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Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State
From the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of the New York Times bestseller Angler, the definitive master narrative of the modern surveillance state, based on unique access to Edward Snowden and groundbreaking reportage around the world.
Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir and cast himself as a pugilist on Snowden's behalf.
Gellman took his own path. Snowden and his documents were the beginning, not the end, of a story he had prepared his whole life to tell. More than 20 years as a top investigative journalist armed him with deep sources in national security and high technology. New sources reached out from government and industry, making contact on the same kinds of secret, anonymous channels that Snowden had used. Gellman's reporting unlocked new puzzles in the NSA archive. And as Snowden's revelations faded somewhat from the public consciousness, the machinations he exposed continue still, with many policies unaltered despite societal outrage.
Dark Mirror is a true-life spy tale that touches us all, told with authority and an inside view of extraordinary events. Within it is a chilling personal account of the obstacles facing the author, beginning with Gellman's discovery of his own name in Snowden's NSA document trove. Google notifies him that a foreign government is trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser finds anomalies on his laptop. Sophisticated impostors approach Gellman with counterfeit documents, attempting to divert or discredit his work. Throughout Dark Mirror, the author wages an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries who force him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense.
With the vivid and insightful style that marked Gellman's bestselling Angler, Dark Mirror is an inside account of the surveillance-industrial revolution and its discontents, fighting back against state and corporate intrusions into our most private spheres. Along the way, and with the benefit of hindsight, it tells the full story of a government leak unrivaled in drama since All the President's Men.
Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir and cast himself as a pugilist on Snowden's behalf.
Gellman took his own path. Snowden and his documents were the beginning, not the end, of a story he had prepared his whole life to tell. More than 20 years as a top investigative journalist armed him with deep sources in national security and high technology. New sources reached out from government and industry, making contact on the same kinds of secret, anonymous channels that Snowden had used. Gellman's reporting unlocked new puzzles in the NSA archive. And as Snowden's revelations faded somewhat from the public consciousness, the machinations he exposed continue still, with many policies unaltered despite societal outrage.
Dark Mirror is a true-life spy tale that touches us all, told with authority and an inside view of extraordinary events. Within it is a chilling personal account of the obstacles facing the author, beginning with Gellman's discovery of his own name in Snowden's NSA document trove. Google notifies him that a foreign government is trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser finds anomalies on his laptop. Sophisticated impostors approach Gellman with counterfeit documents, attempting to divert or discredit his work. Throughout Dark Mirror, the author wages an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries who force him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense.
With the vivid and insightful style that marked Gellman's bestselling Angler, Dark Mirror is an inside account of the surveillance-industrial revolution and its discontents, fighting back against state and corporate intrusions into our most private spheres. Along the way, and with the benefit of hindsight, it tells the full story of a government leak unrivaled in drama since All the President's Men.
810 pages, Paperback
First published May 19, 2020
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April 11, 2022
Journalism at its highest. Bart Gellman tells a detailed, objective and accurate account of the NSA global surveillance programs, as far as I can tell from what I have read on the subject so far, including Snowden's autobiography, Permanent Record.
As the author states in the beginning, "the pages to come tell stories that Snowden will not talk about or has not recounted before, not even in his memoir last year, and many stories that have nothing to do with him. I draw upon hundreds of hours of conversations with Snowden and hundreds more with designers, operators, customers, rebels, and dissidents in the surveillance machinery. There are new revelations here from the classified archive, from independent research, and from old reporter's notes that revealed new meaning in hindsight."
Indeed, there are stories upon stories, from a lot of people involved or affected, directly or tangential, by the surveillance programs. One thing is certain: when you log in, you give up privacy. No matter what measures of security do you think you have, if someone wants to hack your account/s, there is no barrier.
This is not a book to summarize or review; you have to read for yourself what a journalist goes through in order to write a story of impact and disclose such information, the decisions he has to make, the amount of work and risk behind it, how it affects him and those around him, not to mention those who provided the data, but that's Gellman's story, and it deserves all the credit.
To get a glimpse of what I'm talking about, I think below fragments are much more relevant than anything I would say:
"A smartphone is an excellent tracking device. It works well as a remote-controlled microphone, too, for someone who knows how to switch it on."
""The cloud," as the security analyst Graham Cluley put it, was just another word for "somebody else's computer." When you left information there, you gave up control."
"When you check your email, your computer or smartphone is talking to a front end server. Google's private infrastructure, I explained to Snowden, was shown on the right side of the diagram. It included boxes labeled "DC," or data center. "Traffic in clear text here," a caption said. No encryption, in other words. Only outside its digital property line, on the public internet, did Google armor its data with encryption. The NSA, somehow, was inside Google's house. Snowden and I spoke in technical shorthand, but in essence I asked him, how did the NSA break in? "That's a complicated topic and I can't answer everything," Snowden wrote. Then how about a more basic question: why would the NSA do this? Because it could, Snowden replied. The agency saw great heaps of information flowing unencrypted through conduits it could reach. "I'm speculating, but NSA doesn't ignore low-hanging fruit,” Snowden wrote.
"The great majority would just stay and rationalize it, right? A small number would say, 'I can't be part of this,' and leave. Hardly anyone says, 'I have to be the one who stops it.'" Snowden lit up. "I agree. And that's where my frustration was.... If you see that things aren't changing, and you see the gravity of the situation, you may feel compelled simply to do something. Because you realize you can. You realize you have the capability, and you realize every other motherfucker sitting around the table has the same capability but they don't do it. So somebody has to be the first."
"Any refuge against surveillance, any zone of effective privacy, had to be neutralized. That is why encryption, anonymity, and antivirus software were all categorized as "threats" in the NSA's internal literature."
"Ashkan and I discovered a set of programs that gathered nearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals-and map their relationships-on a planetary scale."
As the author states in the beginning, "the pages to come tell stories that Snowden will not talk about or has not recounted before, not even in his memoir last year, and many stories that have nothing to do with him. I draw upon hundreds of hours of conversations with Snowden and hundreds more with designers, operators, customers, rebels, and dissidents in the surveillance machinery. There are new revelations here from the classified archive, from independent research, and from old reporter's notes that revealed new meaning in hindsight."
Indeed, there are stories upon stories, from a lot of people involved or affected, directly or tangential, by the surveillance programs. One thing is certain: when you log in, you give up privacy. No matter what measures of security do you think you have, if someone wants to hack your account/s, there is no barrier.
This is not a book to summarize or review; you have to read for yourself what a journalist goes through in order to write a story of impact and disclose such information, the decisions he has to make, the amount of work and risk behind it, how it affects him and those around him, not to mention those who provided the data, but that's Gellman's story, and it deserves all the credit.
To get a glimpse of what I'm talking about, I think below fragments are much more relevant than anything I would say:
"A smartphone is an excellent tracking device. It works well as a remote-controlled microphone, too, for someone who knows how to switch it on."
""The cloud," as the security analyst Graham Cluley put it, was just another word for "somebody else's computer." When you left information there, you gave up control."
"When you check your email, your computer or smartphone is talking to a front end server. Google's private infrastructure, I explained to Snowden, was shown on the right side of the diagram. It included boxes labeled "DC," or data center. "Traffic in clear text here," a caption said. No encryption, in other words. Only outside its digital property line, on the public internet, did Google armor its data with encryption. The NSA, somehow, was inside Google's house. Snowden and I spoke in technical shorthand, but in essence I asked him, how did the NSA break in? "That's a complicated topic and I can't answer everything," Snowden wrote. Then how about a more basic question: why would the NSA do this? Because it could, Snowden replied. The agency saw great heaps of information flowing unencrypted through conduits it could reach. "I'm speculating, but NSA doesn't ignore low-hanging fruit,” Snowden wrote.
"The great majority would just stay and rationalize it, right? A small number would say, 'I can't be part of this,' and leave. Hardly anyone says, 'I have to be the one who stops it.'" Snowden lit up. "I agree. And that's where my frustration was.... If you see that things aren't changing, and you see the gravity of the situation, you may feel compelled simply to do something. Because you realize you can. You realize you have the capability, and you realize every other motherfucker sitting around the table has the same capability but they don't do it. So somebody has to be the first."
"Any refuge against surveillance, any zone of effective privacy, had to be neutralized. That is why encryption, anonymity, and antivirus software were all categorized as "threats" in the NSA's internal literature."
"Ashkan and I discovered a set of programs that gathered nearly five billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals-and map their relationships-on a planetary scale."
June 3, 2020
Seven years on from the beginning of Edward Snowden's disclosures, there's still plenty to be said on the subject and more light to be shed on the issues that led him to undertake them. Former Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman chronicles his interactions with Snowden from the first contact on, his own often conflicted opinions, and the vast amount of further research he undertook stemming from the files received from Snowden. Ultimately, Gellman strives for a balanced outlook on a highly controversial subject. Of the opinion that in the end, Snowden did more good than harm, he nevertheless also frequently questions and criticises - which tends to be where his and my views diverge and the reason I think it was a very good thing Glenn Greenwald ended up accompanying Laura Poitras to Hong Kong and putting out the first stories rather than Gellman, who strikes me as a little too lukewarm on inflaming issues. That aside, this was another excellent read on a subject I never cease to find fascinating.
November 3, 2020
Barton Gellman, formerly of The Washington Post, was one of three journalists — including filmmaker Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, who Snowden contacted after a fairly lengthy vetting process. He wanted and needed journalists of the highest integrity.
Gellman himself was rather an interesting choice. From his own book, he was rather lukewarm to Snowden and made some serious errors of judgment when it came to leaking Snowden's online identity, burning him in the process, but it became water under the bridge, later.
Having watched documentaries and having read Snowden's autobiography, I'm pretty on top of the whole subject, so while there wasn't a lot of new material here: Snowden's early life, how he was trusted by the NSA and how he could, scarily, research almost anything on anyone and tell you how it was accomplished, and to his ethical decision to reveal to the public just how EVERYONE was spied on.
