GAP Featured in New Book “Bravehearts” By Mark Hertsgaard

An Investigative Tour de Force Revealing A New Chapter In The Edward Snowden Story And Highlighting The Whistle Blowers Who Pay With Their Lives to Save Ours

By now, almost everyone knows what Edward Snowden did: leak secret documents revealing that the US government was spying on hundreds of millions of people around the world.  But if you want to know why Snowden did it, the way he did it, you need to know the stories of two other men.

The first is Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same surveillance ten years before Snowden did and got crushed.  The other is The Third Man, a former senior Pentagon official who comes forward in this book for the first time to describe how his superiors repeatedly broke the law to punish Drake—and unwittingly taught Snowden how to evade their clutches.

When insiders such as The Third Man or Big Tobacco truth-teller Jeffrey Wigand blow the whistle on high-level government or corporate lying, lawbreaking, or other wrongdoing, the public can benefit enormously. Liberty is defended, deadly products are taken off the market, wars are ended.  The whistle-blowers themselves, however, generally end up ruined when they refuse to back down in the face of ferocious official retaliation. This moral stubbornness despite terrible personal cost is the defining DNA of whistle-blowers. The public owes them more than we know.

In Bravehearts, Mark Hertsgaard tells the gripping, sometimes darkly comic stories of these unsung heroes. Deeply reported, impassioned but fair-minded, Bravehearts is for citizens of all nations, especially students, teachers, activists, and anyone wanting to make a difference.

Mark Hertsgaard is the author of six previous books that have been translated into sixteen languages. He has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, Bloomberg Businessweek, Harper’s, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and The Nation, where he is the environment correspondent.  He has appeared on countless radio and TV programs, including Fresh Air, Morning Edition, Marketplace, The Charlie Rose Show, Democracy Now! and The Rachel Maddow Show. He lives in San Francisco.