Books
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Snowden’s Story, Behind the Scenes
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
May 12, 2014
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 fromhundreds 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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