General Discussion

villager

(26,001 posts) Thu May 22, 2014, 06:55 PM May 2014

Guardian: No Place to Hide review – Glenn Greenwald's compelling account of NSA/GCHQ surveillance

This powerful account of the Edward Snowden case reveals the threat posed by spying

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Some of these characteristics made me wonder if his account of the Snowden affair would be one long harangue, but No Place to Hide is clearly written and compelling. Though I have been writing about the war on liberty for nearly a decade, I found that reacquainting myself with the details of surveillance and intrusion by America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ was simply shocking. As the stories rolled out last year, there was almost too much to absorb – from Prism, the program used by the NSA to access, among others, Google, Microsoft and Apple servers, to the UK's Tempora, which taps fibre optic cables and draws up web and telephone traffic; from the secret collaboration of the web and phone giants to the subversion of internet encryption and spying on ordinary people's political activities, their medical history, their friends and intimate relations and all their activities online. I published a dystopian novel in 2009 that featured a similarly intrusive program, which I named DEEPTRUTH, and let me tell you, I didn't predict half of it.

Greenwald's book is a tough read if you find these things disturbing. The insouciance and dishonesty of politicians – some of whom in the UK last week called for increased access to our data – as well as the muted reaction of the established media last year do not augur well for the future of nations that currently regard themselves as free. Democracy and liberty are not synonyms and what Greenwald's book reminds us is that we may well end up as a series of hollowed-out, faux democracies, where the freedoms that we grew up with vanish almost unnoticed, like the extinction of a species of migrant bird.

He writes: "A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one", as well as one that is far less likely to express legitimate dissent, of course. The irony of Snowden's actions is that he may have hastened the chill. There are now legitimate things that many of us will never express in private, unencrypted emails or look up on the web because of surveillance.

I read No Place to Hide wondering how we let the spies probe our lives with such inadequate controls, and how on earth we fell for the propaganda that this massive apparatus was there to protect, not control, us. Greenwald quotes Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, saying: "If you have something you don't want people to know about, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" – and later amusingly catalogues the lengths to which Silicon Valley bosses "who devalued our privacy" have gone to protect their own.

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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/no-place-to-hide-review-glenn-greenwald-nsa-gchq-surveillance-edward-snowden-spying