My first dystopian horror book.

Permanent Record has a few different stories within the story:

Early Life: You can skip this. Aside from growing up in the Intelligence Community region in Maryland, Snowden had a very average childhood and explains it in-depth for 7 chapters. You can start on chapter 8 (which begins with 9/11) and miss nothing important. It would have been great if Snowden used those pages to share his thoughts on any current tech or surveillance: cryptocurrency, biometrics like gait recognition and facial recognition, keystroke logging, VPN/VPS/VPC, cookies, blockchain, anything really.

Intelligence Community Operations: The differences between CIA and NSA knowledge, the evolution of mass surveillance, casual privacy violations and public doxing, how agencies negotiate higher salaries for employees and contractors at the taxpayer's expense, etc.

Route to Whistleblowing: Snowden’s different jobs within the Intelligence Community, his assignments and growing unease, preparations for leaking, and his life after. This is all very interesting.

Sidebar Tech Lessons: Metadata, smart fridges, end-to-end encryption, etc. I could have read a whole book of this, since Snowden is someone who is effectively managing these technologies and knows what he’s talking about. These are things that need to be common knowledge.