Xin giới thiệu lại tác phẩm Không Nơi Trốn Tánh ( No Place To Hide) của Glenn Greenwald. Nội dung tường trình về diễn biến Edward Snowden quyết định rời nước Mỹ, trưng bày bằng chứng tội phạm nhà nước Mỹ và các nhà nước liện hệ, về một hệ thống THEO DÕI RÌNH MÒ TRỘM CẮP THÔNG TIN DỮ KIỆN RIÊNG TƯ của tất cả mọi người- không chỉ Mỹ mà còn là công dân khắp thế giới.
Hiện nay ký giả Laura Poitras cũng cho trình chiếu phim CitizenFour, cũng là mật danh mà Snowden dùng để trao đổi liên lạc, tổng hợp các đoạn phim bà thu thập từ lúc gặp Edward Snowden tại Hong Kong cho đến tháng 9-2014 vừa qua.Cả hai tài liệu văn bản này, rất đáng được chúng ta quan tâm đến. Dĩ nhiên không để giải trí phim ảnh hay thưởng thứ văn chương, mà chính là để học hỏi hiểu thêm về thủ đoạn đê tiện của bọn Nhà nước chính phủ, thái độ bất nhân "tận tụy" của bọn nhân viên nhà nước (anh ninh cũng như đĩ điếm báo chí- cảnh sát cũng như lính tráng quân đội), tất cả rặt một bọn tay sai bất nhân đao phủ. Và cũng để thấy khi giá trị đạo lý nhân bản trỗi dậy, nó nâng con vật hai chân -vốn chỉ trọng miếng mồi ăn và hang trú ẩn, thành NGƯỜI, Con Người này bất chấp hiểm nguy khổ cực khó khăn miễn Họ gìn giữ được Nhân Bản không chỉ cho bản thân của chính họ mà còn đối với đồng loại của họ.
Chính vì vậy, khi cảm phục Edward Snowden, Glenn GreenWald, Laura Poitras, cũng xin đừng quên một phụ nữ can trường thông minh và tài ba, nhưng lặng lẽ hành động trong giai đoạn cực kỳ gay gắt của tiến trình trợ lực Snowden đối kháng tội ác và tội phạm chính phủ này, cô Sarah Harrison. Nhân Chủ cũng đã có đôi lời cảm kích trân trọng về Cô.QUÍ VỊ ĐỘC GIẢ NÀO MUỐN ĐỌC TOÀN BỘ SÁCH, XIN LIÊN LẠC chị ĐÔNG SƠN (Sách dạng word DOC)
Những Trang Đầu của Sách:
This book is dedicated to all those who have sought to shine a light on the US government’s secret mass surveillance systems, particularly the courageous whistle-blowers who have risked their liberty to do so.
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The United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air.… That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
—Senator Frank Church, Chair, Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975
INTRODUCTION
In the fall of 2005, without much in the way of grandiose expectations, I decided to create a political blog. I had little idea at the time how much this decision would eventually change my life. My principal motive was that I was becoming increasingly alarmed by the radical and extremist theories of power the US government had adopted in the wake of 9/11, and I hoped that writing about such issues might allow me to make a broader impact than I could in my then-career as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.
Just seven weeks after I began blogging, the New York Times dropped a bombshell: in 2001, it reported, the Bush administration had secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of Americans without obtaining the warrants required by relevant criminal law. At the time that it was revealed, this warrantless eavesdropping had been going on for four years and had targeted at least several thousand Americans.
The subject was a perfect convergence of my passions and my expertise. The government tried to justify the secret NSA program by invoking exactly the kind of extreme theory of executive power that had motivated me to begin writing: the notion that the threat of terrorism vested the president with virtually unlimited authority to do anything to “keep the nation safe,” including the authority to break the law. The ensuing debate entailed complex questions of constitutional law and statutory interpretation, which my legal background rendered me well suited to address.
I spent the next two years covering every aspect of the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal, on my blog and in a bestselling 2006 book. My position was straightforward: by ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them. In America’s increasingly jingoistic and oppressive political climate, this proved to be an intensely controversial stance.
It was this background that prompted Edward Snowden, several years later, to choose me as his first contact person for revealing NSA wrong-doing on an even more massive scale. He said he believed I could be counted on to understand the dangers of mass surveillance and extreme state secrecy, and not to back down in the face of pressure from the government and its many allies in the media and elsewhere.
The remarkable volume of top secret documents that Snowden passed on to me, along with the high drama surrounding Snowden himself, have generated unprecedented worldwide interest in the menace of mass electronic surveillance and the value of privacy in the digital age. But the underlying problems have been festering for years, largely in the dark.
There are, to be sure, many unique aspects to the current NSA controversy. Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers. Moreover, the post-9/11 American veneration of security above all else has created a climate particularly conducive to abuses of power. And thanks to Snowden’s bravery and the relative ease of copying digital information, we have an unparalleled firsthand look at the details of how the surveillance system actually operates.
Still, in many respects the issues raised by the NSA story resonate with numerous episodes from the past, stretching back across the centuries. Indeed, opposition to government invasion of privacy was a major factor in the establishment of the United States itself, as American colonists protested laws that let British officials ransack at will any home they wished. It was legitimate, the colonists agreed, for the state to obtain specific, targeted warrants to search individuals when there was evidence to establish probable cause of their wrongdoing. But general warrants—the practice of making the entire citizenry subject to indiscriminate searches—were inherently illegitimate.
The Fourth Amendment enshrined this idea in American law. Its language is clear and succinct: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” It was intended, above all, to abolish forever in America the power of the government to subject its citizens to generalized, suspicionless surveillance.
The clash over surveillance in the eighteenth century focused on house searches, but as technology evolved, surveillance evolved with it. In the mid-nineteenth century, as the spread of railways began to allow for cheap and rapid mail delivery, the British government’s surreptitious opening of mail caused a major scandal in the UK. By the early decades of the twentieth century, the US Bureau of Investigation—the precursor of today’s FBI—was using wiretaps, along with mail monitoring and informants, to clamp down on those opposed to American government policies.
No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country’s dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one.
Frank Church’s mid-1970s investigation into the FBI’s spying shockingly found that the agency had labeled half a million US citizens as potential “subversives,” routinely spying on people based purely on their political beliefs. (The FBI’s list of targets ranged from Martin Luther King to John Lennon, from the women’s liberation movement to the anti-Communist John Birch Society.) But the plague of surveillance abuse is hardly unique to American history. On the contrary, mass surveillance is a universal temptation for any unscrupulous power. And in every instance, the motive is the same: suppressing dissent and mandating compliance.
Surveillance thus unites governments of otherwise remarkably divergent political creeds. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British and French empires both created specialized monitoring departments to deal with the threat of anticolonialist movements. After World War II, the East German Ministry of State Security, popularly known as the Stasi, became synonymous with government intrusion into personal lives. And more recently, as popular protests during the Arab Spring challenged dictators’ grasp on power, the regimes in Syria, Egypt, and Libya all sought to spy on the Internet use of domestic dissenters.
Investigations by Bloomberg News and the Wall Street Journal have shown that as these dictatorships were overwhelmed by protestors, they literally went shopping for surveillance tools from Western technology companies. Syria’s Assad regime flew in employees from the Italian surveillance company Area SpA, who were told that the Syrians “urgently needed to track people.” In Egypt, Mubarak’s secret police bought tools to penetrate Skype encryption and eavesdrop on activists’ calls. And in Libya, the Journal reported, journalists and rebels who entered a government monitoring center in 2011 found “a wall of black refrigerator-size devices” from the French surveillance company Amesys. The equipment “inspected the Internet traffic” of Libya’s main Internet service provider, “opening emails, divining passwords, snooping on online chats and mapping connections among various suspects.”
The ability to eavesdrop on people’s communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused. Expecting the US government to operate a massive surveillance machine in complete secrecy without falling prey to its temptations runs counter to every historical example and all available evidence about human nature.
