 In 2013, Barton Gelman of the Washington Post started publishing stories about what he called the surveillance industrial state that were based on documents given to him by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, along with the work of filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald. Gelman's exposés laid bare an extensive and previously unacknowledged network by which the federal government systematically and illegally spied on American citizens and routinely circumvented checks on its power. Gelman has just published Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, which tells the story of his interactions with the whistleblower, bureaucrats, politicians, and the media as he helped reveal one of the biggest secrets in U.S. history. I spoke with Gelman about his new book and his earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning work detailing the ways in which Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others in the Bush administration exceeded constitutional limits in the name of prosecuting the war on terror. Barton Gelman, thanks for talking a reason. Pleasure to be here. Let's start by discussing the title of your book and, you know, in many ways the controlling metaphor for what you're talking about here, Dark Mirror. Explain the significance of that term. The idea comes down to this. We're living in a world that is akin to those police interrogation rooms where the watchers on the outside can see very clearly what's happening inside the room. The person inside is completely transparent to his observers, while at the same time that person inside the room can't see out. The mirror's opaque on that side. And we're all living inside that interrogation room in some ways because the government has built a surveillance machine that is capable of watching anyone and everyone at will. Before we get on to the meat of your book, you know, extend that a little bit. You know, it's obviously it's reminiscent, I mean, now we think of Black Mirror, you know, the British kind of social media critique show. But it's also the tell screen from 1984, which is both a in that it's both a mode of propaganda. You can never turn the screen off. It's in every living room and constantly muttering and humbling, you know, while also taking in stuff. You know, are we is the dark mirror different than a tell screen in that it's, you know, because it's the internet on some level that we are is I mean, it's our computer screen, right? We boot up every day and surf the web and communicate and live our lives online. And we're just feeding more information into the surveillance then, right? Yes, but I don't want to give the misimpression that the government is watching all of us all the time. It has set up a system that is capable of watching any of us any time and the way it collects in large volumes of information, it sweeps up many Americans in some of the programs that aim at foreigners. And once it sweeps us in, once our stuff is captured, the government tends to keep it. Right. And I mean, I guess we can get into this a little bit more, you know, the people that you talked at the NSA and at other intelligence gathering and law enforcement agencies are very quick to say, you know, we pick this stuff up, you know, it's in a big net. It's incidental. It's not our main function, and we're not going to look through that, but we want to keep it because it may make sense at some point to have those dots that we can kind of connect later. Right. I mean, the fundamental ultimate point that they make, and I had this conversation with for example, Rick Ledgett, who was deputy director of the NSA, said fundamentally, we're not interested in you. You're not that interesting to us. I understand that you're worried about it, but we're just not looking. And that is partly true and partly, I think, not the case. It is true that we're not the targets, typically, unless they get a FISA warrant, a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They're not surveilling Americans deliberately as the aim of their intelligence gathering, but they are sweeping us in. And for some purposes, they do use it. For example, the information that is collected from big US internet companies under a program called Prism gets poured into a giant bucket, and that's the American stuff as well as the other stuff. And my reporting found that for every target they collect, they're collecting 10 bystanders, many of those bystanders being Americans. The FBI routinely queries that database, routinely looks through. And so, for example, the NSA is not allowed by law to say, let me go get NICS communications. But if NICS communications are swept up in the mix, which is very well possible, the FBI can go into that bucket and say, let's see what you got on NIC. So they call it not targeting for original surveillance, but you can effectively target by looking into the collection of what's already been taken. Just as a side note, the book is a phenomenal read. It's almost novelistic in the best way possible as journalism. And you constantly come back to the notion, too, that metaphors really aren't that good. I mean, whether it's like a mirror or buckets or cylinders and things like that, and it's worth keeping in mind because we're really only getting towards what is actually going on. You know, talk about Prism. What did it do and or what is it doing? Is it still actually operational in the same way as you were describing it in 2013? Prism is still operational in the same way as 2013, as best anyone knows. My information isn't completely current, but there's been no suggestion that the government doesn't still value the program, which does produce valuable intelligence. And there's been no legislative effort with any serious backing. So explain in general or give the overview of how Prism operates. Prism