We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“NO PLACE TO HIDE” by Glenn Greenwald (Hamish Hamilton /
Penguin $NZ37)
I feel a little redundant telling
you this story because, if you are the type of literate person who reads this
blog, you are probably also the type of person who keeps up to date with major
and important news stories – as opposed to the trivia stories that often
dominate our evening news. So you will already know the outline of this story.
Nevertheless, here goes.
In mid-2013, just over a year
ago, the American journalist and columnist Glenn Greenwald, who most often
writes for the British Guardian, was
contacted by an anonymous informant who said he had accessed and downloaded
thousands of secret and confidential documents belonging to America’s NSA
(National Security Agency). The informant said these documents collectively
proved that the NSA was engaged in a massive spying programme upon millions of
American citizens, who were not even suspected of any crimes. In effect, they
showed that all electronic communications were routinely open to, and
constantly read by, America’s main spy agency, without any of the judicial
process of gaining a warrant for such surveillance.
From the quality of information
he was sent, Greenwald came to trust his informant and finally agreed to meet
him where he was hiding, in Hong Kong, and to report accurately on what the
hacked messages revealed. Only as he was en
route to their arranged rendezvous did he finally learn his informant’s
name and identity. It was 29-year-old Edward Snowden, formerly a data analyst
and security boffin working for various American government agencies.
After interviews with Snowden, establishing
his bona fides and his motives, Greenwald and a fellow journalist duly reported
in detail for the Guardian on what
Snowden’s documents revealed. The story also featured for weeks on the front
pages of other newspapers, and of course on-line and on television. Some media
outlets reported as Greenwald did, emphasising the documents Snowden had leaked
and what they said about this huge breach of trust by the American government.
Others, however, chose at once to see Snowden as a spy and a traitor. This
attitude subsequently became more shrill when Snowden, unable to get safe haven
anywhere else, went to Russia, where he is still residing.
In terms of the sheer quantity of
documents, Snowden’s revelations represent the largest single breach of
American security yet known. For this reason, he is seen strictly through the
eyes of partisanship – as either the ultimate benevolent “whistle-blower”, revealing
a government’s covert attempts to control and spy on its own citizens; or as a
man who should be tried for treason if ever he returns to the USA.
Superfluous to point out that No Place to Hide is strictly
Greenwald’s version of the story, is partisan and is as much polemic as it is
reportage. This in no way limits its value. After all, nobody – not even
Snowden’s fiercest critics – doubts the authenticity of the material Snowden leaked.
The story Greenwald makes from these documents is indeed shocking. No Place to Hide is, after all, given
the subtitle Edward Snowden, the NSA and
the Surveillance State, and it is this concept of the surveillance state
that most concerns Greenwald.
The book’s five long chapter
basically divide into three parts.
First, there is the narrative of
Greenwald’s own contact with Snowden, which reads almost like a spy thriller - how
Snowden first approached him anonymously; how Snowden taught him to encrypt
everything before he would send documents to him, to ensure their
communications were as secure as possible; how Greenwald agreed to meet Snowden
in Hong Kong with only one other person as witness; the signs and codes they
used to ensure privacy etc. etc. Greenwald gives impressions he formed Snowden,
based solely on the documents he sent and before he had actually met him:
“In sixteen hours of barely interrupted reading, I managed to get
through only a small fraction of the archive. But as the plane landed in Hong
Kong I knew two things for certain. First, the source was highly sophisticated
and politically astute, evident in his recognition of the significance of most
of the documents. He was also highly rational. The way he chose, analysed and described
most of the documents I now had in my possession proved that. Second, it would
be very difficult to deny his status as a classic whistle-blower. If disclosing
proof that top-level national security officials lied outright to Congress
about domestic spying programmes doesn’t make one indisputably a
whistle-blower, what does?” (p.31)
Meetings with Snowden reinforced
this favourable impression, and it remains Greenwald’s attitude to Snowden
throughout the book. Greenwald also learned to trust the way Snowden enforced
security, which at first seemed excessive to him. He comments:
“Snowden said the US government has the capability to remotely activate
cell phones and convert them into listening devices. So I knew that the
technology existed but still chalked up [his] concerns to borderline paranoia.
As it turned out, I was the one who was misguided. The government has used this
tactic in criminal investigations for years.” (p.37)
The book’s second section is a
systematic analysis of the accessed documents’ most damning revelations.
Admittedly the writing here is sometimes a little technical, as Greenwald has
to interpret some of the blur-words and codes the NSA uses to make its
techniques sound more palatable.
