THE INSIDE ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS DOCUMENTED IN LAURA POITRAS'S CITIZENFOUR
Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide is the story of one of the greatest national security leaks in US history.
In June 2013, reporter and political commentator Glenn Greenwald published a series of reports in the Guardian which rocked the world.
The reports revealed shocking truths about the extent to which the National Security Agency had been gathering information about US citizens and intercepting communication worldwide, and were based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden to Greenwald.
Including new revelations from documents entrusted to Greenwald by Snowden, this essential book tells the story of Snowden and the NSA and examines the far-reaching consequences of the government's surveillance program, both in the US and abroad.
'The first thing I do when I turn on the computer in the morning is go to Glenn Greenwald's blog. He is truly one of our greatest writers right now' Michael Moore
'The most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years' Bill Moyers
Glenn Greenwald is the author of several US bestsellers, including How Would A Patriot Act?, and A Tragic Legacy. Acclaimed as one of the twenty-five most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights attorney. He has been a columnist for the Guardian since August 2012 and his work has appeared in numerous newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
I was interested in how one person could possibly steal digital information from our government. I never really found out by reading this book. I did find out that the government has the ability to know a lot about us and our personal lives. I also decided that you would have to live totally off the grid to have any real privacy, which I don't think is even possible to do any longer.
What interest me now is if we have such capabilities to spy on people then, we should know exactly what was happening with Trump et al. Early on in the Trump investigation wasn't there talk of surveillance of foreign diplomats and didn't the Obama Administration ask the courts to release information as to whom that foreign diplomat was speaking to? Did Trump collude with the Russians, I personally don't believe he has the depth or knowledge to successfully do that.
While Greenwald makes Edward Snowden out to be the hero of the 20th century, he (Greenwald) takes to task the The Washington Post and The New York Times for going to the government for input before publishing stories about their suspicious activities implying that we never get the truth because the media and government collude to lessen the impact of these stories. Greenwald can, in my mind's eye, be a bit self-righteous at times, but mostly he is spot on.
I wanted to read No Place to Hide prior to reading How America Lost Its Secrets by Edward Jay Epstein, whom has a totally different take on Edward Snowden and the theft of documents from the NSA apparatus.
