Bottoms Up And The Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley

Wow, there is a lot going on here in a few short chapters that at times I felt like it was hard to keep up with the author. The book is at least partly about Reality Winner, the NSA whistleblower who in 2018, at the age of 25, was given the longest sentence ever handed down for a violation of the Espionage Act — five years and three months — after leaking an intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which inadvertently (and, in Howley’s well-argued opinion, negligently and disastrously) revealed their source to the NSA while trying to validate the report Winner mailed to them. Then again, perhaps this book is less about Winner herself and more about the United States in the 21st century — specifically, how the world’s largest shadow government has used and abused tools of surveillance since 9/11; how ultimately, tragically human both the operators and targets of surveillance are; and how a nation that pins the health of its “way of life” on its ability to secure an ever-expanding, impossibly large hoard of classified data (think the Stasi and The Lives of Others ) is doomed to be undone by its own disgruntled bureaucrats.