is this. The government says, I want all the information you have about person X. Usually it would be in the form of an email address or, say, a Facebook identifier. And then one of the large U.S. internet companies, and they're all swept into it, whether it's Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, has to give over the information. So there may be gigabytes of data about any given person. You can imagine five-year history of your Gmail account. It could have documents, photos, many, many photos, many, many documents. Tens or hundreds of thousands of emails, all that stuff. The government can get it. Now, it was always true the government could get that stuff with an individual warrant. What Prism did secretly and without the knowledge of the American public was allow the NSA to decide for itself who it wanted to surveil this way and to do it in very large quantities. So on any given day in 2013, which was the last day I had access to the information, and it was growing exponentially, but at any given day, then there were 100,000 accounts on cover. 100,000 accounts that the NSA was getting everything in them. That's a lot of targets. And because for every account, you get an average of 10 bystanders. Now we're talking about a million bystanders that are swept into this collection. Yeah, this is, I mean, we can understand this better now because of COVID-19, right, or the way the coronavirus kind of, you know, there's an infection factor. So it's every one person who's there. It extends far outward, and you have a great section where you talk about hopping and how quickly, you know, a few people like, oh, we're only looking at a few people, but then we have to look at everybody around them and suddenly within a couple of jumps, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people or, you know, practically the entire globe. What, who are the people who are being targeted when you talk about the 100,000? Who are they? They're supposed to be foreigners, not located in the United States, and of interest on any of several grounds to US intelligence community. There's no probable cause. There's a reasonable belief that it's a foreigner who could produce valuable foreign intelligence. So it could be a terrorist, and that's what they like to talk about because there's an emotional appeal to terrorism that's an emotional appeal to going after terrorists. And it's true that targets suspected of terrorism are an important part of this program, but it's also foreign government officials, foreign corporate officials, people involved in weapons trade, all the usual range of things you would expect an intelligence agency to be interested in. So can you explain how the NSA is not supposed to be spying on American citizens, particularly or people in America? That's the province of a different intelligence operation. How do they, how do they end up, you know, kind of looking at people and things that are in the United States? Well, you used the word earlier, and it's a powerful word. It's called incidental collection. So incidental doesn't mean accidental or unforeseen or even undesirable. It just means that you were aiming for one person, and because of that, you swept in all the people that person communicates with or about or is in a chain. Let's suppose there's a foreign government official who's also interested in turtles or cooking or sports cars and is on a mailing list for people with that particular interest. All the people on that list are going to get swept in because they're in communication with him. And so all of a sudden you're sitting in Toledo, Ohio, and you're a car enthusiast, and your communications are now swept in because they're interested in the Deputy Foreign Minister of Latvia. Talk about muscular. That's another program that you detailed. What is that? Well, this is the spooky counterpart of Prism because with Prism, they go openly, in secret, talking to people who are cleared for classified information. They go to Google and say, please hand me everything you've got on Bart and Nick and 100,000 other people. In the muscular program, they do the collection overseas where the rules are a lot less strict, where there is no FISA court surveillance, that is to say supervision. Congressional committees get much, much less information about foreign operations. And in the muscular program, working with the GCHQ, which is the British counterpart of the NSA, our operators were breaking into and tapping the private data links that connect Google data centers all around the world. So you have to understand that if you're an American and you're sending an email from you to someone down the street, that email is probably going to end up in Singapore and Bogota because Google has giant data centers in both of those places and they distribute the load globally and they back up globally. And so just because the NSA collects overseas doesn't mean that it's not collecting on Americans and American stuff is there. The internet doesn't respect geographic boundaries. And so the NSA was breaking into these links. Google, for example, as other companies do, has thousands of miles of privately owned or privately leased fiber optic cable. These connect these gigantic data centers around the world and the NSA was breaking into those in order to not only to collect lawfully at home according to section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, but it was on purely executive authority, purely on the say so of the president, was breaking in without the knowledge of Google and taking whatever it liked. What is the disposition of, you go into this bit of Google, Yahoo, Apple, how do they feel about this? Because part of them, in what ways are they willing participants and in what ways are they kind of dragged into all of this? Well, it depends on the program and it also depends on