Past the early chapters, Snowden rarely mentions his parents again (or his older sister, Jessica, who was allowed to "stay up later" than Ed), and simply refers to their later divorce without much detail. Snowden talks about his early childhood "spying," but he's no Harriet the Spy). He briefly kids about his early "civil disobedience," which amounts to little more than putting up a fuss for having to go to bed "too early." And his first go at "hacking," which involved bedtime, was changing the house clocks so that his parents were fooled, he says, into believing it was two hours earlier. (What, government employees didn't wear watches back then? The Six O'clock news was now on in the afternoon?) But, as corny -- and mythopoetic -- as these references are, it introduces the young reader to three concepts that will figure prominently later in the journey tale - er, memoir.
His high school experiences are mercifully brief, as his description of the school he attended suggests life-threatening boredom, especially for someone like Ed, who was ahead of the game. Looking at the weights assigned grades for his history class (conqueror's history: snore, not Zinn's People History), he determined how he could skip some work entirely and still pass. "Every day was bliss," Ed crows, after figuring out how to game the syllabus system. Until Mr. Stockton, the teacher, catches on and changes the requirements, making it impossible for students to skip assignments. The teacher isn't done with him:
Then he took me aside after class and said, "You should be using that brain of yours not to figure out how to avoid work, but how to do the best work you can. You have so much potential, Ed. But I don't think you realize that the grades you get here will follow you for the rest of your life. You have to start thinking about your permanent record."
This is the first instance of the use of the term "permanent record." The key being how it follows you around, like a reputation, that sad clowns of ill-repute will control.
Snowden then fails to finish high school, although he attends community college classes, and eventually sits and passes the General Education Development (GED) exam, earning a high school "diploma" in two days of testing. He got around the rules again. (The GED is a best-kept secret. Shhh.) Legally. Although you'd never see it in the quality of his writing and the eloquence of speech today, Snowden recalls the days when teachers and classmates questioned his intelligence:
You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they're merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities-the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.
There you go. Sword of justice, recalling King Arthur's Excalibur and the end of tyrant Rhitta Gawr of Snaw Dun Mountain. I am the hairy man, the end. Indeed. Of course, these days Rhitta Gawr is neoliberalism -- think Capitalism melded to Lady Libertine and you get the picture. But put away your Excalibur, and whatever you do don't hold a torch for her twerky, in-your-face doings.
The early exposure to mythology and
identification with the heroism at Snaw Dun; the technological prowess obtained
from the father and moral reasoning derived from his mother, and their later divorce; the lessons from games
about forging ahead; the "hacking," "civil disobedience," and "spying"; the
getting around rules at school and the getting around school altogether; and a
desire to be a public servant like his parents and grandparents - all of this
is a prelude to how he responds on 9/11. As so many Americans could probably affirm,
this is probably the so-called Jungian wound-moment that causes Snowden to
begin his hero's quest and journey to enlightenment (he says as much), and,
ultimately, a courageous fight-back against tyranny. At least, in this
scaled-down version it reads that way. And let's face it: A lot of those
terrorists that we were shown on TV are were, like Rhitta Gawr, hairy fucks who needed "shaves." (Fidel Castro probably laughed his ass off when he saw the beards on TV.)
In this narrative context, Part Two becomes a descent into darkness. Dick Cheney had announced that the gloves would be coming off in America's response to the terrorists and their supporters around the world, and it may be that Snowden, like a lot of people, confused that darkness for the light of justice in his desire for payback. The young reader learns that the Internet can be dangerous, maybe nobody more dangerous than Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter -- and the programs of the NSA and CIA and FBI. S/he learns of some of the shameful practices of the CIA in their efforts to recruit "assets" and their general practices of deceit. S/he is exposed to the excessive power of programs like Stellar Wind, Prism and XKeyscore, all of which gather prodigious amounts of personal data without any acknowledgement of their existence, and, hence, no public oversight or even discussion.
XKeyscore, a search engine of sorts, may be the most intrusive of all, allowing an agent to view all the data collected for anybody anywhere at anytime, and lets the government (NSA, CIA) with its extraordinary ability to penetrate into the dark heart of privacy. Writes Snowden, "Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages from the public internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything." Back in 1975, on Meet the Press, Congressman Frank Church had warned us all about it years before the Internet's arrival:
...the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back...all agencies that possess this technology [must] operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss...from which there is no return.
Some say we have already crossed the abyss, but Snowden seems to have a modicum of hope left for the next generation to reverse this negativity.
In Part Three, our hero sees the light. We're told that the precipitating factor for turning Ed right again was reading about the NYT's quashing of the 2004 story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the NSA's illegal and unconstitutional Stellar Wind metadata collection program, which was also, according to Risen, in a story he wrote years later for The Intercept, "ironic" because Snowden no longer trusted the Times to publish the revelations. Snowden decided not to dump his data at WikiLeaks, feeling it needed careful vetting, editing and some redacting of names and live programs that could endanger the lives of agents. So, he sought out Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, who helped get his revelations to the public through the Guardian and Citizenfour. Snowden breaks good. Blows the whistle. Goes on the lam. We know the rest. Or do we?
Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition) is a worthwhile read, although I would probably tell the kids to read the adult version - it's more thorough and heaps more interesting, and there's no difference in language. In the 100-page copyedit to accentuate the hero's tale that was already embodied in the adult version, Snowden and his publisher had to take out all kinds of crucial information that gets to the heart of the corruption underlying the surveillance state he exposes. For instance, he totally ripped out the chapter Homo Contractus for unexplained reasons (the reduction is not explained in Foreword or Afterword). This chapter totally lays out the poaching by private contractors of government workers with top security clearances to do the same work, for lots more money, and without any public scrutiny. Snowden tells us here that he himself was hired as a Dell computer employee but was actually a spy for the CIA who worked out of Langley. (Takeaway: Don't buy Dell again. Of course, you could say the same for...shhh.)
Other notable "changes" include: The removal of his reference to his forebears' slave plantation (200 slaves, eventually freed) and the eventual sale or seizure of that plantation to the government, which then became Fort Meade, on which the NSA headquarters is located. I find this information titillating and was sad to see it go. There is no mention of Assange in the junior book, and only one reference to Wikileaks -- the noting of editor Sarah Harrison's flight to Hong Kong to help him. In the adult version, Snowden goes out of his way to note friction between the two, but also to declare he's taken on his nickname,Verax,"speaker of truths" (mentioned in the junior book), in contrast to Assange's nickname, Mendax, "speaker of lies." (Presumably, Assange was referring to the object of his hacks.) There's no mention of the 2004/5 Risen story on Stellar Wind, although it is supposed to be a vital inspiration for his whistleblowing. His involvement with the online Peeping Tom program, LOVEINT, is also nixed.
Hell, even his account of what happened on Mount Snowdon all those years ago with Rhitta Gawr was more active and bloody in the adult version:
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