Do you think we can trust the NSA? Apparently, they violate the rules dozens of times a day.
On July 4, I published a novel about abuse of government surveillance, What Happens to Us, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU, only $3.99 to download.
Tag Archives: Edward Snowden
An Enlightening Podcast on Government Surveillance
On the Sunday political talk shows, government officials have been denying that it was collecting data on ordinary Americans, only that it was collecting harmless li’l ol’ metadata. Now, we know that they were lying, because of an investigative article in The Guardian newspaper on Saturday: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data
I was so outraged by this violation of American law that I wrote a novel about it, What Happens to Us, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU. Download for $3.99 onto your Kindle.
Here’s a podcast that gives some perspective on the subject, from NPR. It’s a must-hear.
They Lied to Us Just Last Week
For the past couple months, government officials have been appearing on the airwaves proclaiming that the NSA collects only metadata. Oh, they’re saints! They’re saviours! They’re only protecting you!
Dianne Feinstein, Peter King, Michael Hayden, Lindsay Graham, John McCain, and many others have been telling us what a liar Edward Snowden is. The government collects only metadata, they say. And that’s not really data at all! It’s just like the information on the outside of an envelope! Chill out, dudes!
Now, it turns out that they collect everything, with no oversight, no FISA approval required. Outrageous.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data
And on top of that, they’re passing that information on to the Drug Enforcement Agency and other local law enforcement, for them to act upon.
It’s blatantly unconstitutional, so when they bring the cases to court, they cover it up by cooking up a whole other scenario about how the information came to light. In other words, they lie and cook up another story.
And other law-enforcement agencies are clamoring to get to that data. If they get their way, the information from our tapped phones will be used to combat all crimes:
Six years ago, I began writing a novel that is a demonstration of the worst that could happen under promiscuous surveillane. It’s Edward Snowden’s worst nightmare. Read What Happens to Us at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU. Download for only $3.99 on your Kindle or Nook.
Metadata Program Can’t Survive
A U.S. representative doubts how much the Prism program has contributed to our security, and predicts that it simply won’t survive.
Terror on a Personal Level (excerpt 2)
This is an excerpt from the newly published novel, What Happens to Us.
Download on the Kindle or on your personal computer for $3.99 at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can download software on your computer for free:
Kindle for PC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/pc/download
Kindle for Mac: http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/mac/download
Nook for PC: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook-for-pc/379003591/
Nook for Mac: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook-for-mac/379003592/
Top 10 Reasons to Pardon Edward Snowden (with apologies to Letterman)
- So that he can frolic shirtless in the Moscow Airport with Vladimir Putin.
- He’s the only guy in government who has ever told the truth.
- His girlfriend is hot!
- Now you can be psychotically paranoid and have a damn good reason!
- His girlfriend is hot!
- He’s cute.
- His car is parked in the white zone, and it’s for loading and unloading only.
- His girlfriend is hot!
- He did a good thing!
- So that I can continue to sell my newly published novel, What Happens to Us, http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU, with the tagline, “Edward Snowden’s Worst Nightmare.”
(This was not written by David Letterman & staff. It was written by David Groves.)
Obsession Is Your Friend
If you’ve never watched a movie 100 times, you should. I did.
There is a way that one can become so thoroughly familiar with a great narrative that it seeps into your bones and becomes like another organ in your body. You expropriate certain phrases. It becomes part of your Bildung, your autonomic nervous system, your premise as a person.
My own particular obsession was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the 6-hour BBC television movie, with Alec Guinness and a fabulous cast of other British luminaries. The reason: The first time I watched it, I didn’t totally understand it. It intrigued me, because it felt like it was comprehensible if I could just watch it again. So I bought a copy and watched it again. I learned a little more, but not everything by any means. So I watched it several more times.
By the fifth time, I had the basic idea. The problem was, LeCarre’s plotting was so airtight that it became richer the more questions you asked. In addition, so much was implied rather than stated in this work of art. It was a puzzle, but a supremely plausible and airtight puzzle. It was like an onion, in that every layer that I peeled away yielded another layer.
How I got past the eighth viewing is an important question. That’s the point at which it began slipping into obsession. The reason: I was working hard. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I would watch a little bit more of the movie. Obviously, I didn’t have a girlfriend, or for that matter, a social life.
