Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman

Journalists, same as everyone else, had accepted the gifts of the internet without considering their price.

“The cloud,” as the security analyst Graham Cluley put it, was just another word for “somebody else’s computer.”

One of them, John Perry Barlow, a former Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a declaration of independence, warning governments at large (“you weary giants of flesh and steel”) that “you are not welcome among us.”

Dell Advanced Solutions Group,

What not to tell a spouse (many things) or children (anything).

Each day Verizon handed over a CD with an updated listing of every telephone call made by every customer.

“Is U.S. Intelligence Connecting All the Dots, or Collecting Too Many?”

When you factored in time and sequence, the results were startling. “A likely storyline emerges,” Felten wrote, when “a young woman calls her gynecologist; then immediately calls her mother; then a man who, during the past few months, she had repeatedly spoken to on the telephone after 11 pm; followed by a call to a family planning center that also offers abortions.” The government may seldom care, may never abuse that knowledge in a given year. But now, for the first time in history, it had acquired the power to do so.

“if you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.”

So much easier said than done. What counts as “harm” or “public interest,” exactly? How could I discern their weight and compare them? Why should anyone trust the likes of me, or the Post, to make that choice? And once I decided that something was harmful, did it become my job, affirmatively, to protect the secret? I had secrets of my own: confidential sources, sensitive notes, future reporting targets. How could I keep them safe from sophisticated thieves? Whom was I even up against? Journalism used to feel a lot simpler.

I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents, fifty thousand or whatever they have, and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense.

one man’s whistleblower is another man’s spy.”

The First Amendment protected me and the other journalists, De said, however unfortunate the effects of our work. But that was not really right, not altogether. American political culture and governing norms, not the letter of the law, were the real protection.

He missed small things from home, he allowed. Milk shakes. Why not make your own? Snowden refused to confirm or deny possession of a blender. Like all appliances, blenders have an electrical signature when switched on. He believed the U.S. government was trying to discover where he lived.

I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society the opportunity to change itself.

You can’t tell everybody without telling the bad guys.”

No law, for much the same reason, forbids publication of false information (with narrow exceptions such as libel).

The NSA, somehow, was inside Google’s house.

“that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America,”

Ellsberg offered a dark theory to begin their discussion of the NSA. “[T]he reason I think they’re keeping targeting of individuals secret is that it gives them blackmail capability against Congresspersons and judges; and a total ability to find sources of journalists and end real investigative reporting,”

If we’re going to be a moral authority, we must act as one.”

Why YOU? And not ANY of those other guys, who had comparable access AND who shared your basic values and views about the wrongness of what was happening?’” “I can’t say. I think most people are crippled by comfort, and I have few needs. It is much easier for someone who doesn’t have many desires to walk away.”

America was not built for maximum police efficiency.

It was a jaw-dropping claim,

At times in its history, the NSA had achieved something like a God’s-eye view of its targets on their specialized communications channels. Now, with the same goal, the agency wanted something it had never had before: efficient means to read and listen to anything on any channel at all. My instincts rebelled against a too-efficient state on this scale of operations. I worried about the Dark Mirror, so transparent on one side and so opaque on the other. The power gradient of government to citizens became too steep.

“If you really want to prevent a surveillance state that could be abused by a tyrant, the only thing is to not have surveillance.”