Cartoonist fired by LA Times after LAPD arrest says evidence 'spliced and edited'

As Ted Rall’s book on Edward Snowden hits shelves this week, parallels are visible between his own story – involving a police encounter over jaywalking – and that of his subject, the NSA whistleblower

Ted Rall’s book Snowden, out this week, could not be debuting at a stranger time for its embattled and controversial author, given the bizarre parallels between his subject’s experiences with state surveillance and his own. In Snowden, Rall chronicles the rise of Edward Snowden as he becomes aware of massive, overreaching state monitoring of our private lives – at the precise moment when secret state surveillance on Rall’s past life would bring his work with the Los Angeles Times to a screeching halt.

But why did Edward Snowden, well-documented in these pages and in the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, need to be captured in cartoon form? Rall’s long-planned project about the NSA whistleblower was a natural for cartooning, he said last week in a phone interview.

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