Beginning in 2013, they began working together to determine whether a contact reaching out to them, and his alleged cache of top-secret documents, were legitimate. He went by the name "Verax", Latin for speaker of truth. Early on Gellman wonders,
Was her source the whistleblower he claimed to be? A fabricator who used public records to feign inside knowledge? A real intelligence analyst peddling fake intrigue? A half-informed official who misread something benign?
Gellman and Snowden didn't hit it off right away, as Snowden was mistrustful of his MSM credentials, which he felt would lead to journalistic compromise and leave Snowden stranded with his story not properly told to the public (making a return to America impossible without facing Espionage charges.) Snowden wants to work with adversarial "voices".
Gellman mentions how Snowden had been reaching out to Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald. "Months of effort, however, had failed to elicit a reply from Greenwald," writes Gellman, "who disregarded emails from Verax and a how-to video on encryption." Thus begins Gellman's ambivalence towards the personality that Greenwald is, in his militant advocacy for Constitutional integrity in government and his concomitant commitment to in-your-face spotlighting of congressional and presidential abuses.
It's an amusing tension returned to several times. Greenwald has been especially effective highlighting the abuse of the pocket-writs called executive orders that Greenwald warned, before Trump arrived, could be catastrophic in the wrong exec's hands. Uh-oh. But for all his genius, Gellman doesn't seem to like Greenwald. He seems to be a bit of Luddite, slow to adopt encryption, and, Gellman thinks, a bit of a backstabber and a primadonald. It helps the reader to see such friction between two prize-winning journalists.
Gellman is not especially fond of Snowden when he meets him either. He's been informed of Snowden's personality from reading old forum posts Snowden made as TheTrueHOOHA on the Ars Technica website. He reads: "blended show-offy erudition, teenage irony, righteous anger, generous advice, and orthodox libertarian bromides". And even reading Snowden's memoir you can feel elements of that sort of vibe coming from Snowden. But there's more to Snowden than Gellman seems to suggest; perhaps he's nodding to the need to seem balanced.
For one thing, Snowden has a devilish sense of humor. Gellman misses out on some of the revealing anecdotal information Snowden offers up in his memoir. Snowden comes from Mayflower stock; his forebears fought in the Revolutionary Wars, and afterward "abolished their family's practice of slavery, freeing their two hundred African slaves nearly a full century before the Civil War". Gellman fails to consider the place of that sale or government "expropriation" (Snowden suggests), and how that legacy might have informed his whistleblowing when he sees the Constitution at risk. Gellman seems to miss the supreme irony of knowing that the headquarters of the NSA was built right there where that slave plantation used to be. Pass the fuckin' bong.
As egregious a violation of the Bill of Rights that the NSA's STELLARWIND program was, using sneaky backdoor tactics to get around the limits imposed by their agency mandate ("incidentally" gathering up the data of Americans in their cyber trawls of potential foreign "enemies" numbering in the millions), another program, PRISM, went even further, and gives the lie to alibi that such trawls are anything but criminal and totalitarian in intention. Gellman writes,
In film and fiction, the NSA mostly listened in on telephone calls. PRISM had capabilities far beyond that... NSA analysts could not only review stored account information but also dial in and record live "audio, video, chat, and file transfers". Analysts could ask for instant notifications when their targets logged on to Hotmail or AOL or Yahoo Messenger.
And with keystroke exploits thrown in, "They can literally watch your thoughts form as you type," Snowden told Gellman.
Ultimately, as Gellman alluded to earlier, it's all about the power. In his chompy sit-down interviews with the likes of Michael Hayden and James Clapper, and other apologists for benign totalitarianism, Gellman makes it clear that these men see no room for oversight, and can't or won't comprehend the ethical and constitutional limitations to what they are doing. They just want us to trust them and narrow-visioned patriotism. This turned Snowden off to a career of public service (in which he was following in the footsteps of his deep-state parents). In his memoir, he describes his in-office participation in LOVEINT --
in which analysts used the agency's programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection-reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online.
If you're sensitive and thoughtful, and still can't trust yourself around such technology, then whom can you trust?
Well, ultimately, Gellman
and Snowden don't trust and reject the power argument -- that because we have
such technology at our disposal we must use it, the capability of knowing what
everybody's up to (except the Bastards in power, of course). We see the Brennans, Clappers, Haydens,
Bushes, Obamas and Trumps just lie about their excesses. They conjure up a world of enemies -- for the
sake of using dreadful technology without concern for privacy or
democracy. A fascist drift into a world
of dystopian psychotronic nightmares ruled by algorithmically-generated
tailored gargoyles intent on turning us into things. Dots. And ultimately, Dots. Right inside our heads.
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