Edward Snowden on How Getting Sued by the Government Resulted in a Best-Selling Book

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From The Hollywood Reporter:

Following the release of his tell-all book Permanent Record, Edward Snowden appeared Thursday night via video feed as a guest on The Daily Show, where he talked with host Trevor Noah about the memoir and getting sued by the government.

After the former CIA employee leaked classified documents from the National Security Agency about government surveillance operations in 2013, Snowden sought asylum in Moscow. The preface of his book states, “The reason you’re reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a man in my position: I decided to tell the truth,” Snowden writes. “I collected internal documents that gave evidence of the U.S. government’s lawbreaking and turned them over to a journalist, who vetted and published them to a scandalized world. This book is about what led up to that decision, the moral and ethical principles that informed it, and how they came to be — which means that it’s also about my life.”

Snowden is now being sued by the Department of Justice, which filed a complaint this week in Virginia federal court, alleging that he “violated his non-disclosure obligations to the United States” by not having the book reviewed before it was published.

During the show, Snowden explained his reaction to the lawsuit. “The nice thing about [getting sued] is, the book was not getting that much attention, it was like [number] 25 on the charts. And then the government said, ‘We don’t want you to read this book. Sue Snowden as fast as you can, do anything to stop it, stop it, stop it,’ and now we’re number 1, basically everywhere.” Snowden then calls out the Attorney General, to whom he attributes the book’s success.

Link to the rest at The Hollywood Reporter