A review for The New Republic says: 'Both Cohen’s and Snowden’s gregariousness can shade into garrulousness their writing and speech teem with grandiosity and introspection.' Over the course of eight months, Cohen traveled to Russia to shape the book into a Bildungsroman, a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth from youth to adulthood. But according to his American lawyer Ben Wizner, Snowden was eventually 'persuaded that people would be much more interested in his story than in his manifesto' and so he got the help of novelist Joshua Cohen. What signals this is the date of its release: September 17, which is Constitution Day in the United States. Ultimately, Snowden's manifesto was never published, but large parts of it may have found their way into his book.

The problem, however, is that Snowden continued to speak out, so his motive, his fear for unrestricted global mass surveillance, shaped the public narrative even when his claims were not or just partly supported by what's in the original documents. In his book No Place to Hide Greenwald considered it 'dramatic and severe' and he feared the editors of The Guardian would think it came from someone unstable, but they said: 'ultimately, the documents are what matters, not him or his motives for giving them to us'.

Of Independence as a placeholder for Snowden's manifestoĪmong the first NSA documents that Snowden had sent to Glenn Greenwald was also a copy of his manifesto. Micah Lee's design for the petition website, with the US Declaration

Permanent record book review