Early book report on No Place To Hide by Glenn Greenwald.

TL;DR: Read this book. The NSA is out of control and a threat to our rights and liberties. We have to stop it.

I highly, highly recommend that everyone on DU and elsewhere read this book. Buy it, borrow it, steal it (well maybe not), but definitely take a look. Here's my take on it so far:

The book is divided into four parts, which I'll expand on below: 1) the backstory of Edward Snowden and how he made contact with Greenwald and Laura Poitras, 2) what the U.S. and allied governments are doing, 3) the chilling effects mass surveillance has on society, and 4) the craven nature of establishment journalism in the U.S.

1. Edward Snowden. This part reads like a thriller, and covers how Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras made contact, learned to trust each other, and published the initial stories. It also goes into considerable detail about Snowden's early life and motivations. I quickly gained a deep respect for Snowden and the courage it took for him to do all of this. He knew he was ending his life-- and it was a good life, with a six-figure income, a longtime girlfriend, and a house in Hawaii-- but felt it necessary to inform the public of what the government is doing. It makes all of the personal attacks on him seem juvenile and ill-informed.

I've said before that to me, it doesn't matter if Snowden is a good person or not. Even if his favorite pastime is kicking puppies or writing odes to George W. Bush, it would not change one iota the importance of what we've learned because of him. But Snowden does appear to someone who was doing all of this for the right reasons.

2. What are the NSA and its foreign counterparts trying to do? Greenwald goes into considerable detail about various programs and what they do. Much of this will be familiar to people who have read all of the articles in various news sources that have come out in the last year or so. But there's an easy summary: They want to "collect it all". They want to have a record of every electronic communication that happens in the world. Whether it's in the U.S. or abroad, whether there's any apparent reason to do so, whether it's moral or ethical. And they definitely don't want the public to know about it. They keep it secret by giving telecoms gag orders, by making court decisions secret, or if finally cornered, by lying.

3. The harm done by massive surveillance. This part of the book is a little more speculative. At some point, I personally thought it was plausible that all of this surveillance is the result of some extremely misguided attempt to protect national security, or the result of some gargantuan ego-driven power trip of some top-level officials. It may not be anybody's goal to lay the foundation for a future oppressive state, though that is certainly a danger. But Greenwald argues, rather convincingly, that mass surveillance can have a chilling effect on the public, and make individual citizens more docile and compliant, and he thinks this is probably an intended outcome of these programs. People who know they're being watched begin consciously and unconsciously modifying their behavior, even if they're not doing anything wrong. He also points to the aggressive, paramilitary police crackdowns on the Occupy protests as evidence that the authorities do have some fear of the public.

4. The failure of the establishment press. This final part is a scathing attack on big press institutions that have too often gotten too cozy with the government and stopped serving their crucial role as an adversarial watchdog. He points out all the articles that personally attacked Snowden, and the eagerness with which news sources ran government speculation about him-- that Snowden was a Chinese spy or a Russian spy (even though a spy would have just handed over the documents without letting anyone know), that the Chinese had "drained" Snowden's laptops, etc.-- without any supporting evidence. Greenwald also goes on to discuss how a number of reporters, most notably David Gregory, suggested that what Greenwald and other reporters was criminal. He notes that news sources routinely publish secret or even top secret information that is leaked to them by the government, but nobody thinks anything is wrong with that-- as if the press's obligation is to be supportive of the government. (If any validation of what Greenwald wrote was needed, the New York Times' book review by Michael Kinsley should end any doubt.)

My main takeaway from the book is that much more of the story of the NSA surveillance state is in the future than in the past. Edward Snowden has done an enormous service to the American people and the people of many other countries by revealing that our governments are tracking and spying our every move. We have not yet determined what will happen-- whether the surveillance state continues on unabated or whether we succeed in reining it in-- and we still have a chance to shape the outcome. Our loyalties should not be to any politician or political party, but rather to our own rights and freedoms.