Snowden's Box

Praise

“An engaging window into the scrappy human effort behind the Snowden revelations, Bruder and Maharidge’s book also manages to provide some of the speculation, context, and—perhaps best of all—practical advice, that Snowden’s book and Poitras’s film will have made readers yearn for.”
—Jonathan Lethem

“I’ve read virtually all of the books about the Snowden leaks, but this one stands apart…A beautifully written, gripping new book.”
—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing

“A short, yet fluent and well-researched, work from a duo of US-based investigative journalists … despite the title, ‘Snowden’s Box’ is essentially not about the box as such, but, as the authors themselves, acknowledge, about some of the most powerful analogue technology in the world: human relationships.”
—Vitali Vitaliev, Engineering & Technology

“Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two innocents in the murky world, describe in Snowden’s Box how, by chance, they were caught up in a potentially dangerous intrigue when a package containing the biggest ever single leak of US national security files was posted in Hawaii by old-fashioned mail and dropped outside their door.”
—Richard Norton-Taylor, Literary Review

“The story of Edward Snowden’s disclosure of NSA secrets to the press has been told and retold in books, films, and countless articles. Left unreported has been the quiet role of [Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge] who literally had Snowden material mailed to them in a cardboard box…[In Snowden’s Box], the duo finally tells their story of beginners’ encryption, convoluted codewords, and extreme paranoia.”
—Sam Biddle, Intercept

“A gonzo story, told with a sense of humour … Bruder and Maharidge tell a good yarn and make a strong case against government surveillance. They argue that everybody should have something to hide.”
—Morning Star

“The simplest human connections are sometimes vitally important for journalists to carry out their work beyond the gaze of the spying agencies. Bruder and Maharige’s book is a timely reminder of this fact.”
—Counterfire