Indeed, even before Snowden’s revelations, it was already becoming clear that treating the United States as somehow exceptional on the issue of surveillance is a highly naive stance. In 2006, at a congressional hearing titled “The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?,” speakers lined up to condemn American technology companies for helping China suppress dissent on the Internet. Christopher Smith (R-NJ), the congressman presiding over the hearing, likened Yahoo!’s cooperation with Chinese secret police to handing Anne Frank over to the Nazis. It was a full-throated harangue, a typical performance when American officials speak about a regime not aligned with the United States.
But even the congressional attendees couldn’t help noting that the hearing happened to take place just two months after the New York Times revealed the vast warrantless domestic wiretapping carried out by the Bush administration. In light of those revelations, denouncing other countries for carrying out their own domestic surveillance rang rather hollow. Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA), speaking after Representative Smith, noted that the technology companies being told to resist the Chinese regime should also be careful regarding their own government. “Otherwise,” he warned prophetically, “while those in China may see their privacy violated in the most heinous ways, we here in the United States may also find that perhaps some future president asserting these very broad interpretations of the Constitution is reading our e-mail, and I would prefer that not happen without a court order.”
Over the past decades, the fear of terrorism—stoked by consistent exaggerations of the actual threat—has been exploited by US leaders to justify a wide array of extremist policies. It has led to wars of aggression, a worldwide torture regime, and the detention (and even assassination) of both foreign nationals and American citizens without any charges. But the ubiquitous, secretive system of suspicionless surveillance that it has spawned may very well turn out to be its most enduring legacy. This is so because, despite all the historical parallels, there is also a genuinely new dimension to the current NSA surveillance scandal: the role now played by the Internet in daily life.
Especially for the younger generation, the Internet is not some standalone, separate domain where a few of life’s functions are carried out. It is not merely our post office and our telephone. Rather, it is the epicenter of our world, the place where virtually everything is done. It is where friends are made, where books and films are chosen, where political activism is organized, where the most private data is created and stored. It is where we develop and express our very personality and sense of self.
To turn that network into a system of mass surveillance has implications unlike those of any previous state surveillance programs. All the prior spying systems were by necessity more limited and capable of being evaded. To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination.
From the time that it first began to be widely used, the Internet has been seen by many as possessing an extraordinary potential: the ability to liberate hundreds of millions of people by democratizing political discourse and leveling the playing field between the powerful and the powerless. Internet freedom—the ability to use the network without institutional constraints, social or state control, and pervasive fear—is central to the fulfillment of that promise. Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen.
That’s what makes Snowden’s revelations so stunning and so vitally important. By daring to expose the NSA’s astonishing surveillance capabilities and its even more astounding ambitions, he has made it clear, with these disclosures, that we stand at a historic crossroads. Will the digital age usher in the individual liberation and political freedoms that the Internet is uniquely capable of unleashing? Or will it bring about a system of omnipresent monitoring and control, beyond the dreams of even the greatest tyrants of the past? Right now, either path is possible. Our actions will determine where we end up.
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EPILOGUE
In the very first online conversation I had with Edward Snowden, he told me he had only one fear about coming forward: that his revelations might be greeted with apathy and indifference, which would mean he had unraveled his life and risked imprisonment for nothing. To say that this fear has gone unrealized is to dramatically understate the case.
Indeed, the effects of this unfolding story have been far greater, more enduring, and more wide-ranging than we ever dreamed possible. It focused the world’s attention on the dangers of ubiquitous state surveillance and pervasive government secrecy. It triggered the first global debate about the value of individual privacy in the digital age and prompted challenges to America’s hegemonic control over the Internet. It changed the way people around the world viewed the reliability of any statements made by US officials and transformed relations between countries. It radically altered views about the proper role of journalism in relation to government power. And within the United States, it gave rise to an ideologically diverse, trans-partisan coalition pushing for meaningful reform of the surveillance state.
