In any case, gone is Leigh. Consequently, no sensitive passwords appear to have been disclosed in the making of Harding's book. Furthermore, there is evidence in these pages that The Guardian is now attempting to embrace basic operational security procedures, a positive development, even if it is years late and being done haphazardly.
Back in 2010, when we were publishing classified Pentagon and State Department documents, the paper's journalists jovially branded me "paranoid" for refusing to discuss sensitive information over email. Would-be lifestyle journalist Decca Aitkenhead later even took this as far as insinuating that I might be losing my mind. But I was just doing my job, and I am relieved that it's starting to sink in at The Guardian that it's their job, too.
Since I've started praising the book, I might as well continue. As hack jobs by Luke Harding go, a lot of work has gone into this one. Mr. Harding has clearly gone to uncharacteristic lengths in rewriting most of his source material, although it remains in large part unattributed.
Plagiarist of the Year
Notoriously, as the Moscow bureau chief for The Guardian, Harding used to ply his trade ripping off work by other Moscow-based journalists before his plagiarism was pointed out by The eXile's Mark Ames and Yasha Levine, from whom he had misappropriated entire paragraphs without alteration. For this he was awarded "plagiarist of the year" by Private Eye in 2007.
But -- disciplined by experience -- he covers his tracks much more effectively here. This book thereby avoids the charge of naked plagiarism.
Yet the conclusion cannot be resisted that this work is painfully derivative. Snowden has never spoken to Harding. The two have never met. The story is largely pieced together from more original work by James Risen, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Peter Maas, Janet Reitman, writers from the South China Morning Post and others.
The subtitle of the book, "The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man," is therefore disingenuous. If this is an inside story of Snowden, then anyone can write an inside story of anything.
Something in me has to applaud the chutzpah. There simply isn't a book here. Tangents and trivia serve as desperate page-filler, padding out scarce source material to book length. We are subjected to routine detours through Snowden's historical namesakes, rehearsals of the plot of the James Bond movie Skyfall and lengthy forays into Harding's pedestrian view of Soviet history.
Elsewhere, Harding runs out of external material to recycle and begins to rehash his own, best evidenced in the almost identical Homeric introductions Harding's boss, Alan Rusbridger, receives every time he arrives on the page.
To be fair, not all of the book is secondhand information. The middle chapters, which document The Guardian's internal struggles over the publication of the Snowden information, contain mostly novel anecdotes. True, I'd already heard many of them (The Guardian leaks like a sieve), but it's convenient to have them all written down in one place.
For most of his narrative, however, Harding is riding on the coattails of other journalists. His is more of a "backside story" than an "inside story." It reveals a glaring lack of expertise in just about every topic it touches on: the Internet and its subcultures, information and operational security, the digital rights and policy community, hacker culture, the cypherpunk movement, geopolitics, espionage and the security industry.
For our author, "computer skills" are about as comprehensible as magical powers in a J.K. Rowling novel. Although examples of this can be found throughout the book, it is nowhere more apparent than in a transparent promo piece in The Guardian where Harding claimed that while he was writing The Snowden Files, his word processor would occasionally start to delete paragraphs while he watched.
Mundane explanations abound, but Harding is apparently desperate to attribute the episode to clandestine actors. "Was it the NSA? GCHQ? A Russian hacker?" the article asks breathlessly. Or, a reader might be forgiven for wondering, a bit of clotted cream stuck under the backspace key?
As a computer security expert who's been in this business for a long time, I can assure Harding that if a well-resourced intelligence agency has compromised his computer, it will not be going out of its way to advertise itself to him by playing silly games with his word processor. As we like to say at WikiLeaks, "the quieter you become, the more you can hear."
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