No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

Maybe the best way to review NPTH here is to repost something I wrote for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Lots of links in that piece, but those won't show up here:Glenn Greenwald spends the last third of his excellent new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State, exposing the mentality and function of pseudo-journalists like David Gregory who are in fact better understood as courtiers to power. So it was kind of Michael Kinsley to offer himself up today as living proof of Greenwald's arguments.In a New York Times book review, Kinsley says:"The question is who decides [what to publish]. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government."Pause for a moment to let that sink in. How can the government have ultimate decision-making power consistent with the First Amendment with regard to the publication of leaks? As Kinsley himself goes on to say, "You can't square this circle." Indeed. Unless you believe the government should be able to impose prior restraint on the publication of anything it deems secret. Unless you want to argue that the Constitution should be amended accordingly. Unless you believe the government should have been able to prevent the publication of, say, the Pentagon Papers (it certainly tried).By the way, that "in a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are)" is worth pausing to consider. Not just for the pretentious use of pace, which I admit is amusing, but more for the childlike notion that America is a democracy and there's nothing more to be said about it. It's almost like Kinsley has never heard of gerrymandering, or doesn't understand that when voters are no longer choosing their politicians and politicians are now choosing their voters, democracy isn't what's at work. It's almost like he's never heard of former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson's argument that modern America is best understood as an oligarchy (pro tip for Kinsley: oligarchies and democracies are not the same thing). It's almost like he's never even heard of Noam Chomsky (more on whom below -- for now, suffice to say that Chomsky is great at explaining people like Kinsley, who are simultaneously sophisticated about irrelevancies and simple-minded about fundamentals).Anyway, never fear, "No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making -- whatever it turns out to be -- should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay.""Whatever it turns out to be"? Kinsley has already explained the "decision must ultimately be made by the government." By comparison, does it really matter what specific mechanism the government then decides on? This is a lot like conceding that the government should have the power to execute American citizens without any recognizable due process, then confining the argument merely to mechanics (Terror Tuesdays, anyone? Due Process just means there is a process that you do?). In both cases, the government's arguments and those of its media flunkies are indistinguishable.(Again, see Chomsky below on the propagandistic technique of narrowing the range of acceptable debate, and then permitting vigorous discussion only within that narrow range.)And here's a bit of the current reality of what Kinsley breezily refers to as a government "usually overprotective of its secrets." Secrecy metastasis would be a far better way of describing what's going on in America, where the government knows more and more about the citizenry and the citizenry knows less and less about the government (otherwise known as "Kinsleyan Democracy").By the way, if we were to implement the Kinsleyan notion that the government be vested with ultimate decision-making authority with regard to the publication of any information the government itself has stamped secret, what do you think would be the impact on secrecy metastasis? Do you think there would be less secrecy? Or even more secrecy abuse?Ah, forget I said it. Silly question. It's not like the government has any history at all of using secrecy to cover up incompetence, corruption, and criminality.Kinsley is a guy who's spent his adult life as a journalist -- or at least pretending to be one -- and it's as though he has no notion at all of George Orwell's pithy definition: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." Now, if Kinsley wants to cede his journalistic autonomy to the government (I think Matt Taibbi would have said "journalistic balls," but there is only one Taibbi. I'm halfway through his new book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, another study of Kinsleyan Democracy, and it is awesome), that's fine. Kinsley pretty clearly prefers the role of servile government flack to that of independent journalist. But would it really be healthy for the republic if all people calling themselves journalists were in fact doing government PR work? Surely we have enough of that already?There are so many other unintentional instances of Kinsley's status as an exemplar of regulatory capture, of his own person functioning as elegant proof of Greenwald's arguments. He calls Greenwald "the go-between for Edward Snowden and the newspapers that reported on Snowden's collection of classified documents." I'm guessing he settled on "go-between" because James Clapper had already used "accomplice"...?Also, did you know that Greenwald is a "self-righteous sourpuss" (my God, who still uses this word? People who like to say "pace," I guess). Or maybe you didn't care? I get so tired of these astonishingly shallow critiques. How much you might want to disguise your disgust with the Kinsleys of the world is primarily a tactical question, and different people will arrive at different conclusions. But if you're not disgusted, if you're not in fact outraged, by the government criminality and journalistic complicity Greenwald chronicles in No Place to Hide, then at best you're not paying attention. Criticizing the demeanor of someone uninterested in concealing his disgust reveals a warped set of priorities and a pernicious set of allegiances.As for substance, for all his flamboyant displays of largely irrelevant erudition (Henry James, Michael Frayn, Herbert Marcuse... bingo! And this guy calls Assange a narcissist?), Kinsley comes across most fundamentally as... a simpleton:"Greenwald doesn't seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that people agree with him undermines his own