Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State

by Barton Gellman

James Risen and Don Van Natta Jr., Washington Post reporters Doug Farah, Steve Mufson, Thomas Lippman, and Kathy Sawyer, and the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh.

Read their work!

Even if you set the bar at eavesdropping on Americans, you still had to consider the impact of collection overseas. The NSA’s and the CIA’s technical collection machinery tapped foreign circuits in bulk, and Americans were ubiquitous on those lines. Google and Yahoo cloud exploitation gathered American data. Location tracking in bulk tracked Americans. Address book collection swept Americans into the NSA’s social networking database. Bulk acquisition methods, inherently, were as nearly comprehensive as possible.

It’s impossible to be anonymous today.