Hero Edward Snowden

All quotations are from No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald and Hero Snowden should be read in tandem with him.

Whistle blower Edward Snowden is responsible for the most critical leak in history. It reveals blanket surveillance by the NSA.

The Internet offers spontaneous expression. I have some important things to say that I think will interest people and which will make a better world and I put them on my blog. I don’t need to become a journalist or get on T.V., I can distribute them immediately. The Internet is a forum for opinion and debate and for activism to challenge the official view. It has begun to open a pathway for democracy.

It’s quite simple: people in power can rule better if we all agree- with them!- which is to say, it’s in their interest to destroy our intelligence so we can’t think- and we don’t want that! Also they want to alienate us from each other and the way they can do that is to make us think we’re being watched. Indeed once they take away our privacy we self-censor and become alienated from ourself-we’re no longer a private person, we don’t know who we are. They want a stagnant world. Power for the sake of Conformity. We’re so suspicious of everyone that we’re happy for the government to provide us with an enemy. We hate! And we turn a blind eye when people who don’t conform disappear. Do you start to recognize the world we live in NOW?

We have a model for this in Orwell’s 1984– Big Brother and the Thought Police.
It’s worse than that: a world of zombies can’t stop Climate Change.

How brave is Edward Snowden! Amazing! Yet Winston the hero of 1984 gives us an insight; when Winston buys the beautiful book for a diary and then writes in it he is committing a crime because he’s not supposed to have private thoughts and that’s how it must have been for Edward- he had to do it. Then one thing follows another until in the case of Edward you effect a world-shattering event. Ed arranged the documents meticulously. They proved that billions of communication data was being regularly collected.

To complete the selection of documents to represent the whole range of NSA surveillance Edward changed jobs so as to be able to fill in the last gap. This last job was based in Hawaii. It’s impressive how Edward applied the knowledge he had developed in his job as a cybersecurity expert to manipulate the way in which the release of the documents achieved maximum effect. He began by contacting Glenn and urging him to adopt PGP9pretty good privacy) to shield his e-mails so they could communicate. In Glenn’s book this is all exciting step-by-step cloak and dagger but deadly serious.

It was important for Glenn to know why Edward was prepared to risk his life doing this

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As to why the press demonize good people, they feel uncomfortable. They don’t want to feel shame for their own cynicism; they would rather hate. The whole media is riddled with this. Don’t forget it.

The last time Glenn saw Edward was just before he left with two trusted lawyers for a safe house.

Edward’s only fear had been that people would not care about the surveillance revelations. But people do care and the effect has been global.

Edward Snowden with girlfriend Lindsay Mills at the Bolshoi