Permanent Record

There was entirely too much personal history in this for me. Even though it was fun to hear how nerdy he was as a kid, a lot of the stories and the narrative voice made me partially dislike the guy. All the factual content is great though. His realization about what the NSA was up to, his meticulous and borderline-paranoid planing on how to report on it (is it still paranoia if you for a fact know all the paranoia is warranted?) and then his escape to HongKong to go public and subsequent forced exile. I also found it very interesting when he talked about whistle-blowers vs leakers, and what fundamentally differentiates democracies from dictatorships, how in the former people concede power to the government, while in the latter the government concedes power to the people. His story also makes you think how complex it gets with national laws in an international arena like the internet. Similar as Snowden got land-locked in Moscow while trying to get to South America, our internet traffic travels through servers and routers hosted all over the world, more often in countries like China with very different privacy laws.