DARK MIRROR

A three-time Pulitzer winner digs deep into “the surveillance state that rose up after [9/11], when the U.S. government came to believe it could not spy on enemies without turning its gaze on Americans as well.

In 2010, Gellman left the investigative team of the Washington Post, where he had developed journalistic expertise in national security issues and topics related to surveillance and digital encryption. By 2013, as he was figuring out his career as a freelance author, his life changed dramatically: He was visited by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who had been approached by a then-anonymous whistleblower with alleged access to evidence of surveillance conducted illegally on American citizens by federal government agencies. Gellman’s masterful narrative proceeds along two primary tracks. One relates the life story of the whistleblower, the now-famous Edward Snowden. The other is a primer about investigative journalism regarding one of the highest-risk exposés in U.S. history. As the author unspools his own saga, he also delivers an endlessly insightful narrative about the practice of investigative journalism, a book that deserves its place alongside All the President’s Men, Five Days at Memorial, Nickel and Dimed, and other classics of the genre. Gellman sets both skillful narrative tracks within the vital context of how a panicky network of federal government officials asserted their authority to break seemingly any privacy law or regulation in the wake of 9/11. The author does not view his role as advocate or dissenter. Rather, throughout the book, he sees his mission as informing all readers about the extent of government overreach into private lives. “The reader is entitled to know up front that I think Snowden did substantially more good than harm,” writes Gellman, “even though I am prepared to accept (as he is not) that his disclosures must have exacted a price in lost intelligence.” Explaining the illegal government surveillance requires cutting through a mountain of technological jargon, a task the author handles expertly.

A riveting, timely book sure to be one of the most significant of the year.