Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

  I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.”

  She was right. And she was right to be worried about me. She thought I was too tense, and under too much stress. I was—not because of my work, but because of my desire to tell her a truth that I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t tell her that my former coworkers at the NSA could target her for surveillance and read the love poems she texted me. I couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took—not just her public photos, but the intimate ones. I couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.

  I tried to explain it to her, obliquely, through an analogy. I told her to imagine opening up her laptop one day and finding a spreadsheet on her desktop.

  “Why?” she said. “I don’t like spreadsheets.”

  I wasn’t prepared for this response, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Nobody does, but this one’s called The End.”

  “Ooh, mysterious.”

  “You don’t remember having created this spreadsheet, but once you open it up, you recognize its contents. Because inside it is everything, absolutely everything, that could ruin you. Every speck of information that could destroy your life.”

  Lindsay smiled. “Can I see the one for you?”

  She was joking, but I wasn’t. A spreadsheet containing every scrap of data about you would pose a mortal hazard. Imagine it: all the secrets big and small that could end your marriage, end your career, poison even your closest relationships, and leave you broke, friendless, and in prison. Maybe the spreadsheet would include the joint you smoked last weekend at a friend’s house, or the one line of cocaine you snorted off the screen of your phone in a bar in college. Or the drunken one-night stand you had with your friend’s girlfriend, who’s now your friend’s wife, which you both regret and have agreed never to mention to anyone. Or an abortion you got when you were a teenager, which you kept hidden from your parents and that you’d like to keep hidden from your spouse. Or maybe it’s just information about a petition you signed, or a protest you attended. Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes—if not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this information was being stored by the US government.

  Some time after our exchange, Lindsay came up to me and said, “I figured out what would be on my Spreadsheet of Total Destruction—the secret that would ruin me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  I tried to chill, but I kept having strange physical symptoms. I’d become weirdly clumsy, falling off ladders—more than once—or bumping into door frames. Sometimes I’d trip, or drop spoons I was holding, or fail to gauge distances accurately and miss what I was reaching for. I’d spill water over myself, or choke on it. Lindsay and I would be in the middle of a conversation when I’d miss what she’d said, and she’d ask where I’d gone to—it was like I’d been frozen in another world.

  One day when I went to meet Lindsay after her pole-fitness class, I started feeling dizzy. This was the most disturbing of the symptoms I’d had thus far. It scared me, and scared Lindsay, too, especially when it led to a gradual diminishing of my senses. I had too many explanations for these incidents: poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep. I had too many rationalizations: the plate was too close to the edge of the counter, the stairs were slippery. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was worse if what I was experiencing was psychosomatic or genuine. I decided to go to the doctor, but the only appointment wasn’t for weeks.

  A day or so later, I was home around noon, trying my best to keep up with work remotely. I was on the phone with a security officer at Dell when the dizziness hit me hard. I immediately excused myself from the call, slurring my words, and as I struggled to hang up the phone, I was sure: I was going to die.

  For those who’ve experienced it, this sense of impending doom needs no description, and for those who haven’t, there is no explanation. It strikes so suddenly and primally that it wipes out all other feeling, all thought besides helpless resignation. My life was over. I slumped in my chair, a big black padded Aeron that tilted underneath me as I fell into a void and lost consciousness.

  I came to still seated, with the clock on my desk reading just shy of 1:00 p.m. I’d been out less than an hour, but I was exhausted. It was as if I’d been awake since the beginning of time.

  I reached for the phone in a panic, but my hand kept missing it and grabbing the air. Once I managed to grab ahold of it and get a dial tone, I found I couldn’t remember Lindsay’s number, or could only remember the digits but not their order.

  Somehow I managed to get myself downstairs, taking each step deliberately, palm against the wall. I got some juice out of the fridge and chugged it, keeping both hands on the carton and dribbling a fair amount on my chin. Then I lay down on the floor, pressed my cheek to the cool linoleum, and fell asleep, which was how Lindsay found me.

  I’d just had an epileptic seizure.

  My mother had epilepsy, and for a time at least was prone to grand mal seizures: the foaming at the mouth, her limbs thrashing, her body rolling around until it stilled into a horrible unconscious rigidity. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t previously associated my symptoms with hers, though that was the very same denial she herself had been in for decades, attributing her frequent falls to “clumsiness” and “lack of coordination.” She hadn’t been diagnosed until her first grand mal in her late thirties, and, after a brief spell on medication, her seizures stopped. She’d always told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary and to this day I’m still not sure if that’s what her doctor had told her or if she was just trying to reassure us that her fate wouldn’t be ours.

  There is no diagnostic test for epilepsy. The clinical diagnosis is just two or more unexplained seizures—that’s it. Very little is known about the condition. Medicine tends to treat epilepsy phenomenologically. Doctors don’t talk about “epilepsy,” they talk about “seizures.” They tend to divide seizures into two types: localized and generalized, the former being an electrical misfire in a certain section of your brain that doesn’t spread, the latter being an electrical misfire that creates a chain reaction. Basically, a wave of misfiring synapses rolls across your brain, causing you to lose motor function and, ultimately, consciousness.

  Epilepsy is such a strange syndrome. Its sufferers feel different things, depending on which part of their brain has the initial electrical cascade failure. Those who have this failure in their auditory center famously hear bells. Those who have it in their visual center either have their vision go dark or see sparkles. If the failure happens in the deeper core areas of the brain—which was where mine occurred—it can cause severe vertigo. In time, I came to know the warning signs, so I could prepare for an oncoming seizure. These signs are called “auras,” in the popular language of epilepsy, though in scientific fact these auras are the seizure itself. They are the proprioceptive experience of the misfire.

