The Edward Snowden moment was inevitable, because you can only roll the dice on conscience for so long until somebody objects.” “If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. The thing I discovered in my own analysis of my past is how undistinguished I was,” Snowden says. Other than the fateful decision to actually become that someone, Snowden points out that the rest of his story could have belonged to practically any of thousands of geeks with similar experiences. Instead, it’s a fundamental threat to that unobserved, unrecorded anarchy, a threat that someone will need to make an enormous sacrifice to stop.

After an attempt to join the special forces-he crashes out after breaking both legs in basic training-he gravitates to the intelligence world, where he discovers that the agency he works for has transformed the internet into the opposite of the playground he idealized. In Snowden’s telling, it sounds for the first time less like a biography of a Black Swan than the experience of a generation: An extremely online kid of the ’90s who is only drawn to government service after the shattering experience of 9/11. Subscribe to WIRED and stay smart with more of your favorite national security writers. They’re denied the opportunities we had to be forgotten and to have their mistakes forgiven.”

They’re so ruthlessly and strictly identified in every network they interact with and by which they live. “This is what’s denied to the rising generation. “To be able to expand your experience, to become a more whole person by being able to try and fail, this is what teaches us who we are and who we want to become,” Snowden told WIRED in an interview ahead of his book’s publication tomorrow. That long-lost internet, Snowden writes, offered its inhabitants a “reset button for your life” that could be pressed every day, at will. Sometimes, he notes, he’d even use his new identity to attack his prior self, the better to disavow the ignoramus he’d been the week before.

These were online videogame and forum personas, he writes, that as a teenager in the 1990s he’d acquire and jettison like T-shirts, assuming new identities on a whim, often to leave behind mistakes or embarrassing ideas he’d tried out in online conversations. Edward Snowden, arguably the world’s most famous whistle-blower, is a man who lived behind plenty of pseudonyms before putting his true name to his truth-telling: When he was first communicating with the journalists who would reveal his top-secret NSA leaks, he used the names Citizenfour, Cincinnatus, and Verax-Latin for “truthful” and a knowing allusion to Julian Assange’s old hacker handle Mendax, the teller of lies.īut in his newly published memoir and manifesto, Permanent Record, Snowden describes other handles, albeit long-defunct ones: Shrike the Knight, Corwin the Bard, Belgarion the Smith, squ33ker the precocious kid asking amateur questions about chip compatibility on an early bulletin-board service.

Snowden memoir