Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

  I remember asking why. “Because,” she said, “it’s not addressed to you.” She explained that opening mail intended for someone else, even if it was just a birthday card or a chain letter, wasn’t a very nice thing to do. In fact, it was a crime.

  I wanted to know what kind of crime. “A big one, buddy,” my mother said. “A federal crime.”

  I stood in the parking lot, tore the envelopes in half, and carried them to the trash.

  I had a new iPhone in the pocket of my new Ralph Lauren suit. I had new Burberry glasses. A new haircut. Keys to this new town house in Columbia, Maryland, the largest place I’d ever lived in, and the first place that really felt like mine. I was rich, or at least my friends thought so. I barely recognized myself.

  I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved—after all, wasn’t that what everybody else did? But it was easier said than done. The denial, I mean. The money—that came easy. So easy that I felt guilty.

  Counting Geneva, and not counting periodic trips home, I’d been away for nearly four years. The America I returned to felt like a changed country. I won’t go as far as to say that I felt like a foreigner, but I did find myself mired in way too many conversations I didn’t understand. Every other word was the name of some TV show or movie I didn’t know, or a celebrity scandal I didn’t care about, and I couldn’t respond—I had nothing to respond with.

  Contradictory thoughts rained down like Tetris blocks, and I struggled to sort them out—to make them disappear. I thought, pity these poor, sweet, innocent people—they’re victims, watched by the government, watched by the very screens they worship. Then I thought: Shut up, stop being so dramatic—they’re happy, they don’t care, and you don’t have to, either. Grow up, do your work, pay your bills. That’s life.

  A normal life was what Lindsay and I were hoping for. We were ready for the next stage and had decided to settle down. We had a nice backyard with a cherry tree that reminded me of a sweeter Japan, a spot on the Tama River where Lindsay and I had laughed and rolled around atop the fragrant carpet of Tokyo blossoms as we watched the sakura fall.

  Lindsay was getting certified as a yoga instructor. I, meanwhile, was getting used to my new position—in sales.

  One of the external vendors I’d worked with on EPICSHELTER ended up working for Dell, and convinced me that I was wasting my time with getting paid by the hour. I should get into the sales side of Dell’s business, he said, where I could earn a fortune—for more ideas like EPICSHELTER. I’d be making an astronomical leap up the corporate ladder, and he’d be getting a substantial referral bonus. I was ready to be convinced, especially since it meant distracting myself from my growing sense of unease, which could only get me into trouble. The official job title was solutions consultant. It meant, in essence, that I had to solve the problems created by my new partner, whom I’m going to call Cliff, the account manager.

  Cliff was supposed to be the face, and I was to be the brain. When we sat down with the CIA’s technical royalty and purchasing agents, his job was to sell Dell’s equipment and expertise by any means necessary. This meant reaching deep into the seat of his pants for unlimited slick promises as to how we’d do things for the agency, things that were definitely, definitely not possible for our competitors (and, in reality, not possible for us, either). My job was to lead a team of experts in building something that reduced the degree to which Cliff had lied by just enough that, when the person who signed the check pressed the Power button, we wouldn’t all be sent to jail.

  No pressure.

  Our main project was to help the CIA catch up with the bleeding edge—or just with the technical standards of the NSA—by building it the buzziest of new technologies, a “private cloud.” The aim was to unite the agency’s processing and storage while distributing the ways by which data could be accessed. In plain American, we wanted to make it so that someone in a tent in Afghanistan could do exactly the same work in exactly the same way as someone at CIA headquarters. The agency—and indeed the whole IC’s technical leadership—was constantly complaining about “silos”: the problem of having a billion buckets of data spread all over the world that they couldn’t keep track of or access. So I was leading a team of some of the smartest people at Dell to come up with a way that anyone, anywhere, could reach anything.

  During the proof of concept stage, the working name of our cloud became “Frankie.” Don’t blame me: on the tech side, we just called it “The Private Cloud.” It was Cliff who named it, in the middle of a demo with the CIA, saying they were going to love our little Frankenstein “because it’s a real monster.”

  The more promises Cliff made, the busier I became, leaving Lindsay and me only the weekends to catch up with our parents and old friends. We tried to furnish and equip our new home. The three-story place had come empty, so we had to get everything, or everything that our parents hadn’t generously handed down to us. This felt very mature, but was at the same time very telling about our priorities: we bought dishes, cutlery, a desk, and a chair, but we still slept on a mattress on the floor. I’d become allergic to credit cards, with all their tracking, so we bought everything outright, with hard currency. When we needed a car, I bought a ’98 Acura Integra from a classified ad for $3,000 cash. Earning money was one thing, but neither Lindsay nor I liked to spend it, unless it was for computer equipment—or a special occasion. For Valentine’s Day, I bought Lindsay the revolver she always wanted.

