THE SNOWDEN FILES
The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
Luke Harding
Vintage
$14.95; 352 pages
The saga of Edward J Snowden, the man whose leaked documents revealed the Orwellian dimensions of the National Security Agency (NSA), reads like a le Carre novel crossed with something by Kafka - at least it does in Luke Harding's new book, The Snowden Files.
A 29-year-old NSA contractor, alarmed by the agency's vast surveillance dragnet, starts secretly collecting hundreds of thousands of classified government documents from his employer and turns them over to journalists, revealing the agency's colossal reach and indiscriminate vacuuming up of information about people's phone calls, emails and contacts.
The revelations not only pull back a curtain on the secretive agency's expanded workings since 9/11, but also unleash an urgent public debate. A debate about the balance between civil liberties and national security; about the scope and protocols of United States government surveillance; about the relationship between the NSA and giant Internet and phone companies; about Web infrastructure and national sovereignty; and about the meaning of privacy in a world in which Big Brother or Uncle Sam could be listening. Mr Snowden, in the meantime, has become a fugitive, holing up first in Hong Kong and then in Russia - the world's most wanted man.
Last June, The Guardian newspaper broke the first NSA article based on documents provided by Mr Snowden; it appeared under the byline of the columnist Glenn Greenwald, whom Mr Snowden had reached out to (along with the documentary film-maker Laura Poitras). Mr Greenwald left the paper last fall to join a new journalistic enterprise, and this Snowden book (by another journalist at The Guardian, Mr Harding) seems timed, with its release this week, to get out ahead of a book by Mr Greenwald scheduled for April publication.
This book, which lacks endnotes, breaks little new ground. It relies heavily on The Guardian's reporting, as well as work from other sources, including The Washington Post, The New York Times (with which The Guardian has shared some of Mr Snowden's documents), books by the longtime NSA chronicler James Bamford, and various Snowden interviews and profiles. Mr Harding has spun all this material into a fast-paced narrative that is part bildungsroman and part cinematic thriller.
The portrait he creates of Mr Snowden is a familiar one - a geek and gamer most at home online, who never graduated from high school but whose "exceptional IT skills" landed him a job with the Central Intelligence Agency and later as an NSA contractor. During a stint with the CIA, Mr Harding writes, Mr Snowden appears to have grown increasingly disillusioned with the tactics of the US government. He joined the NSA as a contract employee in 2009; over the next years he said he discovered how far-reaching the NSA's surveillance activities were.
Mr Harding provides some bright digital snapshots of Mr Snowden's time in Hawaii, where he worked as an NSA contractor. He describes Mr Snowden's seemingly idyllic life on Oahu, with his girlfriend, a dancer and photographer named Lindsay Mills. Some of their friends teasingly likened Mr Snowden to the vampire character Edward Cullen in the Twilight series because of his pale, solemn appearance, Mr Harding reports. "E," as Ms Mills reportedly called him, occasionally made an appearance in her photos online, Mr Harding writes, but his face was routinely concealed.
Tension builds as Mr Snowden settles on a plan - to leak top-secret stolen documents to journalists interested in civil liberties. And there is more suspense as Mr Snowden engineers a high-risk rendezvous with Mr Greenwald, Ms Poitras and The Guardian's Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill in a Hong Kong hotel room. There, the journalists vet their source, and Mr Snowden begins to talk them through the trove of incredibly complex NSA material - all while anxiously fearing a knock at the door.
Mr Harding gives us a spy-novel-like sense of the tradecraft that Mr Snowden and the journalists used, from encryption to old-school huggermugger meetings, but some mysterious gaps in the Hong Kong-to-Moscow story line remain. Of the period in Hong Kong after Mr Snowden left that hotel, Mr Harding writes vaguely that Mr Snowden "went underground" with the help of a "mystery guardian angel" - "a well-connected Hong Kong resident" - who seems to have found him a place to stay with a friend. At one point, he writes, Ms Poitras called Mr MacAskill with the alarming news that Mr Snowden had sent a message saying he was in danger. Hours later, a lawyer phoned back to say Mr Snowden was OK. "The details were hazy," Mr Harding writes, "but it appeared Snowden had survived a close call."
Mr Harding - the author with David Leigh of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy - spends considerable space in these pages chronicling goings-on within The Guardian's offices in London and New York, and explains the legal difficulties British journalists face without the sort of protections provided by the US Constitution. Unfortunately, such discussions of the transatlantic differences in journalism occasionally devolve into parochial and dubious boasts of British superiority, with Mr Harding going so far as to assert that American newspapers "pursue leads at a leisurely, even gentlemanly pace," and that the American news media generally act "deferential towards the president."
The book still gives readers a succinct overview of the momentous events of the past year. And if it leans towards dramatising everything in thrillerlike terms, the book also manages to leave readers with an acute understanding of the serious issues involved: the NSA's surveillance activities and voluminous collection of data, and the consequences that this sifting of bigger and bigger haystacks for tiny needles has had on the public and its right to privacy.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
