Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State Hardcover – May 19, 2020

Gellman, Barton., DARK MIRROR—EDWARD SNOWDEN AND THE AMERICAN SURVEILLANCE STATE, Penguin Press, New York 2020.Review by Ben RobinsonBart Gellman’s Pulitzer prize-winning book discusses three things: 1. Mr. Gellman’s role in receiving stolen NSA documents and publishing them with The Washington Post, 2. The potentially overreaching NSA program titled PRISM which veritably spied on every American (and other nations) email and phone calls from 9/11(2001) on, and 3. Edward Snowden and his theft of classified NSA documents numbering probably in the near hundred-thousand—the largest theft in American Intel history. Snowden now married and living without any incentive to return to the US (from Russia) has been called a “traitor” by the intelligence community (IC) and heralded as a modern day patriot. So, was he Nathan Hale or Benedict Arnold?Gellman’s finely-tuned, cleverly-written memoir of a journalist on the trail of potentially one of the biggest stories of the 21st century takes center stage and does not disappoint. The talk is tech nerd; the intrigue has you wondering if you are being watched while reading this 400+ page book. Likened in publicity and in fact to what Woodward and Bernstein encountered when dealing with Watergate, with the cast of characters that unseated Richard Nixon from the Presidency, Barack Obama’s White House (2008–2016), survived this bold attack and this needs to be looked at.While it was the broad FISA court that allowed American democracy to be held hostage by the twin hands of terrorism and those that purported to buttress democracy, obviously the bureaucracy that is Washington probably over-stepped when stating “national security” was at risk with the notion of every keystroke and call needed to be uploaded to a “cloud” and harvested for catching bad guys. DNI James Clapper sandblasted the author Gellman yelling “We didn’t have another 9/11” defending his intel stance that any information was fair game to profile and catch hackers, and malfeasant state actors. The Tsarnaev brothers who attacked the Boston Marathon leaving dead and disfigured and then “went operational” killing one policeman and mortally wounding officer Walter Donohue while he simply sat in his car, is a case referred to supporting their quick capture by ravenous intel gathering legal or not. Unknown if the “thought cloud” the NSA claims was at work, worked. Seems to this writer Boston boots-on-the ground captured the one living brother (who drove over his older brother) in Watertown, MA were ready to make their city proud, even calling for medical aid for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who attempted to kill himself, but is now in an orange jumpsuit in a federal lock up. Why mention this? Because the narrative the government presents as “anti-Snowden” demands dissection. Snowden provides it eloquently.Timing is important to this story because the loosely titled and availed “Snowden file” was released nary two years after such broad sweeping technology offering up anyone’s cell phone number at any time caught bin Laden leaving him with two gun shots in his head in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011— a mere ten years after his big terror show in lower Manhattan (Washington, and Shanksville, PA too) where 3000 people died.This was justification for the government to protect and serve its populace; but at the end of the book the legality is debated as to what was a fix and what broke the law. By the time Donald Trump makes an appearance, even the so-called government watchdogs are scratching their heads quietly saying,“Yeah, maybe the system is broken if Trump can come in and light the place on fire.” Malfeasant state actors, Russian trolls and cyber punks unite in this tale of intrigue and paranoia-inducing treachery.Was Snowden a hero or despot in hiding? Lenin said that when a crime is committed, one had to look at who benefitted from the crime to know who committed the crime. In this case, young Edward Snowden was a malcontent who used innate logic and creativity to ascend with barely a high school degree for having the highest security clearance possible for vaults of information — some he created — at the CIA and the NSA. Snowden comes off slightly snarky and punctilious— but this is not a biography of Edward Snowden (the film by Oliver Stone does that). Instead we hear little from Snowden in this book, but a lot from CIA and NSA brass like General Michael Hayden who looks like a retiring grandfather in a rocking chair, but in truth, might bring that chair down over your head if you rubbed him the wrong way. Hayden oversaw the government reaction to the revelation of the US planting a computer virus that disabled Iranian nuclear reactors—Stuxnet. Snowden’s revelations reveal that not only has the US been guilty of what the rest of the world is also guilty, but that our daily reality has been compromised. Repeated incidents of intrusion without warrant now seem to be province of a not-to-boldly veiled “surveillance state” recently referred to broadly by a Harvard historian-economist in The New York Times as “surveillance capitalism.” That Harvard professor could not have offered their theories without the bold and, yes, brave, intentions and executions of Edward Snowden.Here we have a dilemma of our current planet. Snowden raises the bar of humanity to ask if privacy exists anymore? You won’t find the answer in this book. But the dialogue will help you form your own answer.I read it in one day. Five stars.

