No Place To Hide

As legal affairs correspondent for the Nation, David Cole is no apologist for the NSA. But he argues in his Washington Post review of No Place To Hide that Glenn Greenwald undermines a compelling argument by hyperbole and his failure to acknowledge the limits on NSA activity:

“Greenwald’s descriptions of NSA programs can also be misleading. He never mentions, for example, that there are significant ‘back-end’ limits on how the agency can search and use much of the data it collects. These limitations constitute the core of the NSA’s defenses of its programs. While I don’t find those defenses entirely convincing, a serious effort to grapple with the issue would not simply ignore them.

“The force of Greenwald’s argument is sometimes undermined by his hyperbolic style and more-radical-than-thou attitude. He depicts the NSA, for example, as part of a grand scheme by elites to control the masses, of a piece with what he sees as ‘the response to the Occupy movement .?.?. to crush it with force, through tear gas, pepper spray, and prosecution.’ Really? Maybe I’m imagining things, but I recall seeing Occupy demonstrations for months on end throughout the country, including in the nation’s capital.

And he asserts that ‘both the United States and the United Kingdom have made clear that there are no limits — ethical, legal, or political — that they will observe when they claim to be acting in the name of ‘terrorism.’ Has he read the substantial debates in Britain over preventive detention, control orders, complicity in torture and the like? Has he seen the Obama administration’s brief to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit insisting that the laws of war must limit detention authority at Guantanamo and urging the court to reverse a statement to the contrary? Or President Obama’s orders barring the use of enhanced interrogation techniques? Such overstatement weakens Greenwald’s credibility, which is unfortunate, because much of what he has to say is extremely valuable.”