Dark Mirror

  ALSO BY BARTON GELLMAN

  Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

  Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Barton Gellman

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  This page, photographs by Bart Gellman.

  This page, photograph courtesy of Ben Wizner.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Gellman, Barton, 1960– author.

  Title: Dark mirror : Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State / Barton Gellman.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019049573 (print) | LCCN 2019049574 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594206016 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698153394 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Snowden, Edward J., 1983– | Gellman, Barton, 1960– | United States. National Security Agency. | Electronic intelligence—United States—History—21st century. | Electronic surveillance—Government policy—United States. | Domestic intelligence—United States. | Leaks (Disclosure of information)—United States. | Journalists—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC UB256.U6 G45 2020 (print) | LCC UB256.U6 (ebook) | DDC 327.12730092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049573

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049574

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  For my children: Abigail, Micah, Lily, and Benjamin

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  ONE PANDORA

  TWO HEARTBEAT

  THREE HOMECOMING

  FOUR PRISM

  FIVE BACKLASH

  SIX JAMBOREE

  SEVEN FIRSTFRUITS

  EIGHT EXPLOITATION

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  PREFACE

  How did you do it? How did you extract all that information and cross a border with it?

  It’s just a question of being smarter than the adversary.

  Which in this case is only the NSA.

  Ha, true. One step at a time and you climb up the mountain. You can tell that story later.

  —Author’s chat with Edward Snowden, June 9, 2013

  This book takes up the gauntlet that Edward Snowden threw down for me that day, the same day he unmasked himself to the world. Shortly after this exchange, he fled his Hong Kong hotel room ahead of an extradition request from the United States. His parting words were a challenge, not a promise. He did not intend to hand me his story. Not all of it. I have built this narrative by my own lights and reporting.

  Dark Mirror is not a book about Snowden, or not only that. It is a tour of the surveillance state that rose up after September 11, 2001, when the U.S. government came to believe it could not spy on enemies without turning its gaze on Americans as well. New methods of electronic surveillance impinged on the digital commons used by just about everyone, encompassing us all in a pool of potential threats. It followed, from this way of thinking, that the public must not be permitted to know what the government was doing in its name. Surveillance and secrecy grew together, side by side.

  As intelligence agencies threw off old restraints, they positioned themselves as if behind one-way mirrors. On their side the glass was transparent. We appeared in plain view. On our side, opaque, the watchers went unseen. The title of Dark Mirror alludes to that design, which takes literal form at the National Security Agency on Fort George G. Meade, Maryland. Reflective panels of blue-black glass wrap the eleven-story headquarters in an electromagnetic cage, safeguarding the secrets of the watchers within.

  It was Snowden who gave us the means to watch them back. In a spectacular act of transgression, he exposed the machinery of a global surveillance Leviathan. Snowden made it possible to document the origins of the “golden age of SIGINT,” or signals intelligence, as the NSA described the times in its strategy documents. Great swaths of human interaction had shifted to the digital realm. The NSA built the wherewithal to gather information in bulk, without discriminants, from the main arteries of global communications networks. It is too simple to describe what the NSA did as mass surveillance, a concept I explore carefully in this book, but there is no doubt that the agency began to sweep bystanders into its nets by the hundreds of millions. The traditional distinction between foreign and domestic espionage, a foundation of American privacy law, began to erode. Even after years of spirited public debate touched off by the Snowden disclosures, U.S. law and society have yet to adapt fundamentally to what he revealed.

  There is another narrative here, more personal, that I did not expect to write. It is the story of my own journey as one of three journalists on the receiving end of the most consequential public leak in the history of U.S. intelligence. Against all inclination and training as a teller of other people’s tales, I came to believe I should answer questions that I had sidestepped for years.

  Why did Snowden choose me? What made me think I could trust him? How did we communicate under the nose of U.S. counterintelligence authorities? Where did we meet in Moscow? Why did my name appear in an NSA file that predated the Snowden leak? Did the government try to stop my stories? How did I decide which secrets to publish and which to hold back? Who the hell elected me to decide?

  No one in my profession had ever possessed tens of thousands of contemporary, codeword-classified documents. There was no playbook for a journalist under that kind of avalanche. Foreign intelligence services tried to hack my accounts and devices. The NSA director, I learned, was calling for a raid to seize my notes and files. Some of the Snowden documents, I believed, should never see the light of day. Others offered leads that I did not know how to follow without endangering my sources. To make matters worse, I had no journalistic home when Snowden appeared in my in-box. I had left the Washington Post three years earlier. Before I negotiated a temporary return, I had to make high-stakes decisions on my own. I improvised. I made mistakes, some of them embarrassing to recount. What emerges here, I hope, is an honest portrait of investigative reporting behind the scenes.

