Dark Mirror

by Barton Gellman

  her latest, The Oath: See Zeitgeist Films, press kit, 2010, https://zeitgeistfilms.com/media/films/182/oath.presskit.pdf.

  pulled aside for interrogation and search: This account, which Poitras gave to me at the time, has not been disputed by the U.S. government. Later, it became public. See Dennis Lim, “An Eye on America Is Also Under Watch,” New York Times, May 6, 2010, http://nyti.ms/1ppyRaH; and Glenn Greenwald, “U.S. Filmmaker Repeatedly Detained at Border,” Salon, April 8, 2012, www.salon.com/2012/04/08/u_s_filmmaker_repeatedly_detained_at_border/.

  stating no reason: Two possible explanations emerged later, but authorities notified Poitras of neither. The first involved an ambush of Oregon National Guard soldiers in Baghdad in 2004. Poitras was said to be filming from a nearby rooftop when it happened. According to documents she obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from the FBI, a lieutenant colonel from the unit reported her to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, saying he “strongly believed POITRAS had prior knowledge of the ambush” and could have alerted U.S. forces. Government documents offer no basis but coincidence for the officer’s belief. See Poitras FOIA release at Poitras-65, displayed at a 2016 exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York and available at https://cryptome.org/2016/02/poitras-docs-whitney.jpg.

  A second possible explanation came in a New Yorker article, which noted that she transferred money to the principal subject of her film, a Sunni doctor and clinic director named Riyadh al-Adhadh, as his family fled the civil war in 2006. See George Packer, “The Holder of Secrets,” New Yorker, October 20, 2014, http://nyr.kr/ZliVIV. The FBI document Poitras-64 described the doctor’s neighborhood as “very pro–SADDAM HUSSEIN.”

  The watch-listing bureaucracy seems to have made no attempt to justify the adverse inferences it drew from these superficial facts or to supply any other evidence to Poitras or the public. Like many other journalists in Iraq, I had also witnessed dangerous encounters for U.S. forces, and I had contributed toward the resettlement of an Iraqi stringer, himself nostalgic for Hussein, who endangered his family by working for the Washington Post. For a critique of the watch-listing process, see “U.S. Government Watchlisting: Unfair Process and Devastating Consequences,” American Civil Liberties Union, March 2014, www.aclu.org/us-government-watchlisting-unfair-process-and-devastating-consequences.

  “confiscated my laptop”: Affidavit of Laura Poitras, paragraph 35, August 24, 2016, in Poitras v. Department of Homeland Security, Civil Action No. 15-cv-01091-KBJ.

  U.S. government’s pretense: In 2008, the Ninth Circuit held “that reasonable suspicion is not needed for customs officials to search a laptop or other personal electronic storage devices at the border,” accepting the government’s contention that laptops and hard drives are analogous to other closed containers. See United States v. Arnold, 523 F.3d 941 (9th Cir. 2008), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1162807.html. The Fourth Circuit had already found no First Amendment exception to border search doctrine for “expressive materials.” See United States v. Ickes, 393 F.3d 501 (4th Cir. 2005), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th-circuit/1308274.html.

  right of a citizen to be left alone: This formulation was famously articulated by Samuel D. Warren and the future Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis in “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review, December 15, 1890, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html.

  judges had only just begun to question it: The leading cases were still to come, or progressing through trial courts. In 2013, the Ninth Circuit revisited some of the issues in Arnold. It found that reasonable suspicion is required to conduct a forensic search of an electronic device, which is considerably more intrusive than a conventional search. See United States v. Cotterman, 709 F.3d 952 (9th Cir., en banc, 2013), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1624272.html. In 2014, the Supreme Court held that law enforcement officers need a warrant to search a cellphone taken incident to arrest. The case is likely to have implications for border searches, especially if a device gives authorities access to information in cloud storage. See Riley v. California, 573 U.S. ___ (2014), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-132-nr3.html.