Finally, in the book’s last two
chapter, entitled “The Harm of Surveillance” and “The Fourth Estate”, Greenwald
gives his ideas on how real privacy is in the process of being destroyed by the
constant watch that his government keeps as it collects “meta-data” from the
telephone calls, e-mails, Skype conferences etc. of millions of people who are
not under any sort of criminal suspicion. This, he says, has been justified
under the fear of “terrorism” ever since what Americans insist on calling
“9/11”. But he says that its real purpose is to keep the populace docile and
obedient by constant surveillance, and he compares it with Orwell’s “tele-screens”
and Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon”. Incidentally, he also notes that the NSA
routinely hacks into the private communications of the leaders of “friendly”
countries. The documents Snowden passed on caused the German chancellor Angela
Merkel to express her outrage when she learnt that the NSA read all her e-mails
and logged all her phone calls.
Greenwald notes that the
governments of four other countries have endorsed unconditionally the NSA’s
electronic spying system and regularly feed information into it. Collectively
they and the USA are the “Five Eyes”. He remarks: “The Five Eyes relationship is so close that member governments place
the NSA’s desires above the privacy of their own citizens.” (p.122) The
four other countries are, of course, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Greenwald is contemptuous of their governments’ lapdog attitudes, and tells
tales of communications to the NSA from the Australian, Canadian and British
governments to prove his point. (I looked hard, but I found no stories
involving New Zealand).
Much to my own surprise, the author
is also fairly contemptuous of some mainstream newspapers, which have generally
been represented as belonging to the liberal-left. He scorns the Washington Post and the New York Times, for being too close to
government sources and for too often adding mitigating clauses to exposes of
government felonies in order to make government look better. He also accuses
them of joining other outlets in a campaign of ad hominem vilification of Snowden, which was no more than a
distraction from the gravity of the things that Snowden had revealed.
Where American party-politics are
concerned, Greenwald is neutral. He asserts that both Republican President Bush
and Democrat President Obama, and their representatives in Congress, have lied
consistently about the reach of NSA’s surveillance, and he sees their pleas of
national security as mere sham. He is also aware that Snowden’s revelations
make the difference between America and more closed, less democratic societies,
such as China and Russia, seem narrower than we once assumed. There is, in his
version, much hypocrisy in the official American stance. He refers to a US government
announcement to the effect that Chinese electronic devices should be shunned
because they could easily be used for long-distance surveillance:
“Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the
motives behind the US government’s claims that Chinese devices cannot be
trusted. But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese
devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA’s
own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only
economic competition but also surveillance competition: when someone buys a
Chinese device instead of an American one, the NSA loses a crucial means of
spying on a great many communication activities.” (p.151)
I sense, however, that Greenwald’s
greatest wrath is reserved for those commercial companies which, while assuring
their subscribers and users that they protect their privacy, have allowed
themselves to be used by the NSA and its surveillance systems. Bear in mind
that Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, Skype, Google, Outlook, Firefox and any e-mail
or other electronic communication system you can name are all party to this.
Says Greenwald:
“In late
2011, Microsoft purchased Skype, the Internet-based telephone and chat service
with over 663 million registered users. At the time of its purchase, Microsoft
assured users that ‘Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the
confidentiality of your personal data, traffic and communications content.’ But
in fact, this data, too, was readily available to the government. By early
2013, there were multiple messages on the NSA system celebrating the agency’s
steadily improving access to the communications of Skype users.”
(pp.113-114)
Of the justifications offered, he
further notes:
“ state authorities have been assisted in their assault on privacy by a
chorus of Internet moguls – the government’s seemingly indispensible partners
in surveillance. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked in a 2009 interview
about concerns over his company’s retention of user data, he infamously
replied: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone else to know,
maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.’ With equal
dismissiveness, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a 2010
interview that ‘people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more
information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people’.
Privacy in the digital age is no longer a ‘social norm’, he claimed, a
notion that handily serves the interests of a tech company trading on personal
information.” (p.170)
This last attitude reveals an
even greater threat than the one posed by the NSA. Only time will tell how
truly destructive this so-called “social norm” really is.
I can add little more to my
comments on this book. After all, it is essentially a work of journalism, to be
read mainly for what it says rather than for how it says it.
Footnote: One
gripe. There are no endnotes or index to this book, which so badly needs them.
A curt note at the end tells you that you can find them by going to Glenn
Greenwald’s website. I know this dodge is increasingly used by publishers, but
I still find it nothing more than an annoyance. If a factual book sets out to
offer you certain data, then it should offer ALL that data.
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