by ANDREW O’HAGAN
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald, Hamish Hamilton, 259 pp, £20.00
Mostly he remained inconceivably calm. Even now, with the clock winding down on his freedom, Snowden still went to bed at 10.30, as he had every night during my time in Hong Kong. While I could barely catch more than two hours of restless sleep at a time, he kept consistent hours. ‘Well, I’m going to hit the hay,’ he would announce casually each night before retiring for seven and a half hours of sound sleep, appearing completely refreshed the next day.
When we asked him about his ability to sleep so well under the circumstances, Snowden said that he felt profoundly at peace with what he had done and so the nights were easy. ‘I figure I have very few days left with a comfortable pillow,’ he joked, ‘so I might as well enjoy them.’
Glenn Greenwald expresses his bafflement and the reader can share it. The journalist is in a panic – about security, about deadlines, about being scooped, about being misunderstood – while the source is cool and inscrutable. Snowden later told the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, that if ‘I end up in chains in Guantánamo Bay … I can live with it’. Greenwald is a former constitutional and human rights lawyer, and now a journalist who isn’t afraid to point the finger at the conventional and the powerful. Snowden came in search of him. At first, Greenwald thought him another nutter – it’s a world of nutters – until the filmmaker Laura Poitras showed him some emails. In one of them, we see the degree of Snowden’s commitment. All his predictions came true, and he was ready from the beginning to see the plan through, at whatever cost to himself. He had it all worked out. The shock after the first revelations, he wrote,
will provide the support needed to build a more equal internet, but this will not work to the advantage of the average person unless science outpaces law. By understanding the mechanisms through which our privacy is violated, we can win here … In the end, we must enforce a principle whereby the only way the powerful may enjoy privacy is when it is the same kind shared by the ordinary: one enforced by the laws of nature, rather than the policies of man.
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