Dark Mirror retells the Edward Snowden story from a journalist's viewpoint

📚 Finished reading Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman.

This is a 2020 re-telling of the (in)famous story of Edward Snowden and the leaks of NSA material he provided that made real the degree and methods of US government spying on its own citizens, as well as the rest of us.

This was where we learned the details of the NSA’s easy access to and storage of your email, photos, messages, your physical location via mobile phone cell towers, as well as all sorts of other extremely dystopian, extremely abusable and potentially illegal material.

Remember PRISM et al? As revealed to us by a trove of horribly-designed top secret powerpoints.

The author here, Gellman, is one of the journalists that originally worked on reporting the story after Snowden approached him, at first under his covert identity as “Verax”.

Whilst I’ve read countless articles over the years as well as Snowden’s autobiography, I very much appreciated the tale from the journalist’s point of view. Understanding the process of the approach, Gellman’s efforts to understand whether he was for real or simply an internet weirdo, as well as how he thought about the tension between reporting extremely important truths vs revealing state secrets that were potentially of benefit to the US’s enemies provides a vantage point distinct from Snowden’s own. Gellman also had to consider his own safety, threats of both legal action and having his own computer targeted for hacking included. After all Gellman has seen, and stored, documents most of us will probably never see even after the main revelations have been reported on.

Whilst the book is perfectly readable by someone with no interest in or knowledge about tech, I did enjoy him providing a handful of the Linux commands he used to explore the vast amounts of files in the leak.

He presents Snowden as a complex character. Often people either believe he’s a white-knight hero striking back against the illegal acts of his government, or a traitorous evil-doer who hates America. Being human, he clearly isn’t entirely either. There was plenty of tension and uncertainty between the parties involved at times. I personally lean towards the hero side. Reading this book provided an important reminder that if you truly want your data to remain private, unfortunately it is incumbent on you to figure out the appropriate tools and services that will present the most challenge to any wannabe spies, state or otherwise.

Of course most of us will not become specific targets of the state, but the point of the revelations was that that doesn’t matter. They’re collecting and your information anyway and running analysis over vast swathes of it. I am especially uncomfortable about that given the nature of some of the world’s governments at present.