Yet another warning ignored. When he was arrested, Binney was naked and showering.
Then, Jessica explains her relationship to Dale and various experiences they've been through together: accidentally driving over a cow; clearing a wilderness trail with chainsaws; helping a rancher who'd managed to pin himself against a tree with his own truck and, pruning a Douglas fir using a shotgun. They were like "a platonic married couple." But after Dale's meeting with Laura, he shares a bite from the Tree of Knowledge gleaned from Laura: "Dale made a sudden request: could we put our cellphones in the refrigerator?" It's almost sexy. And when Jessica finally meets Laura, and comes under the spell of her aura, she, too, seems smitten -- in a platonic fashion.
Poitras collects the Snowden box and runs off to a hotel to sort through its dangerous contents. The narrative gets thicker, as Poitras attempt to engage Glenn Greenwald in the sorting and reporting, but he proves, at first, to be reluctant to engage a stranger (he's ignored Snowden's overtures) and bogged down with overwork, but, more importantly, was resistant to adopting encryption to protect his communiques. She writes,
When a mysterious person - using the handle "Cincinnatus" - pleaded with him to set up encrypted email, Greenwald blew off the request. "Despite my intentions, I never created the time to work on encryption," he later wrote. "It was simply that on my always too-long list of things to take care of, installing encryption technology at the behest of this unknown person never became pressing enough for me to stop other things and focus on it."
Though unintentional, the delay might have cost Snowden his freedom, as he waited for Laura and Micah Lee to convince and teach him how to use the TAILS thumbdrive. Greenwald's reluctance sounds strange now, but Bruder points out "In early 2013, most journalists were like Greenwald. Protecting their email from prying eyes wasn't a priority."
Jessica explains that Snowden had wanted to have his revelations run in the New York Times, the nation's preeminent paper of record, but was seriously bummed out when they quashed an October 2004 article that exposed StellarWind, the government's illegal dragnet of American electronic communications. She writes,
Approaching the New York Times, however, was out of the question. Snowden didn't have confidence that the newspaper would have the guts to break the story...The scoop was scheduled to run right before the 2004 elections, but Executive Editor Bill Keller deferred to Bush administration officials, who claimed the revelations would damage national security.
And the grandiloquent Greenwald had his head up his ass at the wrong time. Then WaPo pulled out, and the New Yorker wouldn't engage Snowden in Hong Kong without a taste of the sugar in the box Laura had. Jessica recalls Laura saying, "I left Ed hanging. There were a few days where he felt like he was completely alone. He felt everyone had turned their backs on him." Eventually, it worked out, and Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill flew to Hong Kong to meet up with Snowden.
A more intriguing section of Snowden's Toolbox comes when Jessica talks about how Poitras and Greenwald got together after the Snowden revelations began running in the Guardian and were invited by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar to start up a new publication -- The Intercept. It was meant to be a solid alternative to the corporatized MSM and a trustworthy reporting platform for whistleblowers. The publication garnered and poached some of the best journalistic talent from NYT and WaPo and elsewhere and seemed like the Travelling Wilburys of journalism. But there was trouble from the start. The Terms of Service (TOS) made it clear that readers could be expected to have their presence at the site logged and their comments scanned by Google and Amazon. Such surveillance was troublesome, if for no other reason than that the Intercept's readership were probably the types the State would want to gather details about.
It recalled the deal that Greenwald had signed with Amazon to promote his Pulitzer Prize-winning post-Snowden account of the surveillance state, No Place to Hide. The deal offered to viewers of the site was an opportunity to receive Greenwald's book for free, if they applied and were successfully approved for an Amazon credit card. The application details would be processed by Chase, which Greenwald had once excoriated for their corrupt practices. But more importantly, by accepting the deal from Amazon, Greenwald was effectively promoting the forwarding of private information to a corporation that would collect and store that data -- and, no doubt, share with the government. Such readers, again, were exactly the kind of data points the State would be eager to collect.
Bruder writes broadly of Amazon in Nomadland. Workers suffer in her tale. She's no acolyte of the Amazon schlong vibe. Here, she notes "Amazon patented a bracelet that could track warehouse workers and deliver a sensory buzz whenever they make mistakes." She tells of the odd behavior of Alexa. "Users reported that she was emitting fits of unprompted laughter," writes Bruder. "Some called it 'creepy' or 'witch-like.' Others heard her cackling away in the dark..." She doesn't discuss the fact that Amazon openly works with the intelligence community and specifically has built a web-services platform for the CIA. And it doesn't help to recently discover that former head of the NSA, Keith Alexander, whom some credit with being the architect of the stuxnet malware program that took down an Iranian nuclear-research facility.
But almost heartbreaking is word from Bruder and Maharidge that Laura Poitras was turned down by The Intercept when she wanted to continue working with the Snowden trove of documents. She was told, "First Look Media was asking us to sign an access agreement, stating the company would own all rights to any publication that resulted from our writing about the Snowden archive." And, she continues, "We also learned that any notes we took at the archive would be confiscated for review - and possible redaction - by the Intercept." And then the killer: "I laughed. The experience felt like something out of Kafka. And it gave me a sense of de'jà vu, echoing how the NSA and the FBI had shut down our request to see our files." The Intercept has since stopped writing altogether about the Snowden archive.
It gets worse when the reader learns that Laura Poitras was stiffed by The Intercept in her compensation package. Bruder writes, "Laura had been facing challenges of her own at the company, including the startling realization that her compensation was far below that of her male colleagues Greenwald and (Jeremy) Scahill." Unbeknownst to her, Scahill and Greenwald had renegotiated their contracts, and the resulting pay disparity was "in the hundreds of thousands of dollars." More recently, we've discovered that Greenwald had a falling out with The Intercept in October 2020 when he took umbrage at an editorial decision that "censored" (his word) his piece on the Bidens just before the election. It smelled of the NYT in 2004, and was de'jà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra put it.
A repetition of the book's leitmotif is an appropriate way to end this review. Trust -- at the interpersonal level, work environment and social contract with the State -- is key. As Bruder and Maharidge put it,
Trust is the basis of all cooperative action in a free society. It's the feeling of fellowship that allows people to take risks and grow. It's also the underpinning of democracy. And it's fragile, easy to undermine.
Succinct, true, and well put. But is it any longer a sustainable credo?
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