Play Book Tag discussion

A very interesting book from the man who broke the story of the Edward Snowden surveillance leaks. Glenn Greenwald writes clearly and with obvious passion for the subjects of internet privacy and government overreach in the name of national security after 9/11. For a layperson, this is a good introduction to what the Snowden leaks were all about, with a chapter dedicated to analyzing and explaining some of the more damning documents. Spoilers: they really were collecting everything. Perhaps the most interesting implication of the book was that the NSA surveillance programs certainly didn't seem designed to find the targets it was claimed they were meant to, i.e. "terrorists." (Strikingly, in the years since the Snowden leaks, the NSA was unable to point to one instance in which these programs actually prevented a terrorist attack.) Most of the described programs sounded like they were most useful when you already knew the identity of a person you wanted to monitor. This makes those programs very poor at finding alleged secret terrorists... but exceedingly good at contributing to existing espionage missions. That so many of the documents talked about targets such as Brazil's president and giant energy firms like Gazprom and Petrobras made me wonder if the justification that this was all in the name of fighting "terrorism" wasn't just a pretext from the start.

I especially liked the anecdotes Greenwald told, about meeting Snowden in Hong Kong and the detention of his husband David Miranda at the hands of the UK government under a terrorism law. There were clear attempts to criminalize journalism when it came to breaking this story, which has some troubling implications for the future of the free press. I also appreciated his criticism of America's mainstream media circa 2013, which my graduate research also revealed was exceedingly deferential to positions put out by the government; this is hardly a sign of a healthy fourth estate. This has changed to some degree in recent years, but I have been hard-pressed to find much acknowledgment of the issue in the first place. In some aspects, though, I felt like Greenwald was preaching to the choir. There are lengthy sections dedicated to explaining why internet/phone privacy is so important for a normal citizen. They are well-argued (Greenwald used to be an attorney), but for me they were a little extraneous, since I'm already completely on board with rights to privacy.

Also, I couldn't help but wish this book had an updated version. So much has transpired since its publication in 2014 that I would really appreciate Greenwald's perspective on everything that has happened in the last six years. He's especially critical of the Obama administration for the expansion of surveillance powers and attempts to criminalize journalists. While this criticism is valid, I couldn't help but think, "Boy, if he didn't like Obama, I wonder how he feels about Trump." There's also a defense of Julian Assange and Wikileaks that hasn't aged well, given the links of Assange and Wikileaks to the Russian meddling in the 2016 election. I'd really like to know Greenwald's thoughts on these issues as they stand today.

Overall, however, this was a well-written and informative book. I just wish I hadn't decided to read it at the start of a pandemic. It was more put down-able than it would have been if I wasn't trying to escape grim real world issues by reading about more grim real world issues.

I was curious and checkecd out what Wikipedia had to say of Greenwald's activities since 2014. It is a lot: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn...