Review: Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

As it happens, I just ran across an article pertinent to this book and review: https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyber-budget-shows-what-us-values%E2%80%94and-it-isnt-defense

Ironically, Gellman was not the first choice for Snowden to use as a conduit for the extraordinary information he had gleaned from the NSA related to their surveillance of U.S.citizens. Glenn Greenwald had ignored Snowden's tentative approach, all cloaked with great secrecy, of course. Gellman's description of the techniques he used to hide what he was doing was fascinating by itself.

What did Snowden reveal? The NSA's stated goal is to collect and process everything, all communications. They have a huge volume problem. They try to filter out the junk and ignore the spam, but sophisticated opposition has realized that spam can be used to hide messages. They look for anything with lists, address books connected to individual accounts, to build sophisticated social network analysis. A lot of digital traffic moves through the United States making the NSA's job easier. Even a phone call from Spain to Colombia may be routed through the U.S. Fears of Chinese dominance through Huawei may be justified. The NSA has legal coercive powers to force communications entities to turn over anything they ask for. So if they are denied access in the U.S., they simply go to one of the social network technologies centers in another country and get it from there. General Hayden former NSA Director justified the sweeping collection of data by saying that "you can't find a needle in a haystack without the haystack." But just as it would be useful to search every house on the block to find something doesn't mean you should be allowed to do it.

Gellman insists that Snowden's revelations did more good than harm but he cocedes that some harm may have been done. The Communications system is so complicated and intertwined that Snowden insists that many processes the NSA had in place change and don't work any more simply based on changes to the communications infrastructure that had nothing to do with Snowden. Firmware gets updated, hardware and software changed, so much of their success must rely on mistakes made by others and the capabilities are constantly being changed.

Perhaps an irony of Snowdon's actions is that he revealed how poor the NSA was at keeping its own secrets. We have learned since that the NSA "lost" many very sophisticated hacking tools, which were later used to wreck substantial damage around the world when modified slightly by malicious hackers. Another irony is that some of the NSA's biggest defenders and Snowden's antagonists have done a 360 since Trump and his tyrannical postures have been revealed. Government can't be trusted and the president has no interest in any legal restraints on his power. Jim Clapper who originally wanted Gellman arrested now questions whether there are enough restraints in place to prevent abuse. The Internet is far more secure than it was before the revelations and even some national security types and James Comey said to the author that Snowden did more good than harm.

Gellman met many times with Snowden and the section on their relationship is fascinating. How they communicated, how trust changed and morphed. Snowden is a man of very strong principles and a zealot, perhaps overly confident in his own rightness. An autodidact, he's very well and widely read so discussions would range over many areas. Ultimately, Snowden got stuck in Moscow because the U.S. canceled his passport hoping to keep him in Hong Kong but he was already on a plane intending to transfer in Moscow for elswhere, but when they landed the authorities said he could not leave because his passport was no longer valid.

Gellman suffered no legal consequences for publishing the Snowden material, and in an interview on Lawfare, Gellman makes the distinction between espionage and reporting. The spy seeks out information that he wants to keep secret and to use that information to harm his adversary. The journalist, on the other hand seeks to make the information public to encourage debate as to whether his society wants to approve and continue certain actions. That kind of debate is essential in a free and democratic society.

Much of the distrust for government stems from Watergate and Vietnam during which it became clear that government was lying to the public to prevent them from know what their government was doing. Snowden's revelations have not assuaged that distrust.