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.
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