Book Reviews

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State

Barton Gellman

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The people charged with keeping us safe from terrorists and other enemies complain that they have the nearly impossible task of hunting for a needle in a haystack: a single bad guy in a world with billions of people.

But what if, instead of searching for a single needle, they could just grab the entire haystack?

The haystack in this case is the data created by cell phones, internet searches, and other electronic communications. Not just the communications of the bad guy, but of everybody.

As Barton Gellman shows in his thoughtful and engaging new book Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, collecting the entire haystack was the goal of U.S. intelligence, a goal that might have been a good military strategy but also threatened American ideals of privacy and the rule of law.

The book is part detective story, part reporter’s handbook on how to cover a dangerous and sensitive topic, and part explainer on government surveillance. The two main characters are the author, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, and Edward Snowden, a former member of the surveillance state who now lives in Russia to avoid U.S. prosecution for revealing highly classified secrets.

Gellman and Snowden have chosen two different ways to live their professional lives, one as a reporter trying to explain the U.S. government’s surveillance programs, and the other as a whistleblower who thinks the system has been abused and could easily be turned against American citizens. Gellman, who I know from many years ago when we both were reporters in Washington, DC, is outgoing and has chased stories around the world, while Snowden spends every waking minute online, mostly alone, and calls himself a “house cat.”

They do share an intensity of purpose, a precision over the details, a belief in the importance of their work, the ability to be a “giant pain in the ass,” and the enduring wrath of members of the intelligence community who think they did far more harm than good by exposing global surveillance programs.

The dramatic part of the narrative is how these two very different men come together as reporter and source, overcome their mutual distrust, and agree to disagree about their respective roles.

Gellman writes early in the book, “The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm, even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence.”

Admiral William McRaven, who lead all U.S. Special Operations forces, is just one of the people quoted in the book who are furious with the whistleblower and the reporter: Snowden “violated the law, so at the end of the day, in divulging that information, you are dealing with a criminal,” McRaven told Gellman in an uncomfortable confrontation. “So where is the integrity in that?”

McRaven, who is almost trembling with rage, tells Gellman: “You as a reporter make the call that it’s more important for the public—and I would contend, more important for the reporter—to get that story out before somebody scoops you. … And you can always make a case in your own mind why the American people need to know something.”

Gellman was not an uncritical conduit for Snowden’s leaks, however, and he agonized over the benefit of every exposure against the damage to U.S. security. Gellman was not always aware of how a given exposure might hurt U.S. intelligence, and that was part of the dilemma, but clearly Snowden’s leaks damaged the government’s surveillance programs.  

The reporter printed only a fraction of the information Snowden had, he refused to publish secrets that he believed would hurt ongoing U.S. operations or personnel, and he protected Snowden’s information from curious foreign intelligence services. “Speaking for myself, I am not agnostic about my loyalties,” Gellman tells the government’s senior intelligence lawyer. “I am not—in this context—a global citizen, indifferent to the outcomes of national conflict.”

Gellman was not happy about being put in the role of deciding which disclosures would harm U.S. operations, however, and that is a key point of the book. The surveillance programs that Snowden exposed were not known to the public, or even to most people in government, so there never was any public debate over whether the programs had gone too far.

Even Snowden, who is not a transparency absolutist, admits that the challenge in a democracy is letting everyone know what the government is doing, without the bad guys knowing. 

Even though Gellman tried to ask government officials about the impact of releasing Snowden’s information, many of his former sources refused to discuss the details before publication, turning their back on Gellman and labeling him “nasty and suspicious.”

“At heart, national security secrecy presents a conflict of core values: self-government and self-defense,” Gellman concludes. “If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know, too.”

During wartime, the contradiction over secrecy versus openness is sharpened because secrecy is so important to military victory. But, as Gellman explains so well, whether to wage war is one of the most important decisions a democracy needs to make, and that decision must be well informed.

Book Review

 

Front Row at the Trump Show

by Jonathan Karl

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Front Row at the Trump Show, the new book by Jonathan Karl, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, warns that the press corps risks becoming the “opposition party” instead of an unbiased source of news.

Of all the reporters who cover Donald Trump at the White House, few have known him longer than Jonathan Karl, who was a 26-year-old reporter for the New York Post when he met the flamboyant real estate developer.

The story that day in 1994 was not about politics, it was about Michael Jackson, who was on his honeymoon in Trump Tower. Trump himself gave Karl the grand tour of the building, agreeing to share details if Karl attributed everything to a “source in the Trump Organization.”

