us in utero, and our data will continue to proliferate even after we
die. Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we
choose to keep, comprise just a sliver of the information that has been
wrung out of our lives—most of it unconsciously, or without our consent—
by business and government surveillance. We are the first people in the
history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened
with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an

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eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that
these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our
children.
Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new
generation. Not yet born on 9/11, they have spent their entire lives under the
omnipresent specter of this surveillance. These young people who have
known no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s
their political creativity and technological ingenuity that give me hope.
Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be
able to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped too—each
successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous
one, subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for
societal control and human manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of
the law but the limits of the imagination.
Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer
to the first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is
everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is
what that data of ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of
established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to come, a type of
digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like
palm reading. Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by
which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science
is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually
manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you
might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering
an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the
future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that
must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be
merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us
to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let
the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship
scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of
education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can
have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our
financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race,

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which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes. And as for our
most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to
identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to
remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology
that seeks its control.
Of course, all of the above has already happened.
E
XILE
: 
NOT A
day has passed since August 1, 2013, in which I don’t recall
that “exile” was what my teenage self used to call getting booted off-line.
The Wi-Fi died? Exile. I’m out of signal range? Exile. The self who used to
say that now seems so young to me. He seems so distant.
When people ask me what my life is like now, I tend to answer that it’s a
lot like theirs in that I spend a lot of time in front of the computer—reading,
writing, interacting. From what the press likes to describe as an
“undisclosed location”—which is really just whatever two-bedroom
apartment in Moscow I happen to be renting—I beam myself onto stages
around the world, speaking about the protection of civil liberties in the
digital age to audiences of students, scholars, lawmakers, and technologists.
Some days I take virtual meetings with my fellow board members at the
Freedom of the Press Foundation, or talk with my European legal team, led
by Wolfgang Kaleck, at the European Center for Constitutional and Human
Rights. Other days, I just pick up some Burger King—I know where my
loyalties lie—and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use
credit cards. One fixture of my existence is my daily check-in with my
American lawyer, confidant, and all-around consigliere Ben Wizner at the
ACLU, who has been my guide to the world as it is and puts up with my
musings about the world as it should be.
That’s my life. It got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of
2014, when Lindsay came to visit—the first time I’d seen her since Hawaii.
I tried not to expect too much, because I knew I didn’t deserve the chance;
the only thing I deserved was a slap in the face. But when I opened the
door, she placed her hand on my cheek and I told her I loved her.
“Hush,” she said, “I know.”

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We held each other in silence, each breath like a pledge to make up for
lost time.
From that moment, my world was hers. Previously, I’d been content to
hang around indoors—indeed, that was my preference before I was in
Russia—but Lindsay was insistent: she’d never been to Russia and now we
were going to be tourists together.
My Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who helped me get asylum in
the country—he was the only lawyer who had the foresight to show up at
the airport with a translator—is a cultured and resourceful man, and he
proved as adept at obtaining last-minute tickets to the opera as he is at
navigating my legal issues. He helped arrange two box seats at the Bolshoi
Theater, so Lindsay and I got dressed and went, though I have to admit I
was wary. There were so many people, all packed so tightly into a hall.
Lindsay could sense my growing unease. As the lights dimmed and the
curtain rose, she leaned over, nudged me in the ribs, and whispered, “None
of these people are here for you. They’re here for this.”
Lindsay and I also spent time at some of Moscow’s museums. The
Tretyakov Gallery contains one of the world’s richest collection of Russian
Orthodox icon paintings. The artists who made these paintings for the
Church were essentially contractors, I thought, and so were typically not
allowed to sign their names to their handiwork, or preferred not to. The time
and tradition that fostered these works was not given much to recognizing
individual achievement. As Lindsay and I stood in front of one of the icons,
a young tourist, a teenage girl, suddenly stepped between us. This wasn’t
the first time I was recognized in public, but given Lindsay’s presence, it
certainly threatened to be the most headline-worthy. In German-accented
English, the girl asked whether she could take a selfie with us. I’m not sure
what explains my reaction—maybe it was this German girl’s shy and polite
way of asking, or maybe it was Lindsay’s always mood-improving, live-
and-let-live presence—but without hesitation, for once, I agreed. Lindsay
smiled as the girl posed between us and took a photo. Then, after a few
sweet words of support, she departed.
I dragged Lindsay out of the museum a moment later. I was afraid that if
the girl posted the photo to social media we could be just minutes away
from unwanted attention. I feel foolish now for thinking that. I kept
nervously checking online, but the photo didn’t appear. Not that day, and

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not the day after. As far as I can tell, it was never shared—just kept as a
private memory of a personal moment.
W
HENEVER
I 
GO
outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get
rid of my beard, maybe I wear different glasses. I never liked the cold until
I realized that a hat and scarf provide the world’s most convenient and
inconspicuous anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk, and,
contrary to the sage advice of my mother, I look away from traffic when
crossing the street, which is why I’ve never been caught on any of the car
dashcams that are ubiquitous here. Passing buildings equipped with CCTV I
keep my head down, so that no one will see me as I’m usually seen online
—head-on. I used to worry about the bus and metro, but nowadays
everybody’s too busy staring at their phones to give me a second glance. If I
take a cab, I’ll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a few blocks away
from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks away from
where I’m going.
Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to
find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I
can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and
point.
Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is
more patient and generous and kind.
Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here
three years ago, and two years ago today, we married.

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NOTES
1.
Hawaii Police Department
2.
Sandra’s mother

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