the company and it also depends on whether you're talking about before or after the Snowden revelations. All of them went along because they were obliged by law to go along under the prison program. When they said, please hand over this data, here's our court order authorizing us to get whatever data we judge to be reasonable. Then they pretty much had to comply. They would make sure the order was reasonable in terms of its framing. They couldn't say give me the emails of everyone whose name begins with a B, but they had little choice but to cooperate. At a certain point they had to cooperate and they were not allowed to tell anybody what was requested. That was then annual. It remains true that these requests are classified. Only a few people at the company are allowed to know. They can't make public anything about those requests. That doesn't show up in their kind of annual transparency documents where they say this many requests were made of us and this is the type of information we gave out. That was highly contested and evolving, but not all the information makes its way into those transparency reports. If you don't mind, I'll just finish that answer. The companies went along with the prism collection because they had to. They didn't know about, until my story, they didn't know about the collection that was going overseas where their data center traffic was being broken into. They were quite outraged by that and that led to a series of actions that the companies took. This is sort of an extraordinary thing. American companies spending tens of millions of dollars to thwart their own government's surveillance programs. Were they successful in that? I think there was considerable success in that, but one of the huge impacts that Snowden had, and we could talk about this later, is that his disclosures led to decisions by many, many companies and eventually became almost standard on the web to encrypt their connections to your computer. Before Snowden, almost all the browsing you did, almost all the email you sent and received, your computer connected to some big server, whether it was in California or somewhere else, in the clear with an unencrypted line. Anyone along the path could just scoop it all in in high volume and the NSA did do that. Now the link to each computer is encrypted. You see the little padlock icon in your browser bar for secure sockets layers, which is the encryption method. That has thwarted high volume collection to a considerable extent. The NSA can still get anyone they want to if they decide to target that person individually, but they can't get everyone as easily anymore. So if we take it back a little bit to get to, because I want to kind of, you mentioned before Snowden or an after Snowden, I mean that's a huge kind of breakpoint in the way we talk about all of this stuff. The FISA courts were set up in the late 70s after, you know, really amazingly disturbing revelations where the most almost the most paranoid fantasies of, you know, right wingers and left wingers about government, the government ability or willingness to spy on just about anybody at any level at any way came out under the Rockefeller Commission and the church committee hearings and whatnot. FISA forced, first off, it made it clear that the NSA couldn't be doing stuff on on American citizens and people in in the country. By after the war on terror sort or after 9 11 walk us through how the Bush administration originally just kind of waved away restrictions on, you know, kind of limitations on things. Who was behind that and then how did it get to a point where the idea still though that you needed a FISA warrant for each target that you were going after where that that then became kind of a mass program where you just needed a warrant to say, we're going to be doing this kind of stuff. Right. So 9 11 happens and there's an understandable desire on the part of the US government to not be surprised again. And so there's a huge emphasis on renewing an expanding collection for intelligence purposes. And that's laudable. I mean, they they needed that information. You know, and if I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you know, one of the things that you make clear. And I think Snowden makes clear. And I know most of the people I know even in the most kind of anti surveillance say people, everybody recognizes the need for government intelligence like secret intelligence and all of that kind of stuff. And that's not a question of whether or not the government should be able to investigate people. It's it's really more what are what are the terms of that and how transparent are they and what are the limitations but continue. Right. I mean, and I completely agree with the transparency is the urgent thing here you can't have a society in which the boundaries of intelligence gathering vis a vis your own citizens are secret. Then the people aren't running the show. So what happened after 911 the best way to explain it is to take a metaphor or an image that Michael Hayden who is then the director of the NSA came up with. He said there's a Venn diagram. Right. Let's, you know, draw there's and there's there's three circles. One is here is everything that we would want to gather if we could. It's our wish list. The second circle is here is everything that we're technically capable of collecting. And then the third circle, he said, is this is what's lawful. This is what's legal under our current setup. And it's at the intersection of all three of those circles where we collect. And he gave that briefing to Dick Cheney, the vice president and Cheney looked at him and he said, just suppose you took that third circle away. Suppose you didn't have to worry about what's lawful. Tell me everything you could do that you're not already doing. And that was the genesis of four different domestic surveillance