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GHOST FLEET : WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF POST-SNOWDEN TECHNO-THRILLERS
▻https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/04/ghost-fleet-welcome-world-post-snowden-techno-thrillers

The Intercept: How did the Snowden revelations inform your thinking about the future?

Singer: In many ways, this is a book that is fiction, but backed by 400 endnotes and written in a post-Snowden world. The impact of it I saw play out in two ways. The first is that there are a wide variety of techniques the NSA was doing against others — as revealed by Snowden — that could be done back against us, or at least other parts of government and business. We are able, in fiction, to play with that scenario. For example, one of the things Snowden revealed the NSA doing was what was jokingly called “the Bigfoot of hacking.” It was using radio waves to cross an air gap. It had long been suspected, and through the documents it was revealed.

Not to give too much of the book away — spoiler alert — but that is a means used against another government agency as a hack at the start.

The second way this is post-Snowden is that it plays with certain changes in American industry, and maybe the mentality today. If there was another great war, it’s not 1941 anymore, so the parts of the American economy that would be key to being mobilized wouldn’t be Detroit; it would be places like Silicon Valley. But, of course, it’s also a post-Snowden world, and Silicon Valley has very different feelings about government [now], so we play with that, too.