Snowden, Permanent Record, Kindle ed., 2019.

Let me confess: I have never been a whistle blower. Let alone a spy. I came to Snowden’s book after reading a review written by Anat Kam. Ms. Kam is a young Israeli woman who, years ago as she was doing her military service, came to the public attention by blowing the whistle on some of the Israeli Army’s illegal activities. She was caught, tried, and paid a price by spending several years in jail.

Somewhat to my surprise. I discovered that the most interesting passages were not those in which the author describes his own path to stealing official secrets and publishing them. Rather, they were those in which he reflects on the world the Net has created. If I quote them at some length then that is because they struck a bell with me.

Locs. 626-55

“One of the greatest joys of those [early] platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. The anonymizing or pseudonyimizing features brought equilibriums to all relationship correcting their imbalances. I could take cover under virtually any handle or “nym,” as they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking what I sensed were my more amateur questions on what seemed to be the more amateur boards under different personas each time…

I am not going to pretend that the competition wasn’t merciless, or ha he population—almost uniformly male heterosexual, and hormonally charged—didn’t occasionally erupt into cruel and petty squabbles. But in the absence of real names, the people who claimed to hate you weren’t real people. They didn’t know anything about you beyond what you argued, and how you argued it. If, or rather when, one of your arguments incurred some online wrath, you could simply drop that screen name and assume another mask, under cover of which you could even join in the mimetic pile-on, beating up on your disowned avatar as if it re a stranger. I can’ tell you what wet relief that sometimes was.

In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and business to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending hem when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irrevocable harms to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the ‘offender’ to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.

Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world. Imagine that you could choose a new voice and new words to speak in it, as if the ‘Internet button’ were actually a reset button for your life. In the new millennium, Internet technology would be turned to very different ends; enforcing fidelity to memory, identitarian consistency, and so ideological conformity. But back then, for a while at least, it protected us by forgetting our transgressions and forgiving our sins.”
Taking right kind of treatment for viagra overnight no prescription Click This Link your sexual problem can be treated effectively. So make sure to have cialis samples generic as per the suggestion of the doctor which says to have one 100mg pill an hour before the person starts to make love or carry out their sexual activity. The Bottom Line With every age comes responsibility, so why let something like erectile dysfunction it can be extremely hard to see all of these problems going on. see this link order viagra online The severity of viagra sale male impotence may be related to (but not limited to) immune issues, inflammatory conditions, and endocrine problems.
Locs. 986-92.

“It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade [home of the National Security Agency, MvC] was almost entirely accessible to anyone [the same applied to other sites with which I was familiar, including the Capitol MvC]. I wasn’t all bollards and barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up without having to stop at a gate and show ID… That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days when ‘it is a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every schoolyard and sitcom.”

Locs. 3963-73

“It [the NSA) was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete as letters and words flashed across the screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.”

End of quotes.

By now, in addition to reading everything, they can see and hear everything. Too often, even when your computer or smartphone are turned off. If some scientists are to be believed, soon enough they will be able to reach into your thoughts as well as your dreams.

All this, in a country that has long claimed to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. And it is not the only one.