Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

  6.9.2013

  I got a phone call from Tiffany. She asked how I was doing and said she was worried about me. I didn’t understand. She got quiet. Then she asked if I’d seen the news. She told me Ed had made a video and was on the homepage of the Huffington Post. Sandra hooked up her laptop to the flatscreen. I calmly waited for the 12-minute YouTube video to load. And then there he was. Real. Alive. I was shocked. He looked thin, but he sounded like his old self. The old Ed, confident and strong. Like how he was before this last tough year. This was the man I loved, not the cold distant ghost I’d recently been living with. Sandra hugged me and I didn’t know what to say. We stood in silence. We drove out to Sandra’s bday bbq, at her cousins’ house on this pretty hill south of the city, right on the Mexican border. Gorgeous place and I could barely see any of it. I was shutting down. Not knowing how to even begin to parse the situation. We arrived to friendly faces that had no clue what I was going through on the inside. Ed, what have you done? How can you come back from this? I was barely present for all the party small talk. My phone was blowing up with calls and texts. Dad. Mom. Wendy. Driving back up to San Diego from the bbq I drove Sandra’s cousin’s Durango, which Sandra needs this week to move. As we drove, a black gov SUV followed us and a police car pulled Sandra’s car over, which was the car I’d come in. I just kept driving the Durango, hoping I knew where I was going because my phone was already dead from all the calls.

  6.10.2013

  I knew Eileen2 was important in local politics, but I didn’t know she was also a fucking gangster. She’s been taking care of everything. While we were waiting for her contacts to recommend a lawyer, I got a call from the FBI. An agent named Chuck Landowski, who asked me what I was doing in San Diego. Eileen told me to hang up. The agent called back and I picked up, even though Eileen said I shouldn’t. Agent Chuck said he didn’t want to show up at the house unannounced, so he was just calling “out of courtesy” to tell us that agents were coming. This sent Eileen into overdrive. She’s so goddamned tough, it’s amazing. She had me leave my phone at the house and we took her car and drove around to think. Eileen got a text from a friend of hers recommending a lawyer, a guy named Jerry Farber, and she handed me her phone and had me call him. A secretary picked up and I told her that my name was Lindsay Mills and I was the girlfriend of Edward Snowden and needed representation. The secretary said, “Oh, let me put you right through.” It was funny to hear the recognition in her voice.

  Jerry picked up the phone and asked how he could help. I told him about the FBI calls and he asked for the agent’s name, so he could talk to the feds. While we waited to hear back from Jerry, Eileen suggested we go get burner phones, one to use with family and friends, one to use with Jerry. After the phones, Eileen asked which bank I kept my money at. We drove to the nearest branch and she had me withdraw all of my money immediately in case the feds froze my accounts. I went and took out all my life savings, split between cashier’s checks and cash. Eileen insisted I split the money like that and I just followed her instructions. The bank manager asked me what I needed all that cash for and I said, “Life.” I really wanted to say STFU, but I decided if I was polite I’d be forgettable. I was concerned that people were going to recognize me since they were showing my face alongside Ed’s on the news. When we got out of the bank I asked Eileen how she’d become such an expert at what to do when you’re in trouble. She told me, very chill, “You get to know these things, as a woman. Like, you always take the money out of the bank, when you’re getting a divorce.” We got some Vietnamese takeout and took it back to Eileen’s house and ate it on the floor in the upstairs hallway. Eileen and Sandra plugged in their hairdryers and kept them blowing to make noise, as we whispered to each other, just in case they were listening in on us.

  Lawyer Jerry called and said we had to meet with the FBI today. Eileen drove us to his office, and on the way she noticed we were being followed. It made no sense. We were going to a meeting to talk to the feds but also the feds were behind us, two SUVs and a Honda Accord without plates. Eileen got the idea that maybe they weren’t the FBI. She thought that maybe they were some other agency or even a foreign government, trying to kidnap me. She started driving fast and erratically, trying to lose them, but every traffic light was turning red just when we approached it. I told her that she was being crazy, she had to slow down. There was a plainclothes agent by the door of Jerry’s building, he had gov written all over his face. We went up in the elevator and when the door opened, three men were waiting: two of them were agents, one of them was Jerry. He was the only man who shook hands with me. Jerry told Eileen that she couldn’t come with us to the conference room. He’d call her when we were finished. Eileen insisted that she’d wait. She sat in the lobby with an expression on her face like she was ready to wait for a million years. On the way to the conference room Jerry took me aside and said he’d negotiated “limited immunity,” which I said was pretty meaningless, and he didn’t disagree. He told me never to lie, and that when I didn’t know what to say, I should say IDK and let him talk. Agent Mike had a grin that was a bit too kind, while Agent Leland kept looking at me like I was an experiment and he was studying my reactions. Both of them creeped me out. They started with questions about me that were so basic, it was like they were just trying to show me that they already knew everything about me. Of course they did. That was Ed’s point. The gov always knows everything. They had me talk about the last two months, twice, and then when I was finished with the “timeline,” Agent Mike asked me to start all over again from the beginning. I said, “The beginning of what?” He said, “Tell me how you met.”

