Below is the Review of No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S.
Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald as submitted to the editor for the July, 2014 issue of the Sturbridge Times Magazine.
It almost seems as if Glenn
Greenwald was trying his best to miss the story of a lifetime. Edward Snowden tried over a period of months
to contact Greenwald with no success. This
is more than understandable. Glenn is a
well-known lawyer and journalist known to be more than a little at odds with
the national security state. The
question as to the possibility that he was being set up had to have occurred to
him. Also, as a controversial reporter,
there is no dearth of people who have the story of the century, or so they
think.
His friend, documentary filmmaker
Laura Poitras, was not put off by the man’s persistence. Laura contacted Greenwald and they met in New
York. She insisted on security measures
suggested by the mystery fellow. Take
out the battery from the cell phone or leave it behind, moving tables in a
restaurant so as not to be heard. Only
then would she talk.
Laura presented evidence of the
man’s proposal and Greenwald was convinced enough to meet. Thus would begin the odyssey that led to the
exposure of the vast surveillance apparatus, the National Security Agency
(NSA), our government maintains to keep tabs on its own citizens and the world.
Once convinced NSA employee Snowden
was genuine, the problem became how to get the information out to the
public. Snowden was understandably
concerned about security. So were
Poitras and Greenwald. They worked to
meet in Hong Kong. Greenwald got his
news organization, The Guardian, on board and went to the autonomous Chinese
territory.
Getting to meet took a few cloak
and daggerish twists and turns. On June
2, 2013, Greenwald and Poitras arrived in Hong Kong. They were to look for a man holding a Rubik’s
Cube. It finally happened, and Greenwald proceeded to question Snowden about
who he was and what and why he was planning the exposé of government programs.
After hours and hours of
interviews, the author was sure that Snowden was the real deal. Greenwald started writing articles and was
ready to publish. There was some back
and forth as lawyers got involved.
Taking on the huge machine of state security would not be without
corporate risk for the Guardian.
Soldiering on, Greenwald finally broke the scoop.
Boy, did it break. The sheer volume of material made it
impossible to ignore. The initial
reaction was somewhat positive and Glenn spoke on network news talk shows.
The tsunami of revelations seemed
unending as it does in No Place to Hide, the
book Greenwald has written to document the event. It is mind boggling how the three dealt with
tens of thousands of files in the ten days in Hong Kong.
The third chapter, Collect It All is page after page of
Power Point documents, internal messages and descriptions of programs to
capture all the world’s electronic signals.
The NSA goes to a lot of effort to scour networks for literally
everything digital. They are not without
help.
Most notoriously, your friendly
social media and communications companies on the Internet give over whatever
the government wants. A graphic on page
108 has the logos of Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Google, Skype, AOLmail, Youtube,
and Paltalk.com. Other than Paltalk, if
you are at all connected to the Internet, it is unlikely that you have not used
at least one, if not most of the services.
Those companies denied giving the
NSA unlimited access, but only Yahoo fought vigorously against being part of
it. They lost in a judgment by the
secret FISA Court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court). The evidence from Snowden’s revelations makes
it clear the companies willingly comply and in the case of Microsoft, with
gusto. Remember that the next time you
“Skype” someone.
There are other corporate
“partnerships” as well as close relationships with the English speaking
countries and some other nations. The
system also can tap into fiber optic cables with programs having cute names
like BLARNEY, FAIRVIEW, OAKSTAR and STORMBREW.
The attitude is best expressed by the graphic on page 97 that states the
“NEW COLLECTION POSTURE” is to “Partner it all, Sniff it all, Know it all,
Collect it all, Process it all, Exploit it all.”
Of course, if one has nothing to
hide, what is a little intrusion into our personal communication if we are
being kept safe? Wrong on both counts
and Greenwald addresses them.
In the chapter The Harm Of Surveillance, Greenwald cites the words of Justice
Brandeis on the makers of the constitution having, “sought to protect Americans
in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government,
the right to be let alone.”
That is the point. None of us would want to be stripped naked
before the world and neither would we want our inner thoughts all exposed no
matter how innocent.
Consider Google mogul, Eric
Schmidt’s statement, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know,
maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Then there is Facebook billionaire, Mark
Zuckerberg, who said privacy in the digital age is not now “a social
norm.” Those two only believe in that
for their users. They go in for privacy
in a big way. Zuckerberg bought the
neighboring houses for tens of millions to guarantee his peace. Schmidt’s company banned employees from
talking to CNET after they published his personal information.
As to all the vacuuming of our
lives’ information insuring our safety, it’s a joke. The president’s own advisory panel concluded
it is unnecessary. Congressional panels
and a bipartisan foundation have said as much.
Locally, we know it as well. All
that electronic magic did nothing to stop the marathon bombers.
After all the evidence Glenn
marshals, he says all he really needs to, “The risk of any American dying in a
terror attack is infinitesimal, considerably less than being struck by
lightning…”
The intelligence community’s
supporters started pushing back, not so much against the evidence but the
messengers. CBS Face The Nation host,
Bob Schieffer, called Snowden narcissistic and compared him unfavorably to
Martin Luther King. When someone uses an
n word and MLK to disparage you, they are not attacking the substance.
Other establishment journos took
punches. Meet the Press’ David Gregory
all but demanded Greenwald’s arrest. New York Times financial columnist,
Andrew Ross Sorkin, called for Snowden’s apprehension and suggested Glenn’s.
Greenwald noted with much irony
“That a reporter for the Times, which had fought all the way to the Supreme
Court in order to publish the Pentagon Papers, would advocate my arrest was a
potent sign of the devotion of many establishment journalists to the US
government: after all, criminalizing investigative journalism would have a
grave impact on that paper and its employees.”
It would be a bipartisan attack
from scribblers and pundits right and left.
To be fair, Greenwald and Snowden did have their defenders, but the
onslaught from the big boys of the Fourth Estate was not their finest hour.
The attacks on Snowden and
Greenwald were all mostly ad hominem with some lies. If there were truth to the
idea that he had endangered national security, it should come out. That it has not speaks volumes. The two men along with Laura have acquitted
themselves well.
Snowden’s fear in exposing himself
was that as he told Greenwald, “his revelations might be greeted with apathy
and indifference, which would mean he had unraveled his life and risked
imprisonment for nothing.” To date, the
controversy would seem to mean his effort was a success. Ah but the state is a cold engine that will
grind on and might be able to count on us taking our eye off the ball. If that is so, it will be a travesty. What Snowden did was a courageous and noble
act. If he is let down, we probably
deserve what we get.
Meanwhile, remember the words of Boston ward boss Martin Lomasney when
you feel the need to expose yourself on social media, "Never write if you can speak;
never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink."
You can be sure real terrorists
understand that.
