Cover of my book. Art work by Hallie Shatravka.
My book Privacy for Me and Not for Thee: The Movement for Invincible Personal Encryption, Radical State Transparency, and the Snowden Hack is now available on Amazon for Kindle.
For a limited time I also have my e-book available on Scribd for 99 cents with photographic illustrations.
Next week I will upload it to Smashwords premium, i-Tunes, etc. and it will be professionally coded, with illustrations -- and yes, some typos corrected hopefully.
This book grew out of my blogs here, but it is not a mere reprint of these blog posts; indeed it doesn't have any reprints but is newly-written with new material, and only some posts included that were substantially rewritten. It has a lot of new facts that haven't appeared before on my blogs.
I went over all my posts and all my findings and in the course of doing so, corrected time-lines, improved arguments and made new findings which I've incorporated. I have put in hundreds of links to primary sources and news articles so that others can follow along.
These include information about the handling of Snowden in Russia; the background and activities of Jacob Appelbaum; the movements of WikiLeaks and their hacker friends in Russia and India; the period of Snowden's stay in Hong Kong; the controversies surrounding Tor.
More than ever I am convinced that what we are seeing here isn't so much a story about "leaks" and the embarassment of US intelligence -- although that's obviously important -- but a story of the latest round in the encryption arms race that began with phreakers and continued through Clipper Chip and went on to PGP and consists now of The Snowden Hack. (If you don't know what any of the events in that sentence were about, use your Wikipedia -- a biased source -- and read my book -- critical of hackers.)
I tried to make a coherent if lengthy narrative fitting these pieces of the puzzle together to explain my thesis: that we can't necessarily find a direct recruitment of Snowden by Russian intelligence, but we can find collusion with figures associated with Russian intelligence who may have served to nudge Snowden and his hacker and journalist comrades toward aiding the Kremlin's interests.
I can only encourage everybody to buy my book -- it's the price of a latte! -- and engage with my thinking. That's my hope!
And write a customer review on Amazon.
It's interesting that both Edward Lucas, author of a new book called The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster, available on Amazon Kindle, and John Schindler both have used the term "Snowden Operation". As that implies that there really is a conscious Russian "op" behind it, i.e. a government intelligence, I haven't used that term because I myself don't have any direct proof of that. That's not because I don't believe Snowden could have been turned into an agent for the Kremlin's purposes. Indeed I do.
Rather, I use the term "Snowden Hack" instead, and even indicate there's a movement directed precisely toward the Snowden Hack because I think that's how it works more cunningly and more indirectly: that anarchist coders, some of whom have colluded with Russian or other hostile intelligence, wittingly or through "false flag" operations, have planned and executed and assisted this NSA hack over a period of time.
I don't think it happened spontaneously with young Ed sitting at his desk at the NSA one day and saying "Gosh, I could wiretap anybody on the planet, even President Obama, isn't that awesome sauce" and then deciding humbly and selflessly that he sh0uld leak this terrible capacity in order to prevent a "turn-key tyranny." Whatever Snowden's actual early associations, whatever the claims that he "acted alone" (something all law-enforcement rushes to say about any major crime to allay public fears), I think he was fitted into an older plan, as part of a long-term war on the NSA conceived by WikiLeaks, Tor and the Chaos Computer Club.
While I have a lot in my book on Russia and some new insights and material, I focus even more on the hacker movements because they've received almost no critical scrutiny from the media.
I began writing this book actually as a "long form journalism" magazine article about six months ago. I was frustrated at the lack of critical coverage on Snowden, then annoyed at the journalists who did occasionally cover it with criticism -- but not willing to reference my blog, or any blog (this was partly because of the long period in which Michael Kelley of Business Insider was talking to Joshua Foust, who casually lifts and takes credit for other people's blogs all the time).
I then submitted this manuscript to a half dozen online publications, one after the other. It seemed as if the manuscript only got longer with each rejection -- I found some editors just didn't understand anything about the hackers and crypto kids and I had to go into long explanations. I got some encouraging readings in some quarters and was invited to submit other articles, but a critical piece on Snowden and his fellow hackers just didn't seem to be one that any editor was prepared to publish at that time, in a climate of overall hysteria and adulation of Snowden. I decided to just keep putting it together and maybe make a book out of it.
When Edward Lucas contacted me about his own e-book about a month ago, I urged him to make me his co-author. He was not interested in doing that. For one, his book was mainly all written at that time. For two, we really had different perspectives and didn't agree on some main issues. Lucas, as a European concedes a criticism of NSA that I'm not willing to concede because it comes from this warring hacker movement coercing us into an undemocratic process. He's concerned about that, obviously, but the threat of the big USA looms larger.
For Lucas, the eavesdropping on Merkel and other key moments are unforgiveable, and understandably so. Edward also delves more into the world of espionage with his knowledge of history which I don't have -- there is a lot in his book about the methods of espionage, similarities in this operation to others, and the damage that Snowden has caused. His book is especially strong in calling out the fact that Snowden can't really be said to be a mere civil rights whistleblower if in fact his hacks amount to help to the Russians and Chinese and are really unnecessary for the purposes of reform.
I think it's great that Lucas' book can create an intellectual home for people who want to be critical of the NSA and reform it, but still have a lot of qualms about Snowden. That's a home that liberal Democrats and conscientious Republicans can have in Washington and can help address this crisis sanely. I know his book is getting a very serious reading in the right places.
But...It's not my intellectual home because I think the entire thing is suspect and has to be opposed at its root. No one has proved to me that the NSA needs reform; my findings only prove that hackers need reform -- as in reform school.
No matter -- I think it's important to have a variety of perspectives on Snowden competing in the debate, because so far, it's been controlled largely by Ron Wyden and the Snowdenistas.
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