The people charged with keeping us safe from terrorists and other enemies complain that they have the nearly impossible task of hunting for a needle in a haystack: a single bad guy in a world with billions of people.But what if, instead of searching for a single needle, they could just grab the entire haystack?The haystack in this case is the data created by cell phones, internet searches, and other electronic communications. Not just the communications of the bad guy, but of everybody.As Barton Gellman shows in his thoughtful and engaging new book Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, collecting the entire haystack was the goal of U.S. intelligence, a goal that might have been a good military strategy but also threatened American ideals of privacy and the rule of law.The book is part detective story, part reporter’s handbook on how to cover a dangerous and sensitive topic, and part explainer on government surveillance. The two main characters are the author, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, and Edward Snowden, a former member of the surveillance state who now lives in Russia to avoid U.S. prosecution for revealing highly classified secrets.Gellman and Snowden have chosen two different ways to live their professional lives, one as a reporter trying to explain the U.S. government’s surveillance programs, and the other as a whistleblower who thinks the system has been abused and could easily be turned against American citizens. Gellman, who I know from many years ago when we both were reporters in Washington, DC, is outgoing and has chased stories around the world, while Snowden spends every waking minute online, mostly alone, and calls himself a “house cat.”They do share an intensity of purpose, a precision over the details, a belief in the importance of their work, the ability to be a “giant pain in the ass,” and the enduring wrath of members of the intelligence community who think they did far more harm than good by exposing global surveillance programs.The dramatic part of the narrative is how these two very different men come together as reporter and source, overcome their mutual distrust, and agree to disagree about their respective roles.Gellman writes early in the book, “The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm, even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence.”Admiral William McRaven, who lead all U.S. Special Operations forces, is just one of the people quoted in the book who are furious with the whistleblower and the reporter: Snowden “violated the law, so at the end of the day, in divulging that information, you are dealing with a criminal,” McRaven told Gellman in an uncomfortable confrontation. “So where is the integrity in that?”McRaven, who is almost trembling with rage, tells Gellman: “You as a reporter make the call that it’s more important for the public—and I would contend, more important for the reporter—to get that story out before somebody scoops you. … And you can always make a case in your own mind why the American people need to know something.”Gellman was not an uncritical conduit for Snowden’s leaks, however, and he agonized over the benefit of every exposure against the damage to U.S. security. Gellman was not always aware of how a given exposure might hurt U.S. intelligence, and that was part of the dilemma, but clearly Snowden’s leaks damaged the government’s surveillance programs.The reporter printed only a fraction of the information Snowden had, he refused to publish secrets that he believed would hurt ongoing U.S. operations or personnel, and he protected Snowden’s information from curious foreign intelligence services. “Speaking for myself, I am not agnostic about my loyalties,” Gellman tells the government’s senior intelligence lawyer. “I am not—in this context—a global citizen, indifferent to the outcomes of national conflict.”Gellman was not happy about being put in the role of deciding which disclosures would harm U.S. operations, however, and that is a key point of the book. The surveillance programs that Snowden exposed were not known to the public, or even to most people in government, so there never was any public debate over whether the programs had gone too far.Even Snowden, who is not a transparency absolutist, admits that the challenge in a democracy is letting everyone know what the government is doing, without the bad guys knowing.Even though Gellman tried to ask government officials about the impact of releasing Snowden’s information, many of his former sources refused to discuss the details before publication, turning their back on Gellman and labeling him “nasty and suspicious.”“At heart, national security secrecy presents a conflict of core values: self-government and self-defense,” Gellman concludes. “If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know, too.”During wartime, the contradiction over secrecy versus openness is sharpened because secrecy is so important to military victory. But, as Gellman explains so well, whether to wage war is one of the most important decisions a democracy needs to make, and that decision must be well informed.(Peter Copeland is a former foreign correspondent and Washington bureau chief. His most recent book is Finding the News: Adventures of a Young Reporter).

Interesting and sometimes beggers belief.However it's more about the author than Snowden.

Ok book but the chapters are very long.Most of the book i have seen elsewhere.

I expected to learn from this book more information (as the subtitle induces to expect) about NSA’s surveillance and its collection of private citizens’ data. But it doesn’t provide it — or, at least, it tells nothing more than it is already known from other sources. It seems to actually be nothing more than1. another narration of Edward Snowden’s exploit;2. a self-celebration of the author’s technological skills and ethical principles.Many times the author alludes to information that he “won’t disclose.” It is possible than the reasons why he won’t do it are really ethical and reasonable (or not), but then, what’s the point on writing a book like that at all?If you want to learn more about digital surveillance both by government agencies and private corporations, read instead Yasha Levine’s book “Surveillance Valley”.

技術的な描写が、素晴らしい。