In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf reviews Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide:
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.
U.S. officials regard the unprecedented concentration of power that would entail to be less dangerous than the alternative. They can’t conceive of serious abuses perpetrated by the federal government, though recent U.S. history offers many examples.
[…]
But it is a mistake (albeit a common one) to survey the NSA-surveillance controversy and to conclude that Greenwald represents the radical position. His writing can be acerbic, mordant, biting, trenchant, scathing, scornful, and caustic. He is stubbornly uncompromising in his principles, as dramatized by how close he came to quitting The Guardian when it wasn’t moving as fast as he wanted to publish the first story sourced to Edward Snowden. Unlike many famous journalists, he is not deferential to U.S. leaders.
Yet tone and zeal should never be mistaken for radicalism on the core question before us: What should America’s approach to state surveillance be? “Defenders of suspicionless mass surveillance often insist … that some spying is always necessary. But this is a straw man … nobody disagrees with that,” Greenwald explains. “The alternative to mass surveillance is not the complete elimination of surveillance. It is, instead, targeted surveillance, aimed only at those for whom there is substantial evidence to believe they are engaged in real wrongdoing.”
That’s as traditionally American as the Fourth Amendment.
Targeted surveillance “is consistent with American constitutional values and basic precepts of Western justice,” Greenwald continues. Notice that the authority he most often cites to justify his position is the Constitution. That’s not the mark of a radical. In fact, so many aspects of Greenwald’s book and the positions that he takes on surveillance are deeply, unmistakably conservative.
