08 November 2014

Letter from Lhasa, number 352.
No Place to Hide

Letter from Lhasa, number 352. No Place to Hide
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Greenwald, G., No Place to Hide. Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Penguin Books, 2014.
(Greenwald 2014).
Glenn Greenwald


This is a book about unaccountable government, about unaccountable power. It opens a windows on a world, the world of government/power, where nothing is how it seems, how as it appears, where there are stacks of deception not of easy detection, and not easy to penetrate and overcome for discovering elements of truth or of possible truth. 

When Glenn Greenwald (US citizen residing in Rio de Janeiro) and Laura Poitras (US citizen residing in Berlin) went to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, the Guardian gave them a ‘babysitter’, the Scottish Ewen MacAskill, who is its defence and intelligence correspondent.

Snowden commented: “But you know you have a minder. That’s why they sent him.” In fact...

In the real world, it is not really possible to be defence and intelligence correspondent of an important newspaper without being fully accepted from the military and from the intelligence community. Ewen MacAskill was previously, from 2007 to 2013, Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief. No one may enjoy that position without being fully accepted from the US government and establishment, so, again, from their Secret Police Disservices.  

That is not necessarily a defect of the journalist who may be extremely naive and who may be manipulated without being aware of being such. For a British journalist, it is very improbable that he be naive. On the contrary, the field of manipulation and hetero-directions is a very delicate field in which no event or possibility may be excluded or judged improbable.     

One may easily hypothesize that the British SIS-MIx, the Intelligence Service[s] of the Crown, eventually with the agreement or non-opposition of NSA-CIA fractions, were part of the operation for managing the Snowden defection.

All that is not necessarily a subjective guiltiness or defect or sin, however that explains why this NSA story could be relatively easily published. It is a tale that when news are passed to media they could not be easily censured and those provided them could not be easily isolated and variously removed. Current brainwashing make to believe that there be any freedom or any [from power] uncontrollable and uncontrolled space. What there is not.

Snowden is finally a young men. He is a specialist in hacking and was part of the US intelligence-terrorist machine. That does not make him an expert in international affairs and, apart from that, it would have been really problematic, for him, as for whoever else, to find a place of the world really free from the US and British influence. He reached Hong Kong. Maoist China is a British-US creation and fully inside, even if unofficially, the area of British-US terrorist. Hong Kong has some special status, since its previous British belonging, and with continuing British strong influence.

The US positively [positively from their point of view of their goal, or apparent goal, of isolating Snowden ] intervened on Cuba and other Latin America countries for avoid whatever possibility, from him, to find whatever refuge. They intervened also on China, as on whatever possible refuge for Snowden. Even in the case of Russia, it was evident the deep lag between its supposed independence and the strong US and British influence over it, even if it finally accorded some refuge to Snowden. That means that, apart from official quacking, the US government did not want Snowden back.  

Even if now everybody is informed about the NSA & associates practices, these practices have not been stopped or limited. Everything is going on as before, now even in a stronger way if publicity could not cause the end to this form of State/government terrorism and totalitarianism. Finally, people, the average louses, do not worry, not at all. The Edward Snowden revelations actually subverted nothing. Of course, it is not his fault. We are only trying to represent reality.  

Economic espionage from the Anglo-American countries relatively to all the other ones, by the interception of whatever communication in the whole world, is not a novelty. Anyway good that this book repeat this information.

Parliaments are pure cover for State Terrorisms and State/Government Totalitarianisms. Against the single MP is used, from insecurity and deficience bureaucracies, the same paranoid sophism they use against the other subjects: there is a danger, you have to accept whatever we order to you to do and without posing any real question. And also each MP reacts as whatever other average louse: by complying.  

Bureaucracies follow their internal dynamics. Bureaucratic proliferation is the natural syndrome of whatever bureaucracy because it increases its power by increasing the number of its employees and the sums it can spend. So, finally, bureaucracies absorb enormous resources. Costs and wastes are bureaucratic power! Also the intrusion in individuals’ lives, and their control, is additional bureaucratic power.  

On the other side, bureaucrats have not superior skills and they do not pursue any superior goal. They only pursue their psychoses as individuals and as a collective entity, a mafia-style entity. Not casually, much of the government activities are secret, and this secrecy is growing since the criminal and insane side of government is progressively growing and overwhelming. Criminals do not like publicity.

Glenn Greenwald’s books is about privacy, so objectively misleading. Is it really a question of privacy?

He, and people as him, argue that if you feel observed you behave differently. It is true. In fact, it is not a question of reality but a question of perception. If you do not know, or if anyway you ignore or decide to ignore, you are observed, you behave again differently from if you think you be observed. Not necessarily censoring yourself. In real people, censorship combines with exhibitionism. You may simply ignore you are observed. You may build various stages of indifference. You may feel observed even when you are not. On the other side, religious education, but also religious or ethical one, condition people to feel observed, observed from God or observed from one’s own values, ethic and so on.

This psychological and philosophical arguing is only a limited aspect of reality. If technology makes total control possible, it will be used. These pro-privacy liberals would like laws obliging government to restrain or self-restrain its invasiveness. This is an illusion, a mystification too.