  6.11.2013

  Coming out of the interrogation exhausted, late at night, with days of interrogations ahead of me. They wouldn’t tell me how many exactly. Eileen drove us to meet Sandra for dinner at some diner, and as we left Downtown we noticed we still had our tails. Eileen tried to lose them by speeding and making illegal U-turns again, and I begged her to stop. I thought her driving like that just made me look worse. It made me look suspicious. But Eileen is a stubborn mama bear. In the parking lot of the diner, Eileen banged on the windows of the surveillance vehicles and yelled that I was cooperating, so there was no reason for them to be following. It was a little embarrassing, like when your mother sticks up for you in school, but mostly I was just in awe. The nerve to go up to a vehicle with federal agents and tell them off. Sandra was at a table in the back and we ordered and talked about “media exposure.” I was all over the news.

  Halfway through dinner, two men walked up to our table. One tall guy in a baseball hat, who had braces, and his partner who was dressed like a guy going clubbing. The tall guy identified himself as Agent Chuck, the agent who’d called me before. He asked to speak with me about “the driving behavior” once we’d finished eating. The moment he said that we decided we were finished. The agents were out in front of the diner. Agent Chuck showed his badge and told me that his main goal was my protection. He said there could be threats against my life. He tapped his jacket and said if there was any danger he would take care of it, because he was on “the armed team.” It was all such macho posturing or an attempt to get me to trust him, by putting me in a vulnerable position. He went on to say I was going to be surveilled/followed by the FBI 24/7, for the foreseeable future, and the reckless driving Eileen was doing would not be tolerated. He said agents are never supposed to talk to their assignments but he felt that, given the circumstances, he had to “take the team in this direction for everyone’s safety.” He handed me a business card with his contact info and said he’d be parked just outside Eileen’s house all night, and I should call him if I needed him, or needed anything, for any reason. He told me I was free to go anywhere (you’re damn right, I thought), but that whenever I planned to go anywhere, I should text him. He said, “Open communication will make everything easier.” He said, “If you give us a heads-up, you’ll be that much safer, I promise.”

  6.16.2013–6.18.2013


  Haven’t written for days. I’m so angry that I have to take a deep breath and figure out who and what exactly I’m angry at, because it all just blurs together. Fucking Feds! Exhausting interrogations where they treat me like I’m guilty and follow me everywhere, but what’s worse is that they’ve broken my routine. Usually I’d tear off into the woods and shoot or write, but now I have a surveillance team audience wherever I go. It’s like by taking away my energy and time and desire to write, they took away the last little bit of privacy I had. I need to remember everything that’s happened. First they had me bring in my laptop and copied the hard drive. They probably put a bunch of bugs on it, too. Then they had copies of all my emails and chats printed out, and they were reading me things I wrote to Ed and things Ed wrote to me and demanding I explain them. The FBI thinks that everything’s a code. And sure, in a vacuum anyone’s messages look strange. But this is just how people who’ve been together for eight years communicate! They act like they’ve never been in a relationship! They were asking questions to try to emotionally exhaust me so that when we returned to “the timeline,” my answers would change. They won’t accept I know nothing. But still, we keep returning to “the timeline,” now with transcripts of all my emails and chats and my online calendar printed out in front of us.

  I would expect that gov guys would understand that Ed was always secretive about his work and I had to accept this secrecy to be with him, but they don’t. They refuse to. After a while, I just broke down in tears, so the session ended early. Agent Mike and Agent Leland offered to give me a ride back to Eileen’s, and before I left, Jerry took me aside and said that the FBI seemed sympathetic. “They seem to have taken a liking to you, especially Mike.” He told me to be careful, though, about being too casual on the ride home. “Don’t answer any of their questions.” The moment we drove away Mike chimed in with, “I’m sure Jerry said not to answer any questions, but I only have a couple.” Once Mike got talking, he told me that the FBI office in San Diego had a bet. Apparently, the agents had a pool going to bet how long it would be before the media figured out my location. The winner would get a free martini. Later, Sandra said she had her doubts. “Knowing men,” she said, “the bet’s about something else.”

