Permanent Record

In 2013, Snowden the extent to which the American intelligence agencies—assisted by those abroad—were surveilling almost every single citizen and recording their most intimate data. Although mass surveillance terrifies Snowden, his coworkers do not share his feelings. When he tries to discuss the issue with his fellow NSA workers, they react with mild indifference. This issue reaches its nadir when Snowden visits a facility and finds the workers spying on women, collecting (and sharing) their nude photographs. This abuse leads him to conclude that the immorality of mass surveillance has become so toxic, and has permeated so much of the agency, that he has no choice but to reveal it to the world.

Snowden likens the NSA’s mass surveillance to that conducted by the SS in Nazi Germany and the KGB in the Soviet Union. He views it as a tool of totalitarian oppression, and even though the US government may have undertaken the program with the best of intentions, he sees his colleagues’ behavior as evidence that power has begun to corrupt those good intentions. He believes the collective guilt intelligence agencies felt after 9/11 caused them to abandon the Fourth Amendment. Unlike the open mass surveillance that Orwell envisioned in 1984, the NSA program operates in secret.