Edward Snowden was in his mid-20s when he joined the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 2009. In his new book Permanent Record, he describes working at 'America's premier signals agency' as. Aside from Snowden’s origin story and motives, the last act of Permanent Record documents in more detail than ever before the process of Snowden’s leaks, from “wardriving” around Hawaii with his.
The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA.
The lawsuit alleges that Snowden published his book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review, in violation of his express obligations under the agreements he signed. Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that Snowden has given public speeches on intelligence-related matters, also in violation of his non-disclosure agreements.
Permanent Record Snowden Free
- The same day as the release of Edward Snowden's new book 'Permanent Record' the Justice Department announced a lawsuit against the at-large whistleblower.
- Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who blew the lid on the US government's classified mass surveillance programs, shut down a conspiracy theory that the US is secretly housing alien lifeforms.
The United States’ lawsuit does not seek to stop or restrict the publication or distribution of Permanent Record. Rather, under well-established Supreme Court precedent, Snepp v. United States, the government seeks to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of his failure to submit his publication for pre-publication review in violation of his alleged contractual and fiduciary obligations.
The lawsuit also names as nominal defendants the corporate entities involved in publishing Snowden’s book. The United States is suing the publisher solely to ensure that no funds are transferred to Snowden, or at his direction, while the court resolves the United States’ claims. Snowden is currently living outside of the United States.
“Edward Snowden has violated an obligation he undertook to the United States when he signed agreements as part of his employment by the CIA and as an NSA contractor,” said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division. “The United States’ ability to protect sensitive national security information depends on employees’ and contractors’ compliance with their non-disclosure agreements, including their pre-publication review obligations. This lawsuit demonstrates that the Department of Justice does not tolerate these breaches of the public’s trust. We will not permit individuals to enrich themselves, at the expense of the United States, without complying with their pre-publication review obligations.”
Permanent Record Snowden Download
“Intelligence information should protect our nation, not provide personal profit,” said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “This lawsuit will ensure that Edward Snowden receives no monetary benefits from breaching the trust placed in him.”
This lawsuit is separate from the criminal charges brought against Snowden for his alleged disclosures of classified information. This lawsuit is a civil action, and based solely on Snowden’s failure to comply with the clear pre-publication review obligations included in his signed non-disclosure agreements.
This matter is being handled by the Department of Justice’s Civil Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
The claims asserted by the United States are allegations only; there has been no determination of liability.
Eric Snowden Permanent Record
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has written a memoir, telling his life story in detail for the first time and explaining why he chose to risk his freedom to become perhaps the most famous whistleblower of all time.
Snowden, who now lives in Russia to avoid prosecution in the U.S., says his seven years working for the NSA and CIA led him to conclude the U.S. intelligence community “hacked the Constitution” and put everyone’s liberty at risk and that he had no choice but to turn to journalists to reveal it to the world.
“I realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible — for anything,” he writes.
The book, “Permanent Record,” is scheduled to be released Tuesday. It offers by far the most expansive and personal account of how Snowden came to reveal secret details about the government’s mass collection of Americans’ emails, phone calls and Internet activity in the name of national security.
His decision to turn from obscure IC wonk to whistleblower in 2013 set off a national debate about the extent of government surveillance by intelligence agencies desperate to avoid a repeat of the Sept. 11 attacks. Intelligence officials who conduct annual classified assessments of damage from Snowden’s disclosures say the documents will continue trickling out into the public domain for years to come.
Though the book comes six years after the disclosures, Snowden, who fled first to Hong Kong and then Russia, attempts in his memoir to place his concerns in a contemporary context. He sounds the alarm about what he sees as government efforts worldwide to delegitimize journalism, suppress human rights and support authoritarian movements.
“What is real is being purposely conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion,” he says.
The story traces Snowden’s evolution from childhood, from growing up in the 1980s in North Carolina and suburban Washington, where his mother worked as a clerk at the NSA and his father served in the Coast Guard.
He came of age as the Internet evolved from an obscure government computer network and describes how a youthful fascination with technology — as a child, he took apart and reassembled a Nintendo console and, as a teenager, hacked the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory network — eventually led him to a career as an NSA contractor, where he observed high-tech spy powers with increasing revulsion.
Analysts used the government’s collection powers to read the emails of current and former lovers and stalk them online, he writes.
One particular program the NSA called XKEYSCORE allowed the government to scour the recent Internet history of average Americans. He says he learned through that program that nearly everyone who’s been online has at least two things in common: They’ve all watched pornography at one time or another, and they’ve all stored videos and pictures of their family.
“This was true,” he writes, “for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race, and age — from the meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or cousin.”
He struggled to share his concerns with his girlfriend, who joined him in Russia and is now his wife.
“I couldn’t tell her that my former co-workers at the NSA could target her for surveillance and read the love poems she texted me. I couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took — not just the public photos, but the intimate ones,” he writes. “I couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.”
Before summoning a small group of journalists to Hong Kong to disclose classified secrets, knowing that a return to the U.S. was impossible, he says he prepared like a man about to die. He emptied his bank accounts, put cash into a steel ammo box for his girlfriend and erased and encrypted his old computers. Calibre 5.11.
These days, the 36-year-old Snowden lives in Moscow, where he remains outside the reach of a U.S. Justice Department that brought Espionage Act charges just weeks after the disclosures. He spends many of his days behind a computer and participating in virtual meetings with fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. “I beam myself onto stages around the world” to discuss civil liberties, he writes.
When he does go out, he tries to shake up his appearance, sometimes wearing different glasses. He keeps his head down when he walks past buildings equipped with closed-circuit television. Once, he says, he was recognized in a Moscow museum and consented to a selfie request from a teenage girl speaking German-accented English.
It’s unclear when or even if Snowden will return to a country where his family has deep roots. He traces his lineage back to the Mayflower and ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War.
He was shaken by the Sept. 11 attacks, but describes his “reflexive, unquestioning support” for the wars that followed as the greatest regret of his life.
Eric Snowden Today
“It was as if whatever institutional politics I’d developed had crashed — the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system — and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance.”
Eric Snowden Permanent Record
____
Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP