Barton Gellman - Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power

How did you do it? How did you extract all that information and cross a border with it?

Its just a question of being smarter than the adversary.

Which in this case is only the NSA.

Ha, true. One step at a time and you climb up the mountain. You can tell that story later.

Authors chat with Edward Snowden, June 9, 2013

This book takes up the gauntlet that Edward Snowden threw down for me that day, the same day he unmasked himself to the world. Shortly after this exchange, he fled his Hong Kong hotel room ahead of an extradition request from the United States. His parting words were a challenge, not a promise. He did not intend to hand me his story. Not all of it. I have built this narrative by my own lights and reporting.

Dark Mirror is not a book about Snowden, or not only that. It is a tour of the surveillance state that rose up after September 11, 2001, when the U.S. government came to believe it could not spy on enemies without turning its gaze on Americans as well. New methods of electronic surveillance impinged on the digital commons used by just about everyone, encompassing us all in a pool of potential threats. It followed, from this way of thinking, that the public must not be permitted to know what the government was doing in its name. Surveillance and secrecy grew together, side by side.

As intelligence agencies threw off old restraints, they positioned themselves as if behind one-way mirrors. On their side the glass was transparent. We appeared in plain view. On our side, opaque, the watchers went unseen. The title of Dark Mirror alludes to that design, which takes literal form at the National Security Agency on Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. Reflective panels of blue-black glass wrap the eleven-story headquarters in an electromagnetic cage, safeguarding the secrets of the watchers within.

It was Snowden who gave us the means to watch them back. In a spectacular act of transgression, he exposed the machinery of a global surveillance Leviathan. Snowden made it possible to document the origins of the golden age of SIGINT, or signals intelligence, as the NSA described the times in its strategy documents. Great swaths of human interaction had shifted to the digital realm. The NSA built the wherewithal to gather information in bulk, without discriminants, from the main arteries of global communications networks. It is too simple to describe what the NSA did as mass surveillance, a concept I explore carefully in this book, but there is no doubt that the agency began to sweep bystanders into its nets by the hundreds of millions. The traditional distinction between foreign and domestic espionage, a foundation of American privacy law, began to erode. Even after years of spirited public debate touched off by the Snowden disclosures, U.S. law and society have yet to adapt fundamentally to what he revealed.

There is another narrative here, more personal, that I did not expect to write. It is the story of my own journey as one of three journalists on the receiving end of the most consequential public leak in the history of U.S. intelligence. Against all inclination and training as a teller of other peoples tales, I came to believe I should answer questions that I had sidestepped for years.

Why did Snowden choose me? What made me think I could trust him? How did we communicate under the nose of U.S. counterintelligence authorities? Where did we meet in Moscow? Why did my name appear in an NSA file that predated the Snowden leak? Did the government try to stop my stories? How did I decide which secrets to publish and which to hold back? Who the hell elected me to decide?

No one in my profession had ever possessed tens of thousands of contemporary, codeword-classified documents. There was no playbook for a journalist under that kind of avalanche. Foreign intelligence services tried to hack my accounts and devices. The NSA director, I learned, was calling for a raid to seize my notes and files. Some of the Snowden documents, I believed, should never see the light of day. Others offered leads that I did not know how to follow without endangering my sources. To make matters worse, I had no journalistic home when Snowden appeared in my in-box. I had left the Washington Post three years earlier. Before I negotiated a temporary return, I had to make high-stakes decisions on my own. I improvised. I made mistakes, some of them embarrassing to recount. What emerges here, I hope, is an honest portrait of investigative reporting behind the scenes.

Snowden is a complicated figure, far from the cartoon templates of hero or traitor. He can be fine company: funny and profane, an autodidact with a nimble mind and eclectic interests. He can also be stubborn, self-important, and a scold. Our relationship was fraught. He knew that I would not join his crusade, and he never relied on me to take his side as he did with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. We struggled over boundariesmine as a journalist who wanted to know more, his as an advocate who saw his cause at stake in every choice of words. He broke ties with me, briefly, when I did not accept his conditions for my first story. The second time he withdrew, believing I had done him harm, we did not speak for months. Im not sure Ill ever be able to trust you to watch my back, but thats not why I talk to you, he told me when we resumed contact in the fall of 2013. I trust you to report.