Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance

Product Description One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden's box–materials proving that the US government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people–and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras. Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden's leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating story on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance. About the Author Dale Maharidge is the author of ten books, including Bringing Mulligan Home: The Long Search for a Lost Marine, which was the genesis for his 2019 podcast The Dead Drink First. He won the nonfiction Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for And Their Children After Them. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and held residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. His novel Burn Coast is due out in 2021. He is a professor at Columbia Journalism School and lives in New York.Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist whose work focuses on subcultures and the dark corners of the economy. She teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism and is the author of Burning Book.Jonathan Todd Ross, a graduate of the NYU/Tisch School of the Arts, has narrated over 120 audiobooks across a wide variety of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, self-help, YA, biography and memoir, children's literature, and romance. He's won an Audie Award (Restart by Gordon Korman), received numerous YALSA and Earphone Awards (Swindle by Gordon Korman, Fake Mustache by Tom Angleberger, and more), and made all of his middle school bullies regret every mean thing they ever said to him when he narrated Tom Brady's The TB12 Method. Jonathan loves narrating all genres, bringing the author's words to audio-life.Chloe Cannon is a non-union multi-genre audiobook narrator living in the Mid-Hudson Valley region of New York. Audiobook narration seized her interest when reading aloud to local seniors, who informed her that her reading sounded just like their audiobooks! Since then, she has narrated titles in a variety of genres, including young adult, sci-fi/fantasy, romance, self-help, thriller/suspense, sports memoir, and biography, with a special affinity for young adult/middle grade works. Her shapeshifting voice provides depth to each character within a story. AudioFile magazine has reviewed her narration: Cannon sounds so authentic that it's impossible not to be moved.