argument that 'the authorities' brook no dissent. No one is stopping people from criticizing the government or supporting Greenwald in any way. Nobody is preventing the nation's leading newspaper from publishing a regular column in its own pages dissenting from company or government orthodoxy. If a majority of citizens now agree with Greenwald that dissent is being crushed in this country, and will say so openly to a stranger who rings their doorbell or their phone and says she's a pollster, how can anyone say that dissent is being crushed? What kind of poor excuse for an authoritarian society are we building in which a Glenn Greenwald, proud enemy of conformity and government oppression, can freely promote this book in all media and sell thousands of copies at airport bookstores surrounded by Homeland Security officers?"There are several problems with this bit of self-indulgence.First, Greenwald never argues that the authorities (and why the scare quotes? Kinsley's the one who wants the government to be able to enforce total secrecy. If that's not "the authorities," what is?), "brook no dissent." This is just a straw man, the kind of fake argument people trot out when they can't respond to the real one, or when the voices in their heads get so loud they can no longer hear the actual conversation. Greenwald never argues that there is no dissent in America or that the First Amendment Kinsley is so keen to abridge is doing nothing to protect free speech. His argument is more akin to what Noam Chomsky has said about propaganda:"One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate."Chomsky also had this to say. See if you can recognize Kinsley in here:"Propaganda very often works better for the educated than it does for the uneducated. This is true on many issues. There are a lot of reasons for this, one being that the educated receive more of the propaganda because they read more. Another thing is that they are the agents of propaganda. After all, their job is that of commissars; they're supposed to be the agents of the propaganda system so they believe it. It's very hard to say something unless you believe it. Other reasons are that, by and large, they are just part of the privileged elite so they share their interests and perceptions."And here's how Kinsley misinterprets the section on David Gregory's infamous Meet the Press "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden... why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" question:"But Greenwald does not deny that he has 'aided and abetted Snowden.' So this particular question was not baseless. Furthermore, it was a question, not an assertion -- a perfectly reasonable question that many people were asking, and Gregory was giving Greenwald a chance to answer it: If the leaker can go to prison, why should the leakee be exempt?"As Greenwald notes in the book, Gregory's "perfectly reasonable question" was in fact a rare textbook instance of "When did you stop beating your wife?" Someone with Kinsley's ostentatious learning ought to know that such a loaded question is by design impossible to answer. It can only be responded to via an attack on the question's false premises, which is what Greenwald did in that interview and then again in the book. Kinsley ignores all this and tries to argue instead that, "A-ha, Greenwald does not deny beating his wife, you see?" Which is as asinine as it is dishonest."Greenwald's determination to misinterpret the evidence can be comic. He writes about attending a bat mitzvah ceremony where the rabbi told the young woman that 'you are never alone' because God is always watching over you. 'The rabbi's point was clear,' Greenwald amplifies. 'If you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes.' I don't think that was the rabbi's point."I'm sure it wasn't -- it was merely the rabbi's unavoidable implication. Similarly, though the de facto end of the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press, and the advent of a new system of prior restraint, might not have been Kinsley's point, it's certainly his unavoidable implication. You'd think a guy who tosses around references to James and Frayn and Marcuse and all that would understand the difference. That he doesn't isn't comic at all. It's sad."As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible hand to assure that the right balance is struck."Well, there kind of is, though it takes an actual journalist to describe it. Here's Washington Post go-between -- sorry, reporter -- Barton Gellman explaining how he handles classified information in reporting on war and weapons. If you follow only one link in this post, make it this one -- it's that thoughtful, thought-provoking, and nuanced. I doubt Kinsley could understand it, but most people will find it illuminating."So what do we do about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second option.)"Yes, clearly these are the only two options.I know I'm being hard on Kinsley, but... is he dishonest? Or is he really this simple-minded?"This is not a straightforward or easy question."Pause for a moment to gaze in wonder at a guy who self-identifies as a journalist... and who just said that whether to lock up a journalist for publishing something the government wanted kept secret is not a straightforward or easy question."But I can't see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find."It's technically correct to say we can't have such a policy -- just as we can't have a policy that the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; or a policy that the people will be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures; or a policy that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Because these things are not "policies." They are constitutional guarantees -- explicit carve-outs from the broad powers we the people have otherwise granted the government. What we really can't have -- literally can't, because of the Bill of Rights -- are policies against those things. Like the policies Kinsley advocates.Kinsley claims that "Especially in the age of blogs, it is impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts."Really? I think a good working test of whether someone is a journalist, professional or otherwise, is whether he or she agrees with Kinsley. Because if you believe the government should have ultimate decision-making authority over what leaks to publish, you might be many things. But a real journalist isn't one of them.

