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NY Times MAY 12, 2014
Snowden’s Story, Behind the Scenes
‘No Place to Hide,’ by Glenn Greenwald
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
NO PLACE TO HIDE
Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
By Glenn Greenwald
Illustrated. 259 pages. Metropolitan Books. $27.
The title of the journalist Glenn Greenwald’s impassioned new book, “No
Place to Hide,” comes from a chilling observation made in 1975 by
Senator Frank Church, then chairman of a select committee on
intelligence. The United States government, he said, had perfected “a
technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go
through the air.” That capability, he added, could at any time “be
turned around on the American people, and no American would have any
privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone
conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to
hide.”
That was nearly 40 years ago, and as the documents leaked last year by
the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed,
the N.S.A.’s ability to spy on our daily lives has grown exponentially
to Orwellian proportions. The documents provided by Mr. Snowden revealed
that the agency has an ability to monitor or collect information from
hundreds of millions of people around the globe, that it has broken into
the communications links of major data centers across the world, that it
has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption that protects
sensitive data on the Internet, and that, according to its own records,
it has broken privacy laws or exceeded its authority thousands of times
a year. The first journalist Mr. Snowden approached by email was Glenn
Greenwald, a columnist for The Guardian and former constitutional lawyer
who had frequently written about civil liberties, the dangers of
enhanced executive power, and surveillance abuses in post-Sept. 11
America. (Mr. Greenwald has since left The Guardian to work with Pierre
Omidyar, the founder of eBay, on building a new media venture, which
includes the news site The Intercept, of which Mr. Greenwald, Laura
Poitras and Jeremy Scahill are founding editors.)
In “No Place to Hide,” Mr. Greenwald recounts the story of how he and
Ms. Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, traveled to Hong Kong to meet with
Mr. Snowden and the race to publish articles based on the documents he
provided, all the while fearful of authorities’ closing in. The outlines
of this story will be familiar to readers who followed it in real time
last year, and to readers of the recent book “The Snowden Files” (by the
Guardian reporter Luke Harding), just as much of the material here about
the N.S.A. will be familiar to readers of articles that have appeared in
The Guardian (many with Mr. Greenwald’s byline), The Washington Post and
The New York Times.
“No Place to Hide” is enlivened by reproductions of dozens of
fascinating documents from the Snowden archive that help illustrate the
N.S.A.’s methodology and that showcase its strange corporatelike
boosterism (complete with sometimes corny graphics). And Mr. Greenwald
fleshes out his portrait of Mr. Snowden with fresh observations from
their exchanges. He amplifies our understanding of the N.S.A.’s sweeping
ambitions, methods and global reach, and provides detailed insights into
what he calls the agency’s “corporate partnerships,” which “extend
beyond intelligence and defense contractors to include the world’s
largest and most important Internet corporations and telecoms.”
For instance, the agency’s Stormbrew program, Mr. Greenwald writes,
“gives the N.S.A. access to Internet and telephone traffic that enters
the United States at various ‘choke points’ on U.S. soil. It exploits
the fact that the vast majority of the world’s Internet traffic at some
point flows through the U.S. communications infrastructure — a residual
by-product of the central role that the United States had played in
developing the network.” According to the N.S.A., he says, Stormbrew “is
currently comprised of very sensitive relationships with two U.S.
telecom providers (cover terms ARTIFICE and WOLFPOINT)”; the identity of
such corporate partners, he adds, “is one of the most closely guarded
secrets in the N.S.A.”
Mr. Greenwald portrays Mr. Snowden — regarded by some as a heroic
whistle-blower, by others as a traitor — as a courageous idealist who
felt he needed to act on his beliefs. That outlook, Mr. Greenwald
suggests, was partly shaped by books Mr. Snowden read growing up — Greek
mythology and “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell, which
convinced Mr. Snowden that, in his own words, “it is we who infuse life
with meaning through our actions and the stories we create with them.”
