The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
Written by Luke Harding
Narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith
4/5
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About this audiobook
Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States government. His whistleblowing has shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, and generated a passionate public debate on the dangers of global monitoring and the threat to individual privacy.
In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age.
Luke Harding
Luke Harding is a journalist, writer, and awardwinning correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin, and Moscow, and covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Between 2007 and 2011, he was the Guardian’s Moscow bureau chief. In February 2011, the Kremlin deported him from the country in the first case of its kind since the Cold War. He is the author of several books, most recently the number one New York Times bestseller Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.
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Reviews for The Snowden Files
92 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A dry subject was very well written as a chronological thriller. I particularly enjoyed this, especially the chapters on the negotiations between the US govt and the Guardian. The chapter on the UK govt's reaction made my blood boil more than a little. An excellent read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the Guardian newspaper. Does an excellent job of explaining who Snowden is and what his "leaks" reveal.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An excellent, fast moving account of the Snowden affair, and why it matters. The sad thing of course, is that people have short memories, and although there was wide spread outrage a year ago, so many bad things have happened in the world since then, that its sort of been forgotten. At least, as far as I can see, very little change has happened. Harding tells a good story; sometimes its a little over blown - descriptions of Snowden, in Hong Kong, being in the "heart of Communist China" are a bit overdramatic. But mainly its well told. He misses one crucial point though. The reason for NSA and related agencies collecting all information, rather than targeting the information that they need, is that is simply easier and cheaper to collect all of it. Finding a needle in a haystack ( a metaphor thats used a lot in the book) depends on identifying the right haystack in the first place. Easier and cheaper to simply hoover up every haystack in sight. Collecting targeted data is hard - collecting all data is much easier. Harding makes the excellent point that how countries reacted depended a lot on how spies are perceived. In Britain spies are James Bond - basically good guys. There's nothing to worry about, you're in safe hands. In Germany, spies are the Stasi - there's a lot to worry about.But now we all know our data is being intercepted, it seems that most of us really don't care. Which proves that is not privacy that people care about, but simply about not being abused, ripped off or otherwise taken advantage of. The point being, though, how do you know? The Snowden affair raises a lot of important questions; sadly though, no one seems to want to debate them. And the bad guys already don't use electronic means for their communications
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When the Patriot Act first passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, I was part of a group that organized panel discussions and protests against the act. The kind of wholesale surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden was exactly the kind of thing, we feared, for which the Patriot Act paved the way. And although the consensus (as far as there is one) seems to be that the post-9/11 surveillance techniques of the NSA over-reach even the provisions of the Patriot Act, the law allowed for just a little hop-skip to the place where we are today. So, while my inclination is to say, "I told you so," no one really cares what I thought when the act was first passed so why bother saying it?
A commenter on the radio asserted that the U.S. is divided into two camps, those who think Edward Snowden is a hero and a patriot and those who think he's a traitor. I would argue there's a third camp of people who know his name but don't know anything else about him, but the division is the source of the point I'm trying to make. I've been inclined to think of Snowden as a hero from the beginning, and I'm even more inclined to think so after reading The Snowden Files. I'm also inclined to ask my many computer-savvy friends for advice on encryption software for my laptop. Not because I'm engaged in illegal activities, but that's the whole point: the NSA is hoovering up data from everyone, not just from suspected terrorists. If I pissed off someone in the government, I'm sure they could come up with enough evidence from my internet search history and my library records to cobble together a case against me, or against anyone.
The thing I don't quite understand is why more people---myself included---aren't totally up-in-arms (figuratively speaking) about Snowden's revelations. Why are so many of us just going about business as usual? Is it because we assume we have nothing to hide, and so we're leaving things be and letting it up to the journalists to be targeted as terrorists for reporting government actions that flout our rights under the Constitution? Or is it because we already assumed we had no privacy and so this new information doesn't really bother us? As one friend puts it, "I assume they already have all of my information anyway."
But about the book: I enjoyed this book. It was a pleasant (if disturbing) read. I admit, I skimmed the "Shoot the Messenger" chapter in which Harding goes into detail about the inner workings of British government. I'm still an American, after all, and hearing about what happens in other countries kind of makes me glaze over. I was astounded, however, at the grounding of the flight of the president of Bolivia when he was suspected of smuggling Snowden out of Russia (he didn't, btw). No wonder some other countries think of the U.S. as a big bully throwing its weight around.