Deacon SolomonReviewerToday I saw an article on the website of Investigative Reporters and Editors. The headline asks: Should law enforcement tell the public about new surveillance tech?I didn't bother to read the article because my journalist's education makes the content plain enough. Other Americans may remember a time (as I do) when the proper response to such a question was "What the hell kind of a question is that? Are you stupid or just plain crazy?"Too bad: many Americans no longer think that way. Our vaunted 'Land of the Free' is presently peopled by a lot of paranoid wimps who depend on government to protect them from any person, any thing, and any idea that might possibly scare them for any conceivable reason.Government, naturally, gives them what they ask for (We live in a democracy, right?) while it dreams up more 'scary' things from which to protect them. In short, many Americans think blanket surveillance is a Good Thing - until comes the day (soon, I hope) when they find themselves strapped down on a waterboard because secret police saw them speaking with or reading a book written by someone Big Sam doesn't like.Luckily, there are still some Americans who don't believe blanket surveillance is a Good Thing. They don't believe government has any right to listen to our phone calls, record our emails, snoop in our medicine chests, send murder squads into our homes, or poke its nose into our body cavities at airports.Noting some disparity between those who like and those who don't like surveillance, an enterprising journalist named Glenn Greenwald has written a book he calls 'No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State'. Greenwald's book could reunite Americans - those who like being watched and those who don't - because it will scare the livin' crap out of everybody who reads it.Mr. Greenwald is what I call a good writer, by which I mean that 'No Place to Hide' is well-organized, and the author's prose is an easy read for being both coherent and lively.Greenwald's 'Introduction' tells how he got interested in surveillance: He once made a career of civil rights and constitutional law. He took up journalism (political blogging) in the first few years of this century, when, as a lawyer, he grew more and more aware that our country was being run by a lot of dangerous cranks. Shortly after Greenwald took up blogging, the 'New York Times' reported that President Bush II secretly ordered warrantless, blanket surveillance of Americans' electronic communications.That's how and why, for the next few years, Mr. Greenwald got a living reporting dirt on the Bushmen. As Heaven and the world both now know, the Bushmen had no dearth of dirt on which to report. Of course, Greenwald's criticism of government and especially the Bushmen put him in the way of counterattacks by government, by the Bushmen, and by the many human and institutional actors within journalism who defended the Bushmen and their vicious, idiotic policy initiatives.Greenwald knew he was making enemies. But little did he realize that his treatment of government-by-perfidious cranks and his disdain of mainstream journalism would bring him a reward - a scoop - as big or bigger than any journalist probably ever hoped for or thought possible.Speaking now of 'No Place to Hide' (NPTH), Chapter 1 is titled 'Contact.' There, Greenwald tells how he was first contacted by Edward Snowden, a person of whom neither Greenwald nor anybody else had heard at the time.Snowden acted anonymously when first approaching Greenwald. He assumed the (to me) laughably melodramatic moniker, 'Cincinnatus.' Too bad: Greenwald had never heard of 'Cincinnatus,' either.When Greenwald found the first 'Cincinnatus' message in his email inbox, he ignored it. Over the next few weeks he ignored several more, believing they came from some kind of a nut. So it was through a third party - journalist and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitrus - that Greenwald and Snowden finally started 'talking' via encrypted email. The rest of the chapter tells how the three of them finally found their way onto the same page and agreed to meet in Hong Kong, there to deal in smoking-hot, national-security documents.Chapter 2, 'Ten Days in Hong Kong,' tells Greenwad's version