Permanent-Record-(Edward-Snowden)

racked

devastating

clearance

sprawling

clandestine

cohort.

stratospheric

doctrine

subterranean

conduct

contravention

scandalized

recoil,

competitive. Certainly, there was conflict, but it was outweighed by goodwill

toxic

when I came to know it, the Internet was a very different thing. It was a friend, and a parent. It was a community without border or limit, one voice and millions, a common frontier that had been settled but not exploited by diverse tribes living amicably enough side by side, each member of which was free to choose their own name and history and customs.

unrecognizable.

shuttered.

Our attention, our activities, our locations, our desires—everything about us that we revealed, knowingly or not, was being surveilled and sold in secret, so as to delay the inevitable feeling of violation that is, for most of us, coming only now.

disregard

fuller

haunted

allegiance?

disclosing

The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called “liberty” and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”

millennial.”

disclosed

concealed.

covertly

telephony

devour

couch.

tug

copilot.

quaint,

surnames

Connecticut

“It’s called tax,” my mother explained. “Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.” “What do they do with it?” “You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?” she said. “The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books.”

intricate

labyrinths,

serpent-haired

intrigued

drowned,

snag

neophyte

encyclopedias

velocipedes

abridged,

Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown.

cartridge

dismantle

exterior

interior

molten

surge

dread.

avionics.

outlets,

tyranny,

transfixed

grasped

stifling

Almost immediately, I grasped the limitations of gaming systems. They were stifling in comparison to computer systems.

preceded

paternal

custody

crush

commissary

opaque

anomalous.

ludicrous.

clunky

throes

puberty.

relinquish

reluctance

miraculousness

wherein

hiss

insatiable

sheer

detention

precisely

quirks

moonlighting

convictions—not for any financial reward, but merely to win converts to their cause.

enthused.

monetize,

anarchy

cooperative,

squabbles.

dissociative

reinvent

conformity.

To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice.

scandalized.

franchise

illegitimate

benevolent

tyranny

confronted

detention;

To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work.

debunking

unconstrained

extracurricular.

syllabi,

cumulative

terminally

bliss,

guile

depriving

scribbling,

You have to start thinking about your permanent record.”

dumb

closest

allaying

fragility

legitimately

stumbled

stammering.

trembling.

reassure

unconvincingly

lightbulb

complimentary

insomniac

snoring,

stifle

groggy

sputter,

misappraise

cartwheel

enchanted

bubbles

rhetoric:

autobiographical

divulge

condominium

custody

visitation

Wilmington.

buckled

mirthful

subdued,

morose,

chores.

feigning

premature

Just changing those words, without remotely changing what I was doing, made a difference in how I was perceived, by others and even by myself.

swollen,

exhausted

mononucleosis.

mitigate

dimness

sophomore

dreading

glandular

pajamas.

accredited.

perilous—I

anonymity,

inconspicuous,

the more you know about others, the less you know about yourself.

shaving—when

rupture,

interrogated

indicative

reconcile

condo

clique,

controversial

Squirrelling

smitten,

concealing

Norm.

inconceivable

faint

pale.

feverishly

ensuing

convoys

opposed

litany

exile,

disinformation

propaganda,

summon

recounted

hustled

swirling

intrigued

America immediately divided the world into “Us” and “Them,” and everyone was either with “Us” or against “Us,”

smoldering.

rubble

hoarded

era,

patriotism

reflexive,

unquestioning

outraged,

humiliation

ambivalent

coincided

dismayed

asymmetrical

wince.

vital

grueling

enormous,

sergeants

grave

sergeants

acquainted,

lightest

scampered

dissolves

toeing

tone-deaf.

platoon

predetermined

boulders

wading

rucksack

blister

coil

naturalist,

deadly

stumbling

excruciating

barracks,

numb.

seized

crouched

invincible

accusations

stigma

whiners

malingerers.

marrow.

battalion.

sergeant

hobbled

pudding

dirtbags

incapacitated

irreparably

dejected

therapies

ebb

reconciled

inevitable:

paranoia

jingoistic

supremely

pseudonymously

corralling

cringed.

remorse

heinous

banal

smoldering

volcanic.

coyly

rattled

reluctant

Distance favors intimacy:

confidants,

appointed

“Buckle

whatsoever

improvised,

apparel:

polygraph

clearance

goofy

foreplay.

oddly

pneumographic

gambling?

dreading.

impugned

deluded

partisan disdain. Rather, it was a certain bemused detachment particular to their class, which nobler ages have called the federal civil service or the public sector, but which our own time tends to refer

“We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

fabric

tinpot

possession

One is that you take possession of the whole of an existing system and maintain it, gradually making it more efficient and fixing it when it breaks. That position is called a systems administrator, or sysadmin.

you analyze a problem, such as how to store data or how to search across databases, and solve it by engineering a solution from a combination of existing components or by inventing entirely new ones.

malfunctions

implicated,

I had hoped to serve my country, but instead I went to work for it.

trivial

sincerity

transient

patriotism

contractors

vantage

corollary

granular

seized

Greenbelt,

middlemen

smack

I set off to find that place, something smack in the middle of that Venn diagram overlap of cheap enough that I could afford it and nice enough that Lindsay could survive it.

apron.

cinnamon,

rhymed:

No mess. No pets. No overnight guests.

marble

intoxicating,

teetotaler

litany

mundane

nadir

chastisement

slacks

eerie

tinker

nocturnal

outlier

enlisted

dismal

vault,

grinned

forays

Chemtrails

unfolding.

cafeteria

astounding.

provincialism.

govvy

solemnly

minted

Inn

chiefly

diplomatic

plausible

espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally

diplomacy

singleton

tangible:

spooked,

martyr,

excelling

sweating.

reiterating

camaraderie

rivalry.

cunning

“hypothetically

Geneva

notoriously

gateway,

hazarded,

lamenting

hegemon,

leash

pitching

smoldering

perpetuity,

relished

intrusion

burglaries

assessment

draconian

gravamen

concerted

utterly

mind-boggling.

audacity

appalled

totalitarian

antidemocratic

scrutinized.

stirred

unredacted.

sullenness.

legible

spontaneously

incinerated

amorality.

nucleus

commonality

overtly

astounding

census

enshrined

jurisdiction

Senate,

intervene

futile.

ubiquity

surfaced

Contradictory

Veterans’

restrain

pantries

fetishes

kinks),

impoverish

ceding

imperial

triumvirate

nodding

leering

In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force—including lethal force.

deterrent

preemptive—with

appalling

policing

grotesque

tendency

intolerable.

Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted.

adultery

prudish

sympathetic

intimate

tantamount

obliquely,

analogy.

speck

joint

drunken

abortion

petition

compromising

chill,

gauge

spill

choke

dizzy.

symptoms

diminishing

psychosomatic

genuine.

dizziness

linoleum,

epileptic

epilepsy.

Epilepsy

syndrome.

oncoming

allopathic

betrayed

cavalcade

“counterterror”:

evocations

vigilance

diagnosed

inevitable,

decamped

uncooperative

upholstery,

nap,

imprisoned

tortured

thuggish

spiraling

rudimentary

derive

In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state.

covenant

ideological

creed,

abridge

worship

peaceably

Americans only have a “right” to free speech because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a “right” to a free press because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it. They only have a “right” to worship freely because the government is forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, and a “right” to peaceably assemble and protest because the government is forbidden from making any law that says they can’t.

arrogated

pluralistic,

cede