Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A True Story of the Deep State

In the past two decades, humans have created more data than in the entire previous course of humanity. Deep in the Utah desert, the NSA has a warehouse the size of nine city blocks that can save any text, video, or photo ever sent from any phone on the planet with storage to spare. Regular people come to work at this facility each day; those regular people are the eyes and ears of the American government, and they are watching us.

In Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, acclaimed essayist and author Kerry Howley reveals the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence community, uncovering a shadow America more fascinating and more unsettling than one could imagine. At the heart of her narrative, which encompasses "American Taliban" John Walker Lind, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, is a woman named Reality Winner. Reality becomes a crypto linguist for a government drone program, eavesdropping on private conversations until she hears information that she can no longer keep secret. Her decision to act on this knowledge leads to a disturbing series of events that ends with Winner sentenced to years in prison.

What does it mean to be an American citizen in the age of the Internet, when privacy no longer exists? Who is a leaker and who is a whistleblower, and how do we treat the people who act on their consciences? A feat of narrative journalism and a profound meditation on modern life, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is an unflinching deep dive into the darkest corners of our digital world.