A toxic brew of money, national interest and ego

Edward Snowden’s decision to give away his identity, as Greenwald notes, was as calculated as it was conscious.

September 29, 2014 11:06 pm | Updated September 30, 2014 05:11 pm IST

NO PLACE TO HIDE: — Edward Snowden, the NSAand the Surveillance State: Glenn Greenwald; HamishHamilton, 11, Community Centre, Panchasheel Park,New Delhi-110017. Rs. 599.

NO PLACE TO HIDE: — Edward Snowden, the NSAand the Surveillance State: Glenn Greenwald; HamishHamilton, 11, Community Centre, Panchasheel Park,New Delhi-110017. Rs. 599.

Any curious observer of international affairs who completes Glenn Greenwald’s  No Place To Hide  will be compelled to agree with him, when he says, “the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants and with very little control, transparency or accountability.”

 With Greenwald at the helm, NSA disclosures had their genesis in a mail that landed in his inbox in December 2012. He was initially unmoved by its cryptic but quotidian content, “I have some stuff you might be interested in.”

Blowing the whistle However, in April 2013, he received another communication, one he couldn’t ignore. This one was from Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker whose assertions he was more inclined to take seriously. Someone with insider knowledge of NSA’s functioning had chosen the two for some disquieting disclosures about the agency’s operations. 

The duo would, in the next few weeks, go on to publish a damning indictment of the agency’s surveillance programmes.

 The ‘heretic’ who had made the brave decision to make the disclosures, meanwhile, became the target of a colossal witch-hunt by the executive arm of the U.S., with a section of like-minded media willing to toe its line. However, neither the White House nor the western media could appreciate the audacity that underlay the whistleblower’s decision to reveal his identity, that too within just a week of his disclosures becoming public.

 Edward Snowden’s decision to give away his identity, as Greenwald notes, was as calculated as it was conscious. Despite being well-aware of the Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers, he was willing to risk his life to prove that he acted in good faith. He also believed that his gesture will make the public sense the importance of its own ‘Right to Privacy’.

 The content of Greenwald’s book is, in part, an elaboration of what we have already come across. We are familiar with the  what  of it: that the NSA indulges in mass collection of private information with sinister-sounding acronyms for code-names – like EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE, MUSCULAR and STORMBREW.

 However, the motives behind NSA’s gargantuan appetite for private information, the  why  of it, are what Greenwald deals with in detail. Following his matter-of-fact description of the ten days Poitras and he spent in Hong Kong – their rendezvous with Snowden – in the first two chapters, Greenwald goes on to reveal the  modus operandi  of the NSA in the very title of the third chapter,  Collect it all .

 He dispels the myth that the NSA does not spy on Americans. The evidence he presents is an order from the extra-judicial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court that orders Verizon to hand over “telephony metadata.” It mentions, in no uncertain terms, that NSA’s remit is to include communications “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

 Greenwald also lays bare the complicity of intelligence agencies from other countries. Many of NSA’s data collection operations happen in partnership with other agencies. Its primary partners-in-crime here are intelligence bureaus in the ‘Five Eyes’ alliance: those from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

NSA’s motives And then there is Israel, the U.S.’s ‘all-weather’ accomplice who Washington treats at par with its indispensible allies in the Five Eyes. This, despite the cooperation being driven primarily by the needs and interests of Tel Aviv, as acknowledged by Washington as it realises that Israel “targets [U.S.] to learn [its] positions on Middle East problems.”

 A list of NSA’s ‘customers’ makes for a chilling reading. It includes, not just other intelligence agencies, but also U.S. policymaking institutions like White House and Departments like Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, indicating NSA’s intention to probe into the commercial strengths and exploit the vulnerabilities of other nations.

 Greenwald surmises that though some of the surveillance pertains to national security, a large part of it encompasses “economic espionage, diplomatic spying and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations.” He demonstrates that the primary objective of the “surveillance state” is to maintain the superiority of the U.S., at a time when we are irreversibly moving toward a multi-polar global order.   He gives numerous examples. One relates to the possible motives for NSA’s spying on U.N. Security Council members in August 2010, coming prior to a resolution imposing fresh sanctions on Iran. Ambassador Susan Rice is said to have professed that the information collected “helped me know when the other PermReps [Permanent Representatives] were telling the truth… revealed their real position on sanctions… gave us an upper hand in negotiations and provided information on various countries’ ‘red lines.’”

 Among Greenwald’s most intriguing revelations is a power point slide – sans diplomatese, sans jargon, but full of hubris. Prepared by an NSA officer for a group of agency officials, it boasts,

 “Put money, national interest, and ego together, and now you’re talking about shaping the world writ large.”

 The sting, however, is in the coda,

 “What country doesn’t want to make the world a better place… for itself?”

Establishment media Toward the end, Greenwald provides an acerbic narrative on the current state of investigative journalism in the West. He has utter disregard for the ‘establishment media’, who he considers too close to state power to undertake any genuine adversarial reporting. However, he doesn’t provide any alternative model of practising journalism – one that would create a revenue stream that makes such high-quality reporting possible.

 Greenwald’s own admissions earlier in the book provide a grudging acknowledgment of the impact journalism backed by a strong institution can have. Frustrated by the legal hurdles he needed to cross before getting his first NSA report published, Greenwald says he even contemplated creating his own website. While wrestling with his inner voice on this, he sensed that publishing such a large trove without institutional protection would be risky and backed out. He, in other words, admits that the Snowden disclosures couldn’t have had such a monumental impact had it not been the support provided by  The   Guardian  and other publications with whom he and his team collaborated.

 Greenwald has, no doubt, done some amazing work since he founded his online publication,  The Intercept , earlier this year, whose objective, to quote the site, is to publish “fearless, adversarial journalism.” However, it is too early to pass any verdict and there will remain, for the foreseeable future, genuine apprehensions about the model’s ability to break even. In the meantime, the tough questions posed by Greenwald in the course of the book about journalism as a passion and as a profession will continue to create moral dilemma in the minds of conscientious journalists, until some of them come up with answers. 

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