Review: Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide

“This is no dream, this is really happening!” ~ Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby

By Catherine Austin Fitts

For those of us who have regularly followed Glen Greenwald’s reporting of Edward Snowden and his revelations, it is a welcome opportunity to review it from the beginning in one coherent story. So Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide, is well worth the read even for those of you who have followed the story closely.

Functioning in the global economy means understanding how privacy has been compromised and how digital systems are used to collect intelligence that is processed into “soft weapons” and tools to harvest the business man, consumer, citizen and investors. That starts with understanding the extent of the data collection apparatus run by the NSA and the US government and their infrastructure of private, powerful corporate contractors. In his latest, Greenwald takes us on a journey as Edward Snowden educates him about the nature of our communication and Internet systems.

Greenwald stops there. He is an attorney and investigative reporter. He has helped Mr. Snowden document and educate about this critical component of the machinery. It is not his mission to engage in conjecture beyond the hard evidence or the thoughts of a constitutional lawyer as to how the data collected may be applied and how these database operations and related tools act as a critical component of the American projection of global power.

This leaves the rest of us to do so; to connect the dots and take action. Foreign leaders are moving ahead with all due speed. The Chinese are throwing IBM servers out of Chinese financial institutions, Mr. Putin is requiring Visa and MasterCard to migrate to national payment systems. A German economic minister is wondering out loud about the break up of Google. Every day the blow back unfolds.

The other day Bill Bonner published a graphic. It helps the reader understand why the machinery that Snowden has documented is such a critical piece of making the whole system go.

Acting-Man – Bill Bonner