The Snowden Saga Begins “I Have Been to the Darkest Corners of Government, and What They Fear Is Light” By Glenn Greenwald

This is publication day for Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, about his last near-year swept away by the Snowden affair. It’s been under wraps until now for obvious reasons.  Today, TomDispatch is proud, thanks to the kindness of Greenwald’s publisher, Metropolitan Books, to be releasing an adapted, much shortened version of its first chapter on how this odyssey of our American moment began. Tom

The Snowden Saga Begins
“I Have Been to the Darkest Corners of Government, and What They Fear Is Light”
By Glenn Greenwald
[This essay is a shortened and adapted version of Chapter 1 of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, and appears at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of Metropolitan Books.]
On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.
The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. He is most remembered for what he did after vanquishing Rome’s enemies: he immediately and voluntarily gave up political power and returned to farming life. Hailed as a “model of civic virtue,” Cincinnatus has become a symbol of the use of political power in the public interest and the worth of limiting or even relinquishing individual power for the greater good.
The email began: “The security of people’s communications is very important to me,” and its stated purpose was to urge me to begin using PGP encryption so that “Cincinnatus” could communicate things in which, he said, he was certain I would be interested. Invented in 1991, PGP stands for “pretty good privacy.” It has been developed into a sophisticated tool to shield email and other forms of online communications from surveillance and hacking.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175843/tomgram%3A_glenn_greenwald%2C_how_i_met_edward_snowden/#more