Edward Snowden - Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition)

The first thing I ever hacked was bedtime.

When I was young, it always felt unfair that my parents forced me to go to sleep before they or my sister did. I wasnt even tired. Lifes first little injustice.

Many nights of the first several years of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining. Until the night I turned six and discovered direct action.

I had just had one of the best days of my life, complete with friends, a party, and gifts, and I wasnt about to let it end. So I went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours, trying to trick my parents into thinking it was earlier in the evening.

When the authoritiesmy parentsfailed to notice, I was mad with power, galloping laps around the living room. I, the master of time, would never again be sent to bed. I was free.

I fell asleep on the floor, having finally seen the sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But when I awoke, the clocks in the house once again matched my fathers watch.

If youre like most people these days, you set your watch, if you wear one, to the time on your smartphone. But if you look at your phone, and I mean really look at it, burrowing deep through its menus into its settings, youll eventually see that the phones time is automatically set. Every so often, your phone quietlysilentlyasks your service providers network, Hey, do you have the time? That network, in turn, asks a bigger network, which asks an even bigger network, and so on through a great succession of towers and wires until the request reaches one of the true masters of time, a network time server run by the atomic clocks kept at places like the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology in Switzerland, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. That long invisible journey, accomplished in a fraction of a second, is why you dont see a blinking 12:00 on your phones screen every time you power it up again after its battery runs out.

I was born in 1983, at the end of the era in which people set the time for themselves. That was the year that the US Department of Defense created a computer network for the public called the internet. This virtual space gave rise to the Domain Name System that we still use todaythe .govs, .mils, .edus, and, of course, .coms. And yet it would be another six years before the World Wide Web was invented, and about nine years before my family got a computer with a modem that could connect to it.