  For further discussion, see Gretchen C. F. Shappert, “The Border Search Doctrine: Warrantless Searches of Electronic Devices After Riley v. California,” United States Attorney’s Bulletin, November 2014, 1–14; and Thomas Mann Miller, “Digital Border Searches After Riley v. California,” Washington Law Review, December 9, 2015, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2701597.

  hiring private investigators: In 2006, private investigators hired by Hewlett-Packard illegally obtained the phone records of several journalists as part of an investigation into leaks by members of the company’s board of directors. See Damon Darlin, “Hewlett-Packard Spied on Writers in Leaks,” New York Times, September 8, 2006, http://nyti.ms/1xk61Jh.

  not to reveal our confidential sources: Even before the Snowden revelations, privacy advocates were making this point. See Christopher Soghoian, “When Secrets Aren’t Safe with Journalists,” New York Times, October 26, 2011, http://nyti.ms/1RskMQl.

  another word for “somebody else’s computer”: Graham Cluley, “Don’t Call It ‘the Cloud.’ Call It ‘Someone Else’s Computer,’” blog post, December 3, 2013, www.grahamcluley.com/2013/12/cloud-privacy-computer/.

  GPG, TrueCrypt, OTR, SOCKS proxies, Tor: The most important link I sent to Poitras was the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s excellent guide “Surveillance Self-Defense,” https://ssd.eff.org, which explains most of those acronyms. More valuably, the EFF lays out a method for thinking about the particular “threat model” in each case. I also sent one of the occasional blog posts I wrote for Time online, “The Case of the Stolen Laptop: How to Encrypt, and Why,” Techland, August 6, 2010, http://ti.me/1Qjdu5f.

  the cypherpunks of the 1990s: See Steven Levy, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government, Saving Privacy in the Digital Age (New York: Viking, 2001). See also Eric Hughes, “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993), www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html; and John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 8, 1996, www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence.

  invented “onion routing”: Among the seminal papers by Naval Research Laboratory employees was David Goldschlag, Michael Reed, and Paul Syverson, “Onion Routing for Anonymous and Private Internet Connections,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, January 28, 1999, www.onion-router.net/Publications/CACM-1999.pdf. Onion routing relays an internet connection through a series of hops, each of them encrypted, ensuring that no single network operator can see both the origin and the destination. Today’s Tor Project (originally an acronym for “The Onion Router”) offers a free, easy-to-use anonymous browser at www.torproject.org.

  GPG, the gold standard of email and file encryption: GPG, also known as Gnu Privacy Guard and GnuPG, is a free, open-source implementation of the encryption standard pioneered by Phil Zimmermann in the commercial software package called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP. (Already we have four names for the same basic product, five if we add OpenPGP.) The original author of GPG remains sole custodian of the code. He marked its first decade in a post to an email listserv, archived here: Werner Koch, “GnuPG’s 10th birthday,” December 20, 2007, https://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-announce/2007q4/000268.html. See also Julia Angwin, “The World’s Email Encryption Software Relies on One Guy, Who Is Going Broke,” ProPublica, February 5, 2015, http://propub.li/223gPN8.

  Time magazine overrode a reporter’s objections: The case was United States v. I. Lewis Libby. Libby was eventually convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in 2005. See Daniela Deane, “Prosecutor Demands Time Reporter Testimony,” Washington Post, July 5, 2005, http://wapo.st/1TthliJ. Also see Matthew Cooper, “What Scooter Libby and I Talked About,” Time, October 30, 2005, http://ti.me/1QovJVB. The chief edit
or of Time Inc. defended his decision in a memoir. See Norman Pearlstine, Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). For my part, I did not want an editor or publisher to be capable of making the decision for me.

  even experts foundered: Disheartening proof is easy to find in the GnuPG-users listserv, an email forum populated exclusively by geeks, where hundreds of thousands of words have been spilled on the software’s mysteries. See the GnuPG-users Archives, http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/.

  manual could swallow: The horror classic runs to about twenty-five thousand words. GPG boasts a sixteen-thousand-word manual and eleven thousand words of “frequently asked questions.” See Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, www.gutenberg.org/files/42/42.txt; “The GNU Privacy Handbook,” www.gnupg.org/gph/en/manual.html; and “GNUPG FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS,” www.gnupg.org/faq/gnupg-faq.txt. After drafting this comparison, I found a fine blog post with a similar comparison to the forty-thousand-word novel Fahrenheit 451. See Moxie Marlinspike, “GPG and Me,” February 4, 2015, www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/gpg-and-me/.

