No place to hide by
Glenn Greenwald (Hamish Hamilton, $37.00).
Reviewed by Gordon
McLauchlan
One of the
most important and seriously contested political debates of our time is the
extent to which Governments should be allowed to spy on their own citizens, as
well as those of other countries, now that technology makes possible
surveillance that is scarily pervasive. Every electronic communication may be
vacuumed up by security agencies for examination. Security cameras track the
movement of millions of citizens as they go about their business.
A small number of men among the
hundreds of thousands employed by United States government security agencies
have broken trust and released secret files into the public domain. They have
been praised as whistleblowers and condemned as traitors.
The question being argued, in the
United States particularly, is do these people who go public with state secrets
do so for moral reasons, insisting on the public’s right to know, or as
attention-seekers who don’t understand the need to be relentlessly vigilant in
the age of international terrorism.
By far the best organised, shrewd,
calculating and apparently stable of these security mavericks is Edward Snowden,
who sought and found the right journalists and news outlets to release the huge
volume of secrets he filched from National Security Agency files while working
for a private contractor to agency.
Glenn Greenwald -- a freelancer who
now lives in Brazil and has had a long connection with Britain’s The Guardian -- was one of two
journalists Snowden chose to contact after he made his decision to go public
with the secrets. Snowden went to ground in a Hong Kong hotel suite and fed his
information to Snowden who then passed it on in story form to the editor of the
US edition of The Guardian.
The whole operation was enormously
clever with all the information kept in
a number of computers and external hard drives in different places, rendering
almost impossible any chance of Government agents regaining the files.
Before he announced that it was he
who was the source of the information, Snowden lived a fraught existence,
piling pillows around his hotel room doors during conversations with his
journalistic accomplices, and placing a blanket over his head and his computer
as he accessed it to avoid the possibility of overhead cameras detecting his
passwords.
Greenwald’s story of how Snowden
managed to contact him and how they managed to release stories to The Guardian reads like a thriller and
the details of the extent of the spying they are still disclosing are, well,
frightening. The book is a great read, superbly direct and well paced, as I
would have expected from one of the world’s best journalists.
There seems no doubt that Snowden is
deeply sincere. He is certainly not mentally soft and was reconciled to the
probability that he would be giving the rest of his life away in the interests
of exposing what he considered was a malevolent government spying in secret on its
whole population without genuine, independent oversight or the legality of
warrants.
A perplexing irony is that both
Democratic and Republican leaders in the US have insisted that if he is caught,
Snowden will go on trial as a traitor, despite substantial popular support
and even legislation to curb the
activities of the NSA, some already enacted and more believed to be
forthcoming.
No comments:
Post a Comment