Battling Techno-Monsters of Empire at Mount Snaw Dun
A Review of Edward Snowden's Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition)
The "ìt" is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape.
- Robert Pirsig, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Last year, as miserable as it was for most Americans, what with science-illiterate DJ Trump in charge of the national rah-rah during a pandemic killing tens of thousands of citizens who wouldn't live to see America great again, and hands-down-his-pants Rudy Giuliani his spokesperson for the origin of the virus, and the economy tanking, and the George Floyd riots, and the Antifa demonstrations, and the failed impeachment leading some people to just keep drinking from the super-spreader Super Bowl onward, to the MSM peddling Russians meddling in the 2020 presidential election, and Joe Biden being the best we can do for a lesser evil, whistleblower-in-exile, Edward Snowden did pretty well for himself by comparison, settling into Mama Russia.
It looked grim for our Broken-Good spy in October last year, when the US government announced that it would suck up the proceeds of sales from his bestselling 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, for "violating his non-disclosure agreement" with the Intelligence Community. Get it? Though the government said it would not seek to control the book's information or its distribution, they sought and were awarded $5.2 million, arguing that Snowden should not profit from his disclosures.
But dang if he didn't partially get around that by being decently compensated for a book advance and for speaking at virtual conferences, collecting a tidy sum of $1.2 million since going on the lam in 2013. In addition, he gained permanent residency in Russia, impregnated his wife, Lindsay, in late March, and saw his revelations validated when a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled last September that the government's mass surveillance program was illegal.
And now in the new year we hear that putsch has come to shove and Lindsay has given birth to the next generation of Snowdens in the form of a bolshy boy named Emoji. Have you ever seen such a smile? I'm thinking Magi, myrrh, a stinky diaper they call frankincense, and Burl Ives singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." (Call me suspicious, but I find myself under my white blankets wondering why Snowden was given Crime and Punishment to read at the Moscow airport in 2013 instead of the more appropriate The Idiot (onnacounta the visionary Myshkin's an epileptic -- like Ed). Has the KGB slipped that much since the red-nosed Yeltsin years? Did Snowden ever finish the book? (Most people I used to know never did.))
I was still ruminating on these mysteries when word came through that Snowden was putting out a "new" book, Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition). I don't often review children's book since I went and got traumatized by Louis Fitzhugh's Nobody's Family Is Going To Change, in which a sassy teenaged Black girl castigates her younger, tap-dancing brother with dreams of Broadway, calling him a "faggot." Still, last year I found the inner strength to review Kamala Harris's politely-don't-take-no-for-an-answer illustrated homily, Superheroes Are Everywhere. Getting braver, I also reviewed Peter Tosh's Africans, and two books read aloud by Samuel L. Jackson -- the pandemic-driven, Trump-disobedient, Stay the f*ck at Home, and the colic-intolerant (and social services alerter), Go the f*ck to Sleep. Still, I'd read Ed's adult version of his memoir and curiosity kicked the cat, as they say.
For awhile now publisher Macmillan has offered an excerpt of the upcoming book (due out on February 9, 2021), and I read the excerpt and scratched my head, confused, not by the content of the excerpt, but by the déjà vu feeling that I'd reader-performed this stuff before. (A voice in the back of my head kept moaning, "It's twoo, it's twoo.") Anyway, it took me some time (say, five minutes), going back and forth between the adult version and its junior, to realize there's no difference. The language, tenor, register, tone and words were all the same. Dazed and confused, like the no-longer-curious kicked-in black cat in my path (see above), I began to wonder if there would be any differences between the adult book and the one young Emoji would one day be proffered by his Dad, presumably on a need-to-know basis. What the fuck is going on, Ed? I wondered.
As soon as I received my reviewer's copy of the junior book last week I immediately dove and delved, and enjoyed the Young Readers Edition. It has all the stuff kids love in a book -- adventure, young love, righteous mom and dad moral homilies, unspeakable mom and dad divorce, science fiction turned dystopian reality, and the author putting the burden of the future on the young reader. I thought of Smokey the Bear's warnings about how only the viewer could prevent forest fires, but that didn't seem possible to rescue anymore. Then I thought of The Terminator, John Connor keeping hope alive, which made me think of franchises, and how you can make a buck -- even off ecocide. How about that? Capitalism as a nearly indestructible cyborg. That's a lot to put on the shoulders of a young Atlas, in a shrugglesome Ayn Rand world.
But that seems to be Snowden's intention. Permanent Record (YRE) is, beyond the sub-title's hero preen (How One Man Exposed the Truth about Government Spying and Digital Security), itself derived from a Randian notion about how one man can make a difference -- kinda: "A man can beat the world's engine." Which itself, reminded me of something else frightful and traumatic -- towers coming down in freefall harmony (no, not those ones). Don't hurt me, Edward; I'm already inward enough.
No. I'm all-too-glad for YRE to remind us of Ed's Puritan stock; he derives from one "Priscilla Mullins, who was the only single woman of marriageable age onboard" the Mayflower. (That's a long voyage among pent-up types, milady, to go unflowered.) She married the ship's cooper. And they had a barrel of laughs and kids who would eventually figure in the Revolutionary War. We really don't want to know any more. And Ed doesn't force it upon us, as, say, Jimmy Carter did when it was one thing to admit to unbiblical lustin' in the heart and another thang to admit it between the sheets of Playboy magazine. Goddamn! Wear a jimmy, Jimmy. And, Jesus, was Rosalynn is a Rosalynn is a Rosalynn your motto?