programs that came into being without legal authority. Without certainly without any explicit court authority or legislative authority in the first years after 911 and and the four were these. One was essentially prism, the content of internet communications. The word spoken, the images sent the documents, the video and so on. Another was the content of telephone calls listening in to the word spoken. And then for each of those two categories, telephone and internet, there was also metadata collection, which just means data about data. It's like the outside of the envelope, who it's addressed from or in a telephone call, when did they talk, for how long did they talk, what's the regular pattern of their conversations. And the people that they talk to, who do they talk to, contacts of contacts or contacts of contacts of contacts and doing big data network analysis. So those were the four programs. In 2004, there was a crisis because the Justice Department came to believe that at least one of those programs was unlawful and refused to sign off on the very expansive executive authority that was claimed by Cheney and his general counsel, David Addington. And that led to a gigantic showdown and very nearly led to mass resignations from the Justice Department, which was being led on an acting basis by Jim Comey at the time and Bush back down. There was a gradual movement after that toward regularizing these programs toward getting the FISA court to authorize them. And the FISA court made some remarkably broad findings. It agreed in litigation and decisions to positions taken by the Justice Department that were more aggressive and frankly more imaginative than anything that had come before that. And so, for example, the government had the authority under the Patriot Act, Section 215, to collect quote unquote business records that were relevant to an authorized investigation of terrorism. And the government came to the court and said, we believe that all records of everyone are relevant because we can use them for this sort of big data analysis. And the relevance is usually in court, it's a legal standard that limits what you can obtain. I can't as civil litigant go into court and say, I want the court to order that the other side produce all records it's ever had and also all the other records of all its competitors and everyone else in the country, just because I might find something important in there. Relevant to me is a confining condition. The court accepted this frankly outrageous argument that every phone call made by every American, whether it's local, national or international, should be collected up in terms of its metadata and they should be able to draw a gigantic social graph of all of our communications. And then what happened to limit certain types of, or what happened that then changed in the late Bush years and going into Obama? How were these rulings kind of changed or what happened that then gave rise to what ends up with the Snowden revelations? So at the end of the Bush years, there were several of these decisions in secret by the FISA court. Now remember that by design the FISA court only hears from one side, it only hears from the government. And it's classified so no one on the outside, not only no one can can brief or oppose the government argument at the time, but no one gets to read the opinion and say, that doesn't make any sense and analyze it. And so in 2007 and 2008, there was also legislation passed by Congress, the more important of which was the FISA Amendments Act, which gave the cover of legal authority to some of the programs. And some of them were never challenged in court because, A, people didn't know about them and B, they were taking place outside the court's authority. The FISA court does not have jurisdiction over intelligence operations that take place overseas that are ostensibly aimed at foreigners. And that's the wiggle room that gave the NSA the power and the practice of bringing in so much incidental communications that cover so many Americans. So explain or walk us through how Snowden got in touch with you originally. And what was your sense of him early on? Because this is, again, in a very serious way, I don't want to reduce your book or your work to kind of cloak and dagger stuff. But because I mean the content of it is so much more important than the telling. But the telling is interesting. How did Snowden contact you? Well, the cloak and dagger is important to the narrative because it really is a sort of real life spy story. And I had to learn techniques of concealment just in order to talk to Snowden. So I mean, when Snowden first appeared, and it was initially to Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, he was an anonymous individual named Virax, which I had to look up. It's Latin for truth teller. And by the way, it was meant to be a little bit of a contrast to Julian Assange who had at one point used the handle Mendax or Lyre. And he said he was a member of the intelligence community with a gigantic scoop about a scandal in terms of overreach of surveillance. And to be honest, my first reaction was, oh, no, not this again. Because if you're a reporter and especially a national security reporter, there is no end of conspiracies that come into your inbox. And most of them are cranks or they're fakers or they're sincere believers in something, but they don't understand it. And this was a lesson in humility for me because my first thought was that this was likely to be a false alarm. I almost told that to Laura Poitras, but I bit my tongue and heard her out. And I'm glad I did because every time we tested this Virax character and asked more questions, the answers came back more than plausible. And he had one habit which I found especially persuasive, and that is to say, I don't know. There were lots of questions we asked that