His anti-establishment ethos gave way to a burning desire to serve the country in uniform. After 9/11, the heads of agencies petitioned and got approval for extraordinary security measures.ĩ/11 marked a fundamental shift in Snowden's life.

Snowden was at Fort Meade during 9/11 and witnessed the uproar when the NSA and CIA were ordered to evacuate the offices. When it looked like he had to repeat that year in school, Snowden did a clever workaround to enroll in the local community college. When Snowden's parents got a divorce during his Freshman year, he was sick for four months with infectious mononucleosis. He analyzed his course syllabus and found smart ways to achieve decent grades without homework. He knew the rules better than anyone else and exploited the vulnerabilities. To spend more time on the Internet, Snowden found ingenious ways to hack school. The anonymity of the Internet allowed young Snowden to freely express himself and gave him the intellectual freedom to change opinions instead of being forced to defend them. Snowden would spend entire nights on the Internet, lost in an endless world of information and possibilities. Snowden's father worked at the Aeronautical Engineering Department of the Coast Guard while his mother worked for the National Security Agency. His love of gadgets was fueled by his father, an electronic engineer who introduced him to computers. 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.Snowden was born in a family that had served in every war in American history.

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.

Permanent record audio book