Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Gellman (Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency) delivers an eloquent behind-the-scenes account of his reporting on NSA contractor Edward Snowden's leak of top-secret U.S. intelligence documents in 2013. Introduced to Snowden (at that point known only by the code name Verax) by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, Gellman first had to convince Snowden of the value of working with a "card-carrying member of the mainstream media," then keep a massive cache of classified documents from falling into the hands of foreign intelligence agents while publishing excerpts and analysis in the Washington Post. By revealing that the NSA was engaged in "mass domestic surveillance," Snowden did "substantially more good than harm," Gellman writes, though he gives space in the book to dissenting opinions from an array of national security officials. Gellman also describes some of his personal cybersecurity measures, hints at the secrets he withheld from publication, explores the ramifications of Snowden's leaks in the Trump era, and settles scores with Glenn Greenwald, who broke the first story on the matter. Enriching the high-level technical and legal analysis with a sharp sense of humor, Gellman presents an exhaustive study of intelligence gathering in the digital age. Even readers who have followed the Snowden story closely will learn something new. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency (May).
Guardian Review
In January 2013, the documentary film-maker Laura Poitras asked Barton Gellman if he wanted to grab a coffee. The venue was New York. Poitras told Gellman - a former Washington Post reporter - that a few days earlier a mysterious source had been in touch with her. The person claimed to be from the US spy community. He had news: the NSA or National Security Agency - America's foremost signals intelligence outfit - had built an unprecedented surveillance machine. It was secretly hoovering up data from hundreds of millions of people. The implications were terrifying. The correspondent said he could supply documents. This sounded promising, but how could one be sure? Over the next few months Gellman held a series of encrypted chats with this strange informant, code name Verax. Verax was sizing up Gellman for a job of historic proportions, it turned out. He was to be co-recipient of a trove of ultra-secret national security files. Dark Mirror is Gellman's account of his interactions with Edward Snowden - a series of lively exchanges, fallings out and making ups. It is a fine and deeply considered portrait of the US-dominated 21st-century surveillance state. Snowden's story has already been told in books, a film and a play. The whistleblower's own memoir Permanent Record, written from Moscow, was published in September. Gellman has waited seven years to give his version. He has spent the time well - delving into some of the more abstruse programmes from the Snowden archive, and talking to sources from the tech and security worlds. Dark Mirror doesn't alter what we have known since 2013: that the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ routinely sweep up virtually all of our communications. But it does provide new and scary technical detail. The original documents - published by the Guardian and the Washington Post - revealed that the NSA claims backdoor access into the servers of Google and other social media companies, and grabs phone records. Privacy advocates call this spying; GCHQ disagrees. Yes, it collects our metadata in bulk. But, it adds, it doesn't examine it without proper legal cause. Gellman argues that the NSA has gone so far as to make this distinction meaningless. The agency has constructed a live social graph of who speaks to whom. This includes not just terrorists but everybody. This database is constantly updated. And is precomputed. That means it is ready to yield up the intimacies of a person's life "at the touch of a button", Gellman writes - romantic, professional, political. The dark mirror is a metaphor for the modern surveillance state: the security agencies can't be seen, we can. This massive expansion of spying capability took place in the years after 9/11. Until Snowden came along - giving material to Poitras, Gellman and the then Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald - citizens had no idea of the scale of this operation, or its civic implications. The Snowden who emerges from these pages is neither a hero nor a traitor. Gellman sketches him as "fine company, funny and profane" with a "nimble mind and eclectic interests". He can also be "stubborn, self-important and a scold". Gellman sees his role as that of a curious journalist, rather than advocate. Snowden isn't a Russian asset, he concludes, but may well have damaged national security - a view Snowden rejects. The most enthralling chapters cover the race to get the story out. Gellman had left the Post in 2010 and briefly contemplated going to a different paper. There are tense meetings with Post executives and lawyers. When he tells colleagues to get rid of their mobile phones several react as if they've been told "to peel off their socks". Publication was made fraught by the fact that Snowden had left his NSA contractor job in Hawaii and fled to Hong Kong. He invited Poitras and Gellman to join him there. After agonising, Gellman decided not to go. This was the wrong call; he writes with honesty about his fear of arrest and prosecution. In June Poitras, Greenwald and the Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill interviewed Snowden in his Hong Kong hotel room. Gellman is frank about the pressures of taking on the Obama administration. Someone tried to hack his iPhone and laptops. He bought a safe for his New York apartment, rode the subway using burner phones. All this had a cost in terms of "time, mental energy and emotional equilibrium", he writes. Yet his paranoia was justified. Foreign intelligence services sought to get their hands on the leak. A Russian emailed to ask if Gellman might share a copy of the NSA's black budget. Gellman's colleague Ashkan Soltani received multiple approaches from "hot" young women via the dating service OKCupid; their profiles subsequently vanished. When Gellman visited Snowden in Moscow in late 2013, he took elaborate precautions. For a while after the Snowden publications, Gellman's top intelligence contacts snubbed him. This hostility ended once Donald Trump became president, and declared war on his own intelligence operatives. Dark Mirror brings down the curtain with Snowden stuck in Moscow, apparently content with his lot. He is, Gellman writes, an "indoor cat", who considers his mission accomplished. There is little prospect of Snowden returning to the US, where he faces espionage charges. The most consequential whistleblower of our times does not regret his costly moment of truth-telling.
