Author: Glenn Greenwald
Title: “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the
U.S. Surveillance State”
Publication: 2014,
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt), ISBN 978-1-62779-073-4, 259 pages, hardcover (available
in paper, Kindle, author download, MP3, 259 pages, five chapters, Introduction
and Epilogue
The notes and index seem to be available online only at
Greenwald’s site,
here I have never seen this done with a
conventionally published book before. I
have to say something for buying a hardcopy and reading it on the DC Metro or
NYC subway. Doing so will attract
attention and conversation from other passengers, who wouldn’t notice what’s on
a Kindle or iPad.
The riveting film “CitizenFour” (Radius TWC, directed by
Laura Poitras) presents the Hong Kong meeting with Snowden and is discussed on my Movies blog Oct. 27, 2014. But I suspect this book will become a film in
its own right. The Weinstein Brothers must be pondering the idea.
So, let me get to my own review!
In fact, this book is a shocker. I could almost call it “Do Ask, Do Tell IV”
because it talks about many of the same kind of existential problems I covered
in DADT III. Glennwald probes and reflects and argues with himself about things
as if he were sitting on the Supreme Court.
His writing style, sentence structure, logic flow and world view seem a
lot like mine. I've noticed the same similarity with the work of two or three other men (artists) two generations younger than me. Lawyers
notice these similarities among various people!
Cognitive identity seems to be genetic.
It’s not that I necessarily agree with everything Greenwald
says. In fact, he attracted the ire of
gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan, with whom I share a lot of common
views.
As part of the background, it’s important note that
Greenwald lives in Brazil because US law (not yet recognizing same-sex marriage
at the federal level) prevents his marital partner David Miranda from getting a
visa to live in the US (Wikipedia,
link ). Change in marriage law may be an easier legal battle for him than the consequences
of his participation in Edward Snowden’s disclosures, although the exact status
of the latter is likely to vary with time.
The most captivating parts of the work are the “bookends”. In December 2012, Greenwald gets a mysterious
email from “Cincinnatus” and is told that there are folks who will share a lot
more with him if he will learn to use encryption, particularly for email. That is difficult for those not proficient in
shell script programming, and in fact Electronic Frontier Foundation has
announced an initiative, called “Let’s Encrypt”, to make encryption (related to
PGP) more usable by everyone by the end of 2015.
Greenwald let this slide for a while, until he came into
contact with documentary film-maker Laura Poitras. That led to the encounter in Edward Snowden
in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong at the end of May 2013. In the film, noted
above, Snowden takes over, and seems charismatic. No one seems to have more integrity.
The details of the encounter, reported in the book, track to
the film closely. (“Ten Days in Hong
Kong”, as a title, reminds me of the movie “
Seven Days in May”.) But what gets really interesting is the idea
that Greenwald would have published Snowden’s contents himself if the Guardian
didn’t meet his deadline. (How he could
enforce that, I’ll come back to.) He was
going to use a new domain name “NSAdisclosures.com”. That domain name does exist now, and
re-directs,
here. The
disclosures are in many pieces, including a program called PRISM, involving
major US Internet and telecommunications companies, especially Verizon. Part of the shocker is the way the government
had compelled the cooperation of Silicon Valley.
It’ important to remember the illegality of some of the NSA’s
activity: that is, spying on purely domestic activity without warrants, or with
(under FISA) only very weak supervision. Richard Nixon had done the same with
telephones a few decades before.
The third chapter of the book (“Collect It All”) is well
illustrated with black-and-white Visio-like diagrams of how NSA surveillance
works. I suspect that a future film will
animate this material (and cost some $$$ to do). “XKeyscore” gets particular attention. Also,
the NSA seems to have a particular fixation with Facebook (as opposed to all
other social media companies and formats), as if Mark Zuckerberg really rules
the world and has sole contact with extraterrestrials (or were one
himself). The NSA will also, as a
military DOD-authorized operation, hamper communication with a target, by
hacking or DDOS. The government will
probably say that this would happen only to prevent a terrorist attack. For example, the NSA, in this theory, might
interfere with someone who had returned from Syria and ISIS radicalizing others
at home.
The fourth chapter is “The Harm of Surveillance” and
Greenwald argues convincingly that the expectation of surveillance tends to
suppress dissent and compel social conformity.
That reminds me of the paranoia of my parents in the 1960s and 1970s,
both about radicalism (whether related to Civil Rights or to anti-Vietnam
protests) and then my homosexuality. My
parents would talk about “subversiveness”, as something that could lead enemies
to counter-attack and expropriate from those of us who led more sheltered,
suburban (and in the past, segregated) lives.
That matches concerns I developed in my young adulthood, that “anti-establishment”
rhetoric on the far left was about more than opposition to government; it
regarded upper middle class white people as “privileged” and as potential
individual targets of revolution. It’s happened
in history (look at Bolshevism) and it could happen again. In fact, the tendency of radical Islam to
target civilians is a secondary perversion of this kind of thinking. So, in my own experience, over decades of
adult life, is that surveillance is a relative thing. It can come from government, but it might
come from real enemies, too.
