NSA Book Review: 'Most Germans Don't Share These Concerns'

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/head-of-german-counterintelligence-reviews-spiegel-nsa-book-a-961795.html



NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks via video conference at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, in early March.

NSA Book Review: 'Most Germans Don't Share These Concerns'
By Hans-Georg Maassen
April 01, 2014 – 05:49 PM



A special investigative committee of German parliament hasn't even started its work in addressing allegations of US spying against Germany, but Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark are already wrapping up their own work on the matter. The SPIEGEL journalists, who appear to have had access to the documents in Edward Snowden's archive, provide a comprehensive and detailed account of the former NSA worker as well as background about his asylum in Russia in their newly published book "The NSA Complex," which came out in German this week.

In the book, they quote from encrypted chats with Snowden, they report on visits to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, to the Chancellery in Berlin and to the White House, and on interviews conducted with both current and former intelligence service workers around the world. The book even quotes a former head of the East German secret police, the Stasi. The tome contains a trove of information from Snowden's documents -- for example on the joint tapping of data from fiber-optic cables by Britain's GCHQ intelligence service and the National Security Agency in the United States. There's not much by way of spectacular new information -- the invaluable service here is the authors' ability to see the forest through the trees and provide greater context about what we have learned so far.

The "NSA Complex" depicts Snowden as the archetype of a new hero for a new generation, one whose arguments and thoughts have a whiff of radical morality to them. And the book does indeed provide thoroughly interesting details about the life of the 30-year-old autodidact, but it is also permeated with a seeming admiration for the subject that is quite atypical of SPIEGEL reporting. It's not just the gushing tone that irritates at times with this book, but also the attempt to elevate the whistleblower to the level of some nascent digital, social movement. Snowden is stylized to the point of becoming an allegory for a generational conflict: Politics 1.0 versus Politics 2.0, the meeting of two worlds that are only semi-compatible with one another.

Exaggerated Fears of a Surveillance Society

Through this newly sculpted hero, the authors paint a gloomy picture of an NSA and GCHQ that have become a global surveillance apparatus that people can no longer escape. The book makes overly clear the authors' fears of a surveillance society in which, thanks to "Big Data" analysis, intelligence agencies can access every bit of knowledge about people, including their thoughts -- even before they have had a chance to become cognitive reality. It's the fear of a "Brave New World" à la Aldous Huxley or of some North Korea 2.0.