Years later, a somewhat bemused Karl was sitting with Trump, who was on the phone and lying his head off about something not at all important. It was then that Karl realized, “Donald Trump lies for comic effect, he lies to make himself feel good, he lies to make you feel good, he lies because he likes to, he lies because he can.”

It probably won’t surprise people that the chief White House correspondent for ABC News says that Trump lies, but Karl does not think Trump alone should be blamed for the toxic state of relations between the Trump administration and the news media.

“It may be silly for somebody who goes to work in the Oval Office every day to feel insufficiently appreciated, but the truth is that the mainstream media coverage of Donald Trump is relentlessly and exhaustively negative,” Karl writes in his new book Front Row at the Trump Show. “His accomplishments – and there are accomplishments – are either ignored or overshadowed by the drumbeat of outrage fueled by his own outrageous behavior.”

Karl writes, “…all too often reporters and news organizations have aided and abetted the effort to undermine the free press by openly displaying how much they detest this president – his policies, his blatant disregard for the truth, or his vilification of the press – and behaving like anti-Trump partisans rather than journalists striving for fairness and objectivity. We are not the opposition party, but that is the way some of us have acted, doing as much to undermine the credibility of the free press as the president’s taunts.”

One reporter Karl singles out is Jim Acosta, the CNN White House reporter known for his combative exchanges with Trump. During one presidential briefing, Acosta shouted over another reporter to get a reaction from Trump. “Acosta was portraying himself as some kind of righteous advocate for the free press,” Karl writes, “but to most of the reporters in that room, he was just rudely interrupting a colleague . . . ”

The current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, Karl has strong feelings about the White House press secretaries – he’s worked with 13 different press secretaries under four presidents, so far – especially when they lie deliberately. Karl actually has less patience with them than he does with presidents who lie, because he believes the job of a press secretary is to tell the truth.

Nor does he spare the self-proclaimed “grownups” who have joined Trump’s inner circle supposedly to protect the country from the president’s impetuousness. Karl’s method of criticizing is not to give his own opinion, but to quote directly from people like John F. Kelly, Trump’s short-term chief of staff, in a way that makes Kelly come off like a self-important, and ultimately impotent, jerk.

One Trump official who was vilified in the press, Kirstjen Nielsen, is portrayed sympathetically by Karl as misunderstood and a victim of cutthroat White House politics, when she unfairly became the face of Trump’s immigration policies. The policies were not hers, but as secretary of Homeland Security she tried to carry out the president’s wishes, and was sharply criticized before she resigned.

Karl points out that Trump’s attacks on the news media have a calculated purpose. Trump himself has said that by attacking reporters, he casts doubt on everything they say. Perhaps more importantly, the Trump Show needs a villain to spar with the hero, and reporters happily play the role. Trump has effectively, and unfortunately, branded the news media as the “opposition party.”

“But a free press is not the opposition party,” Karl writes. “Our role is to inform the public, seek the truth, ask tough questions, and attempt to hold those in power accountable by shining a spotlight on what they are doing. We are not the opposition, but in the Trump era, the free press has sometimes appeared like the opposition.”

There is a place for opinion journalism, Karl writes. “But there is a crucial role for reporters and news organizations who strive for objectivity and balance. Our opinions – and we all have opinions – should be irrelevant.”

One of Karl’s interesting observations is that reaction to violent protests led by racists in Charlottesville was a turning point for Trump. In one of Trump’s comments about the 2017 violence, the new president clumsily tried to blame “both sides.” When even his Republican allies attacked him for equating racism with anti-racism, Trump reversed himself. But then that change of tone was criticized, too.

All his life, Trump believed he never should back down or admit a mistake, but on the unanimous recommendation of his advisors, he tried to change course about Charlottesville, sort of, and it backfired. Karl writes that Trump vowed never again to correct himself or apologize.

Reporters at the White House should remember that about Trump. Reporters frequently ask Trump – about every perceived error, misstatement, falsehood, or errant Tweet – if he will admit to making a mistake or apologize. No, he won’t, and the insistent reporters appear to be badgering and shaming him. There must be more effective ways to hold the president accountable, without expecting Trump to go against his nature and admit a mistake.