  Even the commercial PGP software, which had a friendly graphical interface, was baffling to ordinary users. In a controlled test with a dozen beginners, three accidentally made public their secret encryption keys (which defeated the main protection of PGP), all twelve disregarded instructions to choose a complex passphrase, one forgot her passphrase, and one never managed to send an encrypted message at all. See Alma Whitten and J. D. Tygar, “Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0,” Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Security Symposium, August 23, 1999, 169–84, www.gaudior.net/alma/johnny.pdf [inactive].

  “You should probably have”: Author to Poitras, email, January 14, 2011.

  “Do you have time to grab a coffee”: Poitras to author, email, January 31, 2013.

  conversation had begun five days before: The intermediary who helped the source make contact with Poitras said the secure channel was established on January 28, 2013, when he confirmed the forty-character “fingerprint” of Poitras’s encryption key for the source. See Lee, “Ed Snowden Taught Me to Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger.” Lee’s tweet may be found at https://twitter.com/micahflee/status/296119710485979136.

  domestic surveillance in my last book: Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). For the NSA surveillance narrative, see especially chapters 6, 11, and 12.

  no better than a coin toss: According to Malcolm Gladwell, systematic lie detection tests, based on videotaped interviews, “have been given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done just as well if they hadn’t watched the tapes at all and just guessed.” See Malcolm Gladwell, “The Naked Face,” New Yorker, August 5, 2002, http://nyr.kr/1Rsoae4. Also see Paul Ekman, “8 Myths About Lying,” www.paulekman.com/psychology/8-myths-about-lying/.

  interviewed an Israeli settler named Yigal Amir: I found the notes of that interview and wrote about them on the night of Rabin’s assassination. Barton Gellman, “In June, Suspect Talked of Israel’s Weak Backbone,” Washington Post, November 5, 1995, http://wapo.st/20qTJ1X. The June story, which did not mention Amir, was Barton Gellman, “Jewish Settlers Grab Land as Arab Self-Rule Nears; Israel Does Little to Halt West Bank Moves,” Washington Post, June 26, 1995.

  Top Secret reference site: The CIA disclosed the existence of a Top Secret “Intellipedia,” shared by other agencies, in 2006. See Cass R. Sunstein, “A Brave New Wiki World,” Washington Post, February 24, 2007, http://wapo.st/1oKv9IF. The online “IT Law Wiki” first posted a description of NSANet in 2011, at http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/NSANet, according to this date-based Google search: https://goo.gl/j0Jc8y.

  short film on another NSA critic: Laura Poitras, “The Program,” New York Times, August 23, 2012, http://nyti.ms/1TBmnJp, was a profile of the whistleblower William Binney for the newspaper’s “Op-Docs” series.

  failed to elicit a reply from Greenwald: Edward Snowden used the handle Cincinnatus, not Verax, for contact with Greenwald. Micah Lee, then a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the anonymous source (writing to Lee as “anon108”) first began trying to reach Greenwald in December 2012. When Greenwald did not respond, the source “moved on” to Poitras and asked Lee for her secure contacts on January 11, 2013. It was not until May 13, when Snowden renewed his effort to bring in Greenwald, that Lee sent a thumb drive with encryption tools to Greenwald in Brazil. It was delayed in transit and arrived on May 27, which is also the date of the source’s “first encrypted conversation directly with Greenwald.” See Lee, “Ed Snowden Taught Me to Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger.”

  a how-to video on encryption: See anon108, “GPG for Journalists—Windows Edition | Encryption for Journalists | Anonymous 2013,” Vimeo, January 6, 2013, https://vimeo.com/56881481.