One episode in particular underscored the profound shifts brought about by Snowden’s revelations. Just a few weeks after my first Snowden-based article for the Guardian exposed the NSA’s bulk metadata collection, two members of Congress jointly introduced a bill to defund that NSA program. Remarkably, the bill’s two cosponsors were John Conyers, a Detroit liberal serving his twentieth term in the House, and Justin Amash, a conservative Tea Party member in only his second House term. It is hard to imagine two more different members of Congress, yet here they were, united in opposition to the NSA’s domestic spying. And their proposal quickly gained dozens of cosponsors across the entire ideological spectrum, from the most liberal to the most conservative and everything in between—a truly rare event in Washington.
When the bill came up for a vote, the debate was televised on C-SPAN, and I watched it while chatting online with Snowden, who was also watching C-SPAN on his computer in Moscow. We were both amazed at what we saw. It was, I believe, the first time he truly appreciated the magnitude of what he had accomplished. One House member after another stood up to vehemently denounce the NSA program, scoffing at the idea that collecting data on the calls of every single American is necessary to stop terrorism. It was by far the most aggressive challenge to the national security state to emerge from Congress since the 9/11 attacks.
Until the Snowden revelations, it was simply inconceivable that any bill designed to gut a major national security program could receive more than a handful of votes. But the final vote tally on the Conyers-Amash bill shocked official Washington: it failed by just a tiny margin, 205–217. Support for it was wholly bipartisan, with 111 Democrats joining 94 Republicans to vote for the bill. This discarding of traditional party-line divisions was as exciting to Snowden and me as the substantial support for reining in the NSA. Official Washington depends upon blind tribalism engendered by rigid partisan warfare. If the red versus blue framework can be eroded, and then transcended, there is much more hope for policy making based on the actual interests of the citizenry.
Over the following months, as more and more NSA stories were published around the world, many pundits predicted that the public would lose interest in the subject. But, in fact, interest in the surveillance discussion only intensified, not just domestically but internationally. The events of a single week in December 2013—more than six months after my first report appeared in the Guardian—illustrate just how much Snowden’s disclosures continue to resonate and just how untenable the NSA’s position has become.
The week began with the dramatic opinion issued by US federal judge Richard Leon that the NSA metadata collection was likely to be found in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, denouncing it as “almost Orwellian” in scope. As noted, the Bush-appointed jurist pointedly added that the government had not cited a single instance “in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection” had stopped a terrorist attack. Just two days later, President Obama’s advisory panel, formed when the NSA scandal first broke, issued its 308-page report. That report, too, decisively rejected the NSA’s claims about the vital importance of its spying. “Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of [the Patriot Act’s] section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks,” the panel wrote, confirming that in not a single instance would the outcome have been different “without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.”
Meanwhile, outside the United States the NSA’s week was going no better. The UN general assembly unanimously voted in favor of a resolution—introduced by Germany and Brazil—affirming that online privacy is a fundamental human right, which one expert characterized as “a strong message to the United States that it’s time to reverse course and end NSA dragnet surveillance.” And on the same day, Brazil announced that it would not award a long-expected $4.5 billion contract for fighter jets to US-based Boeing but instead would purchase planes from the Swedish company Saab. Brazil’s outrage over the NSA’s spying on its leaders, its companies, and its citizenry was clearly a key factor in the surprise decision. “The NSA problem ruined it for the Americans,” a Brazilian government source told Reuters.
None of this is to say that the battle has been won. The security state is incredibly powerful, probably even more so than our highest elected officials, and it boasts a wide array of influential loyalists ready to defend it at all costs. So it is not surprising that it, too, has scored some victories. Two weeks after Judge Leon’s ruling, another federal judge, exploiting the memory of 9/11, declared the NSA program constitutional in a different case. European allies have backed away from their initial displays of anger, falling meekly in line with the United States, as they so often do. Support from the American public has also been inconstant: polls show that a majority of Americans, though they oppose the NSA programs that Snowden exposed, nonetheless want to see him prosecuted for those exposures. And top US officials have even begun arguing that not only Snowden himself but also some of the journalists with whom he worked, including me, deserve prosecution and imprisonment.
