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20 • BAY AREA REPORTER • June 12-18, 2014
Unmasking the surveillance state by Tim Pfaff
E
ven if you think you’ve read everything Glenn Greenwald has written about NSA mass surveillance and Edward Snowden’s gamechanging revelations about it, the high-profile gay journalist’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Metropolitan Books), is must reading. Watching HBO’s The Normal Heart hours after finishing Greenwald’s dizzyingly readable book, I was struck by the film’s scene of the first in-person encounter of Ned Weeks and Dr. Brookner, in which the Larry Kramer stand-in says, “I’ve got a big mouth. Is that a symptom [of AIDS]?” and she replies, “No, it’s a cure.” It was that very capacity of Greenwald’s mouth as a journalist that led the then-29-year-old Snowden to seek him out as the reporter of the young cyberanalyst’s leaks documenting the extent of NSA telephony and Internet sleuth-
ing – hard evidence of the NSA’s documenting of itself, more like it. Longtime Greenwald blog-followers, who know that his hard-hitting missives can be tryingly long-winded, will appreciate the careful structure of No Place to Hide (something he may have learned from the highly disciplined Snowden in his filing and cataloging of the documents), its concision relative to the scale of its explosive contents, the lucidity of its polemics – and its sheer narrative verve. Almost as if compensating for nearly having missed the story of the century himself, he tells it masterfully. The chapter “Ten Days in Hong Kong” is asphyxiatingly tight story-telling. Fully aware of the fact that the Snowden story has brought and will continue to bring the reporter previously unimaginable levels of fame and fortune – while Snowden can hope for at best, in his own words, “the bottom bunk at Gitmo” – Greenwald paints a credible, consistent picture
of a wise-beyond-his-years young man of character and courage. In the Hong Kong narrative, you can’t overlook the contrast of the edgy, chronically underslept reporter and the whistleblower who, on the lam, sleeps soundly and with the same discipline he brings to everything else he does. Greenwald’s professional partner, the investigatory journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras, also steps off the page as a three-dimensional individual as well as a woman of unshakeable convictions. And Greenwald’s husband, the Brazilian David Miranda – who, with his own recent detention at London’s Heathrow Airport returning from a visit to Poitras in Berlin, has assumed a role of his own in the ongoing narrative – similarly emerges as a flesh-and-blood human being, sage, wise and street-wise. It may surprise Greenwald that he has become so public about his private life, but these are the prices and rewards of the openness and transparency to
presents
Broadway...Our Way! June 25, 26, 27 8pm Nourse Theatre, San Francisco Tickets on Sale Now 415.392.4400 sfgmc.org Featuring Tony Award winner Laura Benanti The June 26th show will feature ASL Interpreted Performance. For details boxoffice@sfgmc.org
Season 36 Sponsors: Dazzle Sponsor: Don Julio Tequila Additional Support: Barefoot Wine & Bubbly, San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund Grants for the Arts, Bay Times, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bob Ross Foundation, Folsom Street Events
which he has committed himself (and demanded of Big Brother). It’s clear that in Miranda he has a full partner. No one asked me, but it seems there might be a dog or two too many at Villa Greenwald in Rio, not to mention what Woody Allen would call “a spider bigger than a Buick,” but this is clearly a gay marriage for the record books. Throw in the stretched yet singularly responsive Guardian journalists, and you have one great cast. The prose goes from the heart-racing international-intrigue yarn to a grimmer kind of nailbiter in the third and fourth sections, “Collect It All” and “The Harm of Surveillance,” in which Greenwald painstakingly unpacks the creepy, testosterone-iferous acronyms – PRISM, TARMAC, BLARNEY, STORMBREW – that have stolen into our balking consciousnesses as surely as the surveillance programs and transgovernmental agencies they represent have infiltrated the most recondite alcoves of our once personal, now public, digitized, file-served lives. Greenwald builds on his own, career-long investigation of the surveillance state, adding the evidence of the Snowden-captured documents to build an expository slideshow (including many actual government Power Point slides) that’s calculated – and sure – to make the reader first go very quiet and then, however much already “in the choir,” rageful. Yet somehow even more damning, and chilling, is “The Fourth Estate,” in which Greenwald autopsies the ways the media have offered up their collective powers and responsibilities in the interest of attaining money, property and prestige. The largescale death of investigative journalism seems nearly trivial compared with the ways media have become the public-relations departments of corporations and governments, awaiting and dutifully re-issuing the press releases of clandestine powers of unimaginable wealth. Greenwald wears the badge of “journalist” as proudly and defiantly as anyone today, and he is merciless in pointing out how officialdom, displeased with his wares, has turned him from a journalist or reporter into a “blogger” (with its implications of second-tier, can’t-get-officially-hired status) or “activist” – when not an outright co-conspirator or traitor. What with the possibility of his arrest upon entering his native United States at any time, don’t expect him in this year’s
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Show Boat
From page 17
The argument stopped when conductor John DeMain confidently mounted the podium and crashed headlong into a loud and quick-tempo pit-band version of the overture. He had us engaged so quickly and enjoyably no one could pause long enough to ponder or even care whether Show Boat is high- or middle-brow art. Director Francesca Zambello’s sensibly fastpaced staging turns out to take a fairly safe stance, but the bright and blaring production still manages to entertain us and exhibit the pioneering soul of an incredible 87-year-old experiment. The disturbing social commentary embedded in the plot is somewhat soft-pedaled in the current edition, and the controver-
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San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, though he’s consistently good about calling Chelsea Manning “Chelsea.” In describing the global fight against government secrecy, Greenwald gives credit where credit is due and surgically pares away the lines of deception that have demonized Manning and Julian Assange – while drawing clear distinctions between what each has done, compared to what Snowden has done and how he has done it. It speaks to the integrity as much as the breathlessness of Greenwald’s writing that it is hard to pull a quote. His hammering condemnation of the Obama administration’s expansion of the Bushies’ surveillance policies yields this: “The Obama administration, which has brought more prosecutions against leakers than all prior presidencies combined, has sought to create a climate of fear that would stifle any attempts at whistle-blowing. But Snowden has destroyed that template. He has managed to remain free, outside the grasp of the United States; what’s more, he has refused to remain in hiding but proudly come forward and identified himself. Quite simply, [Snowden] has reminded everyone about the extraordinary ability of any human being to change the world.” The title No Place to Hide is sure to have special resonance for othersexual people everywhere. Although Greenwald has been remarkably little vilified for his sexuality – a traitor is a bigger catch than a queer – the corrosive language of disparagement shows in Secretary Kerry’s recent call for skinny, geeky Snowden to “man up,” come home and face the music. The baggy evidence of time-zone dysphoria is showing as much on Kerry as it did on his predecessor, while Edward Snowden continues to speak out and speak clearly, and sleep soundly.t sial aspects of the New York 1927 premiere (a mixed-race chorus of singers and dancers!) can’t help but seem less shocking today. Zambello understands the significance of the libretto, but avoids a heavy-handed revisionist style. Show Boat is a musical first and foremost. The serious moments are potent, but the ultimate aim is to amuse. The famous “miscegenation scene” framed by the doleful (and often cut) “Mis’ry’s Comin’ Aroun’” sung by the black members of the chorus is strong, but it is muted by the sheer size of the opera-house stage. Joe’s powerful first rendition of “Ol’ Man River” becomes less a symbolic motif than a welcome reprise as the show goes on, and everything bogs down dramatically in the surprisingly weak second act. See page 24 >>