Review: No Place to Hide by Gleen Greenwald

No Place To Hide

Edward Snowden is one othe bravest men in recent history. He risked his lifestyle, life, and even his family to reveal the dark truths of surveillance by the United States government machinery via NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6 and what not. No wonder Snowden has always been and will be treated as a pariah. Anybody who pays the slightest attention to the mainstream media cabal would understand that it (the cabal) is just an arm of the government and sometimes the agencies which not always be aligned to the government. As Greenwald writes in some of the pages of his book, often the journalists are just stenographers who take instructions from the powers that be and put it out as news, or, even better, ‘breaking’ news.

When Snowden had exposed the ill intentions and wrong-doings more than a decade ago, I wasn’t that interested in the topic except that it was being broken as a big news item by Guardian and it was trending for few days on Twitter back then. I really didn’t show much interest in it. Over the last few years, it is clear that I can no longer ignore it myself and am always aware that there is absolutely nothing which the govenment doesn’t want to know about me: my websites, my contacts, my passwords, my WiFi, my location, my calls, my metadata, my data. Nothing is left to being unknown. I have zero trust in governments. I am good as long as I stand straight or even bend over backwards. The moment I lean forward and show the finger to the government or agencies, I am done. Their technological arsenal is going to be bombarded at whatever they have collected of me, and even more collection would be done through zero-day exploits, no-click URLs, remotely activated cameras/microphones, and even through means I may be completely unaware of. Your so-called smart devices, smart TVs, automatic robot vaccumm, microwave, light fixtures can all be turned into spying devices by someone sitting in Maryland, or New York (33 Thomas Street Building), or anywhere in the world for that matter. And it is not just the US who is doing it, it is definitely all the developed countries, five eyes, fourteen eyes, and many more which may be hidden from us, including many others like India, China, Japan, Brazil, Russia etc.

If Barry Meier’s book was a shocker, Greenwald’s is even more so. It begins with Greenwald getting an email, asking him to setup a PGP for his email communication. And, I hate Greenwald for this, for months he did not do that! For months! All the while Snowden was waiting to communicate with him and show what he had got out of the surveillance state for the world to see. It was Laura Poitras who ultimately got the lead and made things happen by planning a trip to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. Had it been left to Greenwald, it would have taken years and maybe Snowden himself might have been caught before he could expose the uninhibited spying.

The book focuses on lot of technical programs which the NSA and the likes had developed to collect and analyze information from all sorts of networks around the world, not just within US. However, the more important aspect of the book is the details revealing how Laura had been treated by the US immigration authorities everytime she entered her own country, how Greenwald himself had become bête noire of the mainstream media cabal, and how this very cabal had known to some extent almost a decade ago about illegal spying by the agencies but kept mum under the instructions of the state. Those pages are telling and should worry us to no end that the ‘courageous free enterprise’ called media is not so free after all and is just a mouthpiece.

Recently examples have shown it. Countless books have been written about Trump, all in negative light. Elon Musk is suddenly the ‘bad guy’ because he bought Twitter and often rants against Democrats. ‘Elon bad’ is the new coke out there. If Seymour Hersh could not be spared, with his article – exposing that it was the US behind the destruction of Nord Stream pipeline – being called a ‘blog’!, what authority and credibility do you and I have? This is the new world we live in, where either you comply and bend, or you will be under fire from the powers, the agencies, the media cabal. Seymour has written how the movie Zero Dark Thirty was a work of fiction and was released to boost Obama’s ratings before the elections so that Democrats could bank on it and make lady Clinton win! Greenwald also writes how Obama, who is workshipped by New York Times, and the mainstream media cabal, was one of the most undemocratic presidents who went after the media to punish them for supporting Snowden and anybody who exposed the dystopian clog of the machinery.

Comply or die is the new adage.

This is a must-read book. Just drop everthing that you are doing and pick this up.