WASHINGTON — The Justice Department sued the former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Tuesday, seeking to seize his proceeds from his new memoir because he did not submit the manuscript for review before it was published so officials could make sure it contained no classified information.

Mr. Snowden, whose 2013 leaks of top-secret documents about National Security Agency programs set off a worldwide debate about government surveillance in the internet era, published the memoir, “Permanent Record,” on Tuesday.

He recounts his life up to the disclosures, including how he came to be alarmed by the growth of the security agency’s surveillance capabilities — such as its then-secret systematic collection of logs of Americans’ domestic phone calls — and how he copied the documents and provided them to reporters.

In the lawsuit, the Justice Department complained that by publishing the book, Mr. Snowden violated his legal obligation to let censors at the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. vet the manuscript first, and so he had to forfeit any profits. As a condition of receiving access to classified information, Mr. Snowden had signed nondisclosure agreements promising to submit to the review system any future writings related to his work for the agencies.