An incredible work of investigative journalism, THE SNOWDEN FILES: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding (The Guardian) tells the story of the individuals behind the biggest intelligence leak in history and the forces that tried to stop them. The first, and definitive, book on Edward Snowden,THE SNOWDEN FILES deftly synthesizes many disparate sources and strands of this story into one cohesive insider narrative that reads like an espionage novel. THE SNOWDEN FILES will be published by Vintage Books as a paperback original on February 11, 2014.
A thorough chronology of events leading up to and resulting from Snowden's historic revelations, THE SNOWDEN FILESis the inside story of Snowden's deeds and the journalists who faced down enormous pressure from the U.S. and U.K. governments to break one of the most important stories of our times.
It began with a tantalizing, anonymous email: "I am a senior member of the intelligence community..." What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one man. The consequences of Edward Snowden's actions have shaken the leaders of nations worldwide and ignited a global debate on the role of the surveillance in democratic society. The revelations have raised concerns about growing domestic surveillance, the scale of global monitoring, trustworthiness of the technology sector, whether the agencies can keep their information secure, and the quality of the laws and oversight keeping the agencies in check.
THE SNOWDEN FILES provides the first in depth inside look at the Guardian's scoop -- journalism at its most exciting: Glenn Greenwald's first tentative and secret online encounter with Snowden, the Guardian group's meeting with him in Hong Kong, where the reporters were given code-phrases and were asked to leave their iPhones behind. Harding also follows the trail of Snowden's explosive documents across four continents, while Guardian journalists and editors were placed under the watchful eye of government agencies.
Touching on everything from concerns about domestic surveillance to the complicity of the tech sector while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself, THE SNOWDEN FILES is a necessary and timely account of what is at stake in the new digital age.
THE SNOWDEN FILES will also be published in the U.K., Brazil, China, Korea, Norway, Holland, Portugal and Japan, to date.
About the author: Luke Harding is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian. He has reported from Delhi, Berlin and Moscow and has also covered wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of Mafia State and co-author of WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy (2011) and The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken (1997), nominated for the Orwell Prize. The film rights to Wikileaks were sold to Dreamworks and the film, The Fifth Estate, came out in 2013. He has also written for the magazine Granta.
Vintage Books is an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is a division of Random House, Inc., whose parent company is Bertelsmann AG, the international media company. Known as an industry-leading paperback publisher, its roster of authors includes Robert A. Caro, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Jill Lepore, James Bamford, Jon Krakauer, Lawrence Wright, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, and Dave Eggers, among others.
