Edward Snowden prepares to release memoir saying the US intelligence community ‘hacked the Constitution’ and the 18 years since 9/11 have been a ‘litany of American destruction’
Edward Snowden is preparing to release the new memoir on Tuesday
Tells his life story and explains why he decided to become whistleblower
Says U.S. intelligence community ‘hacked the Constitution’
DAILYMAIL.COM
14 September 2019
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has written a memoir, telling his life story in detail for the first time and explaining why he chose to risk his freedom to become perhaps the most famous whistleblower of all time.
Snowden, who now lives in Russia to avoid prosecution in the U.S., says his seven years working for the NSA and CIA led him to conclude the U.S. intelligence community ‘hacked the Constitution’ and put everyone’s liberty at risk and that he had no choice but to turn to journalists to reveal it to the world.
‘I realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible – for anything,’ he writes.
The book, Permanent Record, is scheduled to be released Tuesday. It offers by far the most expansive and personal account of how Snowden came to reveal secret details about the government’s mass collection of Americans’ emails, phone calls and Internet activity in the name of national security.
His decision to turn from obscure IC wonk to whistleblower in 2013 set off a national debate about the extent of government surveillance by intelligence agencies desperate to avoid a repeat of the September 11 attacks.
Intelligence officials who conduct annual classified assessments of damage from Snowden’s disclosures say the documents will continue trickling out into the public domain for years to come.
Though the book comes six years after the disclosures, Snowden, who fled first to Hong Kong and then Russia, attempts in his memoir to place his concerns in a contemporary context.
He sounds the alarm about what he sees as government efforts worldwide to delegitimize journalism, suppress human rights and support authoritarian movements.
‘What is real is being purposely conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion,’ he says.
The story traces Snowden’s evolution from childhood, from growing up in the 1980s in North Carolina and suburban Washington, where his mother worked as a clerk at the NSA and his father served in the Coast Guard.
He came of age as the Internet evolved from an obscure government computer network and describes how a youthful fascination with technology – as a child, he took apart and reassembled a Nintendo console and, as a teenager, hacked the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory network – eventually led him to a career as an NSA contractor, where he observed high-tech spy powers with increasing revulsion.
Analysts used the government’s collection powers to read the emails of current and former lovers and stalk them online, he writes.
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