This isn't new. We all know by now that the agencies grab ALL the information, whether you're a US citizen or not. It's basically the end of privacy and it's only the fact that the people in those positions of power SAY they're not using it for nefarious reasons that we have any desire to TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORD.
There's no transparency, and that's the meaning behind the title in this book. They can see anything anyone else does, but THEY are shrouded in secrecy.
This book takes a very middle-of-the-road approach. It insists on nothing other than objectivity and proof -- but that was never really in doubt. Compared to any day in public political discourse, the revelations from Snowden shines like a happy beacon of truth rising high above the poisoned apples littering the ditch of Facebook. It's not hyperbole. Snowden was a whistleblower who took, and then judiciously released, after much deliberation, damning information.
Gellman gives voice to the OTHER side of the coin, the coin that says that rulebreakers should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But he does it while also making sure that Snowden's ethical concerns were given full credence. It's the universal question: We need watchdogs, yes, but who watches the watchdogs?
What happens when the NSA can pull up -- everything -- on the Supreme Court? The protections against that are almost nonexistent. You have to trust in the inherent goodness of everyone in the NSA. If a certain administration with a massive disregard for rules manages to find someone with hawk-tendencies in the NSA, what is to say that they can't use the full might of the NSA to quash all his political enemies?
Who is to say it hasn't already happened?
This is why we need transparency. And this is why Snowden is important. We need a light shone on these things.
Gellman himself was rather an interesting choice. From his own book, he was rather lukewarm to Snowden and made some serious errors of judgment when it came to leaking Snowden's online identity, burning him in the process, but it became water under the bridge, later.
Having watched documentaries and having read Snowden's autobiography, I'm pretty on top of the whole subject, so while there wasn't a lot of new material here: Snowden's early life, how he was trusted by the NSA and how he could, scarily, research almost anything on anyone and tell you how it was accomplished, and to his ethical decision to reveal to the public just how EVERYONE was spied on.
This isn't new. We all know by now that the agencies grab ALL the information, whether you're a US citizen or not. It's basically the end of privacy and it's only the fact that the people in those positions of power SAY they're not using it for nefarious reasons that we have any desire to TAKE THEM AT THEIR WORD.
There's no transparency, and that's the meaning behind the title in this book. They can see anything anyone else does, but THEY are shrouded in secrecy.
This book takes a very middle-of-the-road approach. It insists on nothing other than objectivity and proof -- but that was never really in doubt. Compared to any day in public political discourse, the revelations from Snowden shines like a happy beacon of truth rising high above the poisoned apples littering the ditch of Facebook. It's not hyperbole. Snowden was a whistleblower who took, and then judiciously released, after much deliberation, damning information.
Gellman gives voice to the OTHER side of the coin, the coin that says that rulebreakers should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But he does it while also making sure that Snowden's ethical concerns were given full credence. It's the universal question: We need watchdogs, yes, but who watches the watchdogs?
What happens when the NSA can pull up -- everything -- on the Supreme Court? The protections against that are almost nonexistent. You have to trust in the inherent goodness of everyone in the NSA. If a certain administration with a massive disregard for rules manages to find someone with hawk-tendencies in the NSA, what is to say that they can't use the full might of the NSA to quash all his political enemies?
Who is to say it hasn't already happened?
This is why we need transparency. And this is why Snowden is important. We need a light shone on these things.
June 1, 2020
As it happens, I just ran across an article pertinent to this book and review: https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyber-budget-shows-what-us-values%E2%80%94and-it-isnt-defense
Ironically, Gellman was not the first choice for Snowden to use as a conduit for the extraordinary information he had gleaned from the NSA related to their surveillance of U.S.citizens. Glenn Greenwald had ignored Snowden's tentative approach, all cloaked with great secrecy, of course. Gellman's description of the techniques he used to hide what he was doing was fascinating by itself.
What did Snowden reveal? The NSA's stated goal is to collect and process everything, all communications. They have a huge volume problem. They try to filter out the junk and ignore the spam, but sophisticated opposition has realized that spam can be used to hide messages. They look for anything with lists, address books connected to individual accounts, to build sophisticated social network analysis. A lot of digital traffic moves through the United States making the NSA's job easier. Even a phone call from Spain to Colombia may be routed through the U.S. Fears of Chinese dominance through Huawei may be justified. The NSA has legal coercive powers to force communications entities to turn over anything they ask for. So if they are denied access in the U.S., they simply go to one of the social network technologies centers in another country and get it from there. General Hayden former NSA Director justified the sweeping collection of data by saying that "you can't find a needle in a haystack without the haystack." But just as it would be useful to search every house on the block to find something doesn't mean you should be allowed to do it.
Gellman insists that Snowden's revelations did more good than harm but he cocedes that some harm may have been done. The Communications system is so complicated and intertwined that Snowden insists that many processes the NSA had in place change and don't work any more simply based on changes to the communications infrastructure that had nothing to do with Snowden. Firmware gets updated, hardware and software changed, so much of their success must rely on mistakes made by others and the capabilities are constantly being changed.
Perhaps an irony of Snowdon's actions is that he revealed how poor the NSA was at keeping its own secrets. We have learned since that the NSA "lost" many very sophisticated hacking tools, which were later used to wreck substantial damage around the world when modified slightly by malicious hackers. Another irony is that some of the NSA's biggest defenders and Snowden's antagonists have done a 360 since Trump and his tyrannical postures have been revealed. Government can't be trusted and the president has no interest in any legal restraints on his power. Jim Clapper who originally wanted Gellman arrested now questions whether there are enough restraints in place to prevent abuse. The Internet is far more secure than it was before the revelations and even some national security types and James Comey said to the author that Snowden did more good than harm.
Gellman met many times with Snowden and the section on their relationship is fascinating. How they communicated, how trust changed and morphed. Snowden is a man of very strong principles and a zealot, perhaps overly confident in his own rightness. An autodidact, he's very well and widely read so discussions would range over many areas. Ultimately, Snowden got stuck in Moscow because the U.S. canceled his passport hoping to keep him in Hong Kong but he was already on a plane intending to transfer in Moscow for elswhere, but when they landed the authorities said he could not leave because his passport was no longer valid.
Gellman suffered no legal consequences for publishing the Snowden material, and in an interview on Lawfare, Gellman makes the distinction between espionage and reporting. The spy seeks out information that he wants to keep secret and to use that information to harm his adversary. The journalist, on the other hand seeks to make the information public to encourage debate as to whether his society wants to approve and continue certain actions. That kind of debate is essential in a free and democratic society.
Much of the distrust for government stems from Watergate and Vietnam during which it became clear that government was lying to the public to prevent them from know what their government was doing. Snowden's revelations have not assuaged that distrust.
Ironically, Gellman was not the first choice for Snowden to use as a conduit for the extraordinary information he had gleaned from the NSA related to their surveillance of U.S.citizens. Glenn Greenwald had ignored Snowden's tentative approach, all cloaked with great secrecy, of course. Gellman's description of the techniques he used to hide what he was doing was fascinating by itself.
What did Snowden reveal? The NSA's stated goal is to collect and process everything, all communications. They have a huge volume problem. They try to filter out the junk and ignore the spam, but sophisticated opposition has realized that spam can be used to hide messages. They look for anything with lists, address books connected to individual accounts, to build sophisticated social network analysis. A lot of digital traffic moves through the United States making the NSA's job easier. Even a phone call from Spain to Colombia may be routed through the U.S. Fears of Chinese dominance through Huawei may be justified. The NSA has legal coercive powers to force communications entities to turn over anything they ask for. So if they are denied access in the U.S., they simply go to one of the social network technologies centers in another country and get it from there. General Hayden former NSA Director justified the sweeping collection of data by saying that "you can't find a needle in a haystack without the haystack." But just as it would be useful to search every house on the block to find something doesn't mean you should be allowed to do it.
Gellman insists that Snowden's revelations did more good than harm but he cocedes that some harm may have been done. The Communications system is so complicated and intertwined that Snowden insists that many processes the NSA had in place change and don't work any more simply based on changes to the communications infrastructure that had nothing to do with Snowden. Firmware gets updated, hardware and software changed, so much of their success must rely on mistakes made by others and the capabilities are constantly being changed.
Perhaps an irony of Snowdon's actions is that he revealed how poor the NSA was at keeping its own secrets. We have learned since that the NSA "lost" many very sophisticated hacking tools, which were later used to wreck substantial damage around the world when modified slightly by malicious hackers. Another irony is that some of the NSA's biggest defenders and Snowden's antagonists have done a 360 since Trump and his tyrannical postures have been revealed. Government can't be trusted and the president has no interest in any legal restraints on his power. Jim Clapper who originally wanted Gellman arrested now questions whether there are enough restraints in place to prevent abuse. The Internet is far more secure than it was before the revelations and even some national security types and James Comey said to the author that Snowden did more good than harm.
Gellman met many times with Snowden and the section on their relationship is fascinating. How they communicated, how trust changed and morphed. Snowden is a man of very strong principles and a zealot, perhaps overly confident in his own rightness. An autodidact, he's very well and widely read so discussions would range over many areas. Ultimately, Snowden got stuck in Moscow because the U.S. canceled his passport hoping to keep him in Hong Kong but he was already on a plane intending to transfer in Moscow for elswhere, but when they landed the authorities said he could not leave because his passport was no longer valid.
Gellman suffered no legal consequences for publishing the Snowden material, and in an interview on Lawfare, Gellman makes the distinction between espionage and reporting. The spy seeks out information that he wants to keep secret and to use that information to harm his adversary. The journalist, on the other hand seeks to make the information public to encourage debate as to whether his society wants to approve and continue certain actions. That kind of debate is essential in a free and democratic society.