  Snowden is a complicated figure, far from the cartoon templates of “hero” or “traitor.” He can be fine company: funny and profane, an autodidact with a nimble mind and eclectic interests. He can also be stubborn, self-important, and a scold. Our relationship was fraught. He knew that I would not join his crusade, and he never relied on me to take his side as he did with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. We struggled over boundaries—mine as a journalist who wanted to know more, his as an advocate who saw his cause at stake in every choice of words. He broke ties with me, briefly, when I did not accept his conditions for my first story. The second time he withdrew, believing I had done him harm, we did not speak for months.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to trust you to watch my back, but that’s not why I talk to you,” he told me when we resumed contact in the fall of 2013. “I trust you to report.”

  Twice, after that, I traveled to join him in Moscow for marathon conversations fueled by room service facsimiles of American fast food. He eats with an engineer’s logic, ice cream first, because hamburgers don’t melt. In New York and Princeton he has beamed in for visits, inhabiting a remote-controlled robot that sees, hears, speaks, and rolls around the room. Occasionally we visited on two-way video across a surveillance-resistant channel built by trusted technical friends. Most often we rendezvoused in the securest precincts of his native habitat, holding live chats by keyboard over encrypted, anonymous links. Those, done right, are the hardest to intercept.

  Personal questions, no matter how pertinent, were usually out of bounds. The first time I traveled to see him in Moscow, I tried to get him on record about his relationship with the Russian government. You are living here, I said. Do you accept money from the state? Are you questioned about your time in U.S. intelligence? Snowden accused me of parroting his critics. He spoke in theoretical terms about what a person in his position might do.

  “You know I have no relationship with the Russian government,” he burst out, finally. “You shouldn’t engage in this line of questioning.”

  “I don’t know it. I don’t know it until I ask you.”

  “It’s unknowable. You’re asking me to say, prove there is no God.”

  “No, I’m asking you to simply state that you’ve seen no burning bush.”

  “And I am. I am. In hypothetical terms.”

  Hypothetical, because the whole subject was off the record. Until later, when it was not. Even then he declined to respond concretely. We had dozens of conversations like this, round and round, about dozens of subjects. For the record, I had no reason to believe that Snowden was a Russian asset, and no U.S. government official purported to possess evidence otherwise. Snowden dodged me with equal persistence when I asked about the genius-level IQ test result he obtained in elementary school, according to a family source.

  The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm, even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence. Electronic surveillance is a tool of surpassing power and surprising fragility. Its value depends on catching targets unaware. A person of interest, forewarned, can change channels and disappear at least for a while. Dread of lost coverage built a culture of deep silence at the NSA, which earned its nicknames of “No Such Agency” and “Never Say Anything.” From an operational standpoint, comprehensive secrecy appeared to bring only advantage. But when the state of the art expanded surveillance into digital neighborhoods used by everyone, the NSA outran its political mandate. The boundary of secret intelligence in a free society had shifted. It needed debate.

  Some of Snowden’s harshest critics, if only a few, are prepared to accept that this essential conversation would not have happened without him. “I know the world changed as a result of Edward Snowden, in a significant way,” former FBI director James B. Comey told me in a long and contemplative discussion of the leaks. “And I can more easily measure the benefits than the costs, but I would hope we don’t fall in love with the benefits and not respect the fact that we can’t estimate the costs.”

  The pages to come tell stories that Snowden will not talk about or has not recounted before, not even in his memoir last year, and many stories that have nothing to do with him. I draw upon hundreds of hours of conversations with Snowden and hundreds more with designers, operators, customers, rebels, and dissidents in the surveillance machinery. There are new revelations here from the classified archive, from independent research, and from old reporter’s notes that revealed new meaning in hindsight.

  At its core this is a book about power. Information is the oxygen of control. Secrecy and surveillance, intertwined, define its flows. “Who knows what?” is a pretty good proxy for “Who governs whom?” Are citizens equipped to hold their government accountable? Are they free to shield themselves from an unwanted gaze? Can anyone today draw a line, say, “None of your business,” and make it stick?

  There is an origin story for this book, and it antedates Snowden. In 2011, I shared a stage in Silicon Valley with Google’s Eric Schmidt. He asked, “Wouldn’t you like to be able to say to your Android phone, ‘Where are my car keys?’” Good God, no, I told him. Maybe I’m in a casino. Maybe the bartender took my keys and I’m sleeping it off in a room upstairs, never mind whose. I’d be glad to have my phone track my life, but I don’t want you to know. Schmidt observed that my personal life was evidently more interesting than his, which I doubted, and that Android users love the way their phones hand them information before they even ask. The technology, I agreed, is marvelous. It’s like having Batman’s Alfred in my pocket, except that Alfred is not working for me. He is following me, taking notes, and sending them to you. I asked whether Schmidt could foresee a time when I could pay in cash for Google services, rather than agree to be spied on. He disputed the verb, but replied candidly. That’s not our business model, he said. Until Snowden, it was (just about) nobody’s model.

