Gellman on defending against state sponsored espionage. "Against adversaries like this, all I could do was make myself a less appealing target. I layered on so many defenses that navigating through them became a chronic drain on my time, mental energy, and emotional equilibrium"
"Richard Ledgett, who oversaw the NSA’s media-leaks task force and went on to become the agency’s deputy director, told me matter-of-factly to assume that my defenses had been breached." theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… 
'I asked Clapper whether I was a valid counterintelligence target. “Theoretically you could be ... Given how Snowden is viewed by the [IC], someone who’s in league with him ... that’s a valid counterintelligence—and for that matter law-enforcement—target”' theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
'In 2001 [NSA] “stood up” a staff of leak trackers & the CIA director hired a contractor “to build [a] foreign knowledge database”—FIRSTFRUITS. One of its major purposes was to feed information about harmful news stories to the “Attorney General ... to investigate media leaks”'
"At heart, national-security secrecy presents a conflict of core values: self-government and self-defense. If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know too ... This is our predicament." theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
If this is how the American state engages with an American journalist, imagines how it does so with foreign ones. theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… (this applies double to many other countries, of course)
