'Permanent Record' by Edward Snowden

Had a weird moment towards the end of Edward Snowden's book when he mentions that he had his 30th birthday while in Hong Kong hiding from the press and secret services. I'm currently the same age as Snowden was when he became the most famous whistleblower in the world - my 30th birthday is this coming Thursday - and I cannot imagine myself ever being brave enough to do what he did.

Understanding how he became that whistleblower is, therefore, fascinating.

The most exciting chapters are, of course, towards the end when he actually gets round to the whistleblowing, when it becomes a real life globe-hopping spy thriller as he meets journalists to reveal the NSA's global surveillance system, and goes on the run, eventually ending up exiled in Moscow. 

(The US canceled his passport before he could get a connecting flight, and blocked other countries from allowing him asylum, thus enabling the US to discredit him by suggesting he is was a Russian agent all along. At the airport he is met by the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, who do, of course, offer him a job, which he refuses. He had hoped to reach Equador.)

The earlier majority of the book is comparatively extremely bland, but this is where we get to know him more as a person, the forces and events that shaped him into becoming the Whistleblower - his origin story. 

He had a comfortable middle class upbringing, where both parents (who divorced in his teens) were patriotic government employees. He talks about his interest in computers and hacking, and reminisces about the Internet of the 90s which he sees as a golden age of freedom compared to the Internet of today.

He became adept at computing from a young age, and wanted to serve his country - he had been imbued with strong patriotic fervour by his parents - so after a failed stint in the army (discharged for medical reasons), he begins his career in the American intelligences agencies, initially at the CIA, eventually at the NSA.

He was very good at his job, was promoted very quickly, and got access to a lot of classified documents, and what he saw shook his faith in the government he was working for.

Ultimately, the mistake the NSA made was to promote him too highly when he still had a lot of idealism about what America should be, what America should represent, so his conscience rebelled against what he was seeing, reading, and doing at work.

In a particularly affective chapter, he describes a time when he was spying on a target via their laptop - the NSA can access any device's camera and microphone extremely easily. Through the laptop's camera, Snowden was watching the man work while the man's toddler son was fidgeting on his lap. The laptop's microphone picked up the toddler's giggling. Suddenly, the toddler looked directly into the laptop camera and stared at it. Snowden felt like the boy was looking directly at him, peering into his soul.

'Adults in the Room' by Yanis Varoufakis

Varoufakis was the finance minister of Greece during the Eurozone crisis. His memoir is a political thriller: he rushes from meeting to meeting trying to avert an impending disaster, while being demonised by the press, plotted against, and openly spied on. In a memorable scene, he tells an American colleague something over the phone, and that colleague immediate gets a call from the US National Security Council asking about about what he's just been told.

His memoir is also a Kafkaesque nightmare: he struggles to deal with the convoluted rules, bureaucracy, tricks, and backstabbing of the Troika. In another memorable scene, he is presented with a copy of an agreement to be signed by him at a Eurogroup meeting later that day; he reads the agreement and is happy with it; and then at the meeting he notices that the agreement presented to him to sign is completely different to the one he had been shown earlier. 

It is also a tragedy, since it ends in failure and betrayal (spoilers for real world events).

While it is definitely the best political memoir I've read so far, I wouldn't say it is a consistently enjoyable read: a light-hearted fun romp, it is not.

It is dense and packed full of policy details and financial jargon, and was therefore often exhausting and hard to concentrate on. Not being super familiar with many of the characters involved, I often got confused about who was who and what their job was. 

Prior to getting involved in Greek politics, Varoufakis was a professor of economics, and fond of protesting. His limited experience of the political arena - off the streets - meant he struggled with the theatre and the game of politics. While he may have had strong arguments, he and his team lacked the political skill and resources to sell those arguments within the machine and win the game against vastly more powerful and experienced adversaries. Varoufakis is often frustrated that while the people he is arguing against often agree with him in private (or at least say they do), in public and in official meetings they have to be against him because of the complex forces and political allegiances at play.

As Varoufakis notes at the end, the Eurozone crisis and the Greek calamity were huge factors in the growth of Euroscepticism and contributed to the Brexit vote. Certainly, the EU does not come across well in this book, and it has certainly made me feel far more negatively about the European institutions as they exist today. Varoufakis is in favour of European unity in principle but hopes the current set up can be massively reformed, or that something better could be built from its ashes when it falls apart.

The complexity of the European issue has made me convinced of two points:

1) The Brexit referendum should not have been held because the question was too complicated to be reduced to the tedious and mendacious binary campaign narratives of Leave and Remain.

2) As shit as Brexit has been, going against the referendum result would have been a disaster given how toxic the issue of democratic sovereignty had become, both in the UK and in the rest of the EU.