Glenn Greenwald’s detailed and vivid explanation of how Edward Snowden blew the lid off US surveillance system is chilling, engaging and thought-provoking, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
We were to go to the third floor of the hotel... once we got to the third floor, we were supposed to ask the first hotel employee we ran into whether there was a restaurant open. The question would signal Snowden, who would be hovering nearby, that we had not been followed. Inside the designated room, we were to wait on a couch near a giant alligator (a room decoration)... we had two different meeting times: 10:00 and 10:20. If Snowden failed to arrive within two minutes of the first time, we were to leave the room and come back at the second. ‘But how will we know it’s himIJ’ I asked laura. ‘He will be carrying a Rubik’s Cube,’ she said”.
Glenn Greenwald’s book on how Edward Snowden blew the lid off America’s surveillance system is not short of any element to make for a political thriller. last year in May, he went to Hong Kong to meet an absolutely anonymous source who offered to furnish evidence of the American Government’s spying techniques. What followed was one of the biggest uncoverings of the myths about national security and information privacy by the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The book chronicles the journey of Greenwald, Snowden, and documentary filmmaker laura Poitras in revealing the “unprecedented abuse of power” by the NSA. Poitras is known for her fierce and fierceless work. She has shot her films under the most dangerous circumstances, for instance during the height of the worst violence of the Iraq War, she travelled to the Sunni triangle to shoot a film. Another time, she travelled to Yemen to spend months with Osama Bin laden’s bodyguard and driver to prepare for her work.
The book begins when Greenwald, a renowned lawyer, journalist and writer, receives cryptic messages from a sources calling himself Cincinnatus, after lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman farmer in the 5 BC who was appointed the dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. It takes several attempts by Greenwald to have an online interaction with the source (who later turns out to be Snowden) because of the innumerable online fallacies. In the process, several other horrifying facts are revealed, such as that the American Government has the authority to remotely access people’s cellphones and laptops and turn them into listening devices, or that the largest internet companies — Google, Facebook, Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo!, YouTube, Apple — had joined an NSA programme through which the agency had collections directly from their servers. Snowden, however, is uncompromisingly adamant that Greenwald has his online interactions encrypted without which it would be a cakewalk for the Government to locate them. Having failed repeatedly, Poitras joins Greenwald and schedules a meeting with Snowden in Hong Kong.
What follows in the book then is one startling revelation after the other. Greenwald writes that the American Government could continue electronic surveillance approved by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, a court which almost nobody has seen. But once the NSA obtains FISA’s permission, it can target any foreign national for surveillance and even compel internet companies (from Google to Facebook) to hand over any information. He also says that “the NSA was secretly and indiscriminately collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Virtually nobody had any idea that the Obama administration was doing any such thing”. Greenwald claims that the practice of hacking is widespread as well. “One NSA document indicates that the agency has succeeded in infecting at least 15,000 individual computers with a type of malware called Quantum Insertion.”
Against the argument that it is required for national security and to prevent terrorist catastrophes such as 9/11, Greenwald writes: “It is far more of a slogan than an actual argument... much of the data collection conducted by the NSA has manifestly nothing to do with terrorism or national security.” He cites the examples of the spying on Brazilian oil giant Petrobas or spying on an economic summit.
This book compels us to reconsider the relation between the state’s authority to know and the individual’s right to not share information. Greenwald puts forward the very pertinent debate between morality and amorality. He has not only been articulate but has narrated the details for the comprehension of the layman. His account is supremely detailed with quotes, graphs, facts and statistics.
Along with the political issues, a very significant issue which the book raises is that of journalistic ethics. He refers to multiple news organisations that had both supported and discarded their claims. Right from the beginning, Greenwald mentions how he reported it all to The Guardian and the numerous turns and twists that happened in due course, be it the discussions within The Guardian or the Government enquiries that the newspaper had to handle.
Greenwald is, at the same time, critical of the methodology of investigative journalism in the West. He laments the ‘establishment media’, and sees it as the state’s tool, manipulated by Governmental authority already: “Not only had The Guardian agreed, in secret, to destroy its documents but, without consulting or advising Snowden or me, it had given them to the very newspaper Snowden had excluded because he did not trust its close and subservient relationship to the US Government (New York Times)”.
His concluding line reinforces that the objective of political journalism should be to promote the human capacity to reason and make decisions. We will still have to wait and watch if that prevails with triumph eventually, but this book is a commendable project contributing to that hope. It’s a must-read full of information and passion, and lots of appreciation for the young Snowden who gave up his luxurious life and career in the same pursuit.
No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald; Penguin, Rs599