This page is for comments on my book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption and Radical State Transparency and the Snowden Hack.
You can get copies for $2.99 for the Amazon Kindle here
I also have copies here for a limited time for 99 cents from Scribd to read online.
These are early editions of the book which I wanted to get out because Edward Lucas, a prominent writer for the Economist, published his book on Snowden last week -- The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster -- and he mentions my blog posts in his end note and cites me a number of times in his footnotes. The window of opportunity to have my book seen during reviews of his book is limited, and that's why I rushed to finish.
Next week I will upload an edition with illustrations and better coding to Amazon, Smashwords, i-Tunes, etc. -- and yes, some corrections to typos people are complaining about. But probably some will still be missed, and burning grammar issues like "C.P. Snow's 1959 seminal book" instead of "C.P. Snow's seminal 1959 book" may not get caught.
That's because it gets expensive to keep correcting professionally prepared files.
I've already gotten numerous comments in particular by one anonymous "Secret Friend" with tendentious criticism and exaggeration of the typos issue -- and there will be more, like the review on Amazon and nasty Twitter snipes from other anonymous trolls.
That's all to be expected and it will get worse before it gets better. Snowden has powerful forces backing him. In and out of government. And that means that they may succeed, through invoking technical issues or false claims of libel to get my book de-listed. But it's hard to keep doing that on the Internet.
Here's my bottom line to all comers:
If someone wants to buy my book for $100,000 -- or even $50,000 -- plus royalties, let's talk. Then -- after your check clears -- you can give it any name you like; you can shorten or change the sub-title; you can edit it as you see fit; you can take out chapters on Second Life that you think distract; you can take out characterizations of Ron Wyden that you think detract; you can remove things you think are speculative -- but if you have too many of those then we don't have a deal. In other words, pay me money, to get me to do those things you want.
Otherwise, while I'm interested to hear your comments and will especially pay attention to those that are sincere and like-minded, my time is limited. I hope to deal with genuine discoveries of mistakes to the extent possible. But this is samizdat and my labour is voluntary and free. Whatever I earn from this book's sale will likely be a tiny fraction of what it cost even in expenses let alone labour.
I'm not interested in sending the manuscript for free to strangers on the Internet to edit -- a strange request that two of these three "helpers" are demanding. I'm also not willing to make it available for downloadable mark-up or mark-up with the options of "sharing" on Scribd. I'm not interested in playing share-bear with you on the Internet. I don't have much use for the fad among copyleftists of putting up manuscripts and soliciting corrections and comments and incorporating them as free labour. I've already done the free labour, thanks, and don't need your free labour unless you feel like it -- and I certainly don't need griefing and trolling which comes with that feature at least in the early weeks after release. I'll revisit this issue down the line.
So three supposedly different people have all come and made essentially the same comment:
o Allen Kurtz, who left a mixed reader's review on Amazon -- "Brilliantly Conceived, Clumsily Executed," author of a book on Manning's trial, and a retired proof-reader for whom errors jump off the page.
o Tolstoved, a Russian graduate student who has heckled me before who has taken advantage of Edward Lucas' nice tweet about my book to savage it and accuse me of errors.
o Тайный Друг [Secret Friend] who left the multiple tendentious and obsessive comments below.
Maybe they're all different; maybe two of them are the same; I have no idea. But they -- and the worse that may come can't detract from my effort here which is indeed, as Edward Lucas said, "encyclopedic, meticulous, gripping."
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