Kirkus Review
A three-time Pulitzer winner digs deep into "the surveillance state that rose up after [9/11], when the U.S. government came to believe it could not spy on enemies without turning its gaze on Americans as well. In 2010, Gellman left the investigative team of the Washington Post, where he had developed journalistic expertise in national security issues and topics related to surveillance and digital encryption. By 2013, as he was figuring out his career as a freelance author, his life changed dramatically: He was visited by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who had been approached by a then-anonymous whistleblower with alleged access to evidence of surveillance conducted illegally on American citizens by federal government agencies. Gellman's masterful narrative proceeds along two primary tracks. One relates the life story of the whistleblower, the now-famous Edward Snowden. The other is a primer about investigative journalism regarding one of the highest-risk exposés in U.S. history. As the author unspools his own saga, he also delivers an endlessly insightful narrative about the practice of investigative journalism, a book that deserves its place alongside All the President's Men, Five Days at Memorial, Nickel and Dimed, and other classics of the genre. Gellman sets both skillful narrative tracks within the vital context of how a panicky network of federal government officials asserted their authority to break seemingly any privacy law or regulation in the wake of 9/11. The author does not view his role as advocate or dissenter. Rather, throughout the book, he sees his mission as informing all readers about the extent of government overreach into private lives. "The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm," writes Gellman, "even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence." Explaining the illegal government surveillance requires cutting through a mountain of technological jargon, a task the author handles expertly. A riveting, timely book sure to be one of the most significant of the year. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy-winning journalist who was one of three recipients of hundreds of thousands of leaked NSA documents from Edward Snowden. Many readers will be familiar with this story of Snowden's security breach and the resulting fallout once the depth of government surveillance of American citizens was revealed. In Dark Mirror, Gellman provides new insights to this saga based on his own research and reflection. He explores his complex relationship with Snowden and also answers questions like "Why did Snowden choose me?", "Why did the government try to stop my stories?", and more. Foremost a journalist, Gellman delivers a compelling story while recounting difficult predicaments and behind-the-scenes events. He takes a deep dive into the surveillance state while recalling being subjected to government investigations, legal pressures, and threats from foreign agencies determined to steal his files. Readers will be drawn into the conversational style of the book. It will be of interest to conspiracy theorist, historians, those interested in technology and surveillance, and readers looking for a balanced view of this notorious government leak.
Library Journal Review
In this latest work, Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist and author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, describes his experience being among the first to report Edward Snowden's 2013 massive leak of National Security Agency (NSA) programs and methods; he now provides a thorough overview of the circumstances and consequences of that event. One doesn't have to necessarily agree with Gellman's premise that Snowden's exposure "did more good than harm" in order to find this account of the ensuing legal and ethical questions surrounding NSA's counterintelligence efforts to be an engaging one. Based on several firsthand conversations with Snowden, this book also sheds insight into the history of surveillance and the NSA itself, with interviews from former NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, along with others who either agreed or disagreed with Snowden's decision. Occasional NSA vocabulary throughout doesn't detract from the narrative. VERDICT Gellman effectively details the scope and ambition of the NSA, and has written a well-documented account on the far-reaching impact of U.S. domestic surveillance and the resulting intrusions of privacy; highly recommended both for general readers and those with an interest in national security.--Zachary Irwin, formerly with Penn State Behrend