Edward Snowden blew the whistle on how Chinese censors scrubbed his book

It was perhaps inevitable that Edward Snowden’s autobiography would, like almost everything else, come under the knife of China’s censors—after all, the subject matter pertains to state surveillance and people’s struggles for freedom.

The former US intelligence employee turned whistleblower against US surveillance, however, said that censorship of the simplified Chinese version of his recently released book, Permanent Record, violated the publishing agreement for its sale in China. In a Twitter thread today (Nov. 12), Snowden, who currently lives in exile in Moscow, said he was allowed to see some of the censored passages. He posted some of the excised parts along with the English originals, and invited readers to submit their own examples and help translate them in a bid to “compile a correct and unabridged version” of the book in Chinese.