Book summary: Permanent Record Edward Snowden #2 At the age of twenty-six, Snowden was back in the U.S., working as an employee at Dell and a contractor for NSA. His team built a new type of computing architecture—a "cloud." Their goal was to create a 'private cloud' which would unite the agency's processing and storage. Through this new technology improvement, a man sitting in a tent in Afghanistan could work the same way as someone working from the CIA Headquarters. Each major NSA site maintained a 'readboard'- a digital bulletin board, which was updated by its staff daily with the day's most important and interesting documents. Snowden created an automated readboard that didn't rely on anybody posting things to it, but edited itself. He got his boss's approval before carrying out his project. The aim was to make the findings of the readboard available to every NSA officer. He called this system Heartbeat because it took the pulse of the NSA and other agencies. During this time, he learned how NSA kept a permanent record of everything and owned the digital life of individuals. He no longer could reconcile his work with his conscience and felt that his job was against what he had taken oath for, so he decided to become a whistleblower.