Yet the supporters of the NSA have clearly been set back on their heels, and their arguments against reform have been increasingly flimsy. Defenders of suspicionless mass surveillance often insist, for example, that some spying is always necessary. But this is a straw man proposition; nobody disagrees with that. The alternative to mass surveillance is not the complete elimination of surveillance. It is, instead, targeted surveillance, aimed only at those for whom there is substantial evidence to believe they are engaged in real wrongdoing. Such targeted surveillance is far more likely to stop terrorist plots than the current “collect it all” approach, which drowns intelligence agencies in so much data that analysts cannot sift it effectively. And unlike indiscriminate mass surveillance, it is consistent with American constitutional values and basic precepts of Western justice.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the surveillance abuse scandals uncovered by the Church Committee in the 1970s, it was precisely this principle—that the government must provide some evidence of probable wrongdoing or status as a foreign agent before it can listen in on a person’s conversations—which led to the establishment of the FISA court. Unfortunately, that court has been made into a mere rubber stamp, providing no meaningful judicial review to the government’s surveillance requests. But the essential idea is sound nonetheless, and shows a way forward. Converting the FISA court into a real judicial system, rather than the one-sided current setup in which only the government gets to state its case, would be a positive reform.
Such domestic legislative changes by themselves are unlikely to be sufficient for solving the surveillance problem because the national security state so often co-opts the entities meant to provide oversight. (As we have seen, for instance, the congressional intelligence committees have by now been thoroughly captured.) But these sorts of legislative changes can at least bolster the principle that indiscriminate mass surveillance has no place in a democracy ostensibly guided by constitutional guarantees of privacy.
Other steps, too, can be taken to reclaim online privacy and limit state surveillance. International efforts—currently being led by Germany and Brazil—to build new Internet infrastructure so that most network traffic no longer has to transit the United States could go a long way toward loosening the American grip on the Internet. And individuals also have a role to play in reclaiming their own online privacy. Refusing to use the services of tech companies that collaborate with the NSA and its allies will put pressure on those companies to stop such collaboration and will spur their competitors to devote themselves to privacy protections. Already, a number of European tech companies are promoting their email and chat services as a superior alternative to offerings from Google and Facebook, trumpeting the fact that they do not—and will not—provide user data to the NSA.
Additionally, to prevent governments from intruding into personal communications and Internet use, all users should be adopting encryption and browsing-anonymity tools. This is particularly important for people working in sensitive areas, such as journalists, lawyers, and human rights activists. And the technology community should continue developing more effective and user-friendly anonymity and encryption programs.
On all of these fronts, there is a great deal of work still to be done. But less than a year after I first met Snowden in Hong Kong, there is no question that his disclosures have already brought about fundamental, irreversible changes in many countries and many realms. And beyond the specifics of NSA reform, Snowden’s acts have also profoundly advanced the cause of government transparency and reform in general. He has created a model to inspire others, and future activists will likely follow in his footsteps, perfecting the methods he embraced.
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 came forward and identified himself. As a result, the public image of him is not a convict in orange jumpsuit and shackles but an independent, articulate figure who can speak for himself, explaining what he did and why. It is no longer possible for the US government to distract from the message simply by demonizing the messenger. There is a powerful lesson here for future whistle-blowers: speaking the truth does not have to destroy your life.
And for the rest of us, Snowden’s inspirational effect is no less profound. Quite simply, he has reminded everyone about the extraordinary ability of any human being to change the world. An ordinary person in all outward respects—raised by parents without particular wealth or power, lacking even a high school diploma, working as an obscure employee of a giant corporation—he has, through a single act of conscience, literally altered the course of history.
Even the most committed activists are often tempted to succumb to defeatism. The prevailing institutions seem too powerful to challenge; orthodoxies feel too entrenched to uproot; there are always many parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret, who can decide what kind of world we want to live in. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistle-blowing, of activism, of political journalism. And that’s what is happening now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
The endnotes and index for this book can be found at www.glenngreenwald.net.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In recent years, the efforts of Western governments to conceal their most consequential actions from their own citizens have been repeatedly thwarted by a series of remarkable disclosures from courageous whistleblowers. Time after time, people who worked inside government agencies or the military establishment of the United States and its allies have decided that they could not remain silent when they discovered serious wrongdoing. Instead, they came forward and made official misdeeds public, sometimes consciously breaking the law to do so, and always at great personal cost: risking their careers, their personal relationships, and their freedom. Everyone living in a democracy, everyone who values transparency and accountability, owes these whistleblowers a huge debt of gratitude.