Much of the distrust for government stems from Watergate and Vietnam during which it became clear that government was lying to the public to prevent them from know what their government was doing. Snowden's revelations have not assuaged that distrust.
July 27, 2020
http://www.bookwormblues.net/2020/07/...
I honestly haven’t read much about Edward Snowden. I’ve avoided doing so, largely because there’s just so much about him and it all seems to be so polarized. Also, I’m not a computer whiz, so I was afraid that most of the stuff I’d read would go right over my head. However, this book was on my library’s list of books that were coming soon and I decided to put it on hold because… why not.
One reason why I don’t often read books about people who are polarizing like this, is because it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have an agenda to either love them or hate them from the outset. What I pleasantly found here, was that Gellman was pretty middle-of-the-road regarding Snowden. He’s not afraid to be critical and show the flaws in Snowden’s plans and actions, but on the other side, he’s also liberal enough with his praise. Perhaps Gellman was a bit too lukewarm regarding Snowden at times, but largely, if you’re looking for an evenhanded approach to Snowden and his actions, this might be the book you’ll want to read.
There’s a lot in Dark Mirror, which makes this book nearly impossible to put down. It covers so much territory, from a sort of “highlights reel” of Edward Snowden’s life, to his time working for the NSA, to how he got the documents he got, and what he planned to do with them, which then dovetails into current ethical issues and the like. Gellman does a great job at taking complex topics and boiling them down to a level that someone with little computer knowledge (like me) can understand, and putting all of this in context of what Snowden hoped to achieve, and the problems he saw at the time, which drove his actions, was hugely helpful.
I will say that part of this book will likely be hit or miss with readers. Gellman’s long and evolved chapters about how he got involved in all of this and the battles he faced to get these stories published have me a bit mixed. On the one hand, it was very interesting to see just how hard he had to fight, and all the things set against him to get any of this published anywhere. On the other hand, there were times when I felt he went on a bit too much, and while his personal journalistic adventure was interesting, I think sometimes it detracted from the meat and potatoes of the story, which is Snowden’s data and its importance.
Gellman, however, has a sort of respectful but fraught relationship with Snowden. They butted heads a lot, and I believe out of the three journalists selected for his information, Gellman was likely the most skeptical, and the one who demanded the most proof. He also really attempted just about everything to keep all of his information and computers secure, and going into all his personal security measures when he was talking to Snowden, all his attempts to keep prying eyes away from what he was working on, was pretty fascinating. That being said, while I do think he was a little lukewarm at times when he shouldn’t have been, Gellman’s middle-of-the-road, balanced approach to all of this was welcome. He wasn’t afraid to criticize, but he also wasn’t afraid to praise, and he had a levelheaded outlook to the impacts and importance of all of this, which is something you just don’t find much when talking about hot button topics such as this.
He does go into how all of this NSA stuff worked, and it is… horrifying. The scope of these datamining programs, the number of companies involved, the fact that it’s all stored… somewhere, and is only getting larger. How it’s hidden, why no one knew about it. The fact that there was basically no oversight involved in any of this, and how these programs have evolved today, during the current President who, shall we say, has a dubious relationship with all things legal, is enough to make your blood run cold. In the end, I was left with shock more at how easy it was for these spy programs to start, and how easy it has been for them to expand and function at all, than anything else. It was amazing to me that something this extensive was able to exist in the first place, and that it took so much effort to expose it to the world.
When I closed the book, I was kind of amazed that more people aren’t talking about this. Sure, everyone knows Edward Snowden is living in another country because he stole some NSA secrets. I doubt the bulk of the American populous knows exactly the nuts and bolts of what he stole, and that, in my opinion, is the real tragedy. There is a lot here that made me extremely uncomfortable with *gestures wildly at the entire internet*, and I think the discussion needs to change from “is Edward Snowden a good/bad guy” to “let’s seriously talk about the NSA and our personal rights regarding our own information.”
Ultimately, Gellman believes that Snowden did more good than harm, but he’s not averse from saying that he did some harm, despite all of his good intentions. He’s a bit critical of Snowden at times. His frustration with Snowden’s inability to discuss himself without saying, “well, hypothetically…” before nearly every personal statement is palpable, or being a bit critical of his libertarian streak, and Snowden’s overly-zealous nature at times. That, however, ended up being what I enjoyed about this book the most. It’s critical. It’s unafraid to probe into persons and programs alike, and in so doing, I felt like I was reading a very nuanced, interesting, and even-handed overview of a topic that everyone seems to have an opinion about.
In the end, this made me want to know a lot more about issues of security, and privacy. Dark Mirror is a well written account of Edward Snowden’s saga, from a journalist who was there from the beginning. It will make you uncomfortable, but more important, I hope this book starts a conversation.
I honestly haven’t read much about Edward Snowden. I’ve avoided doing so, largely because there’s just so much about him and it all seems to be so polarized. Also, I’m not a computer whiz, so I was afraid that most of the stuff I’d read would go right over my head. However, this book was on my library’s list of books that were coming soon and I decided to put it on hold because… why not.
One reason why I don’t often read books about people who are polarizing like this, is because it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t have an agenda to either love them or hate them from the outset. What I pleasantly found here, was that Gellman was pretty middle-of-the-road regarding Snowden. He’s not afraid to be critical and show the flaws in Snowden’s plans and actions, but on the other side, he’s also liberal enough with his praise. Perhaps Gellman was a bit too lukewarm regarding Snowden at times, but largely, if you’re looking for an evenhanded approach to Snowden and his actions, this might be the book you’ll want to read.
There’s a lot in Dark Mirror, which makes this book nearly impossible to put down. It covers so much territory, from a sort of “highlights reel” of Edward Snowden’s life, to his time working for the NSA, to how he got the documents he got, and what he planned to do with them, which then dovetails into current ethical issues and the like. Gellman does a great job at taking complex topics and boiling them down to a level that someone with little computer knowledge (like me) can understand, and putting all of this in context of what Snowden hoped to achieve, and the problems he saw at the time, which drove his actions, was hugely helpful.
I will say that part of this book will likely be hit or miss with readers. Gellman’s long and evolved chapters about how he got involved in all of this and the battles he faced to get these stories published have me a bit mixed. On the one hand, it was very interesting to see just how hard he had to fight, and all the things set against him to get any of this published anywhere. On the other hand, there were times when I felt he went on a bit too much, and while his personal journalistic adventure was interesting, I think sometimes it detracted from the meat and potatoes of the story, which is Snowden’s data and its importance.
Gellman, however, has a sort of respectful but fraught relationship with Snowden. They butted heads a lot, and I believe out of the three journalists selected for his information, Gellman was likely the most skeptical, and the one who demanded the most proof. He also really attempted just about everything to keep all of his information and computers secure, and going into all his personal security measures when he was talking to Snowden, all his attempts to keep prying eyes away from what he was working on, was pretty fascinating. That being said, while I do think he was a little lukewarm at times when he shouldn’t have been, Gellman’s middle-of-the-road, balanced approach to all of this was welcome. He wasn’t afraid to criticize, but he also wasn’t afraid to praise, and he had a levelheaded outlook to the impacts and importance of all of this, which is something you just don’t find much when talking about hot button topics such as this.
He does go into how all of this NSA stuff worked, and it is… horrifying. The scope of these datamining programs, the number of companies involved, the fact that it’s all stored… somewhere, and is only getting larger. How it’s hidden, why no one knew about it. The fact that there was basically no oversight involved in any of this, and how these programs have evolved today, during the current President who, shall we say, has a dubious relationship with all things legal, is enough to make your blood run cold. In the end, I was left with shock more at how easy it was for these spy programs to start, and how easy it has been for them to expand and function at all, than anything else. It was amazing to me that something this extensive was able to exist in the first place, and that it took so much effort to expose it to the world.
When I closed the book, I was kind of amazed that more people aren’t talking about this. Sure, everyone knows Edward Snowden is living in another country because he stole some NSA secrets. I doubt the bulk of the American populous knows exactly the nuts and bolts of what he stole, and that, in my opinion, is the real tragedy. There is a lot here that made me extremely uncomfortable with *gestures wildly at the entire internet*, and I think the discussion needs to change from “is Edward Snowden a good/bad guy” to “let’s seriously talk about the NSA and our personal rights regarding our own information.”
Ultimately, Gellman believes that Snowden did more good than harm, but he’s not averse from saying that he did some harm, despite all of his good intentions. He’s a bit critical of Snowden at times. His frustration with Snowden’s inability to discuss himself without saying, “well, hypothetically…” before nearly every personal statement is palpable, or being a bit critical of his libertarian streak, and Snowden’s overly-zealous nature at times. That, however, ended up being what I enjoyed about this book the most. It’s critical. It’s unafraid to probe into persons and programs alike, and in so doing, I felt like I was reading a very nuanced, interesting, and even-handed overview of a topic that everyone seems to have an opinion about.
In the end, this made me want to know a lot more about issues of security, and privacy. Dark Mirror is a well written account of Edward Snowden’s saga, from a journalist who was there from the beginning. It will make you uncomfortable, but more important, I hope this book starts a conversation.
September 3, 2020
This is a complicated, detail-rich, balanced and terrifying book. I got lost several times when Gellman went into the weeds (as he was obliged to do), but I understood enough to know how fragile our privacy is. The NSA, CIA, et al. have the capability to look at infinitely more than I thought. And as for the FISA courts and legislation -- absurdly easy to get around.
Gellman is a diligent reporter. His descriptions of his interactions with Snowden and the American security complex are fascinating. As I said, he is balanced in this book, just as he was in "Angler." He's just as quick in pointing out Snowden's flaws as he is to acknowledge the significance of what Snowden did.
I learned a lot, much of which I'd probably be happier not knowing. One thing the author does very well is show the extraordinarily complicated balance between the security needs of the country and the privacy needs of its citizens. As he notes, the balance means one thing when all parties play by the rules and acknowledge the norms of democratic political practice. It would mean something else entirely were there to be a president willing to gain access to all our communications in order to gain and maintain power.
