Indeed, Snowden himself acknowledged this possible response to his activism. One argument says: “It’s hopeless, privacy is gone, why struggle?” The other says: “I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I care?” As Eben Moglen, a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, wrote recently in the Guardian, We face two claims – you meet them everywhere you turn – that summarise the politics against which we are working. So what if Gmail reads my emails and the government reads my text messages? All they’ll find out is that I’m running late for dinner or that I need to buy milk on my way home. One recurring question that seems to pop up in the midst of all this is “so what?”. Reading No Place to Hide creates the unnerving feeling that all that’s required to be under state surveillance is to exist. The practice became so common that NSA employees gave it its own terminology: LOVEINT. Indeed, there were any number of ways in which one could find oneself on the NSA radar – Snowden’s documents showed that NSA agents frequently spied on partners or prospective “love interests,” for example. As No Place to Hide demonstrates, however, the NSA approach was not one of targeted investigation of threats in response to credible intelligence, but rather a dragnet approach to the population at large – listen to enough phone calls, and read enough emails, and eventually someone will do something illegal to justify the whole endeavour. Indeed, the NSA program, known as PRISM, was part of the post-9/11 legislation enacted by the Bush administration to avoid the intelligence flaws that failed to avert the 9/11 attacks. The justification trotted out to excuse such widespread and illegal surveillance of the population has invariably been “national security.” The NSA has attempted to justify its activities by saying that its surveillance program has thwarted terrorist attacks and made the world safer. Domestic legal barriers to prevent such activities – such as the need for warrants and probable cause prior to wire-tapping or otherwise subjecting individuals to surveillance – have been largely ignored or circumvented. The NSA has also broken into or otherwise circumvented much of the encryption that protects sensitive data on the internet, and has, by its own admissions, broken privacy laws thousands of times. Through documents leaked to Greenwald by Snowden, a former systems administrator for private firm Booz Allen Hamilton, it was revealed that the NSA has the ability to monitor and collect information from millions of people around the world – both in the form of data (the content of your text messages, emails and phone calls) and metadata (which tracks information like length of phone conversations, where and when calls and emails were made, but not specific content).

It looks at how the US National Security Agency, or NSA – in conjunction with intelligence agencies in Canada, Britain and Australia, and with most major internet service providers and search engines – illegally spies on the population of, it seems, the entire world. No Place to Hide details the systematic and comprehensive practice of government surveillance of the citizenry, without warrants, and without probable cause. But the revelations from Edward Snowden, and the investigations undertaken by journalist Glenn Greenwald, detailed in No Place to Hide, suggest I haven’t been nearly paranoid enough.

When questioned, I reply that I do this to avoid some horrendous involuntary selfie winding up on the internet though no doubt my friends wonder why I am so paranoid – or perhaps why I think myself so special that my electronic devices would ever be hacked.

I keep the GPS function on my mobile phone switched off, and have gone as far as covering the camera lenses on my phone and iPad with opaque stickers. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance Stateīy Glenn Greenwald | Hamish Hamilton | $30Īmong my peers, my colleagues, my friends and family, I am something of an anomaly.

Just because you re paranoid