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

by Glenn Greenwald

Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune.

Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.

The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.

“I realized,” he said, “that they were building a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally. To make it so that no one could communicate electronically without the NSA being able to collect, store, and analyze the communication.”

The president, who had campaigned on a vow to have the “most transparent administration in history,” specifically pledging to protect whistleblowers, whom he hailed as “noble” and “courageous,” had done exactly the opposite.

Just weeks before my arrival in Hong Kong, it was revealed that the Obama Justice Department had obtained a court order to read through the emails and telephone records of reporters and editors from the Associated Press to find their source for a story.

Journalists had noted for several years that the Obama administration was waging unprecedented attacks on journalism.

i like our President a lot. For me this stuff will forever tarnish his legacy. great works dont erase misdeeds.

Democratic senator Mark Udall issued a statement saying that “this sort of wide-scale surveillance should concern all of us and is the kind of government overreach I’ve said Americans would find shocking.”

“We believe it’s important that you have control over who can and cannot access your personal data in the cloud,” Microsoft’s SkyDrive website proclaims. Yet as an NSA document details, Microsoft spent “many months” working to provide the government with easier access to that data: In late 2011, Microsoft purchased Skype, the Internet-based telephone and chat service with over 663 million registered users.

But that worry was short-lived. Within a few months, the two entities got together and devised methods for the NSA to circumvent the very encryption protections Microsoft was publicly advertising as vital for protecting privacy:

jesus!

The NSA is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability.

It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the United States is certainly doing the same.

It is the ultimate imbalance, permitting the most dangerous of all human conditions: the exercise of limitless power with no transparency or accountability.

Similarly, those Internet tycoons who are so willing to devalue our privacy are vehemently protective of their own. Google insisted on a policy of not talking to reporters from CNET, the technology news site, after CNET published Eric Schmidt’s personal details—including his salary, campaign donations, and address, all public information obtained via Google—in order to highlight the invasive dangers of his company.

“Your personal life is now known as Facebook’s data. Its CEO’s personal life is now known as mind your own business.”

And public health literature on hand washing has repeatedly confirmed that the way to increase the likelihood of someone washing his or her hands is to put someone nearby.

The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

if you've ever said "i have nothing to hide" you're part of the problem

Indeed, after British authorities detained my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow airport under an antiterrorism statute, the UK government expressly equated my surveillance reporting with terrorism on the ground that the release of the Snowden documents “is designed to influence a government and is made for the purposes of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism.” This is the clearest possible statement of linking a threat to the interests of power to terrorism.

All of the evidence highlights the implicit bargain that is offered to citizens: pose no challenge and you have nothing to worry about. Mind your own business, and support or at least tolerate what we do, and you’ll be fine.

These are people who have become convinced that they themselves are not going to be personally targeted—because they are unthreatening and compliant—and therefore either deny that it’s happening, do not care, or are willing to support it outright.

We shouldn’t have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance.

damn right

The senator so harshly attacking metadata collection was Joe Biden, who subsequently, as vice president, became part of a Democratic administration that advanced precisely the same arguments he once derided.

shocker

Given the actual surveillance the NSA does, stopping terror is clearly a pretext.

Moreover, the argument that mass surveillance has prevented terror plots—a claim made by President Obama and a range of national security figures—has been proved false.

interesting.

The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

Democratic Congressman Rush Holt, a physicist and one of the few scientists in Congress, has made the point that collecting everything about everyone’s communications only obscures actual plots being discussed by actual terrorists.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the bottomless exploitation of the threat of terrorism is that it is so plainly exaggerated.

The idea that we should dismantle the core protections of our political system to erect a ubiquitous surveillance state for the sake of this risk is the height of irrationality.

Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name.

Transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.

yet we let them flip the script on us.

That I had threatened to release the names of CIA agents and assets was an outright lie, fabricated by King.

But if the recent past proved anything, it was that the US government was willing to do all sorts of reprehensible things under the guise of national security, without regard to how the rest of the world perceived them.

Take, for instance, the notion that leaking classified information is some sort of malicious or criminal act. In fact, the Washington journalists who applied that view to Snowden or to me do not deplore all disclosures of secret information, only those disclosures that displease or undermine the government.

“Objectivity” means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of entrenched Washington. Opinions are problematic only when they deviate from the acceptable range of Washington orthodoxy.

The administration lies systematically, he argued, “yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles” pose a challenge.

Refusing to use the services of tech companies that collaborate with the NSA and its allies will put pressure on those companies to stop such collaboration and will spur their competitors to devote themselves to privacy protections.

The Obama administration, which has brought more prosecutions against leakers than all prior presidencies combined, has sought to create a climate of fear that would stifle any attempts at whistle-blowing.

sad part of his legacy