Subtitle: Edward Snowden, The NSA, and the Surveillance State

The Introduction and the first two chapters read like a gripping spy thriller. Indeed, I went in thinking this was going to be more of a biography about Mr. Snowden.

The next chapter is an absolute slog through a selection of the classified documents and what they revealed--thankfully that chapter was mostly charts, slides, and graphs--that were easily skimmed over.

The next chapter was dedicated to explaining the evils of mass surveillance, the harmful effects on society, and the murkiness of government and it's politicians, officials, and politics---and---for all the billions that has been placed in the hands of the NSA all this mass collection of data has yet to foil a single terrorist plot on American soil. Now of course, 9/11 could have been foiled had the FBI and the CIA been communicating with one another--but they were having a spat and were not sharing intelligence.

The next chapter picked up the pace a little bit as it detailed the aftermath and the governmental and media backlash where Mr. Snowden was painted as a narcissitic wannabe who didn't even finish high school and Mr. Greenwald was a hack,  a blogger, a criminal but most certainly not a journalist. They did their best to discredit them and their associates, labeling them as terrorists and criminals. 

The epilogue ties it all up in a bow. Do I think they were terrorists no but were they criminals--of the Robin Hood sort, certainly-- but criminals yes.

This book won prizes including the New York Times Best Book of The Year.  All I'm going to say is that once again I have stumbled across a book that everyone loved and raved about but apparently me. I was doing serious skimming by the end and was just glad it was over. I kept waiting for the next one to get better but instead this was just of collection of everything I don't like in a short story.