Sponsored by MUBI

In the Review’s February 22 issue, Ava Kofman writes about the trials of Reality Winner—the National Security Agency employee who in 2018 was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking to the press evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election—and the pervasive digital surveillance infrastructure that simultaneously enabled Russia’s hackers, Winner’s leaks, and the government’s case against her. “Privacy is no longer a matter of spatial arrangements, of walls and property; it is also a function of time,” Kofman argues. “Who owns the memories and histories you’ve docked at myriad social networks? Do you have a right to forget? To be forgotten?”

Below, alongside Kofman’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing about the twentieth-century history of surveillance.

Ava Kofman
Open Secrets

Kerry Howley’s self-defined “nonfiction thriller” about Reality Winner, the most recent millennial charged under the Espionage Act, is less about breaking news than about making dismal facts felt again.

Sue Halpern
Hacking the Vote: Who Helped Whom?

“In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, especially, Trump’s data team knew exactly which voters in which states they needed to persuade on Facebook and Twitter and precisely what messages to use. The question is: How did the Russians know this, too?”

David Cole
‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

“If we want to preserve the liberties that define us as a democratic society, we have to learn to live with risk. It is the insistence on preemptively eliminating all terrorist threats—an unattainable goal—that led the NSA to collect so much information so expansively in the first place.”

Alice E. Marwick
How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined

“It is practically impossible to live life, online or offline, without being tracked…. Cities track car movements; radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are attached to clothing and dry cleaning; CCTV cameras are in most stores. The technology is developing far more rapidly than our consumer protection laws, which in many cases are out of date and difficult to apply to our networked world.”

James Bamford
They Know Much More Than You Think

“The NSA and its predecessors have been gaining secret, illegal access to the communications of Americans for nearly a century.”

On NSA Spying: A Letter to Congress

Dear Members of Congress:

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration’s National Security Agency domestic spying program…. The Justice Department’s defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

Thomas Powers
The Ears of America

“The National Security Agency was established by President Truman—secretly: its official charter has never been made public—in the fall of 1952, but its true origins go back to the First World War.”

Special Offer
Subscribe for just $1 an issue

Get the deal