Permanent Record by Edward Snowden Read Free Book Online Page A

not to hear them. And whenever I was reminded that the computer was a shared computer and not my personal machine, I’d relinquish my seat with such reluctance that as my father, or mother, or sister took their turn, they’d have to order me out of the room entirely lest I hover moodily over their shoulders and offer advice—showing my sister word-processing macros and shortcuts when she was writing a research paper, or giving my parents spreadsheet tips when they tried to do their taxes.
    I’d try to rush them through their tasks, so I could get back to mine, which were so much more important—like playing Loom . As technology had advanced, games involving Pong paddles and helicopters—the kind my father had played on that by now superannuated Commodore—had lost ground to ones that realized that at the heart of every computer user was a book reader, a being with the desire not just for sensation but for story. The crude Nintendo, Atari, and Sega games of my childhood, with plots along the lines of (and this is a real example) rescuing the president of the United States from ninjas, now gave way to detailed reimaginings of the ancient tales that I’d paged through while lying on the carpet of my grandmother’s house.
    Loom was about a society of Weavers whose elders (named after the Greek Fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) create a secret loom that controls the world, or, according to the script of the game, that weaves “subtle patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality.” When a young boy discovers the loom’s power, he’s forced into exile, and everything spirals into chaos until theworld decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea, after all.
    Unbelievable, sure. But then again, it’s just a game.
    Still, it wasn’t lost on me, even at that young age, that the titular machine of the game was a symbol of sorts for the computer on which I was playing it. The loom’s rainbow-colored threads were like the computer’s rainbow-colored internal wires, and the lone gray thread that foretold an uncertain future was like the long gray phone cord that came out of the back of the computer and connected it to the great wide world beyond. There, for me, was the true magic: with just this cord, the Compaq’s expansion card and modem, and a working phone, I could dial up and connect to something new called the Internet.
    Readers who were born postmillennium might not understand the fuss, but trust me, this was a goddamned miracle. Nowadays, connectivity is just presumed. Smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always. Connected to what exactly? How? It doesn’t matter. You just tap the icon your older relatives call “the Internet button” and boom, you’ve got it: the news, pizza delivery, streaming music, and streaming video that we used to call TV and movies. Back then, however, we walked uphill both ways, to and from school, and plugged our modems directly into the wall, with manly twelve-year-old hands.
    I’m not saying that I knew much about what the Internet was, or how exactly I was connecting to it, but I did understand the miraculousness of it all. Because in those days, when you told the computer to connect, you were setting off an entire process wherein the computer would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of snakes, after which—and it could take lifetimes, or at least whole minutes—you could pick up any other phone in the house on an extension line and actually hear the computers talking . You couldn’t actually understand what they were saying to each other, of course, since they were speaking in a machine language that transmitted up to fourteen thousand symbols per second. Still,even that incomprehension was an astonishingly clear indication that phone calls were no longer just for older teenage sisters.
    Internet access, and the emergence of the Web, was my generation’s big bang or Precambrian explosion. It irrevocably altered the course of