he said, I'm not an expert in that or I don't have that information. I have this information. If you want, I can make some informed speculation, but it's only speculation. That's confidence building. As was the fluent way he spoke the language of intelligence, the language of network communications, the language of NSA programs, and also the way he sort of slipped into it without even really quite realizing that he had gone from English to jargon. That's common in people who work in closed systems and it's actually kind of hard to fake. So I had endless, I mean dozens of hours of communications with Snowden before I knew his name, just trying to establish his bona fides. Are you for real? Do you have any ground to know what you're talking about? And this is before I've seen any of his documents either. So far, all of this is about, I've got a secret that I'm going to tell you but not yet. He was meanwhile trying to establish my bona fides. Did he believe that I as a mainstream journalist would have the guts to publish a story if he gave it to me? Did he believe that the Washington Post was going to cave into pressure from the government to squelch this story? To me, those questions had obvious answers but they weren't obvious to him. Meanwhile, we're doing all this communication through these spooky channels. We're bouncing our communications all over the world to anonymize them. We're using encryption. We're using short-lived accounts and then switching to other accounts using burner computers and disguising their MAC addresses and their IP addresses and everything we could possibly do to try to basically sneak up on a surveillance machine without being surveilled. Would you talk a bit about, because you were working at the Century Foundation. You had been at the Washington Post. You were no longer there. And when you got this story and you realized that it was true, you also had a relationship with Time magazine. And you went to them with the opportunity for that to be the outlet. It didn't work out there. It did at the Washington Post. Could you discuss a little bit the difference of the receptions at those? These are two great legacy media kind of outlets. One was like, yeah, you know what? We're not going to go there. And the other one was, yeah, we're going with you. Well, the sad truth is that Time magazine, which is under new ownership now, but at the time it was part of the Time Warner Empire. And Time magazine did exactly what Snowden feared mainstream media would do. It didn't have to wait to cave into government pressure. It was afraid to touch the story of the first place. I mean, and to me, as a journalist, I was a columnist at Time for a while. I was like, wow, that explains why Time, in a profound way, no longer matters. Because it blinked when given the opportunity to pursue one of the most important stories. Certainly of the post-war era, certainly of the 21st century, the post-Cold War, but in American history, what do you think drove their lack of curiosity or their fear? Well, I should emphasize in fairness that I worked with and for some really great journalists who had all the right instincts. They wanted to go ahead. Sure. But the corporate bosses were thinking of a spin-off. They were going to get rid of Time magazine and the whole magazine division because it was a drag on their fabulous profits in, for example, the film and the theme park industry. So the corporate bosses were afraid of the litigation risk. They were afraid of the Espionage Act. They were afraid of the controversy that might affect regulatory decisions. They just sort of saw nothing in it for them to go forward like this. And they never said, I absolutely refuse to run this story. They simply told me that I would have to operate under rules in which, for example, I couldn't talk to the editors about my story because it was classified. And I would have to only talk to some outside law firm which had a cleared lawyer to tell me what was fit to print and what wasn't. And then I could talk about that. I mean, it was completely a non-star. I mean, it's kind of the difference and we'll get to the post in a second. But Time was no longer, or at least the time you were interacting with, was no longer primarily a journalism organization. It was something else. Well, you know, it was, but it was bound. Yeah. It was limited. So then you're, you know, one of the, one of the heroes of your book really is Marty Barron who has emerged at, you know, in multiple places as one of the great, you know, kind of stiff-spined, iron-spined, you know, journalist editors of, you know, the past decades. What was your experience at the post? My experience at the post was very different. Look, I had been at the Washington Post for 21 years. As you mentioned, I had left the post in 2010 and gone to work at the Century Foundation working on magazine and book projects. When I got this Snowden leak, I mean, first one document, and then 50,000 highly classified documents, I did not want to be freelance Bart trying to cope with this. I needed the legal cover and the resources and the partnerships of a large news organization to work with this. So after time, I went back to my old employer, the Washington Post. Marty Barron was relatively new as the editor. I had never met him. I knew him by reputation. He led the coverage in Boston of the, you know, Catholic Church child abuse scandal, which was a brave thing to do in Boston in particular, given the demographics there. He had a great reputation, but I didn't know him from Adam. And I called up an editor I did know at the post and said, hi, it's Bart. I need a meeting with the top boss right away. I can't tell you why, which did not really go over very well. So now you're like V-R-A-X kind of going. I've got the greatest story in the world, but I can't really tell you anything about