Leon Panetta, who had once been Bill Clinton's chief of staff.) As a libertarian, what really gets Snowden's goat is the thought of government getting its tentacles into everything. He has no problem with spying and secrecy in their place (in Iran, for instance). What terrifies him is the idea that no one is setting limits to it all. Like many supporters of Ron Paul, Snowden would like to go back to the gold standard, because he thinks letting politicians print money is a recipe for inflation and ultimate global ruin. He sees the politicisation of surveillance as part of the same pattern: evidence of a system spinning crazily out of control.
Despite dropping out of college and a failed interlude in the army (he broke both legs in a training accident), Snowden's tech skills eventually got him good defence jobs, first at the CIA, then at the NSA, and finally at a private firm, Booz Allen Hamilton, which serviced the NSA's computer systems. At some point he went from loyalist to whistleblower – Obama's election seems to have tipped him over the edge. While Democrats were complaining about government overreach during the Bush years, Snowden was able to hope that regime change in the White House would signal a return to proper oversight. But when Obama morphed from a critic of the security state in opposition to its number one enabler in government, Snowden concluded that any safeguards were gone. In his eyes the entire US government was now operating outside its constitutional remit. What alarmed him about the NSA's activities was that no one was in charge: this had become a system that was, as he put it to journalist Glenn Greenwald, "automatically ingesting" vast amounts of human communications, indiscriminately, blindly, idiotically. It was a monster, and it was taking over the world.
In a way, Snowden's own experiences confirmed that he was right. The monster was so big and so unwieldy that it didn't notice what was going on. It was as if it had no time for old-fashioned security checks in the brave new world of big data. One of the most astonishing revelations in Harding's book is that Snowden had already blotted his copybook at the CIA, where a row with a superior had him marked down as unreliable. But when he transferred to the NSA, no one thought to pass on the personnel file, so they employed him without checking his backstory (perhaps they simply looked at "TheTrueHOOHAA" posts and decided, mistakenly, that he was one of them). At Booz, Snowden was able to scrape vast amounts of data off the NSA computers, using what now appears to have been relatively old-fashioned technology, without anyone detecting what he was up to.
Among his trawl was a series of internal PowerPoint presentations in which the NSA outlined its new capabilities and its eager readiness to use them. There are two ways to read these. One is that they are evidence of an organisation that now has terrifying technological reach, able to cross all borders and access any information it chooses, often co-opting the tech industry along the way (Google, Facebook and other titans of Silicon Valley found themselves implicated in what was going on, to their horror). The other is that, like many PowerPoint presentations, they contain a fair amount of boastful corporate bullshit. "The Mission Never Sleeps" is the ironic heading of one of the files that Snowden stole. Snowden is probably right that what's really scary is the thought of so much power being in the hands of people with so little idea of what it means. When it turned out that GCHQ supervised the destruction of the Guardian's hard-drives that were thought to contain the illicit files. Greenwald's partner was All the President's Men – Harding perhaps does his tale a disservice. What is so astonishing about the secrets that Snowden revealed is how much in the dark everyone turns out to be. No one really understands what it all means. The pace of technological change and its extraordinary reach mean that a lot of this stuff is entirely new: this isn't Nixon's world any longer but it's not Deep Throat's either. Snowden is a quirky figure – a distinctive product of the American right, in ways that some of his European champions on the left ought to find uncomfortable – but he is also a thoughtful one. He is correct in thinking that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to power. He would like to turn the clock back to the late 18th century when the American constitution said what it meant and meant what it said – the "originalist" dream. That's not going to happen. It's not even clear that we can turn the clock back to the late 20th century. This is a new world and a scary one.
In Britain the political debate about how we are going to regulate this new world has barely got going. In the US (and even more in so Germany) Snowden's revelations have kickstarted an angry discussion about how to tame the monster. Though it's unlikely to be enough to satisfy Snowden, some members of the US Congress have begun to bare their teeth. But here in the UK we still have politicians such as Reuse this content