Permanent Record

7.2.2013
Everything got shipped today, except the futons and couch, which I’m
just ditching. All that was left of Ed’s stuff after the FBI raided the
house fit into one small cardboard box. Some photos and his clothes,
lots of mismatched socks. Nothing that could be used as evidence in
court, just evidence of our life together. Sandra brought some lighter
fluid and brought the metal trash can back around to the lanai. I dumped
all of Ed’s stuff, the photos and clothes, inside, and lit a book of matches
on fire and tossed it in. Sandra and I sat around while it burned and the
smoke rose into the sky. The glow and the smoke reminded me of the
trip I took with Wendy to Kilauea, the volcano on the Big Island. That
was just over a month ago, but it feels like years in the past. How could
we have known that our own lives were about to erupt? That Volcano Ed
was going to destroy everything? But I remember the guide at Kilauea
saying that volcanoes are only destructive in the short term. In the long
term, they move the world. They create islands, cool the planet, and
enrich the soil. Their lava flows uncontrolled and then cools and
hardens. The ash they shoot into the air sprinkles down as minerals,
which fertilize the earth and make new life grow.

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29
Love and Exile
If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a
moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it
into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way
suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re
in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much
for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book.
At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether
you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at
a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.
All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely
intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was
more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the
world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally
unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of
your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these
identifiers across every available channel of electronic communications, the
American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store
for perpetuity the data of your life.
And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies
had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your
communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By
poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack
code, or “exploits,” they developed the ability to gain possession of more
than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of

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your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that
if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine,
like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can
tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the
chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up
your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it
gets them the data they want and lets them positively identify you.
This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation—the final
product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master.
No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your
life has now become an open book.
I
F MASS SURVEILLANCE
was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life,
then I wanted the dangers it posed, and the damage it had already done, to
be a constant presence too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to
make this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world,
could not ignore.In the years since 2013, awareness has grown, both in
scope and subtlety. But in this social media age, we have always to remind
ourselves: awareness alone is not enough.
In America, the initial press reports on the disclosures started a “national
conversation,” as President Obama himself conceded. While I appreciated
the sentiment, I remember wishing that he had noted that what made it
“national,” what made it a “conversation,” was that for the first time the
American public was informed enough to have a voice.
The revelations of 2013 particularly roused Congress, both houses of
which launched multiple investigations into NSA abuses. Those
investigations concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the
nature and efficacy of its mass surveillance programs, even to the most
highly cleared Intelligence Committee legislators.
In 2015, a federal court of appeals ruled in the matter of ACLU v.
Clapper, a suit challenging the legality of the NSA’s phone records
collection program. The court ruled that the NSA’s program had violated
even the loose standards of the Patriot Act and, moreover, was most
probably unconstitutional. The ruling focused on the NSA’s interpretation

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of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government to demand
from third parties “any tangible thing” that it deemed “relevant” to foreign
intelligence and terror investigations. In the court’s opinion, the
government’s definition of “relevant” was so expansive as to be virtually
meaningless. To call some collected data “relevant” merely because it might
become relevant at some amorphous point in the future was “unprecedented
and unwarranted.” The court’s refusal to accept the government’s definition
caused not a few legal scholars to interpret the ruling as casting doubt on
the legitimacy of all government bulk-collection programs predicated on
this doctrine of future relevance. In the wake of this opinion, Congress
passed the USA Freedom Act, which amended Section 215 to explicitly
prohibit the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Going forward,
those records would remain where they originally had been, in the private
control of the telecoms, and the government would have to formally request
specific ones with a FISC warrant in hand if it wanted to access them.