The Edward Snowden scandal viewed from planet Guardian

Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies or as a traitor. His revelations provoked outrage from South America, cold fury from Germany and a warm smile from China and from Russia — where Snowden is currently granted asylum.

The Guardian newspaper co-operated with Snowden in releasing this material, as they did with Julian Assange before him. As the author of The Snowden Files is a Guardian journalist, the book written at the suggestion of the paper’s editor and published by the paper’s publisher, it is very much the Guardian’s version of events. But Luke Harding is a fine journalist. The co-author of an earlier book on Assange, he is also sole author of an interesting, if on occasion slightly overheated, account of his troubles as the Guardian’s correspondent in Russia.

Of course certain baggage can come with this ‘spooky’ terrain. Harding has claimed that drafts of the present book were hacked by anonymous forces. I wonder if the NSA inserted some of the ‘hack-ese’ in an effort to discredit him? Before we are past the prologue we have come across ‘the Britain of James Bond’ and ‘GCHQ boffins’. Later on Skyfall and Judi Dench get crowbarred in. Other journalists are scorned for writing of spy chiefs ‘coming out of the shadows’, after Harding has used precisely that cliché himself. Elsewhere in his tale we get ‘pesky Brits’, a US Congress ‘rabid for war’ and so on.