Gellman reads his own book, and he does it very well.
Gellman is a diligent reporter. His descriptions of his interactions with Snowden and the American security complex are fascinating. As I said, he is balanced in this book, just as he was in "Angler." He's just as quick in pointing out Snowden's flaws as he is to acknowledge the significance of what Snowden did.
I learned a lot, much of which I'd probably be happier not knowing. One thing the author does very well is show the extraordinarily complicated balance between the security needs of the country and the privacy needs of its citizens. As he notes, the balance means one thing when all parties play by the rules and acknowledge the norms of democratic political practice. It would mean something else entirely were there to be a president willing to gain access to all our communications in order to gain and maintain power.
Gellman reads his own book, and he does it very well.
September 27, 2020
A balanced, engaging and thoughtful work.
Gellman provides a great portrait of Snowden, his work in the intelligence community and how he got it, and Gellman’s own concerns with the story prior to publication. He ably describes what Snowden did, why he did it, and why it matters, and his coverage of legal and technical questions is pretty good.
Gellman also describes his efforts to build a mutual trust with Snowden: not easy given their respective professions, and not entirely successful. Gellman looks at the arguments over the legitimacy and consequences of Snowden’s leaks, while making his own views on those subjects clear. He has some disagreements with Glenn Greenwald’s take on the Snowden story, and that part was pretty interesting. Snowden himself comes off as intelligent, arrogant and as a bit of a narcissist; Gellman also covers their own disagreements with each other. “I’m not going to suck up to you,” Gellman tells Snowden at one point. “I’m not your advocate. But I’m fundamentally interested in the same debate.” Many call Snowden a hero, and some call him a traitor. Here he doesn’t come off as either.
The narrative is pretty tense and suspenseful, and Gellman can write with a certain dry humor. Particularly interesting is Snowden’s time in Hong Kong, and how Snowden met with reporters while trying to avoid the attention of the Americans, the British and the Chinese. Gellman also covers the paranoia he often adopted over the course of the story. At one point somebody tried to hack Gellman’s devices, and a Russian e-mailed him asking for the American intelligence community’s budget (one of the secrets Snowden leaked) National security reporters often talk to ranking intelligence officials; Gellman recalls that many of these contacts snubbed him after his Snowden stories, only to reach out again after Trump was elected.
One of the most common criticisms of Snowden is that, of the huge number of material Snowden leaked, a large proportion of it was related to foreign intelligence operations (against foreign governments and terrorist organizations, for example) This has been one of the most frequent criticisms of Snowden, and I wish Gellman would have covered it in more detail. Gellman calls Snowden a whistleblower, but does that label apply to this unavoidable part of Snowden’ story? “The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm,” Gellman writes, “even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence.” Gellman mentions foreign-intelligence operations in the PRISM documents that he found “jaw-dropping” and that targeted “valid intelligence targets by any legal standard.” He also writes that the Washington Post declined to print them. Gellman notes that whenever he pressed Snowden on the risks of disclosing these, Snowden dismissed his concerns, claiming that “we have no evidence at all of anything going bad.”
The book can be a bit repetitive. Also, when telling the story of Snowden’s initial leak, he doesn't have much to say about the other reporters and papers involved. Still, a concise and well-written work.
Gellman provides a great portrait of Snowden, his work in the intelligence community and how he got it, and Gellman’s own concerns with the story prior to publication. He ably describes what Snowden did, why he did it, and why it matters, and his coverage of legal and technical questions is pretty good.
Gellman also describes his efforts to build a mutual trust with Snowden: not easy given their respective professions, and not entirely successful. Gellman looks at the arguments over the legitimacy and consequences of Snowden’s leaks, while making his own views on those subjects clear. He has some disagreements with Glenn Greenwald’s take on the Snowden story, and that part was pretty interesting. Snowden himself comes off as intelligent, arrogant and as a bit of a narcissist; Gellman also covers their own disagreements with each other. “I’m not going to suck up to you,” Gellman tells Snowden at one point. “I’m not your advocate. But I’m fundamentally interested in the same debate.” Many call Snowden a hero, and some call him a traitor. Here he doesn’t come off as either.
The narrative is pretty tense and suspenseful, and Gellman can write with a certain dry humor. Particularly interesting is Snowden’s time in Hong Kong, and how Snowden met with reporters while trying to avoid the attention of the Americans, the British and the Chinese. Gellman also covers the paranoia he often adopted over the course of the story. At one point somebody tried to hack Gellman’s devices, and a Russian e-mailed him asking for the American intelligence community’s budget (one of the secrets Snowden leaked) National security reporters often talk to ranking intelligence officials; Gellman recalls that many of these contacts snubbed him after his Snowden stories, only to reach out again after Trump was elected.
One of the most common criticisms of Snowden is that, of the huge number of material Snowden leaked, a large proportion of it was related to foreign intelligence operations (against foreign governments and terrorist organizations, for example) This has been one of the most frequent criticisms of Snowden, and I wish Gellman would have covered it in more detail. Gellman calls Snowden a whistleblower, but does that label apply to this unavoidable part of Snowden’ story? “The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm,” Gellman writes, “even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence.” Gellman mentions foreign-intelligence operations in the PRISM documents that he found “jaw-dropping” and that targeted “valid intelligence targets by any legal standard.” He also writes that the Washington Post declined to print them. Gellman notes that whenever he pressed Snowden on the risks of disclosing these, Snowden dismissed his concerns, claiming that “we have no evidence at all of anything going bad.”
The book can be a bit repetitive. Also, when telling the story of Snowden’s initial leak, he doesn't have much to say about the other reporters and papers involved. Still, a concise and well-written work.
April 19, 2020
Well-written account of the journalist's history with Snowden and his investigations of the NSA. Gellman offers simplified metaphors to explain complex technology and privacy issues. At times, the information can still feel very dense, though. He offers an even-handed view of Snowden. The information about the NSA culture, not policy, was what bothered me most in the end. There is a group of very immature, misogynistic, racist, and irresponsible people working with data that most of us would consider private. That was unsettling. However, the author, NSA leaders, and even Snowden, make it clear that many NSA staffers are just normal people trying to do their job. A very interesting read.
June 18, 2020
This is a book more about journalism and journalistic approach to controversial topic, then Snowden's case per se.
If you have read Snowden memoire and followed events on US news, you may be satisfied with the details. Here, author focus is mostly on reporting, choices he made and methods he used. Some details about pass codes, acronyms and other technical jargon was something I could personally live without but if you are into it, you may find it interesting. Book is well written and edited as expected from experienced journalists.
This is not an objective story by any means, nor Snowden biography - so keep that in mind. Reader finds out author's point of view on the subject early on. This may be particularly interesting read for journalism students and aspiring non fiction writers. If you are thinking about reading only one book about Snowden case, I'm not sure if that would be the one.
If you have read Snowden memoire and followed events on US news, you may be satisfied with the details. Here, author focus is mostly on reporting, choices he made and methods he used. Some details about pass codes, acronyms and other technical jargon was something I could personally live without but if you are into it, you may find it interesting. Book is well written and edited as expected from experienced journalists.
This is not an objective story by any means, nor Snowden biography - so keep that in mind. Reader finds out author's point of view on the subject early on. This may be particularly interesting read for journalism students and aspiring non fiction writers. If you are thinking about reading only one book about Snowden case, I'm not sure if that would be the one.
March 30, 2021
Necessary reading for the times we live in. Highly recommended.
July 16, 2020
After reading this book you’ll feel like you’re actually living in George Orwell’s 1984 and big brother is not a figment of your imagination. In dark mirror, Gellman recounts his interactions with Edward Snowden and his leaks of the extensive surveillance conducted by the American intelligence community against its own citizens. Gellman also talks about his interactions with various government officials and provides a nuanced discussion on the balance between national security and personal freedoms and the responsibilities of a journalist who had to decide what to publish and what revelations constitute a national security threat. “How do you balance what you think the public needs to know with the potential to put lives at risk?”
“There are (sometimes) costs and harms of disclosing secrets, just as there are (sometimes) costs and harms of keeping them from the public. At heart, national security secrecy presents a conflict of core values: self-government and self-defense. If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know, too. That can be dangerous. That is our predicament.”
I felt like he could’ve organized the content a bit better as he jumps back and forth between Edward Snowden and his discussions with intelligence officials. At times he also gets into the nitty gritty legal discussions with his lawyers about journalistic culpability.
Overall a great read if you want to understand the extent of the surveillance conducted by intelligence agencies and the role and treatment of whistleblowers.
“There are (sometimes) costs and harms of disclosing secrets, just as there are (sometimes) costs and harms of keeping them from the public. At heart, national security secrecy presents a conflict of core values: self-government and self-defense. If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know, too. That can be dangerous. That is our predicament.”
I felt like he could’ve organized the content a bit better as he jumps back and forth between Edward Snowden and his discussions with intelligence officials. At times he also gets into the nitty gritty legal discussions with his lawyers about journalistic culpability.
Overall a great read if you want to understand the extent of the surveillance conducted by intelligence agencies and the role and treatment of whistleblowers.
April 28, 2020
Do you want to get the inside scoop on Edward Snowden?
You have options, including Snowden's own memoir.
But what's unique with Dark Mirror is that Gellman's investigative journalism experience gives him extra insight to ask piercing question both of the subject and those Snowden targeted for disclosure.
If that's what you're looking for, then this is the book for you.
You have options, including Snowden's own memoir.
But what's unique with Dark Mirror is that Gellman's investigative journalism experience gives him extra insight to ask piercing question both of the subject and those Snowden targeted for disclosure.
If that's what you're looking for, then this is the book for you.
