Snowden, on the record

The book is unlikely to change anyone's mind about Mr Snowden, but when it comes to privacy and speech and the Constitution, his story clarifies the stakes

Revealing state secrets is hard, but revealing yourself in a memoir might be harder. As Edward Snowden puts it in the preface of Permanent Record: “The decision to come forward with evidence of government wrongdoing was easier for me to make than the decision, here, to give an account of my life.”

Mr Snowden, of course, is the former intelligence contractor who, in 2013, leaked documents about the United States government’s surveillance programmes, dispelling any notions that the National Security Agency (NSA) and its allies were playing a quaint game of spy vs. spy, limiting their dragnet to specific persons of