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

by Glenn Greenwald

The Committee to Protect Journalists—an international organization that monitors attacks on press freedoms by the state—was moved by the situation to issue its first-ever report about the United States. Written by Leonard Downie Jr., past executive editor of the Washington Post, the report, issued in October 2013, concluded: The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive … since the Nixon administration.… The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations … interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

I had called him on Skype to talk about a large encrypted file of documents

Had he not leant his lesson yet??

They demanded that the Guardian in London hand over all copies of the files received from Snowden. If the Guardian refused, a court order would prohibit any further reporting.

They should not portray Russia in such a bad light then, they do the same things.

The image of a government sending agents into a newspaper to force destruction of its computers is inherently shocking, the sort of thing Westerners are told to believe happens only in places like China, Iran, and Russia. But it is also stunning that a revered newspaper would voluntarily, meekly, submit to such orders.

If the government was threatening to shut down the paper, why not call its bluff and force the threat out into the daylight? As Snowden said when he heard the about the threat, “the only right answer is, go ahead, shut us down!” Voluntarily complying in secret is to enable the government to conceal its true character from the world: a state that thuggishly stops journalists from reporting on one of the most significant stories in the public interest.

It changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements made by US officials and transformed relations between countries.

The UN general assembly unanimously voted in favor of a resolution—introduced by Germany and Brazil—affirming that online privacy is a fundamental human right, which one expert characterized as “a strong message to the United States that it’s time to reverse course and end NSA dragnet surveillance.”

Already, a number of European tech companies are promoting their email and chat services as a superior alternative to offerings from Google and Facebook, trumpeting the fact that they do not—and will not—provide user data to the NSA.