Quotes from book
No Place to Hide

No Place to Hide
Glenn Greenwald

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State is a 2014 non-fiction book by American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. It was first published on May 13, 2014 through Metropolitan Books and details Greenwald's role in the global surveillance disclosures as revealed by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The documents from the Snowden archive cited in the book are freely available online.

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“Forgoing privacy in a quest for absolute safety is as harmful to a healthy psyche and life of an individual as it is to a healthy political culture. For the individual, safety first means a life of paralysis and fear, never entering a car or airplane, never engaging in an activity that entails risk, never weighing quality of life over quantity, and paying any price to avoid danger. […] A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up it’s liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security. However, absolute safety is itself chimeric, pursued but never obtained. The pursuit degrades those who engage in it as well as any nation that comes to be defined by it.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 208.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“What is lost when the private realm is abolished are many of the attributes typically associated with quality of life. Most people have experienced how privacy enables liberation from constraint. And we’ve all, conversely, had the experience of engaging in private behavior when we thought we were alone – dancing, confessing, exploring sexual expression, sharing untested ideas – only to feel shame at having been seen by others.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, pages 173-174.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“History leaved no doubt that collective coercion and control is both the intent and effect of state surveillance.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 78.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret, who can decide what kind of world we want to live in. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism. And that’s what is happening now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 253.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the [United States] government had striven to show poeple around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition ISBN 978-0-241-97289-2, pages 83-84.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations. Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, page 94.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“Today, for many in the profession, praise from the government for "responsible" reporting—for taking its direction about what should and should not be published—is a badge of honor. That this is the case is the true measure of how far adversarial journalism in the United States has fallen.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition, p. 247
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“Nobody needed the US Constitution to guarantee press freedom so that journalists could befriend, amplify and glorify political leaders; the guarantee was necessary so that journalists could do the opposite.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition, p. 230
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers [by Huawei], foreign organizations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition, p. 148
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only antidote.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition, p. 12
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition, p. 6
No Place to Hide (2014)

Glenn Greenwald photo

“No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. [...] A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Picador 2015 edition ISBN 9781250062581, p. 3
No Place to Hide (2014)

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