Don’t underestimate the IT guy. Edward Snowden – who in 2013 told the world about the United States’s illegal mass-surveillance of its citizens’ communications – was not a computer genius exfiltrating secrets from the bowels of the National Security Agency (NSA) and CIA through brilliant technical subterfuge. Although he enjoys referring to himself as a “spy”, he was really just a lowly systems administrator for the spies’ computers. But because his sysadmin roles required him to manage documents, he had the top security clearance needed to read any document in the whole system. Then he just methodically copied them on to SD cards and walked out past the guards, day after day, fiddling with his Rubik’s Cube.
It’s halfway through Snowden’s memoir, though, before any secrets get stolen. The first half details his childhood as the son of two government workers, and his blossoming passion for computers. “What I love and believe in the most is connection, human connection,” he writes, before adding, as only an übergeek would, “and the technologies by which that is achieved.” An early epiphany comes when his father, a gruff electronics engineer for the Coast Guard, brings home a Commodore 64 home computer. Before long, young Snowden is upgrading to a PC and haunting the bulletin boards of the early internet on a dial-up connection. At one point he politely informs the national nuclear-research facility at Los Alamos that he has managed to hack their website. They call back and offer him a job, not realising he’s still a schoolboy.
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