Permanent Record

Snowden begins his story with a memory of the first thing he ever hacked: bedtime. As a child who wanted to stay up late, he adjusted all of the clocks in his house. His parents did not notice, and he eventually fell asleep on the floor. When he awoke, the clocks were changed back.

Snowden describes himself as part of the last undigitized generation, one whose earliest memories are not stored digitally. He was born in 1983, the year the US Department of Defense split their internal network in two: one part for the defense establishment, and one part for public use. The latter eventually became the internet; six years later, Tim Berners-Lee invented the worldwide web.

Snowden defines the internet as a “global cluster of interconnected communications networks” (13) and notes that at the time of his memoir’s publication, three billion people—42% of the world’s population—use it, though few understand its technical infrastructure and protocols. These protocols have allowed society to “digitize and put online damn near everything in the world” (14).

Snowden spends his early childhood in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. As a child, spying is his favorite activity: He spies on his older sister Jessica; his mother, Wendy; and most often, his father, Lon.