  6.19.2013–6.20.2013

  While the rest of the country is coming to grips with the fact that their privacy is being violated, mine’s being stripped from me on a whole new level. Both things thanks to Ed. I hate sending Chuck “departure updates,” and then I hate myself that I don’t have the nerve not to send them. The worst was this one night sending a “departure update” that I’m leaving to meet Sandra and then getting lost on the way but not wanting to stop and ask the agents following me for help, so I was just leading them around in circles. I got to thinking maybe they’d bugged Eileen’s car, so I began talking aloud in the car, thinking maybe they could hear me. I wasn’t talking, I was cursing them out. I had to pay Jerry, and after I did all I could think about was all the tax money being wasted on just following me to my lawyer’s office and the gym. After the first two days of meetings I’d already run out of the only decent clothes I had, so I went to Macy’s. Agents followed me around the women’s department. I wondered if they’d come into the fitting room, too, and tell me that looks good, that doesn’t, green’s not your color. At the fitting room’s entrance was a TV blaring the news and I froze when the announcer said “Edward Snowden’s girlfriend.” I fled the stall, and stood in front of the screen. Watching as my photos flicked by. I whipped out my phone and made the mistake of Googling myself. So many comments labeling me a stripper or whore. None of this is me. Just like the feds, they had already decided who I was.

  6.22.2013–6.24.2013

  Interrogations over, for now. But a tail still following. I left the house, happy to get back in the air at this local aerial silks studio. Made it to the studio and couldn’t find street parking, but my tail did. He had to leave his spot when I drove out of range, so I doubled back and stole his spot. Had a phone call with Wendy, where we both said that however badly Ed hurt us, he did the right thing by trying to ensure that when he was gone, Wendy and I were together. That’s why he’d invited her and been so insistent about her coming. He’d wanted us to be together in Hawaii when he went public, so that we could keep each other company and give each other strength and comfort. It’s so hard to be angry at someone you love. And even harder to be angry at someone you love and respect for doing the right thing. Wendy and I were both in tears and then we both went quiet. I think we had the same thought, at the same time. How can we talk like normal people when they’re eavesdropping on all our calls?

  6.25.2013

  LAX to HNL. Wore the copper-colored wig to the airport, through security, and throughout the flight. Sandra came with. We grabbed a gross preflight lunch in the food court. More TVs tuned to CNN, still showing Ed, and still surreal, which is the new real for everyone, I think. Got a text from Agent Mike, telling me and Sandra to come see him at Gate 73. Really? He came up to LA from San Diego? Gate 73 was roped off and empty. Mike was sitting waiting for us on a row of chairs. He crossed his legs and showed us he was wearing an ankle pistol. More macho bullshit intimidation. He had paperwork for me to sign in order for the FBI to release Ed’s car keys to me in Hawaii. He said two agents would be waiting for us in Honolulu with the key. Other agents would be with us on the flight. He apologized that he wasn’t coming personally. Ugh.

  6.29.2013

  Been packing the house for days now with only minor interruptions from the FBI, coming by with more forms to sign. It’s torture, going through everything. Finding all these little things that remind me of him. I’m like a crazy woman, cleaning up, and then just gazing at his side of the bed. More often, though, I find what’s missing. What the FBI took. Technology, yes, but also books. What they left behind were footprints, scuff marks on the walls, and dust.

  6.30.2013

  Waipahu yard sale. Three men responded to Sandra’s “take it all, best offer” Craigslisting. They showed up to rummage through Ed’s life, his piano, guitar, and weight set. Anything I couldn’t bear to live with or afford to ship to the mainland. The men filled their pickup with as much as they could, and then came back for a second load. To my surprise, and I think to Sandra’s, too, I wasn’t too bothered by their scavenging. But the moment they were gone, the second time, I lost it.

  7.2.2013

  Everything got shipped today, except the futons and couch, which I’m just ditching. All that was left of Ed’s stuff after the FBI raided the house fit into one small cardboard box. Some photos and his clothes, lots of mismatched socks. Nothing that could be used as evidence in court, just evidence of our life together. Sandra brought some lighter fluid and brought the metal trash can back around to the lanai. I dumped all of Ed’s stuff, the photos and clothes, inside, and lit a book of matches on fire and tossed it in. Sandra and I sat around while it burned and the smoke rose into the sky. The glow and the smoke reminded me of the trip I took with Wendy to Kilauea, the volcano on the Big Island. That was just over a month ago, but it feels like years in the past. How could we have known that our own lives were about to erupt? That Volcano Ed was going to destroy everything? But I remember the guide at Kilauea saying that volcanoes are only destructive in the short term. In the long term, they move the world. They create islands, cool the planet, and enrich the soil. Their lava flows uncontrolled and then cools and hardens. The ash they shoot into the air sprinkles down as minerals, which fertilize the earth and make new life grow.

  29

  Love and Exile

  If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.

  But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take mu
ch for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.

  All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of your life.

  And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or “exploits,” they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets them positively identify you.