3 ms·

what kind of things does the book allude to?

• sneak 6y ago
  Apparently the documents that he provided to the press had specific descriptions of names, cities, places, and events that had occurred that Gellman didn’t find specifically newsworthy but that the IC really, really wanted kept secret. The view of people familiar with the matter is that anything placed into the unskilled hands of people like Greenwald or Gellman (although the latter did get professional assistance and take a lot of steps to protect it) got accessed/copied by any of a half-dozen other state-level intelligence services, so presumably the US IC was concerned about these particular not-published-in-the-media secrets being available to the public. (This is not to say they weren’t concerned about them being known to other intel agencies, just that based on the unprofessional hands in which it was placed, that ship had probably already sailed once it was given to those incompetent in safeguarding it.) Personally, I wish the original unredacted PRISM deck had been published in full to the public. The state derives its authority from the consent of the governed; it is impossible to consent to something of which you are unaware and uninformed. I heartily recommend reading Gellman’s book about Snowden, Dark Mirror. One of the things he mentioned that surprised me was that Snowden told him that they (the IC) would not hesitate to assassinate him (Gellman, a US citizen on US soil) instantly if they thought it would prevent the leak from going further.