Greenwald explains well why "metadata" gathering compromises individual lives. In past generations (before attitudes toward sexual orientation improved), it could have outed people as homosexual. David Mixner, in his 1996 book "Stranger Among Friends", related a 1969 sting by the government against him with male partners apparently set up by Hoover-era wiretapping. Greenwald also argues here that metadata and other sweeping surveillance, which can install a chilling effect on personal life choices, wasn't instrumental in stopping several terror attacks that might have happened, or in preventing what happened in Boston in 2013. Plain old ground police work is what was needed.
I’ve written often, however, that the expectation of social
conformity is enforced another way: by the common practice now of employers
monitoring personal social media of associates.
This is far more significant in practice for most people than NSA
surveillance.
The fifth chapter (misnumbered by one) is “The Fourth Estate”,
and is perhaps the most challenging of all.
Greenwald examines the apparent contradictions within the journalism
world about journalistic “objectivity”.
Greenwald seems to have left his former career as a litigation attorney
to become an independent journalist. After the Snowden leaks, some members of the “formal
press” did maintain that he was indeed
not “one of them”, because, well, he didn’t report to a particular editor. But he has real contacts, with entities like
Salon and The Guardian, and his own businesses.
It seems that his “blogging” and “self-publishing” has always paid its
own way (a major contrast with mine). He
has always been able to “sell” his work without conventional hucksterism. He
doesn’t say who paid for all these last-minute intercontinental plane fares,
hotels, and special hardware. Maybe The Guardian did so, but it looks like he
makes enough from his journalism himself to pay for all this. That puts him in the category of an
independent film company or media producer, rather like Oprah Winfrey (that’s
probably good company). Whether he is an
“activist” or “reporter” may indeed matter to whether he can face US charges,
whether he can live here again or even could be extradited.
It’s not clear exactly what the law does demand of “reporters”
if someone dumps classified material into their laps. It also is not totally clear if the law would
treat me (an independent blogger who “subsidizes” his activity from other
personal assets) the same as a formal member of the “press” (which I would love
to become, maybe). In fact, particularly
in the years immediately following 9/11, people did share “tips” with me. Several times, I passed these on to
authorities (and at least one of these resulted in a 20-minute phone conversation
with an FBI agent from Philadelphia). In
2002, one file on an HTML file that would become a chapter in my second DADT
book was hacked, and overlaid with information that looked like it had to do
with relations between Russia and Finland. The government has not seized it, but as a legal matter, would I “own”
this if the hacked information was classified?
(That sounds more serious now, given how Putin is behaving.) Later in 2002, someone sent me a map of the sites of nuclear waste all over Russia.
I have been aware of the desirability of encryption for
several years, but, like Greenwald, have not had time to learn it. That may change in 2015, as I noted. But supposed I had learned to use encryption
before the end of 2012. With my own
catchy domain name and book series title (“do ask do tell”) might I have
attracted the contact from “Cincinnatus” instead of Greenwald? Again, the biggest “disadvantage” is that I cannot
show commercial success with my publishing, but Greenwald can. Maybe it helps
that he is 25 years younger. Had I been
contacted, would I have dismissed it as spam?
(There were “spammy” emails warning of 9/11 Labor Day weekend of 2001; I
got one of them.) Would I have paid my
own way to Hong Kong? (I could afford
it, but only because of estate money, not business operations). Could the NSA leak have wound up on my own “doaskdotell.com”
site? Would my ISP have objected? Does this violate “acceptable use policy”? Again, it seems murky where journalists and
bloggers have some responsibility to protect information they didn’t get
legally.
Greenwald is right that “journalistic objectivity” is a bit
of a myth. Anderson Cooper is always
chiding guests on their “moral compass”.
Some of them do seem in cahoots with the “neo-liberal” establishment,
and some (like Fox and The Washington Times) with conservatives. They do tend to be partisan.
It’s worthy of note to remember that in the 1990s, a
reporter for a Tacoma, WA newspaper was transferred to copy-editing for public
activism for lesbian causes, and the courts agreed with the “reporter
objectivity theory”. That was then.
Even if Greenwald is right, I find myself resisting being
asked to join and pimp “other people’s causes”, and people will say that I am
too “stuck up” to carry a picket sign.
This can get dangerous. No, I won’t nominate someone for the “Ice Bucket
Challenge”. Reason: Objectivity! I will report on things like homelessness, but
keep some comfortable personal distance from it. I might not get away with that forever,
unless I become part of the “legitimate Fourth Estate”.
The final episode in the book considers the detention of
Greenwald’s gay marriage partner David Miranda when he was transiting a London
airport. It’s important to note that,
early in the story, the government seems to have delayed a shipment of
encryption firmware to Greenwald’s home; then David’s laptop was stolen. Greenwald talks about the idea that the
government could try to destroy all of someone’s media (including thumb drives
and cloud copies).
Note that in the video embedded above, Greenwald talks with
Noam Chomsky.
