Permanent Record
(Metropolitan, $30) Edward Snowden’s memoir is both “a riveting account and a curious artifact,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. It has been six eventful years since the former intelligence contractor leaked hundreds of thousands of National Security Agency documents to journalists in 2013, exposing how the NSA had been “sweeping up phone records of American citizens, eavesdropping on foreign leaders, and harvesting data from internet activity.” The book reads in part “like a literary thriller,” detailing how Snowden—charged with violating the Espionage Act—fled the U.S. for Hong Kong and then exile in Moscow. Permanent Record is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Snowden, who remains a hero to some and a traitor to others. “But when it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes.”
Snowden’s aim “isn’t so much to justify his decision to expose a menacing intelligence enterprise as to build sympathy for himself,” said Barton Swaim in The Wall Street Journal. At times, he succeeds. A tech prodigy from a family with a tradition of public service, Snowden, “to his great credit,” joined the Army after 9/11. Knocked out of basic training by a leg injury, he passed an exam giving him high security clearance and took jobs with the CIA and NSA, working at one point in a secret facility underneath a pineapple field in Hawaii. He writes that he was shocked to discover the extent of the NSA’s surveillance capabilities, which effectively gave