He was angry when he discovered the documents describing just how extensive the NSA's post-9/11 domestic surveillance program STELLARWIND was. Snowden's decision to become a whistleblower sprang from his strong belief that the Constitution is supposed to restrain the government's power over the public. The selling point of Permanent Record is its insight into why Snowden did what he did and how he feels about the state of the world today. I won't belabor that story-it's pretty much a matter of public record now, and it's not the draw of the book. The book recounts Snowden's fears that the United States is following in the footsteps of China's surveillance of its citizenry, his discovery that these worries were true when he stumbled across a classified report while working for the National Security Agency (NSA), and his decision to sneak documentation of the NSA's techniques to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Happily, he does this in approachable prose that doesn't require readers to have served time in an IT department to understand it.

The whistleblower's new autobiography, Permanent Record, details how he discovered and exposed Washington's mass surveillance of American citizens. Edward Snowden has a message to the tech developers who have digitized so much of our lives: If the United States and other world governments are not willing to recognize our right to privacy, then the private sector is going to have to do the work.

Edward snowdens book