Could any writer outside of that wicked satirist Tom Sharpe or Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes (the two fellows who wrote the 1983 film WarGames) have plausibly invented the saga of Edward Snowden? An aimless young man with a passion for computers and video games somehow turns himself into a tech whiz and gets hired as a high-security-level *Über-*geek by the C.I.A. Before long he is contracted to the National Security Agency, America’s all-seeing and all-hearing eyes and ears, and is grappling with a crisis of conscience over its boundless surveillance. He suddenly finds he has access to everything in its vaults because he is working in Hawaii: the outpost there has vulnerable data lines to the mainland, and so the N.S.A. wants a backup of its vast holdings. It gives the job to Snowden. He makes more than one copy of countless documents. And then he flees to Hong Kong with the goods. When Washington learns about his absence, it tries to cancel his passport—but haplessly gives Chinese authorities his middle name as “James” instead of “Joseph.” Snowden is allowed to depart Hong Kong for Moscow. With him is a pretty young legal researcher with no apparent legal training. She’s been assigned to him by none other than Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks mastermind who is desperate to make himself part of the story. In order to disseminate some of the top-secret documents he has spirited away, Snowden has meanwhile laid bait for several reporters, all of whom confirm his bona fides and get to work. Back in Hawaii, Snowden’s pole-dancing girlfriend, Lindsay, posts risqué pictures of herself on her blog.

That is just the life-as-satire part. The frightening part is everything else: what the Snowden documents actually reveal. Most people suspected that the U.S. government was snooping about with considerable abandon. But no one knew that the N.S.A.—with the War on Terror as its evergreen pretext—was attempting to collect details of every phone call made in America (and millions more made in other countries). Or that it was tapping into the fiber-optic cables running between the overseas data centers of big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo. Or that phone and Internet companies were themselves serving as the N.S.A.’s instruments. As was the case when George W. Bush and Tony Blair were running things, British authorities, this time through their N.S.A. counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, proved to be willing collaborators. (Among Snowden’s revelations: in a case of the British being British, the GCHQ collected, in bulk, millions of often sexually explicit images taken from Yahoo Webcam chats and saved them in the agency’s databases.)

Amazingly, this regime of near-total surveillance probably did not cross any legal boundaries—it may be criminal, but not technically a crime. The powers invested in the U.S. government in the wake of 9/11 are vast and insidious—very much the “dark side” that Vice President Dick Cheney promised us. The safeguards against that power are riddled with loopholes.

One way of dealing with a huge—and hugely consequential—subject is to assemble an enterprise team of superb reporters and let them go at it. A decade ago we published a sort of triptych of long-form narrative dispatches that attempted to explain what has become the story of our times. “The Path to Florida,” written by David Margolick, Evgenia Peretz, and Michael Shnayerson, went beneath the surface irregularities that occurred in the crucial, kingmaking southern state during the 2000 presidential election. “The Path to 9/11,” written by Ned Zeman, David Wise, David Rose, and Bryan Burrough, described the dysfunction among the nation’s intelligence agencies—and the political and security failures—that left us open to the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. “The Path to War,” written by Bryan Burrough, Evgenia Peretz, David Rose, and David Wise, illustrated each step of how President Bush and his advisers used false intelligence to take us into the nine-year, $1.7 trillion war in Iraq, which resulted in as many as 500,000 fatalities.