it. Let me talk to you. Well, I didn't want to talk about it on the phone. I wanted to talk about it in person, and I wanted to talk about it with the man who could make a decision. There are various points that I don't know if you've seen it. I don't know if anybody watching or listening has, but they should. There's a great movie from the 70s called The Parallax View with Warren Beatty as an investigative reporter who's looking into the murder, the assassination of a senator. And he, you know, he comes off as a crazy person, but of course he's actually right about everything. But I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was likening you to Warren Beatty. I haven't seen it, but now I have to. You'll enjoy it very much. Yeah, I'm always happy to be likened to a movie star. Well, I did come off as a crazy person. I mean, there's a scene in the book in which I finally have gathered the lawyers and Marty Baron and a couple of his top leaders from the newsroom and we're in a windowless conference room and I ask everyone to please take their mobile phones and either remove the batteries or take them out of the room. Please hear it, tinfoil hats, secure them, yes. Yeah, I mean, I write in the book that they reacted as though I'd asked them to peel off their socks. It just made no sense to them. Well, you know, and this comes up a couple of times in the book, you know, this was at a moment when it wasn't clear if your cell phones could be worked operated remotely as listening devices and things like that and I can remember the first time I heard people talking about that. I was like, okay, I gotta, you know, there's a train I gotta catch to get as far away from the person telling me that is possible, but, you know, there it is. It turns out that that is true. The NSA has the capability remotely to turn on your microphone and you won't know it. And I just didn't know what I was up against, who I was up against at the time. I didn't expect the NSA to be doing rogue operations against an American journalist, but honestly, an authorized counterintelligence operation might have been legally available to them if they knew what was going on. And I also knew that as soon as foreign governments got wind that I had a lot of classified American documents that I would become interesting to them as well as sophisticated hackers who just wanted to look at the documents for fun or profit. So we did take extraordinary precautions and my introduction to Marty Barron is me telling this guy who's never met me that if we're gonna be able to work together he's gonna have to build a safe room, you know, get a big, heavy safe, remove the guts of computer networking hardware from the computers we use, master new forms of encryption, et cetera, et cetera. And I listened to myself talking and I thought he was gonna throw me out. They really did. You reminded me in those moments of, there's an episode of Seinfeld when George and Jerry are pitching a pilot to NBC and George just starts making categorical demands, you know, non-negotiable demands. I was like, this is the show and we're not gonna dumb it down for anything. But it works. I mean, you get the back. I was absolutely George in that scenario. But it worked. Marty said, okay, we can agree to those conditions. Let's talk about the story. So you, you know, in the book, one of the things, and it's clear, Snowden was, he was talking to different types of people and Laura Poitras, you know, a Academy Award-winning documentarian, but a very highly regarded filmmaker who had run afoul of the government with earlier work, particularly about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, Glenn Greenwald a little bit later on at The Guardian. You know, part of what he needed really in a lot of ways was somebody like you who is working in mainstream media. You know, that is also, you know, has a credibility that's something like The Guardian, the British Guardian was not necessarily going to bring. You, you are not uncritical of Edward Snowden. But in the book, you say that you trusted him. Yet there were a couple of times where he clearly had kind of padded his resume, so to speak. What, you know, what were the things where he overstated what he had actually done or what he had in his possession? And why did you trust him so much? Well, first of all, I trusted that I could verify the documents. And the documents were my primary source, not Snowden himself. I didn't rely on him to explain to me what the programs were. And I quoted him in very few stories and only about himself. As I said, he had earned my trust by cabining his answers to things that he knew about and telling me what he didn't know. And I was able to verify some of what he said. And the documents verified a lot of what he said. But there were times when he exaggerated. He wanted to make sure that I would believe him. He wanted to qualify himself. He had a sense that the jobs he had been assigned in the intelligence community did not comport with his abilities. He is one of the smartest people I've ever met. I mean, IQ is off the charts, self-educated and believed he was capable of far more than the jobs he was given. And so he did exaggerate those jobs. I mean, there's a point in one of his resumes, he talks about being a sort of a computer contractor at Fort Mead, which turned out to be a teenage job helping run a hobbyist website that was out of the basement of an apartment on Fort Mead, not working for the U.S. government. And then he also, he claimed that he had listened in on the gang of eight people doing immigration reform as well as members of the Supreme Court. That turned out to be an exaggeration as well. That's true. The biggest thing he ever told me that turned out to be untrue was that in order to prove that any analyst could listen in on anyone, he had deliberately breached the