Ed is happy enough to remind us that he grew up reading Aesop's Fables and Bulfinch's Mythology, and, of course, the tales of King Arthur's court. Of particular interest to him was the story of the "tyrannical" Welsh king Rhitta Gawr, "who refused to accept that the age of his reign had passed and that in the future the world would be ruled by human kings," writes Snowden. Rhitta Gawr had slain all the other kings of the realms, except King Arthur. And when Arthur refused to yield his beard, but instead, outraged at Gawr's "hubris," ventured to Wales and battled Rhitta Gawr on his mountain, Snaw Dun, and slew him, and watched as RG's hair-suit turned white as the driven snow fell.
Out of this, Ed saw a possible mythological origin of his name -- Snaw Dun (Snowden). He could see himself as a slayer of tyrants. But also, he writes,
I remember the feeling of encountering my last name in this context-it was thrilling-and the archaic spelling gave me my first sense that the world was older than I was, even older than my parents were.
This attraction to the archaic later accounts for his love of Joseph Campbell and Star Wars (at least, that's what Oliver Stone claims in his "creative" biopic Snowden, and also claims that Snowden was deeply influenced by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged -- presumably, before he Broke Good).
When he tells us about his parents, there's a tight didactic angle to the telling. We learn that his father, a Coast Guard petty officer, was interested in technology and some of the first video games, and that he was good at taking things apart and fixing them, especially electronics. This knack would later serve him well as a "systems engineer" (it was an MCSE for fuck's sake -- even I had one of those, along with a CCNA: we all seemed to in the bubble days of fin de siècle). And the games contained hidden lessons. Duck Hunt taught him that "even if someone laughs at your failures, it doesn't mean you get to shoot them in the face." Loquacious.
There's even a lesson in his description of how the Super Mario Bros. game works, with forward-only action, no going back allowed, like life. Ed writes,
Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown future.
Although he could be addressing Trump's MAGA sentimentality, or the notion that America needs to be an empire, his message here seems to be somewhat cryptic for the 10-14 age reading level.
Similarly, Snowden emphasizes his mom's moral and practical teachings. She's not just in the book to be a pretty lip-sticked mom, who cooks and sews, but has a narrative function in his memoir. If his father is seen as a hands-on technologist to emulate, his mom, a retirement benefits officer for the NSA, is quiet, nurturing and full of incidental lessons and observations. For instance, she tells him about the 3% sales tax and its avowed purpose:
"You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?" she said. "The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books."
Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn't match those on the cash register's display. But once again, my mother explained, "They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent."
"So now the library will get even more books?" I asked.
"Let's hope," my mother said.
The young reader presumably catches that edge of cynicism in the mom's tone and gains a valuable insight into the difference between what the Bastards pledge and what they actually do if you don't keep them honest. Ed never forgot, and filed the memory in his permanent anecdote folder.
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, or 'criminal of perception', as Nabokov puts it in Lolita). 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?) But, as corny 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, not Zinn's People's History: snore), 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 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.
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 are hairy fucks.
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 the 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 theTimes 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...)
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:
The king and the giant met on the highest peak and battled each other for days, until Arthur was gravely wounded. Just as Rhitta Gawr grabbed the king by the hair and prepared to cut off his head, Arthur summoned a last measure of strength and sank his fabled sword through the eye of the giant, who toppled over dead.
Game of Thrones stuff there. Nothing like that in the Pilgrim's Progress junior version.
On the other hand, his dropping from his memoir the chapter written by his now-wife, Lindsay, was probably a good idea (although it is made available in a link as a publisher's bonus). While it was nice to know Lindsay's reaction to his fleeing, it was Ed's memoir, not hers. Did she get paid for the chapter? But more importantly, her voice is partially lost in the editing that homogenized the text somewhat. It didn't feel as separate as it should have been. It might have been Bradley rehearsing Chelsea.
None of this is fatal to his cause - ostensibly, to inspire youngsters to follow the path of rectitude and courage in the active citizen journey ahead - because it's a well-written book, but it raises questions about the editing decisions. One possibility is that he expunged the material that got him into trouble with the government in the adult edition. Maybe he hopes to recoup, with the YER, some of the $5.2 million in profits from the adult bestseller awarded to the government by a judge. We don't know. He doesn't say before or after the new edition. No doubt, the "changes" will be raised in interviews after the Young Readers Edition is released.
So what is Snowden's final message to the heroes-in-waiting -- the future class of whistleblowers and democracy-lovers? Ed writes, at the end of his hero's memoir,
If we don't reclaim our data now, future generations might not be able to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped, too "We can't allow ourselves to be used in this way. We can't permit our data to be used against us. We can't let the godlike surveillance we're under be used to "predict" our criminal activity.
We killed the gods once, we can kill 'em again. But if we hurry, kids, we won't have to wait, like John Connor, for the machine, broke good, to protect us from the liquid metal thought copper of the hive mind future we (well, you, anyway - I'll be history) share.
With any luck, Ed Snowden will get pardoned in the waning, farcical hours of the Trump presidency. Maybe DJ will do it out of pure malice and spite (but we'll take it), knowing how it would play with the Demos, especially new president Joe Biden, the silly, barely elected scheiss (incredibly, Trump almost won: the margin of victory in five states was under 1.5%) who believes he has amandate. How about that. The only mandate Joe may have is with Corn Pop (that's a metaphor, son), who may want to yank Biden's chain for four years to make up for his blatherscheissen about how he manhandled pomaded, poolside Blacks, back in the day, before the Civil Rights Act kicked in his amoral door. ("You ain't Black." Mmm-mmm-mmm.)
Biden is on the record as a Snowden hater, so we reactionary Lefties must needs be snarkish and intolerant toward the new Lesser Evil. Personally, I give him until August before the Repugs tar and feather him. Kamala is looking prettier by the hour. (Kamala means 'a lotus on Irish streams' -- at least, that's what Oliver Stone told me).