As much as I object to the obscenity of the Chinese Social Credit System – I can’t help feeling Facebook ‘likes’ and Google’s corporate mining of our ‘user’ data, manipulate us in all too terrifyingly similar ways. Nor would I choose to be one of the 2.3 million prisoners in US gaols – most of whom are victims of the US Jim Crow laws. In fact, it makes me sick to the stomach. I struggle to understand how our governments can think it okay to profit from selling arms knowing it will ensure the conflict in Yemen continues. Nor would I choose to live in Saudi Arabia, and I certainly would not want to live in Yemen or in Gaza either. Would I rather live in China? No, I wouldn’t. The fact this guy, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange were (or are) being persecuted, and prosecuted for exposing crimes against humanity committed by ‘us’ (rather than committing themselves), tells us more about our own societies than we would generally prefer to face. The big difference is that, since we are supposed to live in a democracy, we ought to be able to change the direction of our governments (I know, I know, but that is no excuse for you to start laughing in my face). The problem is, like Snowden, virtually everything I hear China being accused of are things we seem to do in the West with at least as much abandon. Lately I feel like I have become Australia’s chief spokesperson for the Chinese Communist Party – so, I want to start by saying that I’m actually not all that fond of the CCP. After this point, the book springs to life and is over too soon. Up until then it is a long and somewhat boring journey. In a book of 29 chapters, you can safely skip the first 19.Ĭhapter 20, where he gives a talk on China and when the hypocrisy becomes too much for him to cope with, is where this book starts. What the state legally considers a traitor doesn't have to correlate with what morality does. I still think he is sort of a traitor - the exact sort of traitor we needed right then. But then, neither are we - as his memoir makes clear, all the techniques he exposed in 2013 remain in place. The elaborate security surrounding the release of this book is a reminder that, despite his relaxed demeanor and seemingly normal life in Moscow, Snowden is still not safe. I think it's truly a wonderful book, well written and moving. I actually appreciated that he spends a lot of time talking about his childhood, and laying the foundation that he would later build upon in the following chapters. You won't actually learn much about Snowden's disclosures, but he offers a very readable memoir about growing up with the Internet, a detailed rationale for his actions, and a look at how government surveillance has evolved since his disclosures. It is scary how many of his metaphors and hyperbolic examples are actually happening today to a certain extent. Far from the low-level IT drone depicted in most early press accounts, and even further from the naive double agent trashed by his critics, the narrator of this book is a thoughtful, painfully self-aware intelligence professional who found himself forced to confront and expose the reality of mass surveillance - and the immense powers of coercion it gave to authorities who, thanks to technology he helped create, are now able to strip the personal privacy of anyone connected to the Internet. Edward Snowden has no new bombshells in this book, but "Permanent Record" is still full of surprises in some ways.
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