S. If Margaret Sullivan, the public editor ombudsman, or reader representative of The Times, agrees with him on some controversy, he is in heaven. He cites at length the results of a poll showing that more people are coming around to his notion that the governments response to terrorism after 91. Greenwald doesnt seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that people agree with him undermines his own argument that the authorities brook no dissent. No one is stopping people from criticizing the government or supporting Greenwald in any way. Nobody is preventing the nations leading newspaper from publishing a regular column in its own pages dissenting from company or government orthodoxy. If a majority of citizens now agree with Greenwald that dissent is being crushed in this country, and will say so openly to a stranger who rings their doorbell or their phone and says shes a pollster, how can anyone say that dissent is being crushed What kind of poor excuse for an authoritarian society are we building in which a Glenn Greenwald, proud enemy of conformity and government oppression, can freely promote this book in all media and sell thousands of copies at airport bookstores surrounded by Homeland Security officers Through all the bombast, Greenwald makes no serious effort to defend as a matter of law the leaking of official secrets to reporters. He merely asserts that there are both formal and unwritten legal protections offered to journalists that are unavailable to anyone else. While it is considered generally legitimate for a journalist to publish government secrets, for example, thats not the case for someone acting in any other capacity. Hi-Def The Fake Movie. Here at last, I thought, is something Greenwald and I can agree on. The Constitution is for everyone. There shouldnt be a special class of people called journalists with privileges like publishing secret government documents. But no. Greenwalds only problem with the idea of a journalists privilege is that some people dont recognize that hes a journalist. He is right that he is just as entitled to this honor as Bob Woodward. But so is everyone else. Especially in the age of blogs, it is impossible to distinguish between a professional journalist and anyone else who wants to publish his or her thoughts. And thats a good thing. The Snowden leaks were important a legitimate scoop and we might never have known about the N. S. A. s lawbreaking if it hadnt been for them. Most leaks from large bureaucracies are good leaks no danger to national security, no harm to innocent people, information the public ought to have. The trouble is this Greenwald says that Snowden told him to use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people. Once again, this testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think. Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly but are you And even if you do trust Greenwalds judgment, which on the evidence might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy which, pace Greenwald, we still are, that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision making whatever it turns out to be should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you cant square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald. Greenwalds notion of what constitutes suppression of dissent by the established media is an invitation to appear on Meet the Press. On the show, he is shocked to be asked by the host David Gregory, To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden,. Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime Greenwald was so stunned that it took a minute to process that he had actually asked such a patently outrageous question. And what was so outrageous Well, for starters, Greenwald says, the to the extent formulation could be used to justify any baseless insinuation, like To the extent that Mr. Gregory has murdered his neighbors. But Greenwald does not deny that he has aided and abetted Snowden. So this particular question was not baseless. Furthermore, it was a question, not an assertion a perfectly reasonable question that many people were asking, and Gregory was giving Greenwald a chance to answer it If the leaker can go to prison, why should the leakee be exempt But Greenwald seems to feel he is beyond having to defend himself. Even asking the question, he said, amounts to an extraordinary assertion that journalists could and should be prosecuted for doing journalism. Greenwalds determination to misinterpret the evidence can be comic. He writes about attending a bat mitzvah ceremony where the rabbi told the young woman that you are never alone because God is always watching over you. The rabbis point was clear, Greenwald amplifies. If you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes. I dont think that was the rabbis point. As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible hand to assure that the right balance is struck. So what do we do about leaks of government information Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer people chose the second option. This is not a straightforward or easy question. But I cant see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find. This isnt Easter and these are not eggs. NO PLACE TO HIDEEdward Snowden, the NSA, and the U. S. Surveillance State. By Glenn Greenwald. Illustrated. 2. 59 pp. Metropolitan BooksHenry Holt. Correction May 2. An earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to the extent that the journalist Glenn Greenwald, the author of No Place to Hide, acted as a go between for Edward Snowden with newspapers that reported on various aspects of Snowdens collection of classified documents. While Greenwald contributed reporting on the story to several of those papers, he did not do so for all of them.