Snowden on the witness stand.

• Author: Whitney, Jake
• Position: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State - Book review

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

By Glenn Greenwald

Henry Holt & Co. 272 pages. $27.

One morning in June 2013, six months after a source using the alias "Cincinnatus" e-mailed him the first in a series of cryptic messages, Glenn Greenwald found himself scurrying through the cavernous hallways of a five-star Hong Kong hotel searching for a plastic alligator. Meticulous and hypervigilant, the source had left detailed instructions for their first meeting: Find the conference room with the alligator and wait until 10:10; if he didn't arrive within a few minutes, exit the room and return at 10:20.

Greenwald was accompanied by his friend and colleague Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker with whom the source had also shared leaked documents--bombshells that revealed that the National Security Agency, in conjunction with major U.S. corporations, was spying on virtually every American citizen. Greenwald turned to Poitras: "How will we know it's him?"

She answered, "He'll be holding a Rubik's Cube." Sleep-deprived and wired, Greenwald couldn't help but laugh. He felt as if he were in "a surreal political thriller set in Hong Kong," he writes of that first meeting.

"Cincinnatus," of course, turned out to be Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old high school dropout turned tech wiz who went on to leak thousands of classified documents he obtained while working for NSA contractors Dell Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton. In No Place to Hide, Greenwald recounts in vivid, near moment-by-moment detail his early deal ings with Snowden. It is as riveting as any political thriller you'll read.

Greenwald's portrait of Snowden is more nuanced than the one presented by the media so far (hero or traitor?), but it's still not as full as one might expect. After hours of interviews with Snowden and many pages dedicated to him here, we still don't know him very well. He is portrayed as highly intelligent, organized, idealistic, and courageous. But no deep insecurities or doubts? No real negative characteristics, outside of being a touch geeky?

His only fear, he tells Greenwald, is not the consequences to himself, but that the American people won't particularly care about his revelations. For an international fugitive hiding in Russia, this is certainly an understandable concern.

While Greenwald points to the ongoing privacy debate as proof that this has not happened, a crucial question lingers: Will the American people...