February 24, 2021
Great to read Snowden's story from Gellman's journalistic perspective. An easy to understand account of the technicalities plus balanced fair perspectives from both sides. The history of the NSA, whistleblowing and technological advances offered great context to the story. The discussions between snowden and gellman from their chat history was both informative and enjoyable to read.
June 27, 2020
I am amazed by the bravery, fortitude, inventiveness and insight of so many journalists - and appreciative of the risks they take to bring people together with information. This was a great read. Even if you have already read Glen Greenwald’s account as well as Snowden’s own Permanent Record, this is a great addition to the area and provides far more detail about the process of publishing the classified information Snowden made available to Gellman, Greenwald and Poitras in 2013.
July 25, 2021
Recommended.
February 24, 2021
“Patriots don’t go to Russia. They don’t seek asylum in Cuba. They don’t seek asylum in Venezuela. They fight their cause here. Edward Snowden is a coward. He is a traitor. And he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.” –John Kerry
“He believes he is above the law. He believes he should get to decide what stays secret and what does not. He believes that he should get to decide what laws he can and cannot be tried under. He believes he gets to decide what rules should govern spying. And he not only believes he should get credit for civil disobedience without being willing to face the legal consequences of his actions, he believes he should get credit for courage as though he had done so as well.” –Benjamin Wittes
Both of these statements are the kinds of things said to knowing nods and murmurs of agreement at Beltway gatherings of the policymaking elite. Both could have been uttered by any number of politicians and pundits occupying a place within one standard deviation of America’s ideological center (the stridency of the first could as easily have sprung from a bloviating Mike Pompeo as from the notoriously Nobel-thirsty Kerry). And both statements together would have roughly approximated my views of Snowden until 2016 or so, at which point the Schmittian fantasia that was the Trump administration forced me to reexamine my priors about what Snowden calls “turnkey tyranny”—i.e., the notion that existing legal norms and strictures restraining the government’s awesome powers of surveillance can be switched off in alarmingly short order, threatening all of us with the possibility of a bona fide police state. In this regard, Benjamin Wittes’s unimprovable précis of the Trump presidency, “malevolence tempered by incompetence,” is both apt and useful. What becomes of democracy in the feared event—thankfully avoided as yet—that a malevolent and bureaucratically efficient and capable executive should take hold of the powers that have gradually been permitted to accrue to their office? Should we take deliberate measures to weaken state capacity in hopes of preempting the rise of some future authoritarian state?
After reading Gellman’s fascinating account of his relationship with Snowden (along with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, Gellman was one of three journalists originally contacted by Snowden and entrusted with thousands of stolen—or “exfiltrated”—documents), what strikes me about the Kerry and Wittes quotes is the sense of high dudgeon toward Snowden embodied by both. Who does this “high school dropout” (the intelligence community’s rather telling epithet of choice for its most famous defector) think he is, anyway? What gives him the right to play hero exposing the government’s most valuable secrets? There’s something almost plaintive about such reactions to what Snowden did, and I suspect his utter lack of the usual credentials—whether of age, upbringing, experience, or education—has some bearing on the tone of voice in which otherwise respectable bureaucrats, or vicarious bureaucrats, levy accusations of treason against him. For those on the inside, Snowden disrupted the age-old division of labor: The experts in the government worry about chasing after foreign enemies so that normies—the rest of us—need not trouble our pretty heads. To quote Rick Ledgett, former Deputy NSA Director, “Things [you’re] doing are not interesting enough from a national security point of view. The National Security Agency doesn’t care about you.” The unspoken corollary is that we, in turn, should care less about the things the NSA is doing, and for a long time this was the arrangement, but Snowden blew up that equilibrium and one senses that the establishment will never forgive him for the hell they caught—no matter how noble his motives may have been.
“Dark Mirror” is riveting, instructive, and thoughtful in equal measure. It’s the work of a first-rate journalist with both a compelling story to tell and nearly encyclopedic subject-matter expertise, enhanced by his deep network of sources spanning every level of the intelligence ecosystem. Though he states from the outset his belief that “Snowden did substantially more good than harm,” he nonetheless evinces an equal-opportunity skepticism in dissecting the claims of Snowden and his adversaries in the U.S. government. When asked why he fled to Putin’s Russia, not exactly a libertarian paradise, the answer Snowden often gives in public is that he had been held up in transit through Moscow en route to a less oppressive final destination—Ecuador or Iceland, perhaps. But Gellman parses some of his more candid statements and supplies a more plausible, less flattering explanation: “Snowden meant: I am not a Russian asset, but the Russian government protects me because I look like one to other prospective assets. Moscow, he believed, could not treat him badly without harm to its recruiting.” In another drawn-out exercise of doggedly verifying his subject’s claims, Gellman gets Snowden to admit he had overstated the truth about having tapped the phones of the Supreme Court in order to underscore a broader point about the NSA’s technological capabilities. Still, he seems unconvinced by government officials’ unsubstantiated claims that Snowden is or was at one point a Russian intelligence asset and judges Snowden “more reliable than most of the critics and nameless officials who engaged me on this story.”
Gellman’s scrupulous insistence on following the reporting and disclosing what he could and could not verify—even if doing so makes Snowden neither hero nor traitor—offers a refreshing model of journalistic objectivity that Snowden’s more tendentious boosters (esp. Greenwald) seem to think quaint. For me at least, Gellman’s approach of ventilating and scrutinizing competing claims—the best arguments of the IC receive a through airing here—is more convincing than the breathless style of “Citizenfour,” which at the time left me basically agnostic about whether the breach had been worth the cost to American interests—if for no other reason than that such an implicit tradeoff is scarcely acknowledged by the Snowdenista crowd. We will probably never know the extent of that cost—different intelligence agencies and news sources still disagree over how many documents Snowden absconded with—but it’s worth asking whether the debate over the NSA’s unprecedented panoptic powers could ever have taken place without a whistleblower’s leak of similar scope and consequence. Gellman at least seems to believe that absent some principled insider like Snowden going rogue, the odds of such a public reckoning were slim—and that even post-Snowden, though the IC may have taken a reputational hit, the NSA’s capabilities have only grown more expansive and entrenched.
Among the vexing moral questions that Snowden’s actions threw into sharp relief is that of whether our political institutions in their current form even permit the curtailment of state surveillance power to begin with. The political incentives that govern intelligence gathering in the United States—similar to those that dictate national security policy writ large—are perverse in the extreme. According to David Gompert, the former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, “The only thing [Congress] ever asked was how we failed to anticipate something, how we failed to stop it, why we did not know enough.” Just as the U.S. government has spent unspeakable amounts of money waging endless Middle Eastern conflict in hopes of eliminating the last risks of another 9/11 on American soil, the NSA has sought and enjoyed the same latitude in its own less public domain.
But even hypothetical efforts to seriously rein in the NSA’s remit cannot to erase the vast institutional knowledge it and every other intelligence agency worth its salt has developed. In that sense, PRISM, MAINWAY, Stellar Wind, and their untold numbers of foreign counterparts are the 21st-century equivalent of nuclear technology; once Pandora’s box is opened, misery and evil roam the earth while only hope can be kept sealed in. And before we blame Congress for its myopia, we should probably ask whether Donald Trump could have gotten himself elected president absent the virally grotesque rise of ISIS and the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando leading up to Election Day 2016. In other words, there’s something visceral and unstable about how the politics of terrorism function in the United States, such that elected officials and anonymous bureaucrats alike seem to collectively, reflexively, believe it their duty to spare no expense in the pursuit of absolute public safety. Anything less is to risk the public’s ire. In the blunt words of Barney Frank, “Everyone hates Congress, everyone hates the media, everyone hates Washington. But let me tell you something, the voters are no picnic either.”
“He believes he is above the law. He believes he should get to decide what stays secret and what does not. He believes that he should get to decide what laws he can and cannot be tried under. He believes he gets to decide what rules should govern spying. And he not only believes he should get credit for civil disobedience without being willing to face the legal consequences of his actions, he believes he should get credit for courage as though he had done so as well.” –Benjamin Wittes
Both of these statements are the kinds of things said to knowing nods and murmurs of agreement at Beltway gatherings of the policymaking elite. Both could have been uttered by any number of politicians and pundits occupying a place within one standard deviation of America’s ideological center (the stridency of the first could as easily have sprung from a bloviating Mike Pompeo as from the notoriously Nobel-thirsty Kerry). And both statements together would have roughly approximated my views of Snowden until 2016 or so, at which point the Schmittian fantasia that was the Trump administration forced me to reexamine my priors about what Snowden calls “turnkey tyranny”—i.e., the notion that existing legal norms and strictures restraining the government’s awesome powers of surveillance can be switched off in alarmingly short order, threatening all of us with the possibility of a bona fide police state. In this regard, Benjamin Wittes’s unimprovable précis of the Trump presidency, “malevolence tempered by incompetence,” is both apt and useful. What becomes of democracy in the feared event—thankfully avoided as yet—that a malevolent and bureaucratically efficient and capable executive should take hold of the powers that have gradually been permitted to accrue to their office? Should we take deliberate measures to weaken state capacity in hopes of preempting the rise of some future authoritarian state?
After reading Gellman’s fascinating account of his relationship with Snowden (along with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, Gellman was one of three journalists originally contacted by Snowden and entrusted with thousands of stolen—or “exfiltrated”—documents), what strikes me about the Kerry and Wittes quotes is the sense of high dudgeon toward Snowden embodied by both. Who does this “high school dropout” (the intelligence community’s rather telling epithet of choice for its most famous defector) think he is, anyway? What gives him the right to play hero exposing the government’s most valuable secrets? There’s something almost plaintive about such reactions to what Snowden did, and I suspect his utter lack of the usual credentials—whether of age, upbringing, experience, or education—has some bearing on the tone of voice in which otherwise respectable bureaucrats, or vicarious bureaucrats, levy accusations of treason against him. For those on the inside, Snowden disrupted the age-old division of labor: The experts in the government worry about chasing after foreign enemies so that normies—the rest of us—need not trouble our pretty heads. To quote Rick Ledgett, former Deputy NSA Director, “Things [you’re] doing are not interesting enough from a national security point of view. The National Security Agency doesn’t care about you.” The unspoken corollary is that we, in turn, should care less about the things the NSA is doing, and for a long time this was the arrangement, but Snowden blew up that equilibrium and one senses that the establishment will never forgive him for the hell they caught—no matter how noble his motives may have been.
