Writing in Wired, Kim Zetter reviews Glenn Greenwald’s much-anticipated memoir,
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State , which tells the inside story of his involvement with Edward
Snowden and the most significant story about technology, networks and
surveillance in human history. Zetter makes the book sound like a cross
between a spy thriller and 1984, and Snowden himself apparently comes
out sounding like a pretty amazing and clever person, which jibes with
existing accounts of his character. I’ve just bought a copy to start
reading at lunch – I’m setting aside Piketty for now.
For the next sixteen hours, Greenwald sat on the plane to Hong Kong
poring over the files, completely unmolested, while the stewardesses
passed out cocktails and snacks around him.
Remarkably, the man who had become one of the government’s biggest
agitators over its warrantless wiretapping program and other
constitutional breaches held within his hands a weapon with the power to
bring down the surveillance state and there was no one around to stop
him.
Greenwald was amazed at how organized the documents were. Snowden had
arranged them all carefully in folders, sub-folders and sub-sub-folders
according to issue and importance, clearly indicating that he had read
and understood each one. He had even provided glossaries of acronyms and
program names as well as supporting documents that weren’t meant to be
published but were included simply to provide context.
One of the last files Greenwald examined, right before he landed, was
the file he should have read first. The file, named “README_FIRST,”
contained Snowden’s full name, his Social Security number, CIA alias,
and agency ID number.
Snowden, he soon learned, was more than a systems administrator for the
intelligence community. During his stint with the CIA in Switzerland, he
was considered the top technical and cybersecurity expert in the region
and had been chosen to provide President Obama with support at the 2008
NATO summit in Romania. He had trained to become a high-level cyber
operator and had seen things that few see.
“I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they
might kill,” he told Greenwald during their meeting in Hong Kong. “You
could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched
NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware
of just how invasive US surveillance capabilities had become. I realized
the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was
happening.”
