OC book review -- The Snowden Files

In my last review, I listed a few things Chuck Klosterman did not mention in his book But What if We're Wrong? I left out UFOs, because they didn't even occur to me, although on the Facebook page I've been having some fun at the expense of the new conspiracy channel at Gaiam.com. I still don't quite get why a yoga/wellness company is hosting that content (other than profitability, of course).   In any case, I stumbled across this video yesterday, and it gave me a bit of pause.   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkswXVmG4xM

Why? Just because two dozen retired military and intelligence officers stood up before the National Press Club and offered, one after another, to testify under oath before Congress? Well, partially, though I don't have a whole lot of faith in eyewitness testimony. More because I had just finished The Snowden Files, a 2014 book by a Guardian reporter named Luke Harding, rushed back out into paperback form to coincide with the upcoming movie.   

[trailer]   

I had kinda/sorta followed the story in the major news media (by which I mean The Daily Show), and I had watched John Oliver's “dick-pic” interview with Snowden after he made the mistake of flying through Russia on his way to asylum in Latin America. As an educator, I'm always interested in ways to personalize technical information to get people's attention.

 [Oliver]   

The book, on which the movie is supposedly based, starts with Snowden as a high school dropout and Ars Technica-posting libertarian nerdboy who would've probably fit right in on Steemit. He joined the army, but got discharged after breaking both legs during basic training. He started as a security guard at a University of Maryland center, which provides advanced language training to the intelligence community. Then he went into IT, and his career took off. Within five short years he went from the State Department (2006) to the CIA (2007) to Dell, where he was contracting for the NSA in Japan (2009) and then Hawaii (2012) as a China specialist, hacking Chinese networks and trying to prevent them from hacking our networks. It appears from the book that he went to Hawaii with the express intent of maximizing his access to classified documents, though he obviously didn't tell anyone that at the time.   

I expect the movie will – in true spy/heist movie style – go into some detail about the actual or imagined process of stealing those documents. The 2014 book does not do that. It speaks more to his decision-making process, the fact that he had followed the cases of other mistreated whistleblowers like Chelsea (Bradley) Manning and Thomas Drake. By the time James Clapper publicly lied during a Congressional hearing (under oath), saying the the US did not “wittingly” collect information on millions of Americans, Snowden was enraged but stymied. Security was too tight. To get higher clearance he had to switch employers again, to another contractor called Booz Allen Hamilton, taking a pay cut in the process.    

The book also describes in detail the difficulties of the initial contacts with journalists, which Snowden had the sense to at least attempt setting up before he pulled the trigger on his server scraping operation. His first couple of attempts with Glenn Greenwald failed because GG didn't take him seriously enough to install encryption software. He had to do an end-around through film-maker Laura Poitras, who was just finishing a film with NSA whistleblower William Binney.     She was much more familiar with the technical issues, and much more security-conscious, having been detained at US airports multiple times.

From there the book is largely about the media story, as it played out over the course of more than a year. There were multiple newspapers involved, along with the website ProPublica, all fact-checking copies of Snowden's archive and extending those documents into news stories. There's lots of behind-the-scenes editorial wrangling with the Obama administration and particularly the British government, for three reasons:   

• The Guardian is a British newspaper;  
• many of the documents concerned the UK's electronic spy agency, GCHQ; 
• and the UK does not have a Bill of Rights.    

Snowden himself didn't play that big a role once the ball started rolling, other than giving some interviews, as he was either hiding in a Hong Kong hotel room or stuck in the lounge of a Russian airport. Julian Assange made some appearances, tweeting from his hidey-hole in London's Ecuadorian embassy. It's not entirely clear from the book, but the whole Russia fiasco may have been Assange's idea.   

For me, having vaguely paid attention during “Der Shitstorm” in real time, the biggest new revalations were how closely Silicon Valley was cooperating with the NSA, accepting hundreds of millions of dollars of our money in exchange for for our data, all the while claiming it was not their fault, that the secret court orders meant they had to screw us over. So much for “Don't Be Evil.” Apple waited until Jobs died, but not long after; they signed up the same year, in 2012.   

So, to wrap up, I am not in any way saying that Snowden had UFO evidence, or that UFOs are real. For me, the problem has always been how easy it would be for any highly advanced ETs to reveal themselves if they wanted to. They wouldn't even have to land on the Washington Mall.

http://giphy.com/gifs/original-the-day-earth-stood-still-xZHGqcY7sWF1e

There are cameras literally everywhere there are people. Or, how hard can it be to hack a broadcast newsfeed without exposing themselves to bullets? Super-villains do it all the time.   No, for me this is simply a story about how poisonous secrecy is, and how difficult true transparency will be to achieve.  I mean that not technically but politically. 

Randall Hayes writes the monthly PlotBot column for the Intergalactic Medicine Show. He has not, to his knowledge, ever seen a UFO. Or any classified documents.