The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden for not running his memoir, “Permanent Record,” through the proper government review prior to its publication.
“If only the Justice Department was as concerned with the systematic legal violations carried out by the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs as they are about trying to blunt the impact of a personal memoir,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, tweeted.
And Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project and an attorney for Snowden, said the “government continues to insist that facts that are known and discussed throughout the world are still somehow classified, noting that the “book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news organizations.”
Snowden, who sought asylum in Russia in 2013 shortly after he released classified details on the government’s secret surveillance program, wrote the book “to continue a global conversation about mass surveillance and free societies that his actions helped inspire,” Wizner said.
