No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State. By Glenn Greenwald. Metropolitan Books; 259 pages; $27. Hamish Hamilton; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE story of Edward Snowden, a contractor at America’s National Security Agency (NSA) who leaked tens of thousands of secret documents last year, is remarkable. From the brashness of the act to the broad reach of spying he revealed, the tale has all the makings of a thriller. Several books, including one by an Economist writer, have taken up the subject. Now the American journalist who broke the story, Glenn Greenwald, has produced his own.

It offers juicy details on how the stories were produced—and almost weren’t. It provides an excellent overview of the NSA’s still-classified activities and lack of legal controls, putting the pieces together in a way that daily journalism cannot. It discusses how Messrs Snowden and Greenwald were smeared by officialdom, including the mainstream press that the author argues has shed its watchdog role.

Mr Snowden, a high-school dropout and computer prodigy, advanced through America’s spy agencies, yet became alarmed by the vast surveillance his bosses publicly stated did not take place. Having been rebuffed when he brought up concerns internally, and seeing how America mistreated other whistle-blowers, last June, at the age of 29, he gave up his six-figure salary and home in Hawaii to disclose the damning materials. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded,” he said at the time.

The level of surveillance is eye-popping. Some 20 billion phone and e-mail records from people around the world are collected every day, under the doctrine of “collect it all”. Many American companies, as well as other countries, notably Britain, assist the NSA, according to the files. Yet the disclosures are mostly about extreme collection of data, not its misuse.

Mr Greenwald used to be a lawyer. He is very good at showing that much NSA activity was against the law; for example, the agency took raw data collected from Americans and secretly gave it to Israel. All too often, though, he proselytises rather than analyses. He condemns America’s FISA court, a closed judicial panel, as “an empty pantomime” when the reality is far more nuanced. He cites a recent court ruling and the government’s own reports to show that the NSA’s activities are illegal or ineffective—but ignores cases that reach opposite conclusions. The issue of why some surveillance is necessary is never explored, nor is the question of how intelligence-gathering might be reformed. These shortcomings mean that the book is more likely to energise his supporters than persuade his detractors.

The villain of the book is not just the NSA but the mainstream American media, which Mr Greenwald believes is so chummy with politicians and businesspeople that it no longer holds power to account. That was why Mr Snowden leaked the material to Mr Greenwald, then an opinionated blogger and columnist for a left-wing British newspaper, the Guardian, and not the New York Times.