No Place To Hide: A Conservative Critique Of A Radical NSA

Glenn Greenwald's new book is far more grounded in traditional American norms, laws, and values than the surveillance programs it is critiquing.

Glenn Greenwald's new book, No Place to Hide, reproduces a secret National Security Agency document that sums up that agency's radical approach to surveillance: Collect it all. Know it all. Exploit it all.

That totalitarian approach came straight from the top. Outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander began using "collect it all" in Iraq at the height of the counterinsurgency. Eventually, he aimed similar tools at hundreds of millions of innocent people living in liberal democracies at peace, not war zones under occupation.

The strongest passages in No Place to Hide convey the awesome spying powers amassed by the U.S. government and its surveillance partners; the clear and present danger they pose to privacy; and the ideology of the national-security state. The NSA really is intent on subverting every method a human could use to communicate without the state being able to monitor the conversation...