  I consulted with as many epilepsy specialists as I could find—the best part of working for Dell was the insurance: I had CAT scans, MRIs, the works. Meanwhile, Lindsay, who was my stalwart angel throughout all this, driving me back and forth from appointments, went about researching all the information that was available about the syndrome. She Googled both allopathic and homeopathic treatments so intensely that basically all her Gmail ads were for epilepsy pharmaceuticals.

  I felt defeated. The two great institutions of my life had been betrayed and were betraying me: my country and the Internet. And now
my body was following suit.

  My brain had, quite literally, short-circuited.

  18

  On the Couch

  It was late at night on May 1, 2011, when I noticed the news alert on my phone: Osama bin Laden had been tracked down to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed by a team of Navy SEALs.

  So there it was. The man who’d masterminded the attacks that had propelled me into the army, and from there into the Intelligence Community, was now dead, a dialysis patient shot point-blank in the embrace of his multiple wives in their lavish compound just down the road from Pakistan’s major military academy. Site after site showed maps indicating where the hell Abbottabad was, alternating with street scenes from cities throughout America, where people were fist-pumping, chest-bumping, yelling, getting wasted. Even New York was celebrating, which almost never happens.

  I turned off the phone. I just didn’t have it in me to join in. Don’t get me wrong: I was glad the motherfucker was dead. I was just having a pensive moment and felt a circle closing.

  Ten years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes flew into the Twin Towers, and what did we have to show for it? What had the last decade actually accomplished? I sat on the couch I’d inherited from my mother’s condo and gazed through the window into the street beyond as a neighbor honked the horn of his parked car. I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d wasted the last decade of my life.

  The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red–Severe, Orange–High, Yellow–Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation.

  The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened concurrently with the development of digital technology, which made much of the earth American soil—whether we liked it or not. Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force. American politicians weren’t as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East. The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in “counterterror”: the panicked actions of a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unconcerned about upholding the rule of law. After 9/11, the IC’s orders had been “never again,” a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.

  After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon less against terror and more against liberty itself. By continuing these programs, by continuing these lies, America was protecting little, winning nothing, and losing much—until there would be few distinctions left between those post-9/11 polarities of “Us” and “Them.”

  * * *

  THE LATTER HALF of 2011 passed in a succession of seizures, and in countless doctors’ offices and hospitals. I was imaged, tested, and prescribed medications that stabilized my body but clouded my mind, turning me depressed, lethargic, and unable to focus.

  I wasn’t sure how I was going to live with what Lindsay was now calling my “condition” without losing my job. Being the top technologist for Dell’s CIA account meant I had tremendous flexibility: my office was my phone, and I could work from home. But meetings were an issue. They were always in Virginia, and I lived in Maryland, a state whose laws prevented people diagnosed with epilepsy from driving. If I were caught behind the wheel, I could lose my driver’s license, and with it my ability to attend the meetings that were the single nonnegotiable requirement of my position.

  I finally gave in to the inevitable, took a short-term disability leave from Dell, and decamped to my mother’s secondhand couch. It was as blue as my mood, but comfortable. For weeks and weeks it was the center of my existence—the place where I slept and ate and read and slept some more, the place where I just generally wallowed bleakly as time mocked me.

  I don’t remember what books I tried to read, but I do remember never managing much more than a page before closing my eyes and sinking back again into the cushions. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except my own weakness, the uncooperative lump that used to be me spread across the upholstery, motionless but for a lone finger atop the screen of the phone that was the only light in the room.

  I’d scroll through the news, then nap, then scroll again, then nap—while protesters in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were being imprisoned and tortured or just shot in the streets by the secret state agents of thuggish regimes, many of which America had helped keep in power. The suffering of that season was immense, spiraling out of the regular news cycle. What I was witnessing was desperation, compared with which my own struggles seemed cheap. They seemed small—morally and ethically small—and privileged.

  Throughout the Middle East, innocent civilians were living under the constant threat of violence, with work and school suspended, no electricity, no sewage. In many regions, they didn’t have access to even the most rudimentary medical care. But if at any moment I doubted that my anxieties about surveillance and privacy were relevant, or even appropriate, in the face of such immediate danger and privation, I only had to pay a bit more attention to the crowds on the street and the proclamations they were making—in Cairo and Sanaa, in Beirut and Damascus, in Ahvaz, Khuzestan, and in every other city of the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement. The crowds were calling for an end to oppression, censorship, and precarity. They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people. Although each crowd in each city, even on each day, seemed to have its own specific motivation and its own specific goals, they all had one thing in common: a rejection of authoritarianism, a recommitment to the humanitarian principle that an individual’s rights are inborn and inalienable.

  In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state. In the former, people are subjects, who are only allowed to own property, pursue an education, work, pray, and speak because their government permits them to. In the latter, people are citizens, who agree to be governed in a covenant of consent that must be periodically renewed and is constitutionally revocable. It’s this clash, between the authoritarian and the liberal democratic, that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time—not some concocted, prejudiced notion of an East-West divide, or of a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam.

  Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but governments of leaders, who demand loyalty from their subjects and are hostile to dissent. Liberal-democratic states, by contrast, make no or few such demands, but depend almost solely on each citizen voluntarily assuming the responsibility of protecting the freedoms of everyone else around them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality, or gender. Any collective guarantee, predicated not on blood but on assent, will wind up
favoring egalitarianism—and though democracy has often fallen far short of its ideal, I still believe it to be the one form of governance that most fully enables people of different backgrounds to live together, equal before the law.

  This equality consists not only of rights but also of freedoms. In fact, many of the rights most cherished by citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication. They exist in that open-ended empty space created through the restriction of government power. For example, Americans only have a “right” to free speech because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a “right” to a free press because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it. They only have a “right” to worship freely because the government is forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, and a “right” to peaceably assemble and protest because the government is forbidden from making any law that says they can’t.