This memoir is incredibly well written.
The book is in 3 parts:
1/3: Memoir
Here, Edward details his upbringing and values. Having being brought up in a patriotic family, his life was shaping to fit this mold: to serve and protect his country. That obviously did not end up being the case.
I found this section a little dull. The stories about his childhood (disinterest in school, first encounters with hacking) did not strike me as interesting, and I think it was mostly fluff to build some sort of backstory.
2/3: Sys admin manifesto
System admins have more power than we give them credit for, and ES proves it; they can monitor network activity. And the IC is the sys admin of the interconnected network AKA the internet.
Snowden’s disillusionment with the IC and their dealings comes off to me as a failure in 2 parts:
- A failure of the IC to indoctrinate it’s staff I’m not sure if this just wasn’t something they thought about pre-2013, but it seems to me that there was good reason to keep their secrets secret, and the best way to do that is to make sure the staff don’t tell.
- A failure of the prospective staff knowing what they’re getting into The NSA hasn’t stopped hiring people. In fact, they still hire some of the most talented cybersecurity professionals in the country. And these employees willingly sign on to secure the nation. This must be done at all costs, including spying on everyone. Again, I’m not convinced the people who signed were completely oblivious to this reality, but if they were, then they failed (to consider the outcomes of their work).
3/3: They know everything
“There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything— including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling.”
One question I asked myself before reading this book was: Why do I care if the government passively spies on me? I have nothing to hide! The answer to this is that it’s not about you. Governments should not be allowed to spy on it’s citizens because some of them actually have things to hide! I think the biggest fear with of surveillance systems lies in the intersection of such systems with authoritarianism. Here’s an example: Say you’re a citizen of an authoritarian country with strict anti-abortion policies. Pre-surveillance, abortions could happen covertly. But what happens when you search for a suspected covert abortion clinic and both your search and IP address are logged somewhere? You don’t even need to be under authoritarian rule to see how something like this goes catastrophically wrong.
Some interesting excerpts
“an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.”
~ ES describing XKEYSCORE
“The reaction of technocapitalists to the disclosures was immediate and forceful, proving once again that with extreme hazards come unlikely allies. The documents revealed an NSA so determined to pursue any and all information it perceived as being deliberately kept from it that it had undermined the basic encryption protocols of the Internet—making citizens’ financial and medical records, for example, more vulnerable, and in the process harming businesses that relied on their customers entrusting them with such sensitive data. In response, Apple adopted strong default encryption for its iPhones and iPads, and Google followed suit for its Android products and Chromebooks. But perhaps the most important private-sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set about switching their website platforms, replacing http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) with the encrypted https (the S signifies security), which helps prevent third-party interception of Web traffic. The year 2016 was a landmark in tech history, the first year since the invention of the Internet that more Web traffic was encrypted than unencrypted.”