“Dark Mirror” is riveting, instructive, and thoughtful in equal measure. It’s the work of a first-rate journalist with both a compelling story to tell and nearly encyclopedic subject-matter expertise, enhanced by his deep network of sources spanning every level of the intelligence ecosystem. Though he states from the outset his belief that “Snowden did substantially more good than harm,” he nonetheless evinces an equal-opportunity skepticism in dissecting the claims of Snowden and his adversaries in the U.S. government. When asked why he fled to Putin’s Russia, not exactly a libertarian paradise, the answer Snowden often gives in public is that he had been held up in transit through Moscow en route to a less oppressive final destination—Ecuador or Iceland, perhaps. But Gellman parses some of his more candid statements and supplies a more plausible, less flattering explanation: “Snowden meant: I am not a Russian asset, but the Russian government protects me because I look like one to other prospective assets. Moscow, he believed, could not treat him badly without harm to its recruiting.” In another drawn-out exercise of doggedly verifying his subject’s claims, Gellman gets Snowden to admit he had overstated the truth about having tapped the phones of the Supreme Court in order to underscore a broader point about the NSA’s technological capabilities. Still, he seems unconvinced by government officials’ unsubstantiated claims that Snowden is or was at one point a Russian intelligence asset and judges Snowden “more reliable than most of the critics and nameless officials who engaged me on this story.”
Gellman’s scrupulous insistence on following the reporting and disclosing what he could and could not verify—even if doing so makes Snowden neither hero nor traitor—offers a refreshing model of journalistic objectivity that Snowden’s more tendentious boosters (esp. Greenwald) seem to think quaint. For me at least, Gellman’s approach of ventilating and scrutinizing competing claims—the best arguments of the IC receive a through airing here—is more convincing than the breathless style of “Citizenfour,” which at the time left me basically agnostic about whether the breach had been worth the cost to American interests—if for no other reason than that such an implicit tradeoff is scarcely acknowledged by the Snowdenista crowd. We will probably never know the extent of that cost—different intelligence agencies and news sources still disagree over how many documents Snowden absconded with—but it’s worth asking whether the debate over the NSA’s unprecedented panoptic powers could ever have taken place without a whistleblower’s leak of similar scope and consequence. Gellman at least seems to believe that absent some principled insider like Snowden going rogue, the odds of such a public reckoning were slim—and that even post-Snowden, though the IC may have taken a reputational hit, the NSA’s capabilities have only grown more expansive and entrenched.
Among the vexing moral questions that Snowden’s actions threw into sharp relief is that of whether our political institutions in their current form even permit the curtailment of state surveillance power to begin with. The political incentives that govern intelligence gathering in the United States—similar to those that dictate national security policy writ large—are perverse in the extreme. According to David Gompert, the former Deputy Director of National Intelligence, “The only thing [Congress] ever asked was how we failed to anticipate something, how we failed to stop it, why we did not know enough.” Just as the U.S. government has spent unspeakable amounts of money waging endless Middle Eastern conflict in hopes of eliminating the last risks of another 9/11 on American soil, the NSA has sought and enjoyed the same latitude in its own less public domain.
But even hypothetical efforts to seriously rein in the NSA’s remit cannot to erase the vast institutional knowledge it and every other intelligence agency worth its salt has developed. In that sense, PRISM, MAINWAY, Stellar Wind, and their untold numbers of foreign counterparts are the 21st-century equivalent of nuclear technology; once Pandora’s box is opened, misery and evil roam the earth while only hope can be kept sealed in. And before we blame Congress for its myopia, we should probably ask whether Donald Trump could have gotten himself elected president absent the virally grotesque rise of ISIS and the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando leading up to Election Day 2016. In other words, there’s something visceral and unstable about how the politics of terrorism function in the United States, such that elected officials and anonymous bureaucrats alike seem to collectively, reflexively, believe it their duty to spare no expense in the pursuit of absolute public safety. Anything less is to risk the public’s ire. In the blunt words of Barney Frank, “Everyone hates Congress, everyone hates the media, everyone hates Washington. But let me tell you something, the voters are no picnic either.”
May 24, 2020
Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State by Barton Gellman is a very highly recommended account of Edward Snowden's 2013 leak of National Security Agency (NSA) files and the inside story of Gellman's investigation and its repercussions.
"Edward Snowden touched off a global debate in 2013 when he gave Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald each a vast and explosive archive of highly classified files revealing the extent of the American government’s access to our every communication. They shared the Pulitzer Prize that year for public service. For Gellman, who never stopped reporting, that was only the beginning. He jumped off from what Snowden gave him to track the reach and methodology of the U.S. surveillance state and bring it to light with astonishing new clarity. Along the way, he interrogated Snowden’s own history and found important ways in which myth and reality do not line up. Gellman treats Snowden with respect, but this is no hagiographic account, and Dark Mirror sets the record straight in ways that are both fascinating and important..."
The professionally written and organized narrative follows two different threads. The first is Snowden's backstory up to his contacting reporters to send them the stolen files and tell his story. The second part is Gellman's story about his investigation, the illegal intrusion and surveillance of citizen's private lives, and the overreach of meddling in his personal life. Dark Mirror is not a book about Snowden, although he is a part of it. Gellman believes that Snowden did more good than harm, but he will concede that Snowden's disclosures exacted a price in lost intelligence. The power of electronic surveillance requires secrecy in order to catch targets unaware. Dark Mirror is a look at how, after September 11, 2001, the U.S. government came to believe its electronic surveillance of enemies necessitated the inclusion of Americans as well. The NSA extended its data collection into digital areas used by almost everyone, including Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook accounts, among others. FYI: "A smartphone is an excellent tracking device. It works well as a remote-controlled microphone, too, for someone who knows how to switch it on."
What people need to be concerned about is that the NSA arranged our phone records in a "one-hop contact chain of each to all. All kinds of secrets - social, medical, political, professional - were precomputed, 24/7." Gellman was told that there was no cause for concern because "the links are unassembled until you launch a query." But he said "I saw a database that was preconfigured to map anyone’s life at the touch of a button." ALL your digital/online activity tied to a contact chain and all it takes is someone to decide they are going to violate of your right to privacy. Government officials countered to Gellman with the statement that the potential power was not being used or abused and American citizens were not being spied on. It was said that that the government/NSA really doesn’t care about us in that way because we are not that interesting from a national security point of view. The good news is that the Freedom Act of 2015 prohibits the bulk collection of phone records and that internet traffic is more encrypted, making surveillance more difficult. (More difficult does not equate impossible.) Any protections set in place can be stripped away in an instant.
I found this a totally engrossing account of Snowden's actions and everything that followed his release of the files. Dark Mirror sparked several long discussions and debates as I was reading it. The debate is still ongoing, but the discussions and the questions need continuous scrutiny. This is an excellent, even-handed examination of Snowden's actions and Gellman's investigation that is well-worth reading and considering the implications revealed within the narrative.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2020/0...
"Edward Snowden touched off a global debate in 2013 when he gave Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald each a vast and explosive archive of highly classified files revealing the extent of the American government’s access to our every communication. They shared the Pulitzer Prize that year for public service. For Gellman, who never stopped reporting, that was only the beginning. He jumped off from what Snowden gave him to track the reach and methodology of the U.S. surveillance state and bring it to light with astonishing new clarity. Along the way, he interrogated Snowden’s own history and found important ways in which myth and reality do not line up. Gellman treats Snowden with respect, but this is no hagiographic account, and Dark Mirror sets the record straight in ways that are both fascinating and important..."
The professionally written and organized narrative follows two different threads. The first is Snowden's backstory up to his contacting reporters to send them the stolen files and tell his story. The second part is Gellman's story about his investigation, the illegal intrusion and surveillance of citizen's private lives, and the overreach of meddling in his personal life. Dark Mirror is not a book about Snowden, although he is a part of it. Gellman believes that Snowden did more good than harm, but he will concede that Snowden's disclosures exacted a price in lost intelligence. The power of electronic surveillance requires secrecy in order to catch targets unaware. Dark Mirror is a look at how, after September 11, 2001, the U.S. government came to believe its electronic surveillance of enemies necessitated the inclusion of Americans as well. The NSA extended its data collection into digital areas used by almost everyone, including Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook accounts, among others. FYI: "A smartphone is an excellent tracking device. It works well as a remote-controlled microphone, too, for someone who knows how to switch it on."
What people need to be concerned about is that the NSA arranged our phone records in a "one-hop contact chain of each to all. All kinds of secrets - social, medical, political, professional - were precomputed, 24/7." Gellman was told that there was no cause for concern because "the links are unassembled until you launch a query." But he said "I saw a database that was preconfigured to map anyone’s life at the touch of a button." ALL your digital/online activity tied to a contact chain and all it takes is someone to decide they are going to violate of your right to privacy. Government officials countered to Gellman with the statement that the potential power was not being used or abused and American citizens were not being spied on. It was said that that the government/NSA really doesn’t care about us in that way because we are not that interesting from a national security point of view. The good news is that the Freedom Act of 2015 prohibits the bulk collection of phone records and that internet traffic is more encrypted, making surveillance more difficult. (More difficult does not equate impossible.) Any protections set in place can be stripped away in an instant.
I found this a totally engrossing account of Snowden's actions and everything that followed his release of the files. Dark Mirror sparked several long discussions and debates as I was reading it. The debate is still ongoing, but the discussions and the questions need continuous scrutiny. This is an excellent, even-handed examination of Snowden's actions and Gellman's investigation that is well-worth reading and considering the implications revealed within the narrative.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2020/0...
