I dragged Lindsay out of the museum a moment later. I was afraid that if the girl posted the photo to social media, we could be just minutes away from unwanted attention. I feel foolish now for thinking that. I kept nervously checking online, but the photo didn’t appear. Not that day, and not the day after. As far as I can tell, it was never shared—just kept as a private memory of a personal moment.
Whenever I go outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get rid of my beard; maybe I wear different glasses. I never liked the cold until I realized that a hat and scarf provide the world’s most convenient and inconspicuous anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk and look away from traffic when crossing the street, which is why I’ve never been caught on any of the car dash cams that are ubiquitous here. Passing buildings equipped with CCTV, I keep my head down, so that no one will see me as I’m usually seen online—head on. I used to worry about the bus and metro, but nowadays everybody’s too busy staring at their phones to give me a second glance. If I take a cab, I’ll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a few blocks away from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks away from where I’m going.
Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast, strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.
Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is more patient and generous and kind.
Tonight, we’re celebrating our wedding anniversary. Yes, reader, she married me.
AFTERWORD
If you’ve gotten to this chapter, then you’ve done better than I did back in my school days. But even after reading every single chapter, you might still have some basic questions, such as: What can I do to protect my digital privacy as well as my family’s and friends’, and to protect our basic freedoms? It’s fine to make sweeping arguments about the need for technological and legal reforms, but what about some more practical information?
But there’s a problem with practical information: It tends to change, and to change rather quickly. If your goal is to keep yourself safe while using the internet, then you’re going to have to move at the pace of the internet. This is the main burden of being a young person, in any age: The young are always living at the cutting edge.
So let me try to find a way to talk about the practical in terms other than best practices. Let me try to talk about change, because the struggle that begins with you changing your own habits must ultimately end with changes to technology, and changes to law—with change being brought to the world.
Every time you go online, you need to know the current rules of the game if you want to have any chance of controlling what happens next. You should be aware of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools you rely on to connect and protect you, along with the many ways the sites and systems on the other end intend to track and exploit you. Two organizations that I trust, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) and the Freedom of the Press Foundation (freedom.press), publish useful guides that can get you up to speed on surveillance self-defense, from scrubbing the identifying tags invisibly hidden in your photos by your phone to encrypting your data with even better techniques than the ones I used to stand up against the NSA.
Once a solid foundation is acquired, you might want to get involved with the Open Source movement. A great way of doing that is through the Free Software Foundation (fsf.org).
To get involved in the ongoing discussions of technology’s intersections with civil liberties, you can’t do better than seeking out the ACLU (aclu.org); for technology’s intersection with climate science, I’d recommend 350.org.
When I started thinking about putting together a version of my book for younger readers, I realized that I wanted to write a final chapter directly addressing my own protocols—the steps I take to keep secure online—a subject I’m continually asked about. When I sat down to write this book, I didn’t just open up a Microsoft Word document and type in it, and then attach the document to an email to my publisher sent from an account like edwardjsnowden@gmail.com or Sys-Admin@apple.com. Instead, I wrote it in an Open Source word-processing program, LibreOffice Writer, running on a “virtual machine” that never connects to the internet. I then encrypted the finished document, transferred the encrypted copy to write-once media, which I then moved onto a different computer that goes online only through the anonymity-friendly Tor network. From there, I uploaded the encrypted file to a file-sharing site that doesn’t require a log-in, and using another virtual machine pretending to be a phone, I sent the password to the encrypted file to my publisher using the Signal messenger.
If that sounds like babble to you, remember that there was a time when none of it meant anything to me, either. Besides, sometimes you aren’t trying to beat the NSA, you’re just trying to keep your kid brother or sister out of your browsing history or a jealous ex from stalking you. You yourself may not have to go through every step of this process in order to just send an email, but maybe a single technique—whether you’re protecting your identity, your location, your contacts, or just the content of what you say and share online—will one day be of help.
In general, I think it’s important to remember that no matter how quickly the internet changes, you yourself change, too. Some of the best advice I can give is to start thinking about the future as you already think about the past: You know you’ve changed so much in the past decade, so imagine how much you will continue to change as you get older. So much of good online habits come from merely recalling this fact, and the importance of giving yourself the opportunity to reinvent who you are. This involves a significant amount of self-forgiveness, for example, forgiving yourself for past views that you expressed online but may no longer hold, but it also involves extending that forgiveness to others, who are surely going through the same process of continuous growth.
Ultimately, our privacy is collective: Yours depends on your classmates’ and friends’, and theirs depends on yours. Remember that anything you share can be reshared and eventually reach the eyes and ears of those for whom it was never originally intended. We should never make assumptions about people, least of all about what they consider public or private or secret. A good steward is a perennial good student: someone who’s never too afraid to ask, Can I share this and with whom? When and where, if and how?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In May 2013, as I sat in that hotel room in Hong Kong wondering whether any journalists would show up to meet me, I’d never felt more alone. Seven years later, I find myself in quite the opposite situation, having been welcomed into an extraordinary and ever-expanding global tribe of journalists, lawyers, technologists, and human rights advocates to whom I owe an incalculable debt. At the conclusion of a book, it’s traditional for an author to thank the people who helped make the book possible, and I certainly intend to do that here, but given the circumstances, I’d be remiss if I didn’t also thank the people who have helped make my life possible—by advocating for my freedom and, especially, by working ceaselessly and selflessly to protect our open societies as well as the technologies that have brought us, and that bring everyone, together.