Just Read: Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State (2020)

I just finished reading Barton Gellman's book Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State which was published last May.  

Wikipedia calls Baron Gellman "an American journalist and bestselling author known for his reports on the September 11 attacks, on Dick Cheney's vice presidency, and on the global surveillance disclosure."  

Barton Gellman knows Edward J. Snowden personally.  I read his book for the answers to three questions:  1) what did Edward Snowden reveal to the American public? 2) Why did Snowden reveal these previously concealed truths? and 3) is Edward Snowden a hero, or a traitor?

The book is large, with an extensive section of notes.  It was a challenging read.

This is what I learned.

What did Snowden reveal ?

The first of the Snowden documents that was publicly released was a Top Secret, compartmented presentation from the National Security Agency, only one month old.  Under the cover name PRISM, it was revealed that the NSA was siphoning data from tens of thousands of accounts from the American-based internet giants: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple, as well as a service called Paltalk.

Another NSA report revealed that the NSA's acquisitions directorate sent millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade. In the preceding thirty days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records—including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, along with content such as text, audio, and video. 

The National Security Agency had secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans

The NSA harvested millions of address books at data crossing points around the world. Many of them, inevitably, belonged to Americans. The web did not respect geographic boundaries. Just because collection happened abroad did not mean the data was foreign.

During a single representative day, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail, and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake, corresponded to a rate of more than 250 million address books a year. 

American accounts were certain to be scooped up. The NSA believed the law entitled it to pretend otherwise. When information passed through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official told me, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.” That was indeed the formal rule. In the absence of specific information to the contrary, according to the court-approved targeting rules, “a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non–United States person.”

Even when the analysts explicitly described intercepted files as useless for intelligence purposes, the NSA retained them. The contents had an intimate, even voyeuristic quality. 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, résumés from job hunters, and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beamed at a camera outside a mosque. Scores of pictures showed infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs, and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men showed off their physiques. In others, women modeled lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risqué poses in shorts and bikini tops.

All of those examples were from non-targets.

Why did Snowden reveal what he did?

History has not been kind to the belief that government conduct always follows rules or that the rules will never change in dangerous ways. Rules can be bypassed or rewritten.

Within living memory, Richard Nixon had ordered wiretaps of his political enemies. The FBI, judging Martin Luther King Jr. a “dangerous and effective Negro,” had used secret surveillance to record his sexual liaisons. A top lieutenant of J. Edgar Hoover invited King to kill himself or face exposure.

Snowen wrote: “While it is discouraging to think that you cannot be completely safe, the fact that I’m walking free today, the fact that I’m still able to communicate with you, it shows that there are cases and there are circumstances where if you do things right, if you do things carefully, you can win. Not because you’re invincible but . . . you can literally win. You can beat them. One of the very interesting things about doing the right thing is you have no trouble sleeping. You have untroubled nights. It really hasn’t been the giant nightmare people assume it would be. For me, in terms of personal satisfaction and accomplishing the mission, the mission is accomplished. I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work I got everything I wanted. I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society the opportunity to change itself."

Hero or traitor?

The dynamic is beginning to change now. We are shifting it. We’re basically reclaiming spots and making parts of it more private again. Edward Snowden shifted popular culture. He brought about legal, diplomatic, political, and legislative challenges to the prevailing model at the NSA. Alongside all that, and perhaps most significant, came demand for greater resistance in the private sector against NSA bulk surveillance techniques. Security and privacy became marketing points for the internet giants. Google accelerated its plans to encrypt all its services for consumer and business customers.

“I am not convinced that shadowy figures pose a greater threat

to security than information control, total surveillance, and

permanent national militarization.” — Edward Snowden