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Every so often a nonfiction book comes along that has the power to make you think and the power to make you weep, the power to make you question and the power to make you laugh. Permanent Record, the memoir of National Security Administration (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, is such a book. This highly anticipated account of Snowden’s life will be welcome reading for those who, curious about his motives and his methods, seek a reflective and detailed account of his decision to blow the whistle on the mass surveillance practices of the NSA. “This book is about what led up to that decision [to blow the whistle],” Snowden explains in the Preface, “the moral and ethical principles that informed it, and how they came to be—which means that it’s also about my life” (4). In the Acknowledgements, Snowden credits novelist Joshua Cohen, whose novel Book of Numbers anticipated some of the surveillance practices revealed by the 2013 disclosures, with “helping to transform my rambling reminiscences and capsule manifestoes into a book that I hope he can be proud of.” Nevertheless, Snowden’s voice is unquestionably there. With lucid prose, engaging arguments, and personable voice, Permanent Record will seem familiar to those who, like me, have spent hours watching and listening to his interviews. In twenty-nine chapters, organized about equally into three parts, the book takes the reader from Snowden’s childhood in North Carolina, where he lived with his civil servant parents and older sister, to his current life as a worldfamous political exile living in Moscow with his partner, Lindsay Mills, to whom he is now married and by whom the penultimate chapter is written. The first part recounts his youth, from his first encounter with a computer—his father’s Commodore 64—at age 6 to his medical discharge from the army at age 21. The second part covers Snowden’s experiences in the Intelligence Community (or, IC, as he calls it) and the accumulating abuses he observed from his various posts in the NSA and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The third section explains his decision to blow the whistle on NSA mass surveillance: the political failures that motivated him, the personal experiences that inspired him, the ethical principles that guided him, and the pragmatic strategies that enabled him. Along the way, readers who have not waded through the fragmentary reporting on NSA surveillance revelations are helpfully provided a concise legal and technological history of the important issues, arguments, and events surrounding these controversies. However, consistent with Snowden’s principle that journalists, and not the whistleblower, should decide what is in the public interest, the book contains no new revelations. (The lack of new revelations should also help his case against the Department of Justice, which has filed a lawsuit arguing that Snowden did not seek government approval for his memoir, as former IC employees must do by law.) The title of the book is derived from a cascading theme in Snowden’s life—the existence of various inerasable archives of our behavior, our “permanent records.” Snowden was first made aware of such records at age thirteen, when his teacher chastised him for trying to outsmart (or “hack,” as Snowden puts it) a syllabus for a class. As an adolescent, Snowden was told he needed to start thinking about his “permanent record” (56). At twenty-two, when he was applying for his first IC job, Snowden was reminded of a different permanent record: his embarrassing online posts from when he was a kid. Though he was temped to erase his entire online presence, Snowden instead formed what he calls his first self-made political principle: “We can’t erase the things that shame us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. * Patrick D. Anderson [email protected]