  Our new condo was a twenty-minute drive from nearly a dozen malls, including the Columbia Mall, which has nearly 1.5 million square feet of shopping, occupied by some two hundred stores, a fourteen-screen AMC multiplex, a P.F. Chang’s, and a Cheesecake Factory. As we drove the familiar roads in the beat-up Integra, I was impressed, but also slightly taken aback, by all the development that had occurred in my absence. The post-9/11 government spending spree had certainly put a lot of money into a lot of local pockets. It was an unsettling and even overwhelming experience to come back to America after having been away for a while and to realize anew just how wealthy this part of the country was, and how many consumer options it offered—how many big-box retailers and high-end interior design showrooms. And all of them had sales. For Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day. Festive banners announced the latest discounts, just below all the flags.

  Our mission was pretty much appliance-based on this one afternoon I’m recalling—we were at Best Buy. Having settled on a new microwave, we were checking out, on Lindsay’s healthful insistence, a display of blenders. She had her phone out and was in the midst of researching which of the ten or so devices had the best reviews, when I found myself wandering over to the computer department at the far end of the store.

  But along the way, I stopped. There, at the edge of the kitchenware section, ensconced atop a brightly decorated and lit elevated platform, was a shiny new refrigerator. Rather, it was a “Smartfridge,” which was being advertised as “Internet-equipped.”

  This, plain and simple, blew my mind.

  A salesperson approached, interpreting my stupefaction as interest—“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”—and proceeded to demonstrate a few of the features. A screen was embedded in the door of the fridge, and next to the screen was a holder for a tiny stylus, which allowed you to scribble messages. If you didn’t want to scribble, you could record audio and video memos. You could also use the screen as you would your regular computer, because the refrigerator had Wi-Fi. You could check your email, or check your calendar. You could watch YouTube clips, or listen to MP3s. You could even make phone calls. I had to restrain myself from keying in Lindsay’s number and saying, from across the floor, “I’m calling from a fridge.”

  Beyond that, the salesperson continued, the fridge’s computer kept track of internal temperature, and, through scanning barcodes, the freshness of your food. It also provided nutritional information and suggested recipes. I
think the price was over $9,000. “Delivery included,” the salesperson said.

  I remember driving home in a confused silence. This wasn’t quite the stunning moonshot tech-future we’d been promised. I was convinced the only reason that thing was Internet-equipped was so that it could report back to its manufacturer about its owner’s usage and about any other household data that was obtainable. The manufacturer, in turn, would monetize that data by selling it. And we were supposed to pay for the privilege.

  I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes, allowing themselves to be tracked while browsing in their pantries as efficiently as if they were browsing the Web. It would still be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before “virtual assistants” like Amazon Echo and Google Home were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash. The data we generate just by living—or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.

  Meanwhile, it felt as if every major tech company, including Dell, was rolling out new civilian versions of what I was working on for the CIA: a cloud. (In fact, Dell had even tried four years previously to trademark the term “cloud computing” but was denied.) I was amazed at how willingly people were signing up, so excited at the prospect of their photos and videos and music and e-books being universally backed up and available that they never gave much thought as to why such an uber-sophisticated and convenient storage solution was being offered to them for “free” or for “cheap” in the first place.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen such a concept be so uniformly bought into, on every side. “The cloud” was as effective a sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amazon and Apple and Google to sell to their users. I can still close my eyes and hear Cliff schmoozing some CIA suit about how “with the cloud, you’ll be able to push security updates across agency computers worldwide,” or “when the cloud’s up and running, the agency will be able to track who has read what file worldwide.” The cloud was white and fluffy and peaceful, floating high above the fray. Though many clouds make a stormy sky, a single cloud provided a benevolent bit of shade. It was protective. I think it made everyone think of heaven.

  Dell—along with the largest cloud-based private companies, Amazon, Apple, and Google—regarded the rise of the cloud as a new age of computing. But in concept, at least, it was something of a regression to the old mainframe architecture of computing’s earliest history, where many users all depended upon a single powerful central core that could only be maintained by an elite cadre of professionals. The world had abandoned this “impersonal” mainframe model only a generation before, once businesses like Dell developed “personal” computers cheap enough, and simple enough, to appeal to mortals. The renaissance that followed produced desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—all devices that allowed people the freedom to make an immense amount of creative work. The only issue was—how to store it?

  This was the genesis of “cloud computing.” Now it didn’t really matter what kind of personal computer you had, because the real computers that you relied upon were warehoused in the enormous data centers that the cloud companies built throughout the world. These were, in a sense, the new mainframes, row after row of racked, identical servers linked together in such a way that each individual machine acted together within a collective computing system. The loss of a single server or even of an entire data center no longer mattered, because they were mere droplets in the larger, global cloud.

  From the standpoint of a regular user, a cloud is just a storage mechanism that ensures that your data is being processed or stored not on your personal device, but on a range of different servers, which can ultimately be owned and operated by different companies. The result is that your data is no longer truly yours. It’s controlled by companies, which can use it for virtually any purpose.

  Read your terms of service agreements for cloud storage, which get longer and longer by the year—current ones are over six thousand words, twice the average length of one of these book chapters. When we choose to store our data online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us, and can willfully delete any data they object to. Unless we’ve kept a separate copy on our own machines or drives, this data will be lost to us forever. If any of our data is found to be particularly objectionable or otherwise in violation of the terms of service, the companies can unilaterally delete our accounts, deny us our own data, and yet retain a copy for their own records, which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately, the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data. There is no property less protected, and yet no property more private.

  * * *

  THE INTERNET I’D grown up with, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing. And with it, so was my youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught ordeal. Self-expression now required such strong self-protection as to obviate its liberties and nullify its pleasures. Every communication was a matter not of creativity but of safety. Every transaction was a potential danger.

  Meanwhile, the private sector was busy leveraging our reliance on technology into market consolidation. The majority of American Internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by an imperial triumvirate of companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and the American IC was seeking to take advantage of that fact by obtaining access to their networks—both through direct orders that were kept secret from the public, and clandestine subversion efforts that were kept secret from the companies themselves. Our user data was turning vast profits for the companies, and the government pilfered it for free. I don’t think I’d ever felt so powerless.

  Then there was this other emotion that I felt, a curious sense of being adrift and yet, at the same time, of having my privacy violated. It was as if I were dispersed—with parts of my life scattered across servers all over the globe—and yet intruded or imposed upon. Every morning when I left our town house, I found myself nodding at the security cameras dotted throughout our development. Previously I’d never paid them any attention, but now, when a light turned red on my commute, I couldn’t help but think of its leering sensor, keeping tabs on me whether I blew through the intersection or stopped. License-plate readers were recording my comings and goings, even if I maintained a speed of 35 miles per hour.

  America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy. In the American system, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another. In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force—including lethal force. Among the most important of these restraints are the prohibitions against law enforcement surveilling private citizens on their property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant. There are few laws, however, that restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes the vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks.

  Law enforcement’s use of surveillance cameras on public property was originally conceived of as a crime deterrent and an aid to investigators after a crime had occurred. But as the cost of these devices contin
ued to fall, they became ubiquitous, and their role became preemptive—with law enforcement using them to track people who had not committed, or were not even suspected of, any crime. And the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities such as facial and pattern recognition. An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be no mere recording device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer—a true robo-cop actively seeking out “suspicious” activity, such as apparent drug deals (that is, people embracing or shaking hands) and apparent gang affiliation (such as people wearing specific colors and brands of clothing). Even in 2011, it was clear to me that this was where technology was leading us, without any substantive public debate.

  Potential monitoring abuses piled up in my mind to cumulatively produce a vision of an appalling future. A world in which all people were totally surveilled would logically become a world in which all laws were totally enforced, automatically, by computers. After all, it’s difficult to imagine an AI device that’s capable of noticing a person breaking the law not holding that person accountable. No policing algorithm would ever be programmed, even if it could be, toward leniency or forgiveness.

  I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement. I imagined the future SmartFridge stationed in my kitchen, monitoring my conduct and habits, and using my tendency to drink straight from the carton or not wash my hands to evaluate the probability of my being a felon.

  Such a world of total automated law enforcement—of, say, all pet-ownership laws, or all zoning laws regulating home businesses—would be intolerable. Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow, along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about. According to Maryland Criminal Law Section 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine. In North Carolina, statute 14-309.8 makes it illegal for a bingo game to last more than five hours. Both of these laws come from a more prudish past and yet, for one reason or another, were never repealed. Most of our lives, even if we don’t realize it, occur not in black and white but in a gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the recycling bin and recyclables in the trash, ride our bicycles in the improper lane, and borrow a stranger’s Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn’t pay for. Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.