NO PLACE TO HIDE BY GLENN GREENWALD

 Glenn Greenwald's book "No Place To Hide" has the subtitle - 'Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State'.

The dedication explains the importance of the book's contents:

"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."

This gives an indication of the direction in which the unfolding narrative will take us, and it is a journey which will leave you wondering whatever happened to the concept of democracy which is the supposed political system in which we live.

The dust-cover of the book gives an excellent summary of the book's contents and I can do no better than to reproduce the item in its entirety:

"In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet and anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the twenty-nine-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency's widespread, systematic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy. As the arguments raged on and the government considers proposals for reform, it is clear that we have yet to see the full impact of Snowden's disclosures.

Now, for the first time, Greenwald puts all the pieces together, recounting the high-intensity ten-day trip to Hong-Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA's unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself.

Going beyond NSA specifics, Greenwald also takes on the establishment media, excoriating their habitual avoidance of adversarial reporting on the government and their failure to serve the interests of the people. Finally, he asks what it means both for individuals and for a nation's political health when a government pries so invasively into the private lives of its citizens - and considers what safeguards and forms of oversight are necessary to protect democracy in the digital age. Coming at a landmark moment in American history, No Place to Hide is a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to our understanding of the US surveillance state."

One of the most important aspects of this book is the fact that the main-stream-media shy away from telling the citizens of our so-called democracies exactly what our governments are doing and what they are keeping hidden from everybody.

An ongoing case in point is the secret number of free-trade agreements the USA is busy negotiating with countries in the Asia-Pacific region and in the Trans-Atlantic area and one only has to examine what the USA has done with the Trade agreement between the USA, Mexico and Canada to see the disastrous outcomes of the populations of those countries.

The more the USA is involved in secret deals and agreements, the worse it will be for all those countries involved. In the end all of us end up with NO PLACE TO HIDE!