of what went on in Hong Kong, tells of how well and how carefully Snowden had organized and stored and closely kept the many tens of thousands of electronic documents.No sooner did they get the documents (all on thumb drives) from Snowden than Greenwald used them to write two stories for 'The Guardian,' the newspaper that had paid for Greenwald's Hong Kong 'vacation.' The stories splashed around and over Washington, D.C. for the next couple of weeks and predictably left those embarrassed by them howling 'Murder! Treason! Kill the Swine!' and screaming for investigations.How the documents changed hands is told. How they were divided up, for obvious reasons, is not made plain. Surely no one person carried the whole trove back to the States - or to Rio - or wherever they were taken. If one mule got arrested, everything would be lost.My own surmise is that the world will never know any of those who might have taken part in that escapade beyond the few Greenwald named in the book. Regardless, he and his did the deal with Snowden and filed two stories, and then beat it the hell out of there.Snowden was spirited away by some Chinese hoteliers and eventually ended - as the world knows - in Russia. The chapter ends with Greenwald in a television studio at an undisclosed location sweating under a nasty, on-camera grilling by noxious 'journalists' who host noxious, daytime TV 'news' shows called 'Morning Joe' and 'Today.'Chapter 3, titled 'Collect It All,' fingers the NSA for precisely what it is and all it hopes to be in the future. Nothing in Chapter 3 is pretty except Greenwald's own prose and his take-down of the sneaking, treasonous creeps that establishment journalism calls 'our leaders.' Beautiful, black-and-white reproductions of secret NSA documents are replete with handy NSA graphics. The documents and the graphics amply support every last accusations that lawyer Greenwald hurls at the agency. And yes: there are lots of accusations.Chapter 3 is NOT an indictment; it is a nuclear 'smart-bomb' and it hits the target squarely. Of the 5 chapters in NPTH, 'Collect It All' is the meatiest and most laborious read because it does the bulk of the heavy lifting.Chapter 4 discusses 'The Harm of Surveillance'. Author Greenwald's essay explains for readers the numerous ways that a surveillance state does damage to us as individuals, to democracy in America, and to the nation at large. If you're one of those who cannot understand why people such as Greenwald and this writer preach that government surveillance will yet be the ruin of us and of our country, Chapter 4 is for you. Folks who read History and other sentient beings already know such stuff.Finally, Chapter 5 is dubbed 'The Fourth Estate,' because that's where Greenwald takes his lawyer's rhetorical ax to the likes of David Gregory and Michael Kinsley, and other yahoo 'journalists' who in this, that, or the other mainstream venue do their cussed, pathetic best to tar-and-feather Greenwald's credibility. The author disposes of their arguments in ways that look easy because, when their arguments are cut wide open (as good lawyers like Greenwald can do) readers see there's nothing but a few cubic feet of hot ventosity in the heads of David Gregory, Michael Kinsley, and the rest.Considering the entire Greenwald-Snowden-NSA surveillance scandal, this review will now make a long, complex story as short as possible: Edward Snowden gave Glenn Greenwald a huge cache of top-secret documents, the sum of which prove beyond any doubt that if you use the telephone, the Internet, or any other electronic communication device for any purpose whatsoever, the NSA hears every word you say and sees every message you send.Summing up, every American had best depend on this one thing: every word you say on the telephone and every message you post on the Internet can and will be used against you if ever for any reason something you've said or done or borrowed from the library makes Big Sam or some of his friends sore at you. It's there; it's real; it's really there, and there it is.Americans are privileged (and encouraged by government) to stick their heads in the sand at any time they choose. Americans are also privileged to rue the day, the hour, the minute, the second they chose to do so.

