Glenn Greenwald’s insider account lays out what happened day by day as Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA and went on the run
By Nicholas Blincoe
When General Keith Alexander, head of the US National Security Agency, was given a tour of GCHQ in 2008, he might have been justified in feeling that he owned the place. Last year, the whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had paid more than £100 million over three years to buy influence over GCHQ’s work. When discussing the kind of data it should collect, Alexander is said to have asked: “Why can’t we collect it all?” It was not the first time Alexander had used this phrase. “Collect it all” occurs so often in the stash of files released by Snowden that it is clear it had become the NSA mission statement.
We live in a world of mobile phones, GPS, email, Skype and social networks – in short, everything that in wartime would be covered by the term “sigints”. Once, signals intelligence was all about submarines and codes: today it is the stuff of our everyday lives. As a result, sigints has moved from a supporting role in the security services to centre stage. Slowly, too slowly, the power and reach of government listening posts have become a cause for concern. By the summer of 2013, when Snowden released his cache of files, “collect it all” was no longer an abstract slogan. The documents showed that GCHQ and the NSA were gathering data from all of the big telephone and internet companies, Verizon, Google, Microsoft and others.
No Place to Hide is the inside account of these revelations, written by the journalist Glenn Greenwald who took Snowden’s files to The Guardian newspaper. In two action-packed chapters, Greenwald lays out the events, day by day, as Snowden was pursued through Hong Kong by spies and reporters desperate to uncover his identity. The remaining three-fifths of this engrossing and polemical book explains why the revelations matter.
The vast quantity of data gathered by the spy agencies has led to new ways of reading our conversations, using logarithms to detect patterns such as times and dates, geographic spread and all the internet sites that interest us. The results of these analyses, the so-called “metadata”, reveal everything about our lives. We might lie in our calls and emails, but the metadata faithfully record our politics and religion, our closeness to friends and family, and all of our secrets. In this week’s New York Review of Books, Gen Michael Hayden, head of the NSA before Alexander, is quoted as saying: “We kill people based on metadata.”
Snowden was born in 1983 and has grown up at the heart of a communications revolution. In the exculpatory statement he released with the stolen files, he is idealistic about “open source” communities and a “free internet”, and furious at the abuse of power by “the darkest corners of government”. Greenwald, though 16 years older, shares Snowden’s values. A one-time lawyer, he became a journalist via a blog, a route taken by other new journalists such as Nate Silver, the statistician who predicted the results of the US election, and Eliot Higgins, also known as Brown Moses, the self-taught munitions expert who charts the use of chemical weapons in Syria from YouTube videos. The focus may be narrow, but they have managed to get to the big stories fast. Greenwald is scathing about traditional journalists. His writings spit venom at the “beltway media establishment” in collusion with government. Even while employed by The Guardian, he froze out colleagues in the most petty ways until they proved their worth, always threatening to publish directly to the internet if the paper did not follow his schedule.
Greenwald may be right to be so prickly: this is a bad world. His husband was dragged off a plane at Heathrow by MI5; the editor of The Guardian destroyed data at the behest of GCHQ (though only after he knew it was safely copied). Yet as important as this book is, Greenwald and Snowden make life difficult for potential friends. Both are motivated by an all-transcending faith in the founding principles of America, which they regard as an ongoing revolution against government. It leaves them unable to imagine that government might also be an inclusive institution. Snowden is now living in Russia, which is just about the blackest joke one can imagine.
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State
By: Glenn Greenwald
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Price: £18; Pages: 272
