No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State Paperback – April 28, 2015

It is 4 AM and I have just finished reading, in one sitting, the Kindle download of a book that I only intended to skim because I thought that I knew the full story. What was compelling was encountering the courage and decency of this whistleblower and that of the few brave journalists willing to honestly tell his story. That and the justifiable contempt for those in the housebroken media and compromised government who felt the need to besmirch the character of those willing to bear witness to crimes that almost everyone else in a position to know chose to ignore. The result is a page turner survey of just what the Snowden leaks tell us about the creation of the modern surveillance state and a reminder of the deep wisdom of this nation's founders in insisting on the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. This is a brilliant book that you will want to pass on to that neighbor absolutely convinced that the hollowing out of liberty has made us safer. Glenn Greenwald reminds us just why the Guardian and Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in publishing the documents that Edward Snowden made available and how outrageous it is that his effort to inform the public of attacks on their freedom has left this brave young man a hunted fugitive.

A brief note before you purchase this book:
This is not a book written for the purpose of telling you the US government is watching your every step and every move, everyone knows that. And the author did not waste time replicating news articles you've already read through the media outlets. I finished this book within 5 hours, and thought it was well written and well worth your time.

Greenwald, one of the original journalists who revealed Snowden's leaks last year, did a remarkably good job on going over the history of U.S.'s surveillance tactics. In his new book, No Place to Hide, Greenwald briefly goes over his adventures/experience on meeting with Edward Snowden and revealing US's NSA surveillance program. Greenwald explains the difficulties and obstacles that were involved before the story went live, mostly by reluctant lawyers, and news agencies such as NYT and Washington Post. For those curious, Greenwald also explains in detail the true intentions of Edward Snowden.

Later chapters of the book reveal Greenwald's opinion on the recent NSA leaks, and his classification of US as a surveillance state.

Keep in mind that Greenwald was previously a columnist, and his writing style of a columnist is clearly seen throughout the book. This is not merely a book with facts, but a book with opinion, with logical and concrete evidence that not just the U.S., but other state actors are well, are progressing into what George Orwell wrote in his infamous 1984 novel (Orwellian state).

Greenwald ends the book by warning the consequences involved as we progress into the Orwellian state and the issue of journalists not being journalists, but being government puppets instead.

This is a highly recommended book for those who wish to read into detail one of the biggest government leaks in the history.

The answer to the question posed in the title of this review is a definite yes, and follows vacuously if, as the author of this book asserts, that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects data at the scale claimed. This scale covers every person on the planet, and therefore the NSA views everyone as a potential terrorist. Information on everyone is collected and then stored in the NSA’s data repositories, which indeed must be massive in order to store this magnitude of data. Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the company Booz-Allen-Hamilton (BAH), has revealed that the NSA is engaging in this activity. Snowden was placed by BAH in the NSA to engage in security work some of which was classified as Top Secret. As this book and ensuing documentaries reveal, because of moral and ethical reasons Snowden made the decision to abrogate the trust the NSA placed in him and put himself at risk for an extended prison term because of the information he chose to place in the public domain.

The author of this book makes a good case for the morality behind Snowden’s decision, and therefore readers who formally viewed Snowden as a “criminal” or a “narcissist” may make a different assessment of his character after finishing the book. There is no doubt that Snowden did not view his decision as one of self-aggrandizement, and in fact exercised restraint in the sense he chose to not reveal information that could put people at severe risk. It might be a leap to call Snowden a “hero”, but he certainly possesses a level of intestinal fortitude that is unmatched by anyone in the government, whether the United States government or otherwise.

The details of some of the revealed information are included in this book as images, with some of them actually looking as though they originated in PowerPoint presentations. That this may be the case reflects the obsession that many, especially those connected with the Department of Defense (DoD), have in using PowerPoint to not only summarize ideas but also to codify the information in them as valid, authentic, or profound. Therefore it was difficult for the reviewer to accept the author’s (implicit) premise that the information in these images as reflecting anything of genuine importance to those readers who want to understand the extent of the NSA’s illegal surveillance. Typical government/DoD PowerPoint presentations, even though quite impressive from an artistic point of view, reflect a naiveté about scientific and technological matters in general. There is no reason to believe that this is not the case also for the NSA, in spite of the imputation of technical and mathematical competence given to it.

And this raises the further question as to the efficacy of the NSA in doing the analysis and data mining that would actually put individual privacy at risk. Many in the press have claimed that the NSA hires thousands of mathematicians and analysts and this is no doubt true. But what is not obvious from the press or from this book is the extent that this technical pseudo-army is able to extract damaging information about citizens or indeed any really useful information at all. The mere presence of thousands of analysts and mathematicians in a government agency may reflect the usual practice of patronage and other faulty and unethical governmental hiring practices rather than actual technical competence.
But one could also argue, and it seems to be the belief of the author, that the NSA is technically competent to use the gathered information to find individuals who it deems are “harmful” to the interests of the United States. Then since the NSA has no qualms in violating the constitutional rights of US citizens by collecting “metadata” then it would not be an unreasonable assumption that it would collect the actual content of phone calls, Email messages, and so on. It would also not be unreasonable to assume that the NSA would deliberately alter the content of messages and phone calls in order to embarrass certain individuals or groups as part of their security strategy or simply from just pure meanness. There is ample precedent in history for the meanness of governments.