Day 921, Quasi-Quarantine: Self-Deprecation, Radical Transparency Propel "Permanent Record" Toward Required Reading

"A 'whistleblower,' in my definition, is a person who through hard experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed in -- and the loyalty owed to -- the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable."

Tossing expectations out the window is the best way to approach "Permanent Record," an autobiography of Edward Snowden's rise to infamy. 

A meticulous -- and occasionally diffuse -- writer, he covers his childhood, growing fascination with computers, search for belonging, battle with epilepsy, and eventual recognition of the lies and abuses perpetrated by the government he adored.

"If most of what people wanted to do online was to be able to tell their family, friends, and strangers what they were up to, and to be told what their family, friends, and strangers were up to in return, then all companies had to do was figure out how to put themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit. This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism, and the end of the Internet as I knew it."

Snowden goes to great pains to explain very technical concepts in a very accessible way, and the result effectively circumvents efforts to smear him and his decisions to expose privacy abuses and governmental lies.

"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 questionable authority."

The author even delves into a discussion of institutionalized gaslighting perpetrated by a government once held up as a global model.

"The attempts by elected officials to delegitimize journalism have been aided and abetted by a full-on assault on the principle of truth. What is real is being purposefully conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion."

" ... The creation of irreality has always been the Intelligence Community's darkest art."

Obviously this is a one-sided account by its very nature, but "Permanent Record" should be essential reading for anyone interested in pivotal moments involved in democracy's seeming crash course.

"I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: 'Stop resisting.'"

"Technology doesn't have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of 'can we,' not 'should we.'"