January 25, 2021
Secrets? You think you have them? Think again, and I'm not talking about God. We have Edward Snowden to thank for exposing the massive, ubiquitous NSA surveillance that plagues all but the most dedicated Luddite among us. Yes, thank Snowden, who released tons of "secret" info on domestic (even when domestic was foreign) spying on Americans, and the journalists, like Barton Gellman, courageous enough to print it. "It would have been inconceivable at any other time to gather a record of any conversation at will, still less all of them. Today the ambition was plausible, and some of Comey's peers in the intelligence community believed that achieving it was essential. Not to know everything, but to be capable of knowing anything. Any refuge against surveillance, any zone of effective privacy, had to be neutralized. That is why encryption, anonymity, and antivirus software were all categorized as "threats" in the NSA's internal literature. In an ideal world, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis told me, the agency would have 'a universal capability' to penetrate those defenses and adversaries would not know it could do so." Phone log metadata, text messages, photos, emails, social media contact books, followers and following, social media likes and dislikes, some times with the aid of the Googles and Yahoos and sometimes simply pirating the information from foreign communication intersections, results in something like this-"...the agency wanted something it had never had before: efficient means to read and listen to anything on any channel at all.," and "Even when the analysts explicitly described intercepted files as useless, for intelligence purposes, the NSA retained them....They told stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties, and disappointed hopes. They included medical records sent from one family member to another, resumes from job hunters, and academic transcripts of schoolchildren." But never fear, said Rick Ledgett, former NSA deputy director, "The National Security Agency doesn't care about you." Yeah, until it does, like the FBI harassment and attempted blackmail of Martin Luther King Jr., the files on Vietnam War critics and even journalists like Gellman even prior to his Snowden days. Ironically, the only secrets not exposed are the government's own, under the extravagantly whitewash of top secret and national security designations. One example- the torture and murders at Abu Ghraib and the resultant investigation was classified SECRET//NOFORN and even the congressional oversight committee did not receive an unredacted copy. Secret prisons, fabricated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction claims, warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, all were hidden until unauthorized leaks opened our eyes. One of the most demeaning excuses I read was that we the people simply aren't smart enough to know what's good for us. And they used the parent-child analogy. They aren't my daddy; I'm not their child. And neither are you. Funniest quote, concerning the Korston Club, a casino hotel in Moscow- "Also, there were feathers. The place looked as though a tornado had knocked down a trailer full of old Madonna stage sets." Again, thank you Edward Snowden. Knowing I'm being watched and recorded is better than not knowing at all.
March 12, 2021
I have always liked and admired Bart Gellman as an investigative journalist. I did not read his book on the former VP Cheney, so I can't draw a comparison there, but I can tell you this book is very well-written and captivating. The primary question I ask after finishing this text, is why have we not had a national conversation about the the government's ability to collect, collate, sort and save immeasurable pieces of meta- and content data? Nearly a decade has passed since Snowden dropped these files.
It is not that surprising, to be honest, about the revelations of domestic surveillance capabilities. I have long suspected the government's ability to monitor anything they wanted, given the technology attached to all of us while mobile, at home, at work, in public. More shocking is the IC's twisting of the law to monitor Americans once their communication leaves the borders of the US. It's no secret how servers work: data can be generated in Illinois, let's say; then ping to a server in the UK, before coming back to New York. In the time the data is traveling across the Atlantic and back again, the data can be swept in and stored until further sorting is required.
Fair enough to understand that the NSA, CIA, FBI or IC, at large, tells us that they are not probing or listening in on every exchange we might be having about our daily life, unless we have given them some national security reason to do so, but the capability exists and it IS being used. A classic case of "we can do it, but should we do it". And a further point to drive home: no one on the planet is safe from the track & trace unless completely off the grid. Privacy advocates, pay attention!
I can't quite figure out if I think Snowden is really some kind of whistleblower hero if he had ulterior motives. It's not terribly clear that he has a pathway to come back to the US at this point, and it doesn't seem like there is any compelling reason for him to do so. He would never be granted clemency or leniency, anyway.
One point about the book I wish Gellman had detailed more deeply: the complicity and willingness of Big Tech to hand over the information access to the government, at least initially. Not until they found that the government was one-upping them did we see any kind of resistance to the sweeps. Was that because they genuinely care about civil liberties? Hardly, I suspect. I do find it intriguing that the NSA employed more stealth people than Silicon Valley at various points in this epic.
A lot to think about. I would recommend this book to anyone concerned about government overreach and intrusion into the mundane activities of everyday life. Big Brother is here. Well, he's been here for a while.
It is not that surprising, to be honest, about the revelations of domestic surveillance capabilities. I have long suspected the government's ability to monitor anything they wanted, given the technology attached to all of us while mobile, at home, at work, in public. More shocking is the IC's twisting of the law to monitor Americans once their communication leaves the borders of the US. It's no secret how servers work: data can be generated in Illinois, let's say; then ping to a server in the UK, before coming back to New York. In the time the data is traveling across the Atlantic and back again, the data can be swept in and stored until further sorting is required.
Fair enough to understand that the NSA, CIA, FBI or IC, at large, tells us that they are not probing or listening in on every exchange we might be having about our daily life, unless we have given them some national security reason to do so, but the capability exists and it IS being used. A classic case of "we can do it, but should we do it". And a further point to drive home: no one on the planet is safe from the track & trace unless completely off the grid. Privacy advocates, pay attention!
I can't quite figure out if I think Snowden is really some kind of whistleblower hero if he had ulterior motives. It's not terribly clear that he has a pathway to come back to the US at this point, and it doesn't seem like there is any compelling reason for him to do so. He would never be granted clemency or leniency, anyway.
One point about the book I wish Gellman had detailed more deeply: the complicity and willingness of Big Tech to hand over the information access to the government, at least initially. Not until they found that the government was one-upping them did we see any kind of resistance to the sweeps. Was that because they genuinely care about civil liberties? Hardly, I suspect. I do find it intriguing that the NSA employed more stealth people than Silicon Valley at various points in this epic.
A lot to think about. I would recommend this book to anyone concerned about government overreach and intrusion into the mundane activities of everyday life. Big Brother is here. Well, he's been here for a while.
February 11, 2023
The dark mirror is a metaphor for the contemporary surveillance state, where we might be watched while being unable to see security forces. The book's central theme is power with information serving as the oxygen of control, secrecy, and Surveillance interlock to define its flows. The book offers Gellman's description of his dealings with Edward Snowden and includes a number of interesting text message conversations with an informant by the name of Vervax. In the first chapters, Edward Snowden's history and line of work are covered in detail, as well as how he acquired the information and chose them to raise awareness. Because one country's whistleblower is another country's spy, he has been called a hero, a traitor, a whistleblower, and a criminal.
Many things were revealed by Snowden, but none more so important than the National Security Agency's Prism Program.The project was created to be the main driving force behind the United States surveillance system and to carry out the NSA's mandate of protecting American secrets and stealing foreign countries' secrets. Snowden also described how they went about attaining their goals, and that is a real eye opener.
NSA collects the following data :
Documents
Pictures
Contact List
Budget
Medical Records
Chat
Text
Videos
Email
Data is collected from the following companies
Microsoft
Yahoo
Google
Facebook
PalTalk
AOL
Skype
YouTube
Apple
Dropbox
Cloud Storage and Synchronisation services (which were going to be added shortly at that time)
There is additional bad news if the reader believes they have nothing to worry about because their data has nothing of interest for them to track:
When the target is flagged, his prior records can be obtained retroactively, according to information that Snowden also revealed concerning their extensive storage of all the aforementioned data. Other fascinating subjects In the novel, cyberphunks who support data anonymity are touched. The goal of cypherpunks is to shield the internet from intrusive state control, including censorship and spying. Then there is Jamboree, an annual hackers conference held in Northern Virginia since 2006 that honours technological prowess, offensive daring, and unwavering desire to triumph.
Gellmen in the book also highlighted that NSA used loopholes in the judiciary system to bend the rules in their favor. At end of publishing of the book Snowden is still in Russia where he sought asylum and is still no nearer in returning to his country where he will be facing espionage charges. He has never been proved of any charge of sharing secrets with Russia and China.
Best Quote from the book, "The latent power of new inventions no matter how repellent at first, does not live forever dormant in government armories."
Many things were revealed by Snowden, but none more so important than the National Security Agency's Prism Program.The project was created to be the main driving force behind the United States surveillance system and to carry out the NSA's mandate of protecting American secrets and stealing foreign countries' secrets. Snowden also described how they went about attaining their goals, and that is a real eye opener.
NSA collects the following data :
Documents
Pictures
Contact List
Budget
Medical Records
Chat
Text
Videos
Data is collected from the following companies
Microsoft
Yahoo
PalTalk
AOL
Skype
YouTube
Apple
Dropbox
Cloud Storage and Synchronisation services (which were going to be added shortly at that time)
There is additional bad news if the reader believes they have nothing to worry about because their data has nothing of interest for them to track:
When the target is flagged, his prior records can be obtained retroactively, according to information that Snowden also revealed concerning their extensive storage of all the aforementioned data. Other fascinating subjects In the novel, cyberphunks who support data anonymity are touched. The goal of cypherpunks is to shield the internet from intrusive state control, including censorship and spying. Then there is Jamboree, an annual hackers conference held in Northern Virginia since 2006 that honours technological prowess, offensive daring, and unwavering desire to triumph.
Gellmen in the book also highlighted that NSA used loopholes in the judiciary system to bend the rules in their favor. At end of publishing of the book Snowden is still in Russia where he sought asylum and is still no nearer in returning to his country where he will be facing espionage charges. He has never been proved of any charge of sharing secrets with Russia and China.