Already now there are laws against privacy violations, against abusive interception of subjects, proclaiming various legal rights. They simply do not work. They are just propaganda. Even if government accepted a real restriction or self-restriction of its possibilities, realty is binary, double, from this point of view. Pro-privacy liberals mystify from this point of view helping hiding this reality of a double government. That may not be their intention. It is not relevant. It is what they do.

There is a formal or normal or official government, the government as it is claimed, as actually it is claimed in propaganda. And there is the same government with the face and the practices, the legal powers too, of a parallel government, of a criminal government. They are the same government. They are both legal, even if the parallel law, the parallel government, is not known to the ordinary subject and not, or not in detail, exposed in educational institutions and in legal books.

There is the law for everybody, more or less for everybody can afford it, and there is an usually secret law for the parallel government. There are normal police disservices, deficience agencies, armed forces, and there are secret police disservices, secret armed forces, secret deficience agencies, with special powers, in practice with absolutely unaccountability relatively to the judiciary etc, so with the power to violate whatever current law and practice, at institutional orders, and in the name of a supposed “national interest”, “emergency state”, “imminent danger” and similar sophisms.

Government, using this parallel law, can commit whatever crime, inside and abroad. Also internal terrorism and mafias are created and managed using this Secret Police legal frame, a parallel law nullifying the official one and covering whatever crime. The State Secret, the classified information, the same State Secret on the State Secret, permits to keep totally covered, nearly invisible, these activities of the parallel government, which is, we repeat that, the official government but doing different things from those claimed, absolutely insane and criminal although with legal cover, with the cover of the secret law.  

There is no difference between Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Labour or Lib-Dem or other, left, centre or right, communists, liberals and nazi-fascists, once they are in office. Once in office, such is government and whatever political colour, or absence of colour, has to follow these rules where normal government and insane-criminal one are only two faces of the same government. The point is that criminal practices are not used from some moral people in the name of some superior interest, but from insane and criminal louses self-proclaiming ‘institutions’. And it can be only such.

The politician is a showman/woman used for conquering the vote of the people he/she deceives. Once elected, and even more if he/she becomes an administrator or an institutional figures, he/she surrounds him/herself of a staff not really different from him/herself. All these institutional figures variously interact with the bureaucracies they should, in theory, lead. Government, as a whole as well as in its various factions and sub-factions, variously interact with economic and financial interests have contractual power relatively to it.

Technology destroys privacy At the same time it can help to defend it, in some limited aspects, if properly used. Since one cannot rely on government self-restraining itself, perhaps one should pursue absolute publicity, the absence of privacy, also for government, for secret/parallel government too. Of course, without any real illusion. Criminal/Secret/Parallel government will always try to preserve itself and its insane criminal practices. In fact, government is against the free diffusion and use of technologies, which are under tight government control and monopoly. Only technologies permit to control subjects are freely buyable and usable from the same subjects who in this way pay for being controlled. See the mobile phones.  

We have no program and no preference. We are only exposing problems, which may be have no solution. On the other side, the large majority of subjects are just louses anxious to uniform themselves to power and government, and there is no reason, also no utility, to try to change them.    

Glenn Greenwald arguing about terrorism and antiterrorism, although journalistically elegant, and also journalistically superficial and vain, is decidedly deceptive in its essence. From 9/11, to nearly all terrorist operations, they have been cases of State/government terrorism, not external threats. Also before the 9/11 Bush-Cheney terrorist attacks. Where, occasionally, some terrorist attack has not been directly organised from Secret Police branches of the CIA, FBI or other government agencies at government orders, it was anyway organized and implemented from terrorist groups created on government decision, promotion, sponsorship and eventually with government fully informed of going on attacks. Terrorism always is a government activity. No independent terrorism is possible. It is too expensive and it needs technical tolls only governments have. This is what happens in the USA, UK, but also, with some exception deriving from foreign interference, in whatever country of the world. When there are ‘terrorist’ attacks, first look at the people formally and actually in office. Later, examine eventually other options but only if stronger forces can interfere with the will of the people on office. They organize and manage terrorists and terrorism, obviously publicity denying whatever their responsibility, so declaring responsible other, eventually ‘obscure’, entities.   

The Modern Prince, the contemporary bureaucratized governments, are terrorist and super-terrorist entities. They need terrorism for justifying bureaucratic proliferation and overwhelming militarization implemented with the justification of “fighting terrorism”. In this way, States/governments strength their totalitarianism.

One of the merit of Glenn Greenwald, apart from having contributed to publicly disclosing some materials collected from Edward Snowden, is to have shown that many well known journalists, as well as civil liberties supposed defenders, are just Secret Police agents at the service of government and power. That is what happened against him, labelled, from many of them, as a criminal to be prosecuted, while he was only doing his job. As it always happens, the problem, for power and government, was not their own insane and criminal nature and acts but those who denounced and cooperated to denounce it using their same secret documents somebody disclosed.   

It is also interesting and useful the author’s arguing about personality destruction. Just government identifies a target, it launches its dogs for slandering in all possible way its target. That happens at whatever level, be a target famous and ‘important’ or be not such.



Greenwald, G., No Place to Hide. Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, Penguin Books, 2014.