NO
PLACE TO HIDE
Edward
Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
By Glenn
Greenwald
Illustrated.
259 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. $27.
“My position was straightforward,” Glenn Greenwald writes. “By
ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should
be held accountable for them.” You break the law, you pay the price: It’s that
simple.
But it’s not
that simple, as Greenwald must know. There are laws against government
eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are laws against leaking official
government documents. You can’t just choose the laws you like and ignore the
ones you don’t like. Or perhaps you can, but you can’t then claim that it’s all
very straightforward.
Greenwald
was the go-between for Edward Snowden and some of the newspapers that reported
on Snowden’s collection of classified documents exposing huge eavesdropping by
the National Security Agency, among other scandals. His story is full of
journalistic derring-do, mostly set in exotic Hong Kong. It’s a great yarn,
which might be more entertaining if Greenwald himself didn’t come across as so
unpleasant. Maybe he’s charming and generous in real life. But in “No Place to
Hide,” Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every
issue is “straightforward,” and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of
something he calls “the authorities,” who control everything for their own
nefarious but never explained purposes.
There are
narcissists like Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. These are self-canonized
men who feel that, as saints, they are entitled to ignore the rules that
constrain ordinary mortals. Greenwald notes indignantly that Assange was being
criticized along these lines “well before he was accused of sex crimes by two
women in Sweden.” (Two decades ago the British writer Michael Frayn wrote a
wonderful novel and play called “Now You Know,” about a character similar to
Assange.)
Then there
are political romantics, played in this evening’s performance by Edward
Snowden, almost 31 years old, with the sweet, innocently conspiratorial
worldview of a precocious teenager. He appears to yearn for martyrdom and,
according to Greenwald, “exuded an extraordinary equanimity” at the prospect of
“spending decades, or life, in a supermax prison.”
And
Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary —
Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and
he is the man who will topple it. Sounding now like Herbert Marcuse with his
once fashionable theory of “repressive tolerance,” Greenwald writes about “the
implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: Pose no challenge and you have
nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least
tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine. Put differently, you must refrain from
provoking the authority that wields surveillance powers if you wish to be
deemed free of wrongdoing. This is a deal that invites passivity, obedience and
conformity.”
Throughout “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald quotes any person or
publication taking his side in any argument. If an article or editorial in The
Washington Post or The New York Times (which he says “takes direction from the
U.S. government about what it should and shouldn’t publish”) endorses his view
on some issue, he is sure to cite it as evidence that he is right. If Margaret
Sullivan, the public editor (ombudsman, or reader representative) of The Times,
agrees with him on some controversy, he is in heaven. He cites at length the
results of a poll showing that more people are coming around to his notion that
the government’s response to terrorism after 9/11 is more dangerous than the
threat it is designed to meet.
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?
Through all
the bombast, Greenwald makes no serious effort to defend as a matter of law the
leaking of official secrets to reporters. He merely asserts that “there are
both formal and unwritten legal protections offered to journalists that are
unavailable to anyone else. While it is considered generally legitimate for a
journalist to publish government secrets, for example, that’s not the case for
someone acting in any other capacity.”
Here at
last, I thought, is something Greenwald and I can agree on. The Constitution is
for everyone. There shouldn’t be a special class of people called “journalists”
with privileges like publishing secret government documents.
But no.
Greenwald’s only problem with the idea of a journalist’s privilege is that some
people don’t recognize that he’s a journalist. He is right that he is just as
entitled to this honor as Bob Woodward. But so is everyone else. 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. And that’s
a good thing.
The Snowden
leaks were important — a legitimate scoop — and we might never have known about
the N.S.A.'s lawbreaking if it hadn’t been for them. Most leaks from large
bureaucracies are “good” leaks: no danger to national security, no harm to
innocent people, information the public ought to have.
The trouble
is this: Greenwald says that Snowden told him to “use your journalistic
judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that
can be revealed without harm to any innocent people.” Once again, this
testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think.
Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly — but
are you? And even if you do trust Greenwald’s judgment, which on the evidence
might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous?
The question is who decides. 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. 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. But ultimately you can’t square
this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn
Greenwald.
Greenwald’s
notion of what constitutes suppression of dissent by the established media is
an invitation to appear on “Meet the Press.” On the show, he is shocked to be
asked by the host David Gregory, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted
Snowden, . . . why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”
Greenwald was so stunned that “it took a minute to process that he had actually
asked” such a patently outrageous question.
And what was
so outrageous? Well, for starters, Greenwald says, the “to the extent”
formulation could be used to justify any baseless insinuation, like “To the
extent that Mr. Gregory has murdered his neighbors. . . .” 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? But Greenwald seems to feel he is beyond having to
defend himself. Even asking the question, he said, amounts to “an extraordinary
assertion” that “journalists could and should be prosecuted for doing
journalism.”
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.
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. 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.) This 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. This isn’t Easter and
these are not eggs.
Correction: May 22, 2014
An
earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to the extent that the
journalist Glenn Greenwald, the author of “No Place to Hide,” acted as a
“go-between” for Edward Snowden with the newspapers that first reported on
various aspects of Snowden’s collection of classified documents. While
Greenwald contributed reporting on the story to several of those papers, he did
not do so for all of them.
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