I recently read Permanent Record[1][2] by Edward Snowden and it'll be interesting to contrast his account from Bamford's some 30-40 years ago.
I have to say, Snowden's autobiography was a fantastic read and a chilling look inside the 3-letters agencies. Highly recommended, as the topic is evidently pretty circumstancial to us right now and for the foreseeable future. Also, if you grew up anywhere near the 1980-1990's, especially as a computer geek / nerd, you'll probably love this book for nostalgic / human / relatable reasons.
I just started Permanent Record, by Edward Snowden. I thought it was going to be more tech-heavy, but, at least the start, seems to be more on the memoirs side.
This, among a few other nuggets of which I was unaware, are described in Snowden’s book Permanent Record (although briefly, it’s a biography first and foremost) which I enjoyed.
I posted this in another thread, but it didn't get much traction. It's a serious question.
Isn't Snowden's book an auto-biographical memoir? Given this, is there really classified information contained in the book? Can someone who has read it give an example?
I've watched Snowden's Rogan interview, where he covers the material in the book, and I don't remember anything that was classified.
Snowden memoir not simply called "Permanent Record" if you like to read, it's in chapter: Part Three - Fourth Estate, or in audiobook at 08:30:24
He writes about CIA CTO, Gus Hunt talk at GigaOM's Structure:Data conference in 2013, still available to witness https://youtu.be/GUPd2uMiXXg?t=1258
TLDR: “At the CIA,” he said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”
> The second event happened one year later, in March 2013—one week after Clapper lied to Congress and Congress gave him a pass. A few periodicals had covered that testimony, though they merely regurgitated Clapper’s denial that the NSA collected bulk data on Americans. But no so-called mainstream publication at all covered a rare public appearance by Ira “Gus” Hunt, the chief technology officer of the CIA.
I’d known Gus slightly from my Dell stint with the CIA. He was one of our top customers, and every vendor loved his apparent inability to be discreet: he’d always tell you more than he was supposed to. For sales guys, he was like a bag of money with a mouth. Now he was appearing as a special guest speaker at a civilian tech event in New York called the GigaOM Structure: Data conference. Anyone with $40 could go to it. The major talks, such as Gus’s, were streamed for free live online.
> I got insight, certainly, but of an unexpected kind. I had the opportunity of witnessing the highest-ranking technical officer at the CIA stand onstage in a rumpled suit and brief a crowd of uncleared normies—and, via the Internet, the uncleared world—about the agency’s ambitions and capacities. As his presentation unfolded, and he alternated bad jokes with an even worse command of PowerPoint, I grew more and more incredulous.
> “At the CIA,” he said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, he went on: “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human generated information.” The underline was Gus’s own. He was reading from his slide deck, ugly words in an ugly font illustrated with the government’s signature four-color clip art.
> Nevertheless, the Pentagon’s clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using “disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government.”
Good luck trusting OpenAI's generative seductive female operative with Johansson voice.
Wow, here's a quote from their summary of one of the books:
Each of these books about the Snowden affair covers the
basics of Snowden’s broken family life, his half-finished
education, his political beliefs, and his devotion to the
Internet.
It's a look at the reporting of PRISM and other Snowden leaks by the guy who first broke the leaks. Pet jarring look at how the program can't to be, and how it evolved.
Article is from June, 2013 ... right about the time the Snowden revelations were just starting to come out. Additionally, author is Moxie Marlinspike, a prominent privacy advocate in his own right.
I recently read Permanent Record[1][2] by Edward Snowden and it'll be interesting to contrast his account from Bamford's some 30-40 years ago.
I have to say, Snowden's autobiography was a fantastic read and a chilling look inside the 3-letters agencies. Highly recommended, as the topic is evidently pretty circumstancial to us right now and for the foreseeable future. Also, if you grew up anywhere near the 1980-1990's, especially as a computer geek / nerd, you'll probably love this book for nostalgic / human / relatable reasons.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_Record_(autobiograph...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46223297-permanent-recor...
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