Quarantines, Phones and the Information Bomb: Permanent Record (Edward Joseph Snowden)

One of the worst parts of working from home is that you are always at work. Your phone doesn't stop pinging and since your workaholic brain feels such guilt at being in your pajamas while at "work" you overcompensate by always being available. So while I am technically still working, I thought what's a work from home if you don't take time out to fill out your review blog? And this week it is going to be a barrage of reviews because after Edward Snowden's Permanent Record I am almost scared of being too cozy with my laptop or my phone and its a paranoia which is indescribable till you actually read the book. So I will be instead reading more. At least books don't spy on you. Till now. that is.

I chanced upon Edward Snowden's Permanent Record through a colleague. I had hardly seen it in my store and she told me she had to request the merchandiser to get it specially for her. At INR 775 it is also an expensive book for most people to pick up. So like a true book thief I first pressurized her to read it quickly for a week by being whiny and then the sheer power of my nagging won when she just gave me the book in three days  just to get me off her back. After that the virus pandemic began and my poor friend, long story short, her book is hostage with me.

Back to the book. To begin with, Snowden staring at you from the book cover is one of the most uncomfortable feeling you will have while reading. His expression is serene, mouth set in a line which somehow makes you feel like he is actually watching you while you go with your life around the book. I could swear at some moments of reading the book and keeping it by my bed, I woke up in the morning feeling like I was being watched. And this sense of being watched is the best way of describing what the book is about. I would like to congratulate the book jacket designer Rodrigo Corral--he truly captures the sense of unease and disquiet that leads Snowden to do what he does--become a whistleblower.

Snowden is a great story-teller and I am guessing his editors must have had a field day with his material because it is unputdownable. A spy thriller which is also a horror story because you suddenly realise this is happening to you. It has all the ingredients for a great movie--much better than the holier than thou Snowden that came out in 2016. Snowden is cocky in his talent with technology, as he happily reminisces "The first thing I ever hacked was bedtime". As he navigates you through his childhood, the typical middle class American family, the overzealous sense of patriotism, you sitting some thousands of miles away in a country which has suddenly rediscovered overzealous patriotism cant help but feel wary as well as piqued because you know where this is leading. Snowden builds up his story--from his cockiness about his talent to his slow realisation of what he is creating and then to the final decision of being the whistle-blower. You know all of the story but you still read it with a breathlessness, your heart in your mouth every time he moves files from the NSA tunnel to his laptop. 

To a computer novice like me, a lot of Snowden's explanation of different programmes was hard at first to understand. But he understands that his reader, the one for whom he became a whistle-blower is not the tech-savvy technical guy who will easily understand the problems. He breaks down the programmes in ways which makes me believe he would make such an amazing teacher and truthfully I would love to attend his classes! To give a small example, he describes encrypted data as "Imagine...I stood by the exit as each of the twenty audience members shuffled out...as each of them passed through the door, I whispered a word into their ear--a single word that no one else could hear, and that they were only allowed to repeat if they were all together, once again in the same room. Only by bringing back all twenty of those folks and having them repeat their words in the same order in which I'd originally distributed them could anyone reassemble the complete twenty word incantation" (272-3)!! So lucidly simple right?

Sitting in India which is fighting about privacy of data, Adhaar and the National People's Register, this book is a great wake up call of how vulnerable our data is and how easily the government can manipulate it to mark you out--today it is the Muslim, tomorrow it is you. Where Attorney Generals argue that your data is safe because it is in a safe house, you realise how much a book like this and maybe even classes by a person like Snowden is important for most of us to understand the beast that is the information network. Our worlds are our phones, our Alexas and all of this data that we consciously and unconsciously feed into it are vulnerable to the simplest of programmes and most of us don't even know what to do about it.

 Is it a book to read during the lock down? preferably no. Because like me you would have a tough time keeping your phone or any gadget near you, now that you have opened the Pandora's box.

Permanent Record is a book you shouldn't miss. Because even if you think what Snowden did was wrong or you think he was a Russian spy, he still deserves a hear, specially when you are sitting on an information bomb and the government is waiting for the right moment to use it against you.       

till the next time,

dont let the powers get to you.