“The Trump show will eventually become a distant memory,” Karl concludes. “The question is whether America will ever be the same again, whether we have become a nation of people who define truth in relative terms, accepting as true only what we want to believe, yelling ‘fake news’ at everything else, a nation so thoroughly divided we cannot agree on what is real.”

Fortunately, we have people like Jonathan Karl – reporters with good memories, even dispositions, and a relentless desire to be in the front row.

Book Review

 

When the Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later

by Robert Giles

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The words “Kent State” mean only one thing to many Americans who were adults during the Vietnam War: the place where National Guard soldiers opened fire and killed four student protesters.

The killing of the four students and the wounding of nine others on May 4, 1970 at a rural Ohio campus occurred amid anti-war protests around the country. It was a time when young people were angry with their parents, the government, the universities, and the news media. Older people were baffled and outraged by the protests, which seemed anti-American, the work of “outside agitators,” or the folly of an indulged and spoiled generation.

The divide was not just young versus old, but also liberals versus conservatives, hippies versus squares, business versus labor, men versus women, and blacks versus whites.

An important difference from today was that the news media appeared – to people on the outside – to be free of those social conflicts. What we now call the “mainstream media” was the only news media. There was no internet, Twitter, Facebook, or 24-hour cable news channels catering to the left or right. The national news media organizations were less dominant, and most people got their news from very competitive local television stations and especially local newspapers.

Society’s tensions existed inside those newsrooms, of course, which mostly were run by older white men who had lived through the depression and World War II. They were defenders of the establishment, but they believed they had a vital mission to inform the country accurately and fairly, even when bad things happened.

The Akron Beacon Journal was the local newspaper 20 minutes from Kent State University, and the sometimes violent protests on campus – called rioting by the headline writers – were covered regularly. The weekend before the shooting, students had burned down the campus ROTC building and fought with firefighters trying to put out the blaze. The paper that landed on doorsteps that Sunday was a fat 271 pages, with 28 pages of classified ads, and a circulation of 174,000.

The young man in charge of the newsroom was the managing editor, Robert Giles. His boss was traveling in Israel with local business leaders, and Giles was left in control. He would lead the paper’s coverage of the shootings, the long investigations that followed, and the court cases that lasted for years. The paper’s coverage won a Pulitzer Prize and is a model of how to cover breaking news and the difficult search for truth, meaning, and justice.

The insightful and very readable story of how the paper covered Kent State is told in a new book by Giles called When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later. The book is focused on that one day in May, but really it is the product of the author’s lifelong career as a distinguished journalist and an example of how a single story can illustrate the core values of real news.

The book’s focus is on the reporters, photographers, and editors at the paper. Although the author was at the center of the coverage, he keeps himself in the background, writing the book the way he directed the coverage that day: firmly and competently in control, but without calling attention to himself. The few times Giles reveals his feelings are to take the blame for some mistake or to regret that reporters didn’t get the credit they deserved.

The paper’s work was not necessarily appreciated at the time by its readers. The editors received hundreds of letters, most of them angry and accusing the paper of taking sides in favor of the students and against the National Guard and the governor.

“There were two prominent and distinct views,” Giles writes. “Our commitment to be fair and balanced, and to give voice to the truth, came face to face with special interests: President Nixon, the governor of Ohio, university officials, National Guard officers, student radicals and angry townsfolk.”

The book concludes by imagining how a story like this would be covered today, at a time when print newspapers are in decline and the internet allows anyone to capture and share information.

Today the Akron paper, like most local papers, has a small fraction of the staff it had in 1970, and it no longer has a virtual monopoly on news coverage (or advertising) in the area. That solid, reliable institutional voice is missed.

On the other hand, many people witnessing a violent clash today would record the protest on their phones, possibly avoiding some of the confusion and uncertainty – even 50 years later – about what happened at Kent State, such as who started shooting and why.

Today “experts” would appear on cable news within minutes claiming that the shooting was the fault of Democrats or Republicans, or that the supposed video was enhanced or fake or out of context. People on social media would make up details about the shooting, and share speculation and conspiracy theories. Readers might throw up their hands and say it’s all too confusing, and anyway you can’t really know the truth.

When Truth Mattered is a powerful argument for trying to get the facts right, even when there is chaos, violence, and confusion, and even when people dispute the facts and disagree about their significance. The paper didn’t get everything right the first time, and editors kept sending the reporters out to correct the record or explore new angles. The book shows how quality journalism was done 50 years ago, and holds up a high but achievable standard for how it should be done today.