Never one to shy away from contemporary nonfiction, W. and World Trade Center helmer Oliver Stone is now planning to adapt for the big screen Luke Harding’s recent book, “The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man.” The Guardian has the news, reporting that production is planned to begin before the close of the year. The book, from the newspaper’s own correspondent, was published earlier this year with the following official description.
It began with a tantalizing, anonymous e-mail: “I am a senior member of the intelligence community.”
What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man. Edward Snowden was a 29-year-old computer genius working for the National Security Agency when he shocked the world by exposing the near-universal mass surveillance programs of the United States government. His whistleblowing has shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, and generated a passionate public debate on the dangers of global monitoring and the threat to individual privacy.
In a tour de force of investigative journalism that reads like a spy novel, award-winning Guardian reporter Luke Harding tells Snowden’s astonishing story—from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Honolulu carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of his secret-spilling in Hong Kong, to his battle for asylum and his exile in Moscow. For the first time, Harding brings together the many sources and strands of the story—touching on everything from concerns about domestic spying to the complicity of the tech sector—while also placing us in the room with Edward Snowden himself. The result is a gripping insider narrative—and a necessary and timely account of what is at stake for all of us in the new digital age.
The Snowden Files will be racing to the big screen against another project set up at Sony Pictures. That film, announced last month, is based on Glenn Greenwald’s (also a reporter with The Guardian) Pulitzer Prize-winning “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.”
