Dark Mirror by Barton Gellman *** (of 4)

A super provocative book, written by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, that is a surprisingly poor read. Gellman was one of three reporters to receive the information Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Administration and dumped in their laps on his way out of the United States. To explain their significance, Gellman describes how much  digital surveillance the United States is capable of. By extension it is evident that rogue hackers and other countries around the world (Russia, North Korea, Iran, Israel, China) are waging vicious and secret attacks upon one another's computer systems.

So if you begin with the premise that every computer system, and hence every office, school, home, military, weapons system, electrical grid, medical facility, communications network, transportation system, etc., is vulnerable, you can recognize how high the stakes are. Gellman than explains that spycraft in the digital age is simply updated, and highly technological, cloning of old fashioned spying. Government agencies penetrate the communications of their enemies. They plant bugs and misinformation. They pose as friends, sneak into one another's networks and hard drives under cover of darkness and pseudonyms. Some work as double agents. They work both offensively as saboteurs and defensively to try to uncover moles and upcoming attacks before they occur.

The job of the NSA is to protect America from devastating attacks on our portion of the internet. To do so, as Snowden has pointed out, they have the ability to monitor every digital transaction on the planet. They can track a person's whereabouts from the pings their phones send to towers. Anywhere. They can dip into digital rivers of emails, phone calls, bank transfers, zoom meet-ups, or keystrokes of any computer connected to the web. Presumably, the NSA also engages in offensive actions, in the name of protecting the homeland.

Two big questions arise. The first is that the volume of digital information traveling around the globe is an unimaginably large ocean and NSA is tasked with developing algorithms for sampling, storing, and updating data in real time in hopes of finding connections between say a bank transfer in South Africa, a text from a North Korean, a hacker in Turkey, and an American corporation with a vulnerable server. It's like locating a few cells of algae in the Atlantic during a storm. 

What concerns Gellman, however, even more than the data management problem is that US law states that American surveillance agencies may not spy on US citizens. Snowden made clear that the NSA does not always abide by that law. The NSA argues that sometimes their analysis leads to US citizens, there are oversights in place, a secret court has to approve their actions before they spy on an American, and NSA is comprised of patriots charged with protecting Americans from terrorists. To which Gellman counter argues that the history and ability of American spy agencies to abide by either the laws of the land or laws of morality is far from pristine. 

While Gellman's libertarian cry to protect American privacy at all costs is well-founded, his book was published before the depth and breadth of American-grown terrorists was finally taken seriously, witness the attack on the U.S. Capitol. That and the problem of a book that wanders aimlessly, drones to the point of ranting, and fails to carry a narrative thread from one chapter to the next, or even, from the beginning of a chapter to its end, leaves a lot of work to the reader to do their own job of dipping a ladle into the torrent of information Gellman has provided in order to make a personal algorithm for detection.