One of Edward J. Snowden’s earliest memories is of sneaking around the house and turning back the time on all the clocks in the hope of tricking his parents into letting him stay up late to watch more TV. Another is of the day his father brought home a Commodore 64 and how exciting it was, that very first time, to hold a joystick. Snowden’s new autobiography, “Permanent Record” (Metropolitan), is the autobiography of a gamer, pale and bleary-eyed and glued to his screen, longing for invincibility. Some people write memoirs; other people craft legends. Snowden, who once aspired to be a model and is in some quarters regarded as a modern messiah, is the second kind. As a kid, he read about King Arthur, and his family name comes from Snaw Dun, a mountain in Wales on top of which the legendary ruler is said to have slain a terrible giant by sticking a sword in his eye. Snowden makes a lot of this Tolkien-y sort of thing—avatars, portents of destiny, signs of greatness.

“Permanent Record” offers less than what most readers will want of the John le Carré-meets-Jason Bourne stuff: why, at the age of twenty-eight, while working for a defense contractor, Snowden decided to smuggle top-secret computer files from the U.S. government and give them to reporters at the Guardian and the Washington Post; how he did it; and what his life has been like since then. In dozens of interviews, Snowden, who lives in exile in Russia, has fielded and dodged a lot of questions about those parts of his life. Critics charge him with evasion and distortion; supporters see a becoming honesty and the nobility of an unimpeachable integrity. Readers will split over his book, too, without actually learning much, except about the mind of a gamer. Most of the book chronicles not Snowden’s disclosures and their consequences but his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, game by game, from the Nintendo Entertainment System to the National Security Agency.

“I used to work for the government,” Snowden begins, “but now I work for the public.” In 2013, Snowden’s disclosures proved that the N.S.A. had been conducting surveillance on the entire U.S. population, by way of a series of top-secret programs staggering in their scale and intrusiveness, including the bulk collection of telephone records in the form of metadata that was acquired from telecommunications companies. The scale of Snowden’s heist was also staggering. The N.S.A. claims that he stole 1.7 million classified documents. Snowden disputes this number, but, even if the actual number is quite a lot smaller, it’s likely that he stole more documents than he was able to read.

Snowden is a controversial figure, and whistle-blowing, which is how Snowden describes what he did, is a contentious subject, especially when it concerns intelligence operations. Much of the controversy, in Snowden’s case, divides along what can appear to be merely a matter of opinion: Is he a patriot or a traitor? Obama’s Justice Department charged him with treasonous federal crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act. Snowden’s defenders view these charges as wrongheaded; his critics suggest that he ought to face trial, even though, since the material he stole was classified, any proceeding would be partly closed to the public, a condition that, as a rule, makes a fair trial awfully unlikely. People who consider Snowden a patriot argue that exposing the N.S.A.’s mass-surveillance program was both a public service and an act of heroism. People who consider Snowden a traitor argue that his disclosures set U.S. counterterrorism efforts back by years, and endangered American intelligence agents and their sources all over the world. Some also point to the circumstances of his flight and exile: because Snowden first sought refuge in Hong Kong and has been granted temporary asylum in Russia (due to expire in 2020), it has been variously alleged, without proof, that he did not act alone, that he shared American military secrets with China, and that he’s a dupe of Putin. Snowden denies these accusations.

The patriot-traitor divide should be less a matter of opinion than a matter of law, but the law here is murky. On the one hand, you might think, if Snowden is a patriot who did what he did for the good of the country, then he deserves not only the protection of First Amendment freedom of speech but also the legal shelter afforded whistle-blowers, under legislation that includes the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act—except that Snowden signed an oath not to disclose government secrets, and neither the Whistleblower Protection Act nor its many revisions and amendments extend its protections to people who disclose classified intelligence. On the other hand, you might think, if Snowden is a traitor whose actions put his country at risk, the Justice Department was right to charge him under the Espionage Act—except that it doesn’t sound as though he were a spy. (Unlike Julian Assange, Snowden has criticized Putin, and the F.B.I. believes that Snowden acted alone.) “Permanent Record” doesn’t settle any of these questions, or even evince much concern about them. Instead, Snowden appears to have other worries. “Forgive me if I come off like a dick,” he writes, knowingly.

“Snowden could one day be seen as America’s first traitor-patriot,” the political scientist Allison Stanger writes, less King Arthur than King Solomon, in “Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump” (Yale). Stanger interviewed Snowden for her book, a brisk and interesting history of people who, while working for the government, find out about terrible things the government is doing, including waste, fraud, mismanagement, and abuse of authority, and expose that misconduct to the public. She argues that Americans support whistle-blowing in theory, but, in practice, they treat whistle-blowers badly. They also tend not to like them. “Whistleblowers are by definition troublemakers,” Stanger writes. “For that reason, they can be difficult people.”

Laws protecting government whistle-blowers from retaliation have been on the books in the United States since 1778, when, in the wake of a scandal in the Navy, Congress resolved that “it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.” In “Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud” (Riverhead), Tom Mueller dates legislation having to do with corporate whistle-blowers to the Civil War, when Congress passed the False Claims Act of 1863, to encourage private citizens, referred to as “relators,” to help counter corruption among military contractors by initiating suits for fraud on behalf of the government. (The Department of Justice did not then exist.) Relators who could prove fraud were to be rewarded with a portion of any recovered money. They still are.

Whistle-blowing, at least by that breezy name, is on the rise. In the years since Congress passed a sweeping revision of the False Claims Act, in 1986, relators have recovered sixty billion dollars in misspent taxpayer money. “This is the age of the whistleblower,” Mueller observes. Mueller, who interviewed more than two hundred whistle-blowers and profiles half a dozen, focusses on the corporate kind, especially in the health-care and finance industries. Stanger sets corporate whistle-blowing aside, declaring it a separate case. But the age of the whistle-blower is also an age of corruption, deregulation, and privatization in which the border between the public and the private sectors is as thin as a dollar bill. Snowden, notwithstanding his “I used to work for the government” line, worked mostly for a series of private companies, because the kinds of services he provided, mainly security and systems administration, had been privatized.

“Don’t sit there—it’s wet.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping Cartoon by Robert Leighton

Snowden currently heads the board of the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation, which was established in 2012 by, among others, Daniel Ellsberg. In 1971, Ellsberg leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post forty-seven volumes of classified documents about the Vietnam War which came to be called the Pentagon Papers. (Unlike Snowden, Ellsberg, a former marine with a Ph.D. in economics, had held positions of considerable influence: he’d served as an adviser in Vietnam and helped draft some of the reports that made up the Pentagon Papers, and he’d read all of them.) In New York Times Co. v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court ruled the publication of the papers to be constitutional, but the Nixon Justice Department pursued charges against Ellsberg under the 1917 Espionage Act all the same. So desperate was Nixon for a conviction that his “plumbers” broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the hope of finding evidence to discredit him. The arrest of the plumbers led both to the dropping of the charges against Ellsberg and to the great unravelling known as Watergate. But the exposure of classified intelligence still falls into a different bin from all other kinds of whistle-blowing. Since 1978, whistle-blowing that risks national security has been a contradiction in terms. If you steal classified documents, you can’t be a whistle-blower.