Edward Snowden would like you to think of him not only as a whistleblower, but also as a man of conscience.
His new memoir, Permanent Record, appears poised to frame Snowden as he has hoped to be known all along — someone who’s just after the truth.
The Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden, and it is attempting to confiscate the book’s proceeds because he didn’t run its contents by the CIA or the NSA, which is “in violation of his secrecy agreements and non-disclosure obligations to the United States,” according to the lawsuit.
Characteristically undeterred, Snowden took the legal challenge as an endorsement. “It is hard to think of a greater stamp of authenticity than the US government filing a lawsuit claiming your book is so truthful that it was literally against the law to write,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
It is hard to think of a greater stamp of authenticity than the US government filing a lawsuit claiming your book is so truthful that it was literally against the law to write.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) September 17, 2019
There’s no sliding scale that equates truth with illegality, but that won’t stop Snowden from taking every personal challenge as a mark of his success. The former CIA employee, who in 2013 leaked classified information from the NSA, continues to claim that mere truth is on his side. Yet, his actions have proved otherwise.
“Were he a true whistleblower, Snowden would have gone through established channels to raise his concerns,” my colleague Tom Rogan wrote. “Instead, he leaked thousands of documents — compromising active programs — to anti-government journalists such as Glenn Greenwald.”
In Permanent Record, though, Snowden is no conspirator. Ben Wizner, Snowden’s ACLU lawyer, told the New Republic that Snowden “was persuaded that people would be much more interested in his story than in his manifesto.” By taking the form of a memoir, “the way the book is written, it could be assigned to 16-year-olds as a classic coming-of-age memoir and the autobiography of a conscience.”
Snowden, who has already proven that he cares less about the point of whistleblowing than his supposed role in it, may try to persuade readers that he only wanted transparency. Maybe that’s why he hired a fiction writer to help him out.
Novelist Joshua Cohen helped Snowden prepare the memoir. As the New Republic notes, “Enlisting a noted fiction writer to tell his life story might strike casual observers as odd, but Snowden and Cohen are both obsessed with the ways in which tech has transformed self and society.”
Permanent Record has found its supporters, including actor John Cusack, and it quickly hit Amazon’s bestseller list. Though the book may be compelling, don’t expect the memoir to contain as much truth as Snowden promises. When his reputation is on the line, transparency will do him no favors.
