The Snowden Files by Luke Harding – review

We live in a new world, and a scary one: this is a riveting read that unravels the mysteries behind the Snowden revelations
David Runciman
The Guardian, Thursday 13 February 2014 06.00 EST

... What's striking is not so much the range of Snowden's fantasies as the depth of his political commitment. He emerges as a committed Republican, a libertarian, a huge fan of Ron Paul, a gun lover and believer in national security with a tendency to suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise deserves to be shot.

This produces some startling moments. Writing in 2009 after the New York Times has leaked secret information about covert US action against Iran's nuclear programme, "TheTrueHOOHAA" rages against whistleblowers, WikiLeaks and anyone who would betray their country for the sake of airy-fairy liberal principles. "Those people should be shot in the balls," he writes. But the real clue to his motivation comes later in the same exchange, when he wails: "Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the CIA." (The politician in question was Leon Panetta, who had once been Bill Clinton's chief of staff.) As a libertarian, what really gets Snowden's goat is the thought of government getting its tentacles into everything. He has no problem with spying and secrecy in their place (in Iran, for instance). What terrifies him is the idea that no one is setting limits to it all. Like many supporters of Ron Paul, Snowden would like to go back to the gold standard, because he thinks letting politicians print money is a recipe for inflation and ultimate global ruin. He sees the politicisation of surveillance as part of the same pattern: evidence of a system spinning crazily out of control ...

Among his trawl was a series of internal PowerPoint presentations in which the NSA outlined its new capabilities and its eager readiness to use them. There are two ways to read these. One is that they are evidence of an organisation that now has terrifying technological reach, able to cross all borders and access any information it chooses, often co-opting the tech industry along the way (Google, Facebook and other titans of Silicon Valley found themselves implicated in what was going on, to their horror). The other is that, like many PowerPoint presentations, they contain a fair amount of boastful corporate bullshit. "The Mission Never Sleeps" is the ironic heading of one of the files that Snowden stole. Snowden is probably right that what's really scary is the thought of so much power being in the hands of people with so little idea of what it means. When it turned out that the NSA had been bugging Angela Merkel's phone, with disastrous political consequences, no one could say what the point had been. As John McCain told Der Spiegel, the only plausible explanation is that "they did it because they could" ...

... Snowden is a quirky figure – a distinctive product of the American right, in ways that some of his European champions on the left ought to find uncomfortable – but he is also a thoughtful one. He is correct in thinking that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to power. He would like to turn the clock back to the late 18th century when the American constitution said what it meant and meant what it said – the "originalist" dream. That's not going to happen. It's not even clear that we can turn the clock back to the late 20th century. This is a new world and a scary one ...

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/13/snowden-files-luke-harding-review