Who is watching me type these words? Is my computer playing up? Has an alarm at Google started flashing as the words ''Snowden'', ''NSA'' and ''scandal'' are entered into a word-processing program? I'm freaking out here! Give me a nom de plume!
Such paranoia is inescapable after you rip through this page-turning tale of the biggest spy scandal in the history of the civilised world.
You may have heard of Snowden. He was the young American working for the National Security Agency who blew the whistle on wholesale American (and British) spying on the general public's communications.
He gave up life as he knew it to feed information to journalists working for the Guardian newspaper, who blew open the biggest scoop imaginable last year.
Snowden remains in Russia, knowing a return to the United States is impossible. But his actions continue to resonate, and doubtless they will for some time.
Mere months have passed since the story broke, so you might think The Snowden Files premature. But Harding, a Guardian writer, does a superb job of wrapping up the story. And it rattles along at such a pace, as all good spy thrillers should, there is not time to ponder whether the news is old. Consider, too, that as big as the story was, not everyone has a handle on who Snowden was or why his actions were so earth-shattering.
Harding writes in a crisp style that seamlessly incorporates Snowden's life story - obviously, the newspaper had full access, so this part was not exactly hard - into the background of the actual spying.
Some of the intricacies of the security operations are dense, yet this is an easy read, an enthralling if deeply worrying story that should concern us all.
It's not all serious. I was particularly taken with the line about the joke that did the rounds and referred to an NSA spook's favourite pick-up line in a bar: ''You come here often.''
Primarily, this is the story of the scandal, but it is also the story of how the story was covered, how Snowden's tentative approach to one of the world's great media organisations led to the whistle being blown. As a reporter, this was most interesting to me.
(Look online for more from Harding about how he wrote the book, complete with details of words being deleted by someone who had presumably hacked into his computer.)
There seems no doubt there will be sequels of the real-life spy thriller that is stranger than fiction.
And remember: they are watching.
- Hayden Meikle is ODT sports editor.
