Preface: Yet another book about Snowden and Safe Harbor?

[Extract] A series of events led to the idea for this book and the first one is more than obvious: the Edward Snowden affaire. On 6 June 2013 Glenn Greenwarld published in The Guardian the first in a series of articles- and later co-authored a few other - on global mass surveillance practices led by the United States' National Security Agency (NSA). On the first day, the worldwide public learned that the NSA has obtained a clandestine court order from a secretly operating court of law, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and on its basis the Agency has been collecting metadata on telephone calls of millions customers of a major private telecommunications provider, Verizon. this provider was forbidden from disclosing both the order itself and its compliance with it. on the second day (7 June), the worldwide public learned further that these practices had not been limited to a single provider and that the NSA was allegedly 'tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies': Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple.