Partial Disclosure

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State

by Glenn Greenwald

Metropolitan, 259 pp., $27.00

by Luke Harding

Vintage, 346 pp., $14.95 (paper)

a Frontline documentary directed by Michael Kirk

by the Presidents Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies: Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire

Princeton University Press, 239 pp., $16.95 (paper)

Within days of the publication of No Place to Hide by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a photograph began circulating on the Internet that showed National Security Agency operatives surreptitiously implanting a surveillance device on an intercepted computer. After nearly a year of revelations about the reach of the NSA, spawned by Edward Snowdens theft of tens of thousands of classified documents, this photo nonetheless seemed to come as something of a surprise: here was the United States government appropriating and opening packages sent through the mail, secretly installing spyware, and then boxing up the goods, putting on new factory seals, and sending them on their way. It was immediate in a way that words were not.

That photo itself was part of the Snowden cache, and readers of Greenwalds book were treated to the NSAs own caption: Not all SIGINT tradecraft involves accessing signals and networks from thousands of miles away, it said.

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Partial Disclosure