This book is about the current scandal involving the NSA's (National Security Agency, American government agency that spies on communications ) mass spying on the global communications (phone and computer) of the entire world. It is written by journalist Gleen Greenwald who was leaked many documents about what was going on by NSA contractor Edward Snowden.The fact the NSA is spying on global communications is not anything new, it's the size, scope and illegal nature of the spying that is causing the scandal, for example they were tracking every phone call made by users of AT&T (without needing to get a warrant) and were intercepting routers been sent abroad to put spying devices on them.This book follows Glenn's first meeting with Edward Snowden, basic information about what is in the documents, the release of the documents, the response to the leaking and what this means politically and philosophically.It is interesting to read about how the media handle the revealing of government secrets."Worse, I knew that the Post would dutifully abide by the unwritten protective rules that govern how the establishment media report on official secrets. According to these rules, which allow the government to control disclosures and minimize, even neuter, their impact, editors first go to officials and advise them what they intend to publish. National security officials then tell the editors all the ways in which national security will supposedly be damaged by the disclosures. A protracted negotiation takes place over what will and will not be published. At best, substantial delay results. Often, patently newsworthy information is suppressed. This is most likely what led the Post, when reporting the existence of CIA black sites in 2005, to conceal the identities of those countries in which prisons were based, thus allowing the lawless CIA torture sites to continue. ""This same process caused the New York Times to conceal the existence of the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping program for more than a year after its reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were ready to report it in mid-2004. President Bush had summoned the paper's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, and its editor in chief, Bill Keller, to the Oval Office to insist, ludicrously, that they would be helping terrorists if they revealed that the NSA was spying on Americans without the warrants required by law. The New York Times obeyed these dictates and blocked publication of the article for fifteen months--until the end of 2005, after Bush had been reelected (thereby allowing him to stand for reelection while concealing from the public that he was eavesdropping on Americans without warrants). Even then, the Times eventually ran the NSA story only because a frustrated Risen was about to publish the revelations in his book and the paper did not want to be scooped by its own reporter."A common defence for government spying is if your doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear, but unfortunately anybody that pisses off the authorities becomes the target for spying, both Martin Luther King and John Lennon were spied on by American government agencies and just knowing that authorities may be listening causes people to be more likely to accept the status que rather than risk attention by speaking out against injustice. And the files leaked show the information was been used for economic spying as well.It is also interesting to read about the character attacks unleashed on Greenwald and Snowden with all manner of name calling ( this a logical fallacy known as "ad hominem" because even if those claims are true it does not make any difference to the fact that the NSA are illegally spying on people). Government intimidation and bullying of journalists involved with the case is also covered."Internet freedom-- the ability to use the network without institutional constraints, social or state control, and pervasive fear-- is central to the fulfillment of that promise. Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen. That's what makes Snowden's revelations so stunning and so vitally important. By daring to expose the NSA's astonishing surveillance capabilities and its even more astounding ambitions, he has made it clear, with these disclosures, that we stand at a historic crossroads. Will the digital age usher in the individual liberation and political freedoms that the Internet is uniquely capable of unleashing? Or will it bring about a system of omnipresent monitoring and control, beyond the dreams of even the greatest tyrants of the past? Right now, either path is possible. Our actions will determine where we end up."

This is, as the title says, a book about Edward Snowden and the surveillance state in the US. The first part tells the story how Snowden got through to Greenwald (and Laura Poitras) and how he succeeded in getting the NSA papers published in the Guardian against heavy odds. In Greenwald's view, this was done by Snowden in a very rational and effective way, where he wanted to maximize the effect of the NSA's activities, not his own person. The only hitch in the plan was that Snowden got stuck in Russia instead of South America where he would have liked to go. After this, highly gripping and interesting part (but mostly already known) Greenwald immerses in the activities of the NSA and the role of the Obama administration in advancing surveillance in the US. The main impact of the Snowden leaks is surely that we know now in which ways the United States is following its own citizens and foreigners who are in some ways in contact with the US (as most of us who use internet, are). But the most disturbing thing is that the NSA program which was started in long ago and which got a big boost from the 9/11 attacks, has been actively and and enthusiastically been pursued by the Obama administration, which was supposed to be curbing these activities. Even the revelations have done nothing to restrain the US mass spying programs. Greenwald describes the recent activities to justify the spying and the possible consequences of mass spying. The final part of the book is the one not mentioned in the title and which probably accounts for the relative silence about the book in the media, at least in the media most directly criticized by Greenwald. In his opinion, the US news media is beholden to the government and the leading stars are now so close to the political and economic power that they have forgotten the basic role the the media as an independent and critical watchdog. A good example is that Washington Post (one of the worst lapdogs, together with New York Times) only published its story about the Snowden revelations when they got a tip form their government sources that Greenwald was about to publish the story (concerning the use of the big internet companies in the spying). And then Greenwald's story was more cautious, because they had been threatened by criminal prosecution... In any case Greenwald does not endear himself with the so called leftist liberal media (he does not even bother much to discuss Fox and its likes) .In the book, Greenwald does his best to make us ordinary people understand how pernicious the NSA spying is. I believe that most of us think that the US are just wasting their effort by collecting data about our more or less trivial activities, but the thing is that IF we get by chance caught in a web of suspicion, the data can be used to build up a case against almost anybody. As long as we are in the great swarm of small fish,we are safe, but who knows what can happen? When the swarm disappears and you are left alone, then the data concerning you can prove fatal.So this is a very dark book which leaves one very much disturbed and worried! Is Greenwald paranoid, am I becoming paranoid, or should I really worry about this? You choose,after reading the book!

