Snowden recounts growing up in a patriotic military family in Elizabeth City, North Carolina and moving to Crofton, Maryland just shy of his ninth birthday.

In Crofton, his father worked as a chief warrant officer in the Aeronautical Engineering Division at Coast Guard Headquarters and his mother at the National Security Agency (NSA).

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Snowden joined the United States Army to show he wasn't "just a brain in a jar" and was on track to become a Special Forces sergeant through the 18X enlistment option but suffered stress fractures during training at Fort Benning in Georgia.

Snowden still wanted to serve his country and realized he had taken his talent for technology for granted, and began taking classes again at Anne Arundel Community College.

Knowing he would need a high-level security clearance to work for an intelligence agency, he searched for jobs that would sponsor his application for the Single Scope Background Investigation.

He eventually passed the full-scope polygraph and successfully attained the TS/SCI security clearance, completing his final interview at the NSA's Friendship Annex when he was twenty-two years old.

In March 2012, he began working at "the Tunnel", a former aircraft factory turned NSA facility located under a pineapple field in Kunia, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

As part of his work, Snowden developed a system called Heartbeat which created an automated queue from the classified documents posted to the Intelligence Community's "readboards".

Heartbeat would perpetually scan for new and unique documents and create a kind of aggregated newsfeed personalized for each employee, based on their interests and their security clearance.

Heartbeat's servers stored a copy of each scanned document, allowing Snowden to "perform the kind of deep interagency searches that the heads of most agencies could only dream of."

He considered The New York Times but was unimpressed with how Bill Keller intentionally delayed the reporting of the Terrorist Surveillance Program until after George W. Bush's 2004 reelection.

To stay anonymous, he went war-driving, exploiting local Wi-Fi networks with an antenna and magnetic GPS sensor while driving in his car around Oahu.

He used Tor and the Kismet mapping software, running on the Tails operating system which allowed him to easily spoof his laptop's MAC address.

Under the guise of compatibility testing, Snowden transferred documents from the Heartbeat server to outdated desktop Dell PCs from his office, then onto SD cards after deduplicating, compressing and encrypting them.

He left Dell on March 15, 2013, and began working as an "infrastructure analyst" at the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) in Honolulu through a contractor job at Booz Allen Hamilton.

On June 5, The Guardian published Glenn's first story, on the FISA court warrant that ordered Verizon to provide a daily feed to the NSA containing "telephony metadata".

They arrived at Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport on June 23, but were taken aside and questioned by a man from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB).

Snowden explained that no one but her had the experience or the right to recount that period of her life: "the FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the press attention, the online harassment, the confusion and pain, the anger and sadness.

"[6] In the final chapter, "Love and Exile", Snowden expresses his feelings on the impact of his revelations, including ACLU v. Clapper and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, and his hopes for the future of technology and privacy.

[9] The government stated that its lawsuit "does not seek to stop or restrict the publication or distribution" of the book, but instead aims to capture the proceeds Snowden would be earning from it.

[11] On August 7, 2020, U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan agreed to impose sanctions on Snowden, ruling that he "unequivocally acted in bad faith".

[12][better source needed] Snowden himself referred to the lawsuit on an episode of The Daily Show, stating it was largely responsible for the book's increased sales via the Streisand effect.

[13] On November 11, 2019, Snowden posted on his Twitter that the simplified Chinese edition of Permanent Record, published in mainland China, had been censored.

The Chinese version removed Snowden's observation on the motivations of Arab Spring protestors: "The crowds were calling for an end to oppression, censorship, and precarity.

Snowden invited his Twitter followers to help him create a "correct and unabridged version" of Permanent Record in Chinese to be published freely online.

[19] Kirkus Reviews wrote, "Snowden's book likely won't change the minds of his detractors, but he makes a strong case for his efforts.

"[22] Publishers Weekly felt the book lacked a strong case for the argument that NSA surveillance "leads inevitably to oppressive control" but concluded, "Still, Snowden's many admirers will find his saga both captivating and inspiring.

[24] The Economist called the book "well-written, frequently funny" but concluded, "Whatever his relationship with the Russian authorities, and whenever it began, everything he says in Permanent Record—about himself, and about America—must be seen through the prism of his dependence on the Kremlin.