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Mirror, Mirror on the World Who's the Darkest of Them All?

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This all sounds hokey and hoochy and maybe even a little hallucinogenic. But think about it, reader. Recently, I was reading (and reviewing) a book on consciousness by Philip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, wherein he leads the reader toward a vision not-so-splendid:

[Integrated Information Theory] predicts that if the growth of internet-based connectivity ever resulted in the amount of integrated information in society surpassing the amount of integrated information in a human brain, then not only would society become conscious but human brains would be "absorbed" into that higher form of consciousness. Brains would cease to be conscious in their own right and would instead become mere cogs in the mega-conscious entity that is the society including its internet-based connectivity.

Scary, true stuff in theory. But here's the big question, as it approaches: Who's in charge? Time to re-read your dogma-eared copy of The Portable Marx.

We need sure-footed Sherpas for the Himalayas of heaped-up sh*t ahead. And that's what Bart Gellman proposes to be in his new book, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State. Who's in charge? The worry is built right into the title. We live now in a world divided by a pane of tinted glass behind which unseeable (but sensed) protectors of our Way of Life (whatever that means this week), without our permission, watch and store all of our activity -- Internet and Mobile -- as if we were little more than data points requiring constant scrutiny for signs of terrorism, -vertently or in-, and every dot-person we connect to will go into a special database when we visit CounterPunch magazine. (Too late, buy your buds a Bud and sheepishly apologize. They'll smile, with revelations of their own, raising the ante: Hustler. Douche'! now you're in the Raunch database.)

Another question that comes up while reading Gellman's book is the question of why the book now? Sad to say, it's almost nine years since Snowden spilled the beans on what the Bastards are up to, and while his brilliant memoir last year served to plump up a thinking man's pillow to sleep on, nobody seems to give a sh*t any more, again -- a default position, it seems, in the postmod age. But Gellman seems unquieted by such indifference and is providing a long-overdue, and welcome, account of what makes Snowden run -- from the point of view of a self-described mainstream journalist (he's 'free' now, after many years at WaPo, where darkness has fallen on democracy).

I found it quite valuable for him to page-perform the political pressures and legal issues an MSMer was up against as he worked alone, and with journalistic rogues and renegades, such as Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and even Julian Assange. Maybe Gellman was inspired by the film, Official Secrets, which features the hand-wringing of journos at the Observer in London as they report on a whistleblower's leak (Katherine Gunn) proving the NSA's attempts to get the GCHQ to extract kompromat from members of the UN Security Council in the lead-up to the vote on going to war with Iraq.

It's good to know what struggles some newsroom journos go through to report on abuses by our elected political governors. If nothing else, such a struggle is unexpectedly uplifting to witness in an era when reporters are often likened to stenographers. The film played out the dramatic tension that exists between the public's right to know and the government's need for secrecy, ostensibly in order to protect its citizens from harm, which is what Gellman is interested in examining when he looks back at his meetings with Edward Snowden in 2013 and thereafter.

A key moment in all this wonderment came in 2004, just before the November presidential election. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote a blockbuster piece on mass surveillance in America for the New York Times that their Editorial Editor, Bill Keller, quashed, expressing, according to Risen later, a desire to avoid being an October Surprise for the upcoming election. Risen knocked back Keller's argument, writing in the Intercept, "I pointed out that if he decided not to run the story before the election, that would also have an impact, but he seemed to ignore my comment." Mass surveillance is not the same as some pol's unwanted hand down a woman's panties -- revealed just before the election -- it's potentially a clear and present danger to democratic values; voters should've been allowed to factor in Bush's surveillance.

In the piece, finally published in the Times more than a year later, in 2005, and only after Risen had informed them that he would be including the story in his upcoming book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, Ris and Lichtblau describe how the Bush administration,

Under four collection programs overseen by Vice President Cheney, the NSA and FBI began wide-ranging surveillance of internet and telephone communications within the United States.

It was unknown to the public; they had no idea that a secret program, known as STELLARWIND, existed, and that Bush authorized the comprehensive collection of all American communications without any kind of warrant, and with the full cooperation of telephone and internet providers.

The program raises many questions, among them, "Are citizens equipped to hold their government accountable?" writes Gellman. And, Risen adds that, sadly for democracy, the decision to exclude the piece may have come as a result of the personal friendship between NSA Director Michael Hayden and Philip Taubman, associate editor for national-security issues at the Times: "Keller now says that Taubman's relationship with Hayden played an important role in the decision to not run the story." The NSA (Michael Hayden) and FBI (Robert Mueller) were in on this illegal activity. Snowden, Risen and Gellman all point out that this information on STELLARWIND would have come nine years before Snowden's revelations, and, all agree, that the story's suppression affected his later decision on how to publicize the information.

An unhappy Risen recalls that "the impact of the story was immediate and explosive. George W. Bush was forced to confirm the existence of the program, even as he called the leak of information about it a 'shameful act'." Federal agents were unleashed to hunt down the hoodoo everythere. Congress was professionally "outraged" that the Bush administration would have the chutzzies to hide such a program; they called investigations (later, they helped pass legislation that retroactively legalized Bush's executive order and passed immunity to the telecoms for their role in the extra-constitutional activity). Bush justified his "terrorist surveillance program", using Unitary Executive theory as his basis.

Turns out, it would have been a critical issue in the presidential campaign. As Snowden put it, "Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have changed the course of the 2004 election." (Hurts even more, when you consider that Greg Palast, in his new book, How Trump Stole 2020, shows that John Kerry was robbed of the presidency by vote manipulation.)

This is a lot of cyber ink spilled on the failings of the New York Times in October 2004 and Snowden's revelations later -- a long time ago -- "but Dark Mirror is not a book about Snowden, or not only that," writes Gellman. "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." He adds, "At its core this is a book about power."

Gellman first heard of Snowden through independent filmmaker Laura Poitras. He writes that "three days before Christmas 2010, she turned up unannounced at my office, just off Washington Square." He had admired her film, My Country, My Country, which traced the failed attempt to install democracy under U.S. occupation in Iraq. She would later go on to win an Oscar for the documentary of her 2013 encounter with Snowden in Hong Kong, called CitizenFour.

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John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelance journalist and poet currently residing in Oceania.

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