Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman

The tailors worked from checklists. If this, then that. Survey your target’s hardware, software, firmware. Identify known security holes. Check for antivirus applications. Push this button, run that scan, deliver the corresponding exploit. TAO slang for this was “popping boxes,” no harder than popping a door lock for a halfway competent burglar. Boxes were the computers, routers, and firewalls of a surveillance target. With aptitude and training, a newly enlisted cryptologic technician could do the job most of the time.

Swallowing the sea is a fatuous idea,” said Joel F. Brenner, a Harvard-trained lawyer who served as NSA inspector general in the mid-2000s. “No organization, and no technology, can do it. Doing SIGINT for foreign intelligence purposes therefore implies electronic filtering, sorting, and dissemination systems of amazing sophistication.”

George R. Cotter, who served as the NSA’s chief scientist until 2009, liked to describe the division of labor in signals intelligence as “Fetch It, Etch It and Retch It.” Fetching happened in acquisition, or S3 on the organization chart, where the first stage of spying took place. Thousands of workers reached into cables and routers and networks around the world to extract information that belonged to someone else. Etching was the domain of S2, analysis and production, where thousands of others filtered and looked for meaning in the raw intercepts. Retching, in Cotter’s irreverent phrase, described the labors of S1, where the NSA prepared intelligence

If suspicion fell upon her, Poitras could “make them feel like they’ve unraveled the mystery” with a suitcase full of sex toys and lingerie. Under questioning she could hint at an assignation with a stranger she met online. She need not spell out the mortifying details. Her luggage would tell the story. The camera was for bed play, the video files encrypted for privacy. Snowden laid out the scenario colorfully.

His advice came straight from the playbook of clandestine travel. Cover for presence. Cover for action. An embarrassing story, even as fiction, but all the better camouflage for that.

If the power implications do not seem convincing, try inverting the relationship in your mind. What if a small group of citizens had secret access to the telephone logs and social networks of government officials? How might the privileged knowledge affect their power to shape events? How might their interactions change if they possessed the means to humiliate and destroy the careers of the men and women in power?

As I parsed the documents and interviewed sources, the implications finally sank in. The NSA had built a live, ever-updating social graph of the United States.

Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to somebody [online], that’s really more about the meaning of

life to me than coming out and looking at landmarks. I like learning. I like reading. That makes the internet pretty attractive.”

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. Wartime heightens the case for secrecy because the value of security is at its peak. But secrecy is never more damaging to self-government than in wartime, because making war is the very paradigm of a political choice.

what has saved them is policy rather than capability, and policies may be revised at any time. If the

“The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time,” he told the audience. “Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”