No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

by Glenn Greenwald

Surveillance thus unites governments of otherwise remarkably divergent political creeds.

“The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs,” he said. “If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.”

The lesson Snowden had learned from immersion in video games, he said, was that just one person, even the most powerless, can confront great injustice. “The protagonist is often an ordinary person, who finds himself faced with grave injustices from powerful forces and has the choice to flee in fear or to fight for his beliefs. And history also shows that seemingly ordinary people who are sufficiently resolute about justice can triumph over the most formidable adversaries.”

He wasn’t the first person I’d heard claiming video games had been instrumental in shaping their worldview. Years earlier, I might have scoffed, but I’d come to accept that, for Snowden’s generation, they played no less serious a role in molding political consciousness, moral reasoning, and an understanding of one’s place in the world than literature, television, and film. They, too, often present complex moral dilemmas and provoke contemplation, especially for people beginning to question what they’ve been taught.

Equally central to his worldview was the unprecedented value of the Internet. As for many of his generation, “the Internet” for him wasn’t some isolated tool to use for discrete tasks. It was the world in which his mind and personality developed, a place unto itself that offered freedom, exploration, and the potential for intellectual growth and understanding.

He did not want to go to prison, he said. “I’m going to try not to. But if that’s the outcome from all of this, and I know there’s a huge chance that it will be, I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing I did nothing.”

Exclusive scoops on top secret documents uniquely elevate a publication’s status and empower the journalist who breaks the news. It makes much more sense to give such scoops to independent journalists and media organizations, thereby amplifying their voices, raising their profile, and maximizing their impact.

It was that fear-driven, obsequious journalism that led the Times, the Post, and many other outlets to refuse to use the word “torture” in their reporting on Bush interrogation techniques, even though they freely used that word to describe the exact same tactics when used by other governments around the world.