* * * * * Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility. CART captioning and this realtime file may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> AIDAN FLAX-CLARK: Hi, everybody. Thank you for being with us tonight. My name is Aidan Flax-Clark. I get to introduce tonight's conversation Barton Gellman about his new book, "Dark Mirror" and he will be speaking about the book with Emily Bell. Bart's book in part Chronicles his control along with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in receiving the information that was leaked by Edward Snowden, but it also documents the continuing erosion of our rights to privacy, as well as the continuing enlargement of what the government deems acceptable of our civil liberties. The book is available for sale from the library shop, which you can get to from nypl.org/shop. All of the proceeds go to benefit the New York Public Library. You can go to nypl.org/shop and purchase Bart's new book. First of all, tonight's event is being simulcast on Zoom and Youtube. If you're watching it on Zoom, the event is being recorded there, but only the event, not you, speaking of your privacy rights. What you see on the screen is being recorded, nothing else. Bart would love to answer your questions and he is ready to answer any difficult questions you have, so anything you would like to ask, type it in the Q&A box at the bottom of the Zoom app and we will make sure he sees them and he will answer as many as he is able. OK, so let's bring on Emily Bell and Bart Gellman and get to it. Again, thank you for being with us tonight. Here is one. >> EMILY BELL: Hi, good evening. >> AIDAN FLAX-CLARK: All right, take it away. >> EMILY BELL: Thank you very much indeed, Aidan. I'm Emily Bell. I'm the director of the center for digital journalism, journalism school. Welcome. >> BARTON GELLMAN: Thank you. Pleasure to be here and thank you Aidan for that. >> EMILY BELL: Yes, Bart, I was just thinking, June 11, 2020, can you remember what you were doing exactly seven years ago? [LAUGHTER] >> BARTON GELLMAN: June 11, yeah, I was frantically working my way through a much too large pile of classified material that I got from a source I had known as Virax. I now night was Edward Snowden and by then, I had written the first story or two what would become a year- long series of stories about the NSA. I was quite overwhelmed, I would say. >> EMILY BELL: I was just remembering that Snowden himself, who none of us knew self disclosed on June 9, so just two days into that. I have to say as somebody who has taught this in the journalism school and I knew of the characters involved from the guardian side, what a huge story it was, what a huge impact it happen This book that you're bringing out now and I'm going to ask you in a minutes, why wait so long, "Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance," it does two things that nobody else has done so well until the many, many thousands of works that have been written about this, one of which is the way you lay out the journalistic process and the other is the way that you really elusive complex matters and make them real for people. So you were sorting through classified document, none of the issues a the time felt like, perhaps that people were going to engage with how important they were. Were you worried at any point as a journalist after you worked for months and months on the disclosures, were you worried about people were not going to get it at the point? >> BARTON GELLMAN: I worried about that all of the time. I did not worry about a political point of view. As a mainstream reporter there are values in my story, there are -- there's news that I think is important and I want people to notice it, but I wasn't trying to elicit horror or anger. I didn't feel equal telling this story in a way that made sense in old fashioned analogue terms and that is a big reason why I wrote the book. I was dissatisfied with the daily newspaper stories and I felt like I needed a narrative and characters and the voice that you take in a book to get the story across. >> EMILY BELL: You certainly managed that and it was a story that I feel I know very well but new things on every single page and it is beautifully told. Take us right back. This probably something you do in your sleep, it has been a why for people who haven't been engaged in the facts, but how did you first encounter this story and when did you know there was something truly, sort of important and verifiable here? >> BARTON GELLMAN: In January of 2013, we now know, reconstructing events, Edward Snowden who had been frustrated by his inability to reach Glenn Greenwald. Glenn didn't answer his e-mails and didn't know how to use the encryption that Snowden required to communicate. Snowden turned to the filmmaker Laura Poitras. I previously advised Laura on how to encrypt her own personal materials so they wouldn't be taken freely by inspectors at the border, which were happening. Laura wrote to me in January in an encrypted message and said I'm going to be passing through town, can we have a coffee there is something I need to talk to you about. In subsequent e-mails, she did not want me to bring my cell phone with me and would like the place to be quiet, very discreet. She was contacted by someone who claimed to be a member of the intelligence community and said he had a story about surveillance that was so broad and so deep it was a threat to the republic. My first unspoken reaction was, oh, not that again. You get a lot of false tips as a reporter and there is something about the spooky world of national security and intelligence that draws out disturbed people who imagine plots and I had been given sophisticated false documents in the past, so I was very suspicious to begin with. >> EMILY BELL: That is a wonderful part the way you're describing the meeting with Laura who is a great journalist, but you went to this and this is not enough, we have to go to another one. I think it is so interesting that the sort of cliche of the investigate journalist is meeting a shadowy figure on the bridge and passing notes. It is interesting that you and Laura are both really versed in the issue of surveillance, so she has been on the rough end of it as a reporter. How do -- were you constantly thinking at the time as a national security reporter that you were being watched or followed or did you think this was a slightly, too paranoid level of security? >> BARTON GELLMAN: I did not think that Laura was paranoid or that she would lightly ask for special precautions. I assumed she had reason to be cautious and she did. She was -- she was using anonymous proxies and encrypted channels to talk to her source and she wanted to consult very privately about it and it made good sense. For most of 10 years by then, I had been gradually more convinced I had to cover my digital tracks in my work, because it was all well and good to say as a newspaper reporter, as I was at the time, I'm going to protect the confidentiality of my sources, but if we're leaving our names and addresses in our digital exhaust, if we're leaving traces all over the Internet that doesn't do much good, so I had become proficient in the basic tools of privacy and security on the web. >> EMILY BELL: I think it is fair to say that you were one of only a small number of journalists who regularly practiced that at the time and after the story broke, everyone had a PGP key and everyone started to understand. >> BARTON GELLMAN: You're right. >> EMILY BELL: Right, so it really did, I think personally from the field of journalism, Snowden changed a huge amount almost immediately in terms of practice. You introduced by Laura and I'm intrigued how often these characters from classical references to identify themselves. You have no idea exactly who Edward Snowden was for quite some time, is that right? >> BARTON GELLMAN: Right, I had an extensive correspondence with him, some of it was by e-mail, asynchronous and some was live, live chat over encrypted channels. We exchanged, I don't know, it had to be tens of thousands of words of back and forth in which he was trying to work out in his own mind whether he could trust me enough to give me the story. I was trying to figure out whether he was authentic, whether the story was real. He talked about a document. We never talked a lot of documents. You can imagine my surprise. I cross examined him closely about the Providence of the document, what it would say, who authored it, what their qualifications were to speak to what was happening inside of the NSA, whether the document was, not only authentic, but accurate.