— More on what happened to every NSA whistleblower who tried to work through the system can be found in chapter 9 of James Risen’s excellent book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014)

— More on Jesselyn Radack, whistleblower and lawyer to whistleblowers

— And Diane Roark and Thomas Tamm, who also tried to go through the system

— pbs.org

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Chapter 27

— Peyton Quinn’s Five Rules for Managing Impending Violence

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Chapter 28

— HUMINT, SIGINT . . . and now, LOVEINT

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Chapter 31

— The National License Plate Reader (LPR) Initiative—the DEA’s massive license plate tracking system, open to other federal agencies

— Using license plate trackers to monitor gun shows . . . and what else?

— License plate readers are being paired with facial recognition technology, just like Evie’s camera network

— The NSA targets the privacy conscious

— XKeyscore: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications

— How XKeyscore works

— How the FBI caught Petraeus: cross-referencing metadata, all without a warrant

— MIT researchers report they don’t need an individual’s name, address, or credit card number to identify people

— Don’t worry; it’s just metadata!

— The CIA intercepts whistleblower communications

— How a surveillance system ostensibly targeted at terrorists in fact sucks in massive amounts of unrelated people and data: Canada’s download dragnet

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Chapter 32

— How to leak securely using SecureDrop

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Chapter 41

— CIA director’s attempt to conceal emails by saving them as drafts, not sending

— If you’re using encryption, the NSA is watching extra closely

— Lawyer-client privileged communications are of particular interest

— Governments monitor WikiLeaks website, collect IP addresses of visitors

— Thinking about searching for privacy-enhancing tools? The NSA is watching for that

— UK Parliamentary Committee: “GCHQ’s bulk interception capability is used primarily to find patterns in, or characteristics of, online communications which indicate involvement in threats to national security”—aka God’s Eye

— NSA spies on journalists

— “Surveillance Forces Journalists to Think and Act Like Spies”

— This is by design: “When journalists must compete with spies and surveillance, even if they win, society loses.”

— Another example of God’s Eye-type pattern recognition: the NSA’s SKYNET program

— Israel’s Unit 8200 uses compromising information gathered from captured emails to coerce key Palestinians. Unthinkable NSA does anything similar?

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Chapter 45

— Turning a phone into a listening device via WARRIOR PRIDE and NOSEY SMURF (yes, they really have names like that—your tax dollars at work)

— New exploit turns Samsung Galaxy phones into remote bugging devices

— Using a cell phone’s gyroscopes like a microphone

— The $2.8 billion JLENS blimps floating over Maryland

— The CIA/US Marshals joint cell phone tracking initiative

— Accessing baby monitors and other listening devices

— Entertainment systems listening in on your living room conversations

— The NSA converts spoken words into searchable text so surveillance of conversations can be conducted at huge scale

— I wish I were inventing the phrase “civil liberties extremist,” as clear a sign of our authoritarian times as any. Alas, I’m not. Pity Barry Goldwater

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Chapter 46

— Uber tracks user movements with a program called God View (aka Creepy Stalker View)

— engadget.com

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Chapter 47

— “When you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.”

— “We are drowning in information. And yet we know nothing.”

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Chapter 49

— Former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden’s “off-the-record” interview gets live-tweeted

— Former NSA director Keith Alexander doesn’t cover his laptop webcam

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Epilogue

— Not quite the “privacy advocate” position imagined in the book, but close enough: the president’s blue ribbon intelligence reform panel recommends “public interest advocate”

— nybooks.com

— Names change; programs continue

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General Reading

— For more on the real-world events depicted in the prologue and in the novel generally, I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014)

— And Laura Poitras’s Oscar-and other award-winning documentary, Citizenfour

— A brief history of the US surveillance state

— Julian Assange’s
When Google Met WikiLeaks (New York: OR Books, 2014)

— Scott Horton’s Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare (New York: Nation Books, 2015)

For an overview of the ever-metastasizing international surveillance state, I recommend two great books:

— Julia Angwin’s Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom In a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014)

— Bruce Schneier’s Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)

— If you’d like some historical context for Edward Snowden’s actions and what the government has been trying to do to him, Judith Ehrlich’s and Rick Goldsmith’s Academy Award-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers is as illuminating as it is riveting