Weeks passed. Every viewing was reassuring, like a secret society that was accepting me in. Months passed. The plot became so labyrinthine that I felt I was becoming an expert at something. I could answer trivia questions. When did Jim Prideaux learn that he was betrayed? Why did Toby Esterhaze change sides so easily? Why did Bill Haydon have an affair with George Smiley’s wife? I could answer all those questions and more.
When I moved on to the sequel, Smiley’s People, also a 6-hour BBC miniseries, I felt truly inducted. These were my neighbors, my intimates, the voices on the other end of the phone. Years passed, and I watched both videos countless times. I bought the books and read them several times, as well, which gave me all the vast universe of detail. I don’t know whether I watched the movies 50 or 100 times, but it was many.
Six years ago, I began writing a novel that had espionage elements, and that novel was informed by LeCarre’s work, as they say. Attitudes, tones, shadings. The realistic and mature attitude toward action still remains with me in this newly published novel, called What Happens to Us http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DSSN5SU.
In addition, this exhaustive approach to art has transferred to my own creative process. There are certain passages in my new novel, for example, that I’ve rewritten over 100 times. When you look at something that many times, you can pretty much rest assured that you’ve done everything to turn it into art. No stone is left unturned.
After about ten years, I stopped watching those movies. That was about ten years ago. Recently, I picked them up again, watching the serialization on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzYtb47vvf0 I found it strangely emotional. When I began explaining plot points to my girlfriend, I found myself choking up. Every plot point had tragedy behind it. It was like talking about my grandmother’s life and understanding what decision led to what act which led to me. It was like understanding the totality of life. It was like living inside the Tree of Life.
Here’s a YouTube video about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKM26bYkCbk
Excerpt from “What Happens to Us,” part 1
A fan of What Happens to Us speaks
The NSA Responds to “What Happens to Us”
My novel, What Happens to Us, indicts the NSA for its wiretapping policies. Over 4.9 million people have access to “confidential and secret” information gathered by the government, including nearly 500,000 who work for private contractors like Booz Allen, where Edward Snowden worked. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/nsa-leak-contractors_n_3418876.html
That’s an awful lot of possibilities for misbehavior and misuse of that access. In 2007, I was so appalled by that possibility that I wrote a novel tracing a hypothetical instance of misbehavior and the havoc that it might wreak. It took the form of a thriller: Cat is being chased by a stranger whom she doesn’t even know. It’s made much more frightening because this stranger seems to know her friends, where she might spend the night, and seems to locate her mysteriously whenever she turns on her cell phone.
Once I published the novel, it didn’t even take a week for the NSA to learn of its existence. A Facebook friend forwarded information about my novel to a friend who works at the NSA. Even though he hadn’t yet read the book, he expressed extreme skepticism. He wrote that there is “no such thing as an ‘NSA operative,’ but that’s what you get when you combine the concept of CIA agents (‘operatives’) with the public’s view of the NSA as ‘one step even more secret than the CIA.’”
Of course, What Happens to Us never uses the term “operative.” (I just searched the document.) But never doubt the power of changing the subject, which is what the government so often does when it comes to surveillance. After arguing that irrelevancy, he continues in that vein:
“There aren’t ‘NSA agents’, either. No such thing. However, I have yet to see ‘Enemy of the State’, and as I understand, Gene Hackman or someone else is an ‘NSA agent’. It’s pure fantasy.”
Then he takes on a subject on which he is unexpectedly right.
“It’s probably because they’ve been so successfully secret in general that writers have to make such stuff up. The public probably DOES “know” a bit more about the CIA, which is why there’ve been so many CIA characters and movies related to it.”
In fact, it’s true that there’s very little known about the Prism, Pinwale, and other NSA surveillance programs. In all my research over a number of years, these are the things I learned about it. It’s based in San Francisco on Comstock Street. The telecommunication companies seem to be cooperating with it. And IT workers seem to have incredibly broad access to it. That’s pretty much all any of us knows.
So that’s the point. If you want to write about a supersecret program but don’t have many facts, what do you do? Ignore it? If you’re a novelist, you make stuff up, as our critic so eloquently put it. And after all, there is a reason that it’s called fiction.
The larger point of the novel, however, is that all employees everywhere sometimes step over the line. It’s that when you’re collecting private information, you need oversight. It’s that my antagonist Rafe Noyes, who hides his obsessions from nearly everyone, could easily exist. And that’s what’s so frightening about this novel, and ultimately, the NSA.
What Happens to Us 
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