I was quite surprised that Edward Snowden wrote this book. Because he had categorically stated, when he had exposed spying by American agencies like NSA, CIA etc., that he wanted the focus on the various programs of surveillance and spying and not on him. He had purposefully kept himself out of spotlight by giving very few interviews. The writing of this book may have been motivated by financial reasons because Snowden’s assets had been frozen by the US authorities.
Snowden is not only intelligent but also courageous. He exposed the evil ways in which NSA and the likes went unhindered in their assault on freedom of regular citizens like you and I.
This book provides details of Snowden growing up and being a computer geek right childhood due to his dad. And then he decides not to continue his education beyond high school. However he did get a job as a security guard and due to lax intake requirements back then and the overwhelming open positions, he was taken in later in a technical position. Snowden exposes not only the various different programs used by the government to spy, but also how embassies worldwide have become only spots for surveillance and nothing more. He writes how he went to Switzerland and Japan to strengthen the data collection practices. He also is unabashedly critical of the main stream media (not as much as Greenwald though).
Towards the end, Snowden recounts his escape from Hong Kong and how, while at Moscow airport, is interrogated by the Russian agents and asked to cooperate with them so they could take care of him. Ultimately he refused and stayed there for many months. Finally, because he was attracting too much attention at the airport, he was given permit to exit the Moscow airport. He has lived in Russia since then.
‘Permanent Record’ is a must read book. It should be made mandatory in schools and colleges and I wish it becomes a manifesto of sorts for our freedom and tyranny of governments and technology.
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.
Barry Meier has crafted a thriller in Missing Man, tracking the disappearance of Robert Levinson (Bob), a former FBI agent and who was later working as a contractor to CIA. Bob disappeared when he went to Kish Island from Dubai for a “side trip” to reach a nut head Dawud Salahuddin. The purpose of Bob’s visit was to get information from Dawud about Iraninan regime’s possible methods which may be resorted to in the future in case US imposed sanctions on Iran due to uranium enrichment. Dawud was constantly feeding him how Rafsanjani had spread his tentacles into financial crime and money laundering and had even invested in various projects in Canada. Barry’s narration doesn’t keep you on the edge of the seat, but is more like an undercurrent of suspense which links the whole plot together.
Bob was struggling financially to keep up with the expenses for his family as his childrent (seven of them) went from school to college to their jobs and finally married life. Bob had worked in FBI for multiple decades and had forged strong connections within the intelligene and law enforcement agencies. When he started working as a CIA contractor in the hopes of getting more excitement and possibly better remuneration, he was dishing out copious amounts of reports for his handler Anne Jablonski, who teaches yoga. The financial unit of the CIA wanted dirt on the political elite in Ian and Bob made a connection with Dawud via the journalist Ira.
This book however is also an eye opener that the FBI and CIA are after all two arms of the government, where bureaucracy and red tape have rusted the piston as with any other departments of the government. The details about how Bob used to struggle to get his contracts finalized on time, reaching out to different departments within CIA for additional budget, and even spending money from his own pocket with the hope that eventually the bills would be tabled for reimbursement. But it is also a story we all know too well: government’s shirking away from owning up when things go south. After Bob was reported missing, CIA refused to acknowledge that Bob had gone to Iran (Kish) at its behest. The intelligence agencies were trying (not sincerely enough though) to get information about Bob through other means: Russian oligarchs, Kurdish fighters, Iranian exiles. Then there were people who had contacted the Levinson family through the website setup by them to give them tips. Somebody even sent emails few times from a Gmail id “osman.muhamad@gmail.com” but initially the emails were marked as hoax by the agencies, a decision which came to haunt them later. [The recovery email associated with it is “nsa******@gmail.com”, where the “*” may represent any characters but probably could be 6 characters. However, presence of “nsa” at the beginning of the recovery email might indicate that the person behind both of these email ids is trying to mock the US authorities]
Nobody still knows the complete truth about Bob, though there was a military court order from Iran which was shared by an Iranian exile in Germany. As much as one would want to dig deeper into the mystery, the outline is that Bob was a victim of the worsening relations between Iran and US. He was probably detained as a collateral for bargaining in negotiations. None of it worked though it seems when in 2020 the Levinson family released a statement that they were contacted by the authorities in US to inform them that it was believed that Bob had died while in custody in Iran.
I would highly recommend this book to understand how the world of spies is not as glorious as depicted in movies, and how they too are not above the shenanigans of government inefficiencies and inter-agency rivalries. Then there’s media too which played along the CIA version that Bob wasn’t their agent in the hope that it would be safer for Bob that way in captivity. It would have been a dramatic victory if Bob had been located or even released, but that were not to be (yet).
It has become fashionable to appear anti-Trump to sell anything, from t-shirts, to Netflix shows, to books, to magazines, to newspapers, to news shows, to slogans, and even politicians. There only rallying point? Anti-Trump-het. Credence? Anti-Trumpism. Validity? Anti-MAGA. I am surprised that people in US have become so dumb that they can be sold any potion with ‘anti Trump’ properties and it will instantly become a best-seller.
This book is no different, even though it is somewhat balanced in its criticism of newspapers, journalists, even agencies of all kinds. However the cast of central characters in this book is as spooky as it can get: ex-spies working as spies-for-hire, journalists using these spies as sources, weak primary sources being presented as gospel of truth. They say that there are lies and then there is journalism and this book proves that.
The central theme of this book deals with the Steele dossier which was released when the Democrats were trying their best to pull down Trump. All media houses covered it as if that so-called dossier had the ultimate truth within it. Yet none even issued an apology when years later it was discovered that the primary source of the that dossier was unreliable and the author Christopher Steele never even bothered to meet his primary source.
However, this book is not just about that, but covers way more breadth than one can comprehend in one reading. It is astounding to see the underbelly of journalism and I am surprised that this book hasn’t gained that kind of traction it deserves. I have consistently lost confidence in today’s journalism, but after reading this book, there is no way I am ever going to trust all these mainstream newspapers and their so-called “exclusives” and “expose”. It is mind-numbing to read about the politicking that goes behind lobbying and how journalists collaborate with private spies to dig out dirt on politicians and political parties they don’t like. And you thought journalists ought to be neutral? Good luck with that.
This is a must read book for anyone out there who is trying to form an opinion about the kind of world we have created, and especially those who espouse journalists as the beacons of truth (whatever ‘truth’ means). The kind of sordid and murky details that are covered by the author, and the extensive references (in terms of books and articles and even documentaries) make this a great read and no amount of praise would be enough, notwithstanding the fact that Meier was himself associated or maybe still is with New York Times whose bias is as clear as the sky on a starry night. Yet, despite of Meier’s own inclinations, this book will reward you by making you believe in often quoted CIA agents’ supposed famous line: welcome to the real world.
Withered Papyrus 