Mr. Snowden also confided “with a hint of embarrassment,” Mr. Greenwald
writes, that video games had taught him certain lessons. As Mr. Snowden
put it: “The protagonist is often an ordinary person, who finds himself
faced with grave injustices from powerful forces and has the choice to
flee in fear or to fight for his beliefs. And history also shows that
seemingly ordinary people who are sufficiently resolute about justice
can triumph over the most formidable adversaries.”
In the course of this book, Mr. Greenwald describes how he received his
first communication from Mr. Snowden on Dec. 1, 2012, though he had no
idea who it was from. The email came from someone calling himself
Cincinnatus and urged Mr. Greenwald to begin using PGP encryption so
that Cincinnatus could communicate with him securely. Busy with other
projects, Mr. Greenwald procrastinated about installing the encryption
program, and Mr. Snowden was only able to make contact with him months
later, through Ms. Poitras.
According to Mr. Greenwald, Mr. Snowden would later describe his
frustration: “Here am I ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life,
to hand this guy thousands of Top Secret documents from the nation’s
most secretive agency — a leak that will produce dozens if not hundreds
of huge journalistic scoops. And he can’t even be bothered to install an
encryption program.”
The most gripping sections of “No Place to Hide” recount Mr. Greenwald
and Ms. Poitras’s 10-day trip to Hong Kong, where they and The
Guardian’s veteran correspondent Ewen MacAskill met with Mr. Snowden in
his hotel room. Mr. Greenwald describes the tradecraft they employed
(removing batteries from their cellphones, or placing the phones in the
minibar refrigerator) to avoid detection; his initial five-hour,
litigatorlike grilling of Mr. Snowden; and the “giddy gallows humor”
that later crept into their conversations (“I call the bottom bunk at
Gitmo,” Mr. Snowden reportedly joked).
Mr. Greenwald writes that Mr. Snowden said one turning point in his
decision to become a leaker came in 2010, when he was working as an
N.S.A. contractor in Japan. “The stuff I saw really began to disturb
me,” Mr. Snowden recalled. “I could watch drones in real time as they
surveilled the people they might kill.” He added: “I watched N.S.A.
tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of
just how invasive U.S. surveillance capabilities had become. I realized
the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening”
Substantial sections of this book deal not with Mr. Greenwald’s
relationship with Mr. Snowden and the N.S.A., but with his combative
view of “the establishment media,” which he has denounced for “glaring
subservience to political power” and to which he condescends as inferior
to his more activist kind of journalism.
In “No Place to Hide,” Mr. Greenwald is critical of the process by which
publications like The Washington Post, The New York Times and The
Guardian speak with government officials before publishing sensitive
articles dealing with national security issues; he contends that this
process allows the “government to control disclosures and minimize, even
neuter, their impact.” He also makes self-dramatizing boasts about his
own mission: “Only audacious journalism could give the story the power
it needed to overcome the climate of fear the government had imposed on
journalists and their sources.”
In one passage, Mr. Greenwald makes the demonstrably false assertion
that one “unwritten rule designed to protect the government is that
media outlets publish only a few such secret documents, and then stop,”
that “they would report on an archive like Snowden’s so as to limit its
impact — publish a handful of stories, revel in the accolades of a ‘big
scoop,’ collect prizes, and then walk away, ensuring that nothing had
really changed.” Many establishment media outlets obviously continue to
pursue the Snowden story. Further, many of Mr. Greenwald’s gross
generalizations about the establishment media do a terrible disservice
to the many tenacious investigative reporters who have broken important
stories on some of the very subjects like the war on terror and
executive power that Mr. Greenwald feels so strongly about.
When Mr. Greenwald turns his fervor to the issue of surveillance and its
implications for ordinary citizens’ civil liberties, he is far more
credible. Sometimes eloquent. He places the N.S.A.’s current activities
in historical perspective with the F.B.I.’s Cointelpro program to target
political groups and individuals, begun in 1956 and ended in 1971. And
he delivers a fierce argument in defense of the right of privacy,
quoting the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous dissent in the
1928 case Olmstead v. United States, of the founding fathers’ efforts
“to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions
and their sensations.”
The makers of our Constitution, Brandeis argued, conferred “the right to
be let alone.”
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