rules, listened to the eight senior-most leaders in Congress and also surveilled the justices of the Supreme Court. Turned out that that didn't happen. And I finally got him to admit it two years after the fact. But I never published it either because I needed backup and he never could give me the backup. So I'm honest in the book. I mean, I think I give a rounded picture of Snowden. Yeah, I think so too. In many ways I admire. And he has his human flaws. Now, you also talked to throughout the book, you mentioned this on a number of occasions, people like kind of rank and file employees at the NSA and other places. You say, you know, every time you looked, you found them scrupulously trying to comply with the letter of the law as well as in most cases, the spirit of the law. And yet they were involved in programs that just seemed to be off the charts in terms of, you know, if not being strictly illegal or unconstitutional, just really bad. And then you, when you talk to the leadership, you know, the James Clappers, the Keith Alexander's of the world, the Michael Haydn's, they're really squirrely about, you know, whether or not they should be bound by any rules or that you, I mean, you're an informed civilian, I'm an uninformed civilian relatively. Like we don't understand, we never could understand. So they don't really feel a need to be fully honest with us. Is that true? And then how do you put that all together to figure out, you know, where we should be heading with this kind of stuff? Well, first of all, in Michael Kinsley's great phrase, sometimes the scandal is what's legal. You could be following the letter of the law and it's interpreted secretly in such a way that it can do remarkable things, remarkable things that the American public, if it knew about them, would not approve. But no one ever said it was illegal because there was no one there to challenge it in court because it was a secret or because the Foreign Intelligence Court only heard from the government. So there was a great deal that was legal as it was then interpreted. Some of it, Congress has since made illegal and some of it, when it finally, because of Snowden, got heard by a regular Title III of the Constitution Federal Court, a judge found to be unconstitutional. What was the biggest thing that was, you know, that is not happening now because of the Snowden revelations? The biggest thing is the collection of all those telephone records of all the Americans. That program not only was found to be of dubious constitutional validity, court's split on that, but Congress changed the program and effectively outlawed it. And not only that, but even the way that it was eventually allowed to continue, the NSA decided was not worth doing because it had not produced much of anything. That was the great metadata tutorial, right, of 2013 and 14, I guess. That's when a lot of us first heard the term metadata and began to understand its power. Yeah. What were the stories you chose not to tell? I mean, because this says you have, you know, an almost infinite amount of material, but you talk about this, as does Portress and Greenwald, you didn't tell everything there. You didn't publish everything. And there's, I think, you know, you had mentioned Julian Assange before. One of the things that many people hold up, they hold Snowden in higher regard because he went to journalists who then were discriminant in what they published. What are, how did you make the decision of this is a story we need to bring out to the public and this is something that we're not going to pursue? Well, first of all, there are a lot of things in the archive that just aren't interesting as news stories. They don't raise important public policy questions. They don't raise questions of boundaries. There's nothing to do with corruption or overreach or wasteful spending or anything that's legally controversial. And so just giving out technical information about how the NSA does its job, if you believe in the value of intelligence at all, it's just nothing but harm. It's not a close call. There are other cases where the story would be significant. I mean, it's noteworthy news. But if you tell the story, you're going to immediately blow an operation that's productive against someone who just about anyone would acknowledge is a legitimate adversary hostile to this nation's interests. So let's suppose they find specific evidence of a breach of a nuclear weapons treaty in some country. And you say they found out about this breach by the following means. Well, they're not going to have that means anymore. The bad actor, the adversary, is going to learn how to conceal. And those are stories that I wasn't interested in publishing. I mean, so they could be fantastic, sensational stories. I mean, I can't really say what the stories were that I held back. So I've come up with a sort of a fanciful... So some of them are boring and not interesting, and others are too big to really reveal? Well, others get into very specific targets and very specific channels of surveillance. I mean, here's my fanciful illustration. Let's suppose that I find out one day that the NSA has invented mind-reading earrings and has placed them on the mistress of the Emperor of Mars. And by this means has detected the plans to invade the Earth and thwarted it. You would say, holy moly, that's one of the stories of the century. That's humongous. And a reader would read the story and say, wow, that's a big deal. I'm sure glad that they stopped that plot. And now, you son of a bitch, they can't stop the next one because you just told everyone how they did it. On the other hand, if the NSA produced mind-reading technology, that would be a fairly big and important thing to debate because it has pretty significant civil liberties implications as well. So you might not talk about the earrings of the Emperor's