The Edward Snowden scandal viewed from planet Guardian

Last summer a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor called Edward Snowden leaked a vast trove of secret information on the mass data-gathering of his erstwhile employer and Britain’s GCHQ. He was widely lauded on the political left and libertarian right as a principled whistle-blower. Elsewhere he was derided as a naïve enabler of America’s enemies or as a traitor. His revelations provoked outrage from South America, cold fury from Germany and a warm smile from China and from Russia — where Snowden is currently granted asylum.

The Guardian newspaper co-operated with Snowden in releasing this material, as they did with Julian Assange before him. As the author of The Snowden Files is a Guardian journalist, the book written at the suggestion of the paper’s editor and published by the paper’s publisher, it is very much the Guardian’s version of events. But Luke Harding is a fine journalist. The co-author of an earlier book on Assange, he is also sole author of an interesting, if on occasion slightly overheated, account of his troubles as the Guardian’s correspondent in Russia.