So, my next action is to procure Greenwald's book about the contents of the Snowden leaks, and to maybe buy myself a typewriter and start visiting people in person more often rather than calling or e-mailing. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It's clear that our governments, democratic or otherwise, still live in the Middle Ages. Perhaps the tools have changed but little else. We are still building walls around countries, if no longer cities, and sending out our spies and artillery salvos at enemies of our own constructing. Harding's book about the NSA whistleblower is all the evidence we need. He writes like the reporter that he is, which is a good thing. Half thriller, half commentary. Easy to read. Hard to forget. Which is also a good thing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A great insight. Much more details than the movie. A recommended read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a great book to learn about the events that surrounded the facts released by Snowden. A must read for any internet enthusiast.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Author appears to be tech illiterate. Otherwise good if extremely depressing book. Five years on and things actually got worse so this turned out to have had less of an effect than people (and probably Snowden himself) had hoped for.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5If you really want to read about Snowden, go straight to the source instead of getting someone else's ideas of what happened. Read Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, excellent read!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an amazing account of whistle-blower Edward Snowden and his leak of intelligence documents to the press concerning the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs conducted against nearly all U.S. citizens, as well as those abroad, even including heads of state of allied countries. This release sparked debates worldwide about the needs for mass surveillance that infringe on our civil liberties and rights to privacy, as well as the need for a free press. Shockingly, the country even more zealous than ours in seeing this situation resolved in favor of its intelligence community was Britain, who citizens do not have a Bill of Rights with freedom of speech and the press to protect them from such invasive actions. The claims that all of this is necessary in the fight against terrorism lacks strength when no one can prove that even one terrorist attack has been thwarted due to these practices. As I write this I am in horror that because it is being posted on the Internet, I can be put on some government watch list simply because I commend Snowden for his actions in making us all aware of what our government has been doing to us. Making this worse is the fact that he was forced to seek asylum in Russia of all places because he is safer there! We have much to be ashamed of. I think of Snowden as being similar to Daniel Ellsberg and hope that our government does the responsible thing – enact meaningful curbs on such intelligence gathering with realistic oversight and brings Snowden home to the U.S.A. I can’t wait to see the movie.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Radio and TV coverage of the Snowden leaks were spotty. This book helped to fill in the details, background, and what happened since Snowden showed up in Moscow. Snowden himself, and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, are fleshed out a little more, and I learned why an American would go to British journalists, the Guardian, with the information he had purloined. It turns out the British, specifically their top-secret telecommunications monitoring arm, GCHQ, collaborated with the NSA: “We have the brains: they have the money. It’s a collaboration that’s worked very well.” [Sir David Omand, Former GCHQ Director] No shortage of egoism and despotism to go around, then.
Snowden was a right-wing libertarian in early writings on the web as a user he called ‘TheTrueHOOHA’. It was frankly unsettling for me to read/listen to his thinking as a teen, and see his progression to action. To use his words, he would like to be viewed as a patriot who believes in the right to privacy enshrined in the U.S. constitution. When I’d first learned of his leaks, I was startled. Listening to his first interview on TV, I was admiring. After reading this book, I am unsettled.
Luke Harding, a Guardian reporter, outlines the Snowden action for us with a minimum of sensationalism but with some incredulity at the scope of the revelations. And the news is pretty sensational. Harding gives a little background into Snowden’s early development, and his foray into working as a U.S. government contractor specializing in the protection of U.S. government communications. Snowden’s amazed and amazing reach into the lives of others via their private data transfers must vindicate the paranoid. While I have my doubts that any world leader or business executive thought their telecommunications were truly secret, Snowden’s revelations are startling in the scope of the data collection and in the holes in the system, e.g., a relatively low-level contractor had access to the material.
I should probably state from the get-go that I do not fear my government. I grew up in an age where inaction was much more to be expected than action; incompetence and bureaucratic bungling was much more common than overreach. I was not subject to the kind of totalitarian control experienced in Eastern Bloc countries, the Soviet Union, or China, but we have those examples to know it can happen. I believe the president and his minions who claim that the government is not listening to the communications of private citizens. They simply do not have the capacity, nor the interest, to do that. However, they now apparently have the means, and individuals within governments can have a deleterious effect upon the stated objectives of government. Snowden has shown us a place where an individual might have an outsized effect to his purported role.
Knowing just what I know now, if I had to make a judgment on Snowden’s fate, I might say he should go to court congruently with the leadership of the NSA and the GCHQ. I don’t think it would have been possible for him to “go up the chain of command” to protest this data collection. It is ridiculous to contemplate that anyone would have listened to him, given the reaction from our fearless leaders upon learning of his revelations. But I wish things had gone differently…for him and for us.
I listened to the Random House Audio version of this title, very ably read by Nicholas Guy Smith. I had a look at the paper copy as well, and found it concise enough that the momentum never lagged. Since Guardian reporters were the ones that initially broke this story, it is reasonable that they are the ones to write the details of what happened and the follow-up. I can’t imagine there is a person out there who wouldn’t be interested in this topic. Inform yourselves. This is going to be a political topic for some years to come.