The Snowden Files - The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

Zusatztext 77517054 Informationen zum Autor Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian . He has reported from Delhi! Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011) and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (1997)! nominated for the Orwell Prize. The film rights to WikiLeaks were sold to Dreamworks and the film! "The Fifth Estate!" came out in 2013. His books have been translated into 13 languages. Luke lives in England with his wife and their two children. Foreword   Edward Snowden is one of the most extraordinary whistleblowers in history. Never before has anyone scooped up en masse the top-secret files of the world’s most powerful intelligence organisations, in order to make them public. But that was what he did.   His skills are unprecedented. Until the present generation of computer nerds came along, no one realised it was possible to make off with the electronic equivalent of whole libraries full of triple-locked filing cabinets and safes – thousands of documents and millions of words.   His motives are remarkable. Snowden set out to expose the true behaviour of the US National Security Agency and its allies. On present evidence, he has no interest in money – although he could have sold his documents to foreign intelligence services for many, many millions. Nor does he have the kind of left-wing or Marxist sentiments which could lead to him being depicted as un-American. On the contrary, he is an enthusiast for the American constitution, and, like other fellow ‘hacktivists’, is a devotee of libertarian politician Ron Paul, whose views are well to the right of many Republicans.   What Snowden has revealed is important. His files show that the methods of the intelligence agencies that carry out electronic eavesdropping have spiralled out of control, largely thanks to the political panic in the US which followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11.   Let off the legal leash and urged to make America safe, the NSA and its British junior partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ (secretly allied with the internet and telecommunications giants who control the hardware), have used all their technical skills to ‘master the internet’. That is their phrase, not ours. Democratic control has been vague, smothered in secrecy and plainly inadequate.   The result has been a world that is spied on. The technologies that the west has trumpeted as forces for individual freedom and democracy – Google, Skype, mobile phones, GPS, YouTube, Tor, e-commerce, internet banking and all the rest – are turning into machines for surveillance that would have astonished George Orwell, the author of 1984 .   The Guardian was, I am glad to say, first among the free press to publish Snowden’s revelations. We saw it as our duty to break the taboos of secrecy, with due regard, as Snowden himself wanted, to the safety of individuals and the protection of genuinely sensitive intelligence material.   I am proud we did so: fierce debate and demands for reform have been now launched across the world – in the US itself, in Germany, France, Brazil, Indonesia, Canada, Australia, even in deferential Britain. The Guardian was eventually forced to publish from the safety of its New York division, because of British legal harassment. I think that readers of this book might well see the value of introducing a UK equivalent to the first amendment of the US constitution, which protects the freedom of the press. It is a freedom that can protect us all.   Alan Rusbridger Editor-in-chief, Guardian London, February 2014     Prologue: The Rendezvous Mira Hotel, Nathan Road, Hong Kong Monday 3 June 2013

Zusammenfassung

In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Edward Snowden’s astonishing story

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.
 
For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story, from the day Snowden 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. Harding touches 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.

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Luke Harding
• Verlag: Vintage USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 07.02.2014
• EAN: 9780804173520
• ISBN: 978-0-8041-7352-0
• Themen: Sachbuch > Philosophie, Religion > Biographien, Autobiographien; Sozialwissenschaften, Recht,Wirtschaft > Politikwissenschaft > Politische Wissenschaft und Politische Bildung