  By the time I sat down with Schmidt, I had been worried about my digital exhaust for some time. Most of what I want to know in my work is one or another kind of secret. After 9/11, the U.S. government tried harder to deter, discover, and punish my confidential sources.

  In self-defense I set about learning the tradecraft of electronic security. I became comfortable with encryption and anonymous proxies. I bought burner phones with cash, like a drug dealer, then realized I had to turn off my usual phone so that the burner would not march with it in lockstep around town. Would time-stamped security video in the phone store give me away? Maybe, if someone cared enough to review it. Was it enough to change SIM cards, or could I be tracked by the hardware identifier of the phone itself? No, and yes. I fell ever deeper into the rabbit hole, walking up to the line of the absurd. A journalist cannot sensibly aspire to go off the grid.

  Just as I began to wonder why I bothered, a man who called himself Verax showed up. Using a clever method I had not seen before, he sent me an encryption key, a recognition signal, and a method to verify both. It was like one of those old comic book advertisements: “If U Cn Rd Ths Msg . . .” Delighted, even vindicated, I found that I could. “I appreciate your concern for operational security, particularly in the digital environment,” Verax wrote in his next message. “Many journalists are still exceedingly weak on this topic, which leaves their interests and intentions an open book for sophisticated adversaries. . . . I’m told you’re already quite skilled in this regard.”

  That was not true, actually. I knew the basics. Verax taught me some of the finer points, and we began to talk.

  ONE

  PANDORA

  The in-box logged a message as I slept. Many hours passed before I checked. Probably should have kept away, but habit tugged. We had taken the channel dark last night. Not because we knew it was blown, but because we could not know. These email accounts were anonymous, encrypted, isolated from our everyday internet lives. Best I could tell, there was no way to lock them down tighter. That thought had reassured me once.

  It was the second half of May 2013. Nearly four months had passed since Laura Poitras, an independent filmmaker, reached out to me for advice about a confidential source. Verax, as I came to know him later, had brought her an enigmatic tip about U.S. government surveillance. Poitras and I teamed up to see what would come of it. The previous night, months of suspense had come to an end. Verax delivered. The evidence was here. His story was real, the risks no longer conjecture. The FBI and the NSA’s “Q Group,” which oversees internal security, were bound to devote sizable resources to this leak. For the first time in my career, I did not think it was out of the quest
ion that U.S. authorities would try to seize my notes and files. Without doubt we were about to become interesting to foreign intelligence services.

  Poitras and I resolved to meet again in two days. Anything that came up sooner would have to wait. That plan did not last the night. I logged on the next morning, expecting nothing. According to the time stamp, Poitras had fired off a note less than four hours after we parted. She could not have slept much. I hadn’t either, but the fog cleared when I saw her subject line. It was our private signal for “urgent.” The message, once decrypted, was succinct.

  I really need to show you something.

  You are going to want to see it.

  Odd. Very. Something to look at? After what we saw last night? Verax had sent a Top Secret, compartmented presentation from the National Security Agency, updated the previous month. Poitras and I stood over a small laptop screen past midnight, struggling with the jargon. The main points came through readily enough. Under the cover name PRISM, the NSA was siphoning data from tens of thousands of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook accounts, among others. Forty-one slides and eight thousand words of speaker’s notes laid out the legal rationale and operating details. If authentic—and it sure looked that way—this briefing offered something very rare: an authoritative account, in near real time, of intelligence operations on U.S. soil that spilled far beyond the bounds acknowledged in public.

  When we quit for the night, Poitras said she understood maybe 10 percent of it. I could not claim more than half. No shame in that. Journalists were not supposed to know all the answers. We were supposed to know how to find them, to test the evidence and look for more. Building a story might take time, but we had the cornerstone.

  So I thought. But something had startled Poitras, startled her enough to break email discipline. There was no use guessing. I found nothing to read between the lines. The news, I supposed, could be good or bad, but any surprise was unsettling at this stage. Surprise meant I did not know where we stood. For weeks, I had been mapping contingencies, thinking through likely paths and roadblocks in the next stage of reporting. I had to find additional sources, make contact without endangering them, authenticate the document, and look for context. There were all kinds of ways I could screw this up—exposing Verax, falling for a fake, misreading the text, disclosing something that caused inadvertent harm. If I had misdrawn my mental map, I might not see trouble coming.