mistress on Mars, but you might want to say the NSA is developing mind-reading technology and it raises all these questions and it's being done in secret. I'm also worried if we can get to Mars when we're still wearing earrings. I don't know. It seems like uneven progress. I need to work on that. In a few minutes left, I want to ask a couple of questions about the continuity of the willingness of the intelligence community to kind of push and circumvent and hide and obscure and obfuscate from the public. We are taught to believe that George W. Bush was awful in a particular way. Some of us think Obama was awful in a particular way. Many of us believe Donald Trump is awful, yet more awful in different ways. Is there a continuity, though, among people in the intelligence community that Obama, and you have one of his advisors saying, we would be, and Obama said this actually when the Snowden stuff came out, like, oh, I welcome a conversation about surveillance and national security and all of that kind of stuff, but it never seems to happen unless somebody pushes it from the outside. Is it safe to say that there's a logic to the intelligence community that runs cleanly through whatever administration, whether they're liberal or conservative, whether they're Democratic or Republican, and they're just going to do what they're going to do or get away with as much as possible. Hayden has that metaphor about dirtying the lines, like really working the line that's out of bounds. Is there a continuity there that escapes any kind of partisanship that's meaningful? I think there is a continuity. The continuity is, first of all, the intelligence community wants to protect the country and wants to obtain the information that the president and the president's people say they need. I need to know what the economic plans are in China. I need to know what the real fallback negotiating position is of this rival in a set of bilateral or multilateral talks. I need to get to yes, so tell me what he's really willing to give up. There's a whole long list of literally thousands of items of interest that guides intelligence community behavior, and they also know that there is zero tolerance for failure, that if you miss something big, another 9-11 or something, even as relatively small as one guy with explosives in his shoe, getting it on an airplane, you're going to be blamed. Of course, they want to use every tool they could possibly get. Of course, they are going to push the rules. Hayden's image was that he wants to play the game with chocolate as cleats. He wants to be right on that line. If you're allowed to define in secret where the line is, it might not be a line that others would accept or that outsiders would accept. There's a continuity in that. That's why institutional incentives are toward more intelligence gathering and more secrecy. Can I ask, a presidential election is essentially between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. You asked a lot of the former heads of intelligence services, are you comfortable that Donald Trump is now getting to call the shots given the way that you yourselves operated in many gray, if not absolutely black areas? How did they respond to that? Then also, Joe Biden was vice president under Barack Obama, who was really bad on journalists who were trying to expose the national surveillance state and who was a faker, a knock-off skater on a lot of what was going on in his watch. How did people respond about the Donald Trump question? Do you think, is Joe Biden an apostle of transparency in any meaningful way? That's interesting questions. Well, first of all, with regard to Trump, you have to rewind a little bit. When Snowden raised the question whether we could trust government with these enormous powers, members of the intelligence community thought that was obvious. They trusted themselves. They trusted each other. They trusted the rules. They knew that their actual motives were to protect the country, and so they thought, why would anybody challenge this? When they look at the same programs, under the auspices of Donald Trump, someone who is no respecter of rules or traditions, someone who can't be relied on to tell the truth, I mean, can be relied on to lie every day of his presidency, they're much less sanguine about the government accumulating this enormous machinery of surveillance that is subject to horrific potential abuse. I mean, we're living in a world where, within living memory, we had J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon and flatly illegal surveillance programs, and those things could return. So they're surprisingly thoughtful, I think. I'm not surprised they're thoughtful. They're surprisingly willing to make concessions about their doubts about programs they had taken for granted for their whole careers, and I have several long scenes in the book of conversation with Jim Clapper, who was the Director of National Intelligence, who shows fresh doubts in the book about those programs. Joe Biden, no, he's not been an apostle of transparency in the national security world. He was a strong backer of the prosecution of whistleblowers and leakers in the Obama administration, and there were more prosecutions with charges of espionage against people who talked to journalists during the Obama administration than in all previous administrations combined, which had a chilling effect on national security reporting. At the same time, you can't claim that they shut down national security reporting or anything like that because, to be honest, in the time since 9-11, there have been more huge revelations about secret programs than at any other time in journalistic history. Mark Elman, thank you so much for talking to reason. The book is dark mirror, read it with the lights on. Thanks, Mark Elman. Thank you very much. Pleasure being here.