Best Quote from the book, "The latent power of new inventions no matter how repellent at first, does not live forever dormant in government armories."
May 31, 2020
359 pages, but very readable. Currently the only book which combines into a single narrative comprehensive information about Snowden's history/biography, summaries of (most of) the leaked NSA documents themselves, the reporting process, and the broader, "meta" ethical-political issues as they've morphed into the age of Orange One. Even someone following most of the reporting since 2013 will find some new information, or useful commentary, in this book — for example: how Time magazine's lawyers discretely attempted to squelch Gellman's reporting, before Gellman acquired his new contract with the Washington Post; clear accounts of the NSA's purposefully misleading use of ordinary language, when offering non-denial denials to story details (and in congressional testimony); well-written accounts, for non-technical readers, of how the "big data" techniques employed in the data analysis basically amount to creating a "time machine" for retroactive evidence discovery on anything, since mid-2000s (systems correlating web traffic, emails, chats, electronic address books, call records & content, financial records, etc.); how overlapping legal authorities are "constructively" used to feed various data sets into these systems, which then are used to interact in new ways/contexts, anyway.
Gellman comes down on the side of seriously questioning the fundamental value of bulk collection and analysis at the scope and scale currently occurring, even as he is also personally critical of Snowden's sometimes libertarian-streaks. (He fundamentally agrees with Snowden, though, that it's just a bad idea to have this level of surveillance capability dependent on little more than good-faith policy mandates.) Oddly, though, hardly anything is written here about the Obama administration's reactions to the leaks, nor about the controversy of the NSA dishonestly orchestrating backdoored encryption algorithms with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) — https://www.propublica.org/article/th.... Granted, those stories were reported by others (not Gellman), but news of the encryption-breaking capabilities is argubaly the most significant Snowden leak.
For those curious to get the history of Snowden's involvement with Gellman, Poitras, and Greenwald, it's also amusing to read Gellman set the record straight within a two-page endnote (short version: Gellman was the one originally in touch with Snowden, via Poitras; Greenwald was tech.-illiterate and only ended up in Hong Kong with Poitras after Gellman had decided to stay in the U.S. and focus on the reporting instead).
Gellman comes down on the side of seriously questioning the fundamental value of bulk collection and analysis at the scope and scale currently occurring, even as he is also personally critical of Snowden's sometimes libertarian-streaks. (He fundamentally agrees with Snowden, though, that it's just a bad idea to have this level of surveillance capability dependent on little more than good-faith policy mandates.) Oddly, though, hardly anything is written here about the Obama administration's reactions to the leaks, nor about the controversy of the NSA dishonestly orchestrating backdoored encryption algorithms with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) — https://www.propublica.org/article/th.... Granted, those stories were reported by others (not Gellman), but news of the encryption-breaking capabilities is argubaly the most significant Snowden leak.
For those curious to get the history of Snowden's involvement with Gellman, Poitras, and Greenwald, it's also amusing to read Gellman set the record straight within a two-page endnote (short version: Gellman was the one originally in touch with Snowden, via Poitras; Greenwald was tech.-illiterate and only ended up in Hong Kong with Poitras after Gellman had decided to stay in the U.S. and focus on the reporting instead).
December 14, 2020
I listened to the audio book and while I am not normally a fan of an author narrating his/her own audio book, Bart Gellman sound like a professional.
I enjoyed the book until Gellman started talking about Trump and seems to have drunk the kool-aid and enamored by the myth that Trump colluded with Russia when the reality is that the NSA, FBI, CIA, and others within the government of the United States of America spied on candidate Trump, President-Elect Trump, and likely President Trump. What really surprises me is that after the treasure trove of documents that Snowden gave Bart Gellman he bashes Trump in his book and talks about Trump as the one abusing power as if he has forgotten about the fact that the NSA spied on many Americans for years without their knowledge and without a warrant.
The details about the documents provided by Snowden and Snowden's life and early career are great as was the discussion about how Gellman and Portris lawyered up and Gellman decided not to go to Hong Kong to meet Snowden.
I definitely recommend this book thought the anti-Trump rhetoric should of and could have easily been left out of this book. I have a suspicion that Gellman added this to the book so that he can maintain employment as if being anti-Trump is a pre-requisite in the post-Trump age due to Trumpism (the same as McCarthyism now updated for the 21st Century) which is sad.
I enjoyed the book until Gellman started talking about Trump and seems to have drunk the kool-aid and enamored by the myth that Trump colluded with Russia when the reality is that the NSA, FBI, CIA, and others within the government of the United States of America spied on candidate Trump, President-Elect Trump, and likely President Trump. What really surprises me is that after the treasure trove of documents that Snowden gave Bart Gellman he bashes Trump in his book and talks about Trump as the one abusing power as if he has forgotten about the fact that the NSA spied on many Americans for years without their knowledge and without a warrant.
The details about the documents provided by Snowden and Snowden's life and early career are great as was the discussion about how Gellman and Portris lawyered up and Gellman decided not to go to Hong Kong to meet Snowden.
I definitely recommend this book thought the anti-Trump rhetoric should of and could have easily been left out of this book. I have a suspicion that Gellman added this to the book so that he can maintain employment as if being anti-Trump is a pre-requisite in the post-Trump age due to Trumpism (the same as McCarthyism now updated for the 21st Century) which is sad.
June 5, 2020
Imagine if your government could type your name or your email address into a computer and see everything you ever posted online, every call you made, all of the people connected to you, their details. Now imagine your government turns on you. Snowden calls this turnkey tyranny.
“The man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he’s the one who has succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside, they’re the criminals we throw in jails, they’re simply the people who didn’t make it.” - Alan Watts
The Deep State of data collection started with Reagan in 1981 when he passed Executive Order 12333:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execu...
The Patriot Act we all agreed to, as a result of 911, expanded this effort
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patri...
This evolved into PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect internet communications from various companies (Google, FB, Yahoo, etc.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM...
There were related operations such as Operation FirstFruits where the NSA spied on Dissenters and Journalists
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2006/1...-
Using tools like XKeyscore to capture your data
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeys...
Which was then stored on a system called MAINWAY allowing the NSA to search for your information without a warrant
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAINWAY
That should give you an idea of what we’re up against in this country. If any of that interests you then you’ll like this book.
“The man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch. Because he’s the one who has succeeded in crime. The other people are pushed aside, they’re the criminals we throw in jails, they’re simply the people who didn’t make it.” - Alan Watts
The Deep State of data collection started with Reagan in 1981 when he passed Executive Order 12333:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execu...
The Patriot Act we all agreed to, as a result of 911, expanded this effort
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patri...
This evolved into PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect internet communications from various companies (Google, FB, Yahoo, etc.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM...
There were related operations such as Operation FirstFruits where the NSA spied on Dissenters and Journalists
https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2006/1...-
Using tools like XKeyscore to capture your data
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeys...
Which was then stored on a system called MAINWAY allowing the NSA to search for your information without a warrant
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAINWAY
That should give you an idea of what we’re up against in this country. If any of that interests you then you’ll like this book.
July 12, 2020
Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman tells how he came to be one of three recipients of Edward Snowden's cache of purloined classified files that laid out in astonishing clarity and detail how the U.S. government collected data and surveilled its own citizens. This is a real-life thriller and a masterwork of investigative reporting. It's also a damned uncomfortable read for those who want to believe that Uncle Sam is, at core, out to protect American citizens and whistleblowers like Snowden are traitors.
August 31, 2020
It was good, but I would just recommend you read this:
Permanent Record
2.8/5
Permanent Record
2.8/5
July 11, 2024
An incredible, twisting play-by-play on Snowden’s sordid journey of self-discovery and courageous efforts to expose clandestine government actions. The absolute epitome of the truth is likely stranger than fiction.
January 4, 2023
Wow! You don’t really want to know what you don’t know.
When this story first came out, I felt like oh no, our government wouldn’t do that to us. Now, after the last two years and other things happening, I would not put it past them.
When this story first came out, I felt like oh no, our government wouldn’t do that to us. Now, after the last two years and other things happening, I would not put it past them.
February 2, 2024
Started off gripping: a journalist with a big folder of unpublished NSA secrets. But from then on it was a little flat.
December 26, 2021
The first book I have read about Edward Snowden's revelations. Quite insightful, but the book often read like it's less about Snowden and his exposes, and more about the author.
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. They should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year or for any year, as they have helped exposed further the US surveillance state, one that the mainstream media seem to sweep under the rug. Shame on the Norwegian Nobel Committee. But then again, with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama and other US war criminals also being recipients, no surprise there really.
Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. They should have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year or for any year, as they have helped exposed further the US surveillance state, one that the mainstream media seem to sweep under the rug. Shame on the Norwegian Nobel Committee. But then again, with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama and other US war criminals also being recipients, no surprise there really.
February 6, 2021
An interesting read from one of the journalists who broke the original Snowden leaks (and, in some ways, was probably the most important as the most “establishment” journalist who legitimised the view that Snowden was more right than wrong to leak the information he did).
I have disagreed with that view from the outset and nothing in here really changed my mind - but what is interesting is both the sense from Gellman and Snowden that the US national security state is too powerful coexisting sign the fact that the publication was allowed to happen with no real repercussions for the people who facilitated it (the examples he gives are being labelled “accessories” and being cold-shouldered at some events with press in - neither of which seem particularly alarming). It’s all frustratingly inconclusive (including as to Snowden’s motives - they’re logical but stretch credibility).
I have disagreed with that view from the outset and nothing in here really changed my mind - but what is interesting is both the sense from Gellman and Snowden that the US national security state is too powerful coexisting sign the fact that the publication was allowed to happen with no real repercussions for the people who facilitated it (the examples he gives are being labelled “accessories” and being cold-shouldered at some events with press in - neither of which seem particularly alarming). It’s all frustratingly inconclusive (including as to Snowden’s motives - they’re logical but stretch credibility).
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