There is a good passage in the book where he describes some of the essentially boring jobs he had, often working the graveyard shift, where he honed his skills, helped to build the monitoring environment and realized that at his fingertips he had immense power to satiate his considerable curiosity. It was soon after this that he became a contractor for companies hired by the government and quickly developed his skills and worked his way up the ladder in a governmental environment that was desperately scrambling for the skills he had. Snowden also provides good context in relation to political influence on the necessity to gather information on people as a result of the 9/11 attacks. For what was essentially a plaything in the early days, we had little idea the internet would become as pervasive as it has done. This provided good context for what was to come, particularly as it clearly demonstrated the journey that we, and the internet, have been on in the last twenty five years. The initial chapters provide an overview of his childhood where he was the son of government employees and how he developed into the self-proclaimed computer geek he became in the 1990s. In his recently published book, Permanent Record, Snowden outlines the story of how his background and experience led him to making the decision to become a whistleblower, how he did it and what has happened since. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.It’s hard to over-estimate the influence that Ed Snowden has had on the world we now live in and it’s also hard to believe that the revelations he made about the American government monitoring the way we all live our lives only happened six years ago. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online-a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet's conscience. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email.

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government's system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.

Ed snowden permanent record