  a less tractable panelist: In fairness, the discussion flew out of control when NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston told him angrily from the floor that she knew more than he did about the evidence in one of her recent stories. Greenwald counterattacked, and the exchange went south. Puzzled about the hostility, I asked Greenwald afterward, “Did you happen to run over her dog recently?” He smiled and said, “Actually, I kind of did.” He had branded Temple-Raston a patsy in a recent column about reporters who swallow U.S. intelligence claims without proof. See Glenn Greenwald, “Government Accusations: No Evidence Needed,” Salon, November 1, 2010, www.salon.com/2010/11/01/awlaki_2/. The NYU panel took place on November 5, 2010. The video, uploaded three days later, is at https://youtu.be/nyJU2Ceq83s.

  huge scoop about secret overseas prisons: See Dana Priest and Julie Tate, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” Washington Post, November 2, 2005, http://wapo.st/1fk1wVN.

  seized the press run, and burned it: See “Smiles or Tears for Town Crier?,” Student Press Law Center Report (Fall 1979), 28, http://issuu.com/splc/docs/v2n3fall79. I recounted this story at length in a 2014 speech marking the fortieth anniversary of the Student Press Law Center, which assisted us in our legal battle. The speech and accompanying slides are available in full on YouTube, https://youtu.be/bSMnfzGyn08.

  a First Amendment lawsuit: Gellman v. Wacker, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 1977. I brought the case with fellow students Craig Snyder and Robert Gordon. Many of the filings and hearing transcripts are available in the Barton Gellman Papers, box 10, Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University. See http://findingaids.princeton.edu/collections/MC262/c011.

  poison note for my college application file: During my freshman year of college, I obtained a copy from the admissions office. (I had not waived my right under the Buckley Amendment, 20 U.S.C. § 1232g, to see my recommendations.) The principal filled out nothing on the four-page form, save for one sentence: “I do not feel as though I could give a recommendation that would be helpful toward Barton’s acceptance by your institution.” A copy is on file in the Gellman Papers.

  a Philadelphia Inquirer photograph: The photograph accompanied Marc Schogol, “Confiscated School Paper May Lead to Court Fight,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 29, 1977. A copy is available in the Gellman Papers.

  express his contempt for my work: See, for example, Face the Nation, CBS, September 18, 2011, http://cbsn.ws/1PXLdT6.

  Bob Schieffer: Barton Gellman, who wrote a biography on you, “Angler,” said your book shows mutual disillusionment that developed between you and President Bush. Is that accurate?

  Dick Cheney: No, I don’t think it is. I didn’t think Gellman’s original book was all that accurate either. I believe it’s called �
��Angler,” which is my Secret Service code name. He got that part right.

  ten-page letter to Congress: Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella to Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, November 23, 2005, http://wapo.st/1TagwuW. See also Christopher Lee, “Report on FBI Tools Is Disputed,” Washington Post, November 30, 2005, http://wapo.st/1PR4g1r. The article in dispute was Barton Gellman, “The FBI’s Secret Scrutiny: In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans,” Washington Post, November 6, 2005, http://wapo.st/1KmBrrl.

  A year and a half later, on the same day the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report, the department retracted most of its previous letter and promised to “correct, as necessary, any erroneous statements made in . . . correspondence to Congress.” See Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice, A Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Use of National Security Letters, March 9, 2007, https://oig.justice.gov/special/s0703b/final.pdf; and Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard A. Hertling to Senator Arlen Specter, March 9, 2007, http://wapo.st/1UEMpZB.

  CIA had mounted a fierce campaign: “Statement by Dr. David Kay, Special Advisor to the DCI [director of central intelligence],” November 3, 2003, published as a CIA news release and sent to scores of news organizations. It is available at https://perma.cc/8CL8-U3AB. Kay oversaw the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, which was searching for weapons of mass destruction after the fall of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein. His statement, and his private letter to the executive editor demanding that my story be retracted, were reactions to Barton Gellman, “Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat: No Evidence Uncovered of Reconstituted Program,” Washington Post, October 26, 2003, http://wapo.st/1ZnfdZD.

  In 2006, Kay told me he knew at the time that the 2003 story was accurate. The nuclear accusations, he said, were “a gross manipulation of data,” but pressure from the CIA’s deputy director, John McLaughlin, and Cheney made it impossible for him to acknowledge the truth publicly until he made his formal report to Bush the following year. David Kay, interview with author, August 3, 2006.