The long line of predecessors who inspired Edward Snowden begins with Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, one of my long-time personal heroes and now my friend and colleague, whose example I try to follow in all of the work I do. Other courageous whistle-blowers who have endured persecution to bring vital truths to the world include Chelsea Manning, Jesselyn Radack, and Thomas Tamm, as well as former NSA officials Thomas Drake and Bill Binney. They played a critical role in inspiring Snowden as well.
Bringing to light the ubiquitous system of suspicionless surveillance being secretly constructed by the United States and its allies was Snowden’s own self-sacrificing act of conscience. To watch an otherwise ordinary 29-year-old knowingly risk life in prison for the sake of a principle, acting in defense of basic human rights, was simply stunning. Snowden’s fearlessness and unbreakable tranquility—grounded in the conviction that he was doing the right thing—drove all the reporting I did on this story, and will profoundly influence me for the rest of my life.
The impact this story had would have been impossible without my incomparably brave and brilliant journalistic partner and friend, Laura Poitras. Despite years of harassment at the hands of the US government for the films she made, she never once hesitated in pursuing this story aggressively. Her insistence on personal privacy, her aversion to the public spotlight, has sometimes obscured how indispensable she has been to all of the reporting we were able to do. But her expertise, her strategic genius, her judgment, and her courage were at the heart and soul of all the work we did. We spoke almost every day and made every big decision collaboratively. I could not have asked for a more perfect partnership or a more emboldening and inspiring friendship.
As Laura and I knew it would be, Snowden’s courage ended up being contagious. Numerous journalists pursued this story intrepidly, including Guardian editors Janine Gibson, Stuart Millar, and Alan Rusbridger, along with several of the paper’s reporters, led by Ewen MacAskill. Snowden was able to remain free and thus able to participate in the debate he helped trigger because of the daring, indispensable support given by WikiLeaks and its official, Sarah Harrison, who helped him leave Hong Kong and then remained with him for months in Moscow at the expense of her ability to safely return to the United Kingdom, her own country.
Numerous friends and colleagues provided me very wise counsel and support in many difficult situations, including the ACLU’s Ben Wizner and Jameel Jaffer; my lifelong best friend, Norman Fleisher; one of the world’s best and bravest investigative journalists, Jeremy Scahill; the strong and resourceful Brazilian reporter Sonia Bridi of Globo; and Freedom of the Press Foundation Executive Director Trevor Timm. Family members, who often worried about what was happening (as only family members can), nonetheless remained steadfastly supportive (as only family members can), including my parents, my brother Mark, and my sister-in-law Christine.
This was not an easy book to write, particularly under the circumstances, which is why I’m truly grateful to Metropolitan Books: to Connor Guy for his efficient management; to Grigory Tovbis for his insightful editorial contributions and technical proficiency; and especially to Riva Hocherman, whose intelligence and high standards have made her the best possible editor for this book. This is the second consecutive book I’ve published with Sara Bershtel and her remarkably wise and creative mind, and I cannot imagine ever wanting to write one without her. My literary agent, Dan Conaway, was once again a steady and wise voice throughout the process. Deep thanks as well to Taylor Barnes for her critical help in putting this book together; her research talents and intellectual energy leave no doubt that a stellar journalistic career lies ahead.
As always, at the center of everything I do is my life partner, my husband of nine years, my soul mate David Miranda. The ordeal to which he was subjected as part of the reporting we did was infuriating and grotesque, but the benefit was that the world got to see what an extraordinary human being he is. Every step of the way, he injected me with fearlessness, bolstered my resolve, guided my choices, offered insights that made things clear, and stood right by me, unflinching, with unconditional support and love. A partnership like that is incomparably valuable, as it extinguishes fear, destroys limits, and makes everything possible.
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