Permanent Record
3 June 2023
You'd have to be living under a rock the past ten years not to know the story of Edward Snowden and how he exposed the US government's vast digital spying network on US citizens in the US. Repeated US governments starting with the Obama administration whose misdeeds he exposed have persecuted, hunted, and conducted a smear campaign against Snowden. They have tried to prevent him from even collecting royalties on his autobiographical book, Permanent Record. I read it while walking the Chemin Saint-Jacques last month and left it at the gîte we stayed at in Gland for someone else to read because I think that it's an important story. Snowden will never be able to counter the propaganda machine of the US government and may just be remembered one day as a traitor who endangered US spies in the support of terrorists and Russia. Which is complete bullshit, but the big lie repeated again and again is often successful in finding its way into the minds of citizens. I've always seen Snowden for the hero he is because I knew the capabilities of tracking people's activity from working at Experian, an American credit bureau, where I had a vast number of informational datapoints on most American with which I created mathematical models. In 2008 we were even buying people's browsing histories from internet service providers to crack the problem of serving targeted ads to them. And before social media companies like Twitter and Facebook had their own advertising products I mined information through their APIs to find potential customers for advertisers to message.
Snowden's book lays out in detail how he was slowly inducted into the intelligence community and as an IT guy given access to huge amounts of information that few others had access to. This allowed him to put together the pieces of what the US government was doing to its citizens. And then he compiled information about these spying programs from the government's own computers and snuck them out of one of the most secure facilities in the world. Snowden took his oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic seriously. The domestic enemies of the Constitution have been running the US government for some time now though, and continue to this day. Thus Snowden must continue to hide as a refugee in Russia, which is a strange ending to his story. Fortunately his girlfriend was able to follow him there and they got married to live happily ever after. Thank you, Edward, for your sacrifice!