Glenn Greenwald (along with The Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill) was the person who first broke the story about Edward Snowden, a young National Security Agency contractor who exposed the massive, illegal, international spying operation that was covertly being conducted, at first by the George W. Bush administration and then hugely expanded by President Barack Obama.Your interpretation of this book will therefore depend very much on what you think of its subject: is Edward Snowden a brave, whistle-blowing patriot, who forfeited a lucrative career in Hawaii and had to sever links with his girlfriend and family and risk a potential lifetime in prison, all to expose how anybody who uses mobile phones or the Internet, has no privacy whatsoever and that everything they do and say, every website they visit, message or email they send, every phonecall they make and social media they interact with, is all being hoovered up and stored by an organisation that has little effective oversight; or, is Snowden a cowardly traitor who illegally stole secrets and publicised them for the world to see and has therefore impeded the "war against terror", jeopardising the public's security for the sake of his own ego and personal agenda, taking refuge in that bastion of openness and democracy, Russia?Regardless of your take on this matter, the importance of the story itself is beyond debate and this is where the value of Greenwald's book lies. Greenwald breaks the story down into three highly readable sections: the first details how Snowden at first made contact with Greenwald and they met up in Hong Kong. This facet reads in some respect like a spy story: all encrypted communications and surreptitious meetings.The second section and perhaps the driest to read, covers the revelations themselves, illustrated with NSA PowerPoint presentations. This part covers what is actually happening, in terms of a global eavesdropping mission. The targets are not only the predictable bogeymen (Iran et al) but friendly countries like Germany and Mexico, along with spying on economic targets (oil businesses that rival US businesses) and diplomat targets such as the United Nations, all to give the US the upper hand when it comes to international negotiations.The third part of the book - and for me the most interesting - is Greenwald's analysis of the mainstream mass media's reaction to his revelations. In this part, Greenwald accuses a complacent media of taking a deferential position to power as their default setting and that those that challenge this convention are "irresponsible" "naive" or at worst, giving help to terrorists and therefore treasonous.No Place to Hide is a hugely important book that deserves the widest possible audience - perhaps Oliver Stone's forthcoming film will help raise it's profile. It is well written and highly engaging in most respects, even if the middle section loses its way somewhat. Author Glenn Greenwald's background is as a former litigator and as a consequence, the book has a certain courtroom, accusatory touch to it, which elevates it above mere dry reportage. Regardless of your position on this controversy, No Place to Hide will be extremely informative for you - a crucial book on the biggest national security leak in the history of the United States.

There is no way that I would call this a perfect book but it is very enlightening. Even if you have followed the Snowden case closely it is very useful to have the account laid out like this. Sometimes the author's style can grate a little — he refers to a past book on the subject not just as as book but as a "bestseller" — he is not a man to undersell!It does sometimes feel like a screenplay waiting to be produced but aside from the style (possibly the ego) of the writer this is well worth reading.The implications of such mass surveillance are worth thinking about properly and this book lays bare the scope of US ambition. It also is quite frightening in the way it documents how the US administration has lied about surveillance when specifically asked by those authorities to whom it is supposed to be accountable!

Glenn Greenwald collates all the various revelations that were published by The Guardian and the Washington Post and adds his own eloquent commentary.Not only should this book be required reading for every Amercian, every high-school student in America should be promptly provided with a copy, because it is only the younger generation who will be able to return America to constitutional government.Edward Snowden reminded Americans that every Federal government employee, from the President on down, and every member of the armed services takes an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” not to follow unconstitutional orders or perform unconstitutional acts, even when they are law of the land.Therefore, in order to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, if may sometimes be necessary to break the law or disobey orders. That is because the “supreme law of the land” as defined in the Constitution is the actual laws within the Constitution of the United States itself.The "supreme law of the land" means that no other law within the United States of America trumps or surpasses the power of the laws within the Constitution.Therefore, Edward Snowden may have broken the law, but he definitely did not violate the Constitution of the United States of America; instead, he defended the Constitution, just as his oath of office required.