# No Place to Hide

## Metadata
- Author: [[Glenn Greenwald]]
- Full Title: No Place to Hide
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- 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. ([Location 33](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=33))
- 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. ([Location 44](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=44))
- 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. ([Location 96](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=96))
- 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. ([Location 101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=101))
- The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote. ([Location 199](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=199))
- I instantly recognized the last sentence as a play on a Thomas Jefferson quote from 1798 that I often cited in my writing: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” ([Location 423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=423))
- “The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs,” he said. “If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real. ([Location 786](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=786))
- “What keeps a person passive and compliant,” he explained, “is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear. ([Location 805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=805))
- Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do to those who impede our agenda. ([Location 1468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=1468))
- Rather than dealing with me as a reporter, the hosts preferred to attack a new target: Snowden himself, now a shadowy figure in Hong Kong. Many US journalists resumed their accustomed role as servants to the government. The story was no longer that reporters had exposed serious NSA abuses but that an American working for the government had “betrayed” his obligations, committed crimes, and then “fled to China. ([Location 1556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=1556))
- Several years ago, I attended the bat mitzvah of my best friend’s daughter. During the ceremony, the rabbi emphasized that “the central lesson” for the girl to learn was that she was “always being watched and judged.” He told her that God always knew what she was doing, every choice, every action, and even every thought, no matter how private. “You are never alone,” he said, which meant that she should always adhere to God’s will. The rabbi’s point was clear: if you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes. You cannot even consider forging your own path beyond those rules: if you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual. ([Location 2340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=2340))
- All oppressive authorities—political, religious, societal, parental—rely on this vital truth, using it as ([Location 2346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=2346))
- a principal tool to enforce orthodoxies, compel adherence, and quash dissent. It is in their interest to convey that nothing their subjects do will escape the knowledge of the authorities. Far more effectively than a police force, the deprivation of privacy will crush any temptation to deviate from rules and norms. ([Location 2347](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=2347))
- Only when we believe that nobody else is watching us do we feel free—safe—to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore new ways of thinking and being, to explore what it means to be ourselves. What made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration. For that reason, it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate. A society in which everyone knows they can be watched by the state—where the private realm is effectively eliminated—is one in which those attributes are lost, at both the societal and the individual level. ([Location 2353](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=2353))
- When the normally restrained German chancellor Angela Merkel learned that the NSA had spent years eavesdropping on her personal cell phone, she spoke to President Obama and angrily likened US surveillance to the Stasi, the notorious security service of East Germany, where she grew up. Merkel did not mean that the United States was the equivalent of the Communist regime; rather that the essence of a menacing surveillance state, be it the NSA or the Stasi or Big Brother or the Panopticon, is the knowledge that one can be watched at any time by unseen authorities. ([Location 2399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00E0CZX0G&location=2399))