Blowing whistle on eavesdropping
Author suggests U.S. cyber spying benefits economy, not just security
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
By Glenn Greenwald Signal/McClelland & Stewart
To some a patriotic martyr, for others a traitor, Edward Snowden is undeniably and admirably jaunty in the face of extreme danger.
Last May, Snowden, then a 29-year-old contractor on leave from the National Security Agency, met with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong, where he gave them a world-changing scoop: Supported by thousands of documents downloaded from his employer, Snowden revealed that the NSA has been engaged in a massive global campaign of cybernetic espionage, a far-reaching invasion of privacy that involved intercepting billions of communication events (including phone calls, email s and Skype conversations) every day.
Snowden’s blockbuster story implicated not just the United States government, but also many close allies such as Canada and the United Kingdom as well as some of the largest corporations in the world, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
“I call bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Snowden quipped as Greenwald and his fellow journalists starting writing up the startling disclosure. As it happens, Snowden has so far been able to evade jail for his epic security breach, finding protection first in Hong Kong and now in Moscow where, in Greenwald’s words, the former NSA employee safely resides “under the shield of political asylum.”
The fact that Snowden has received a measure of protection from the anti-democratic govern- ments of China and Russia has made him vulnerable to both sober criticism and scurrilous nationalist innuendo.
Because of the vast dust storm of accusations generated by Snowden’s revelations, Greenwald’s No Place to Hide is not a dispassionate rehearsal of the facts of the case. Rather, it is a spiky and largely convincing polemic making a few essential points: It argues that Snowden is a legitimate whistleblower rather than a turncoat; that the NSA is out of control and aiming at “the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide.”
It further argues that NSA electronic eavesdropping is motivated not by anti-terrorism but by a desire to shore up U.S. economic hegemony; that Greenwald and his colleague are practising legitimate journalism while mainstream publications like The New York Times have been far too timid in criticizing government misconduct.
A seasoned litigator before he found his vocation as a muckraker, Greenwald makes a compelling case but not an airtight one. Like many lawyers, he tends to indulge in overkill, offering so many different arguments that he occasionally shades into contradiction.