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

by Glenn Greenwald

But general warrants—the practice of making the entire citizenry subject to indiscriminate searches—were inherently illegitimate.

A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.

@ggreenwald new book profound from intro.

Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.

#NSA #NoPlaceToHide

I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.

@ggreenwald #Snowden: #NoPlaceToHide

“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.” How had he developed this measure for assessing his worth? Where did he derive this belief that he could only be acting morally if he was willing to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of the greater good? “From a lot of different places, a lot of experiences,” Snowden said. He had grown up reading large amounts of Greek mythology and was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which, he noted, “finds common threads among the stories we all share.” The primary lesson he took away from that the book was that “it is we who infuse life with meaning through our actions and the stories we create with them.” People are only that which their actions define them as being. “I don’t want to be a person who remains afraid to act in defense of my principles.

“I do not want to live in a world where we have no privacy and no freedom, where the unique value of the Internet is snuffed out,

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.