Permanent Record

¹ Looking Through the Window

The first thing I ever hacked was bedtime.

It felt unfair, being forced by my parents to go to sleep—before they went to sleep, before my sister went to sleep, when I wasn’t even tired. Life’s first little injustice.

Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until—on night 2,193, the night I turned six years old—I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday. I had just had one of the best days of my young life, complete with friends, a party, and even gifts, and I wasn’t about to let it end just because everyone else had to go home. So I went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours. The microwave’s clock was easier than the stove’s to roll back, if only because it was easier to reach.

When the authorities—in their unlimited ignorance—failed to notice, I was mad with power, galloping laps around the living room. I, the master of time, would never again be sent to bed. I was free. And so it was that I fell asleep on the floor, having finally seen the sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. When I awoke, the clocks in the house once again matched my father’s watch.

IF ANYBODY BOTHERED to set a watch today, how would they know what to set it to? If you’re like most people these days, you’d set it to the time on your smartphone. But if you look at your phone, and I mean really look at it, burrowing deep through its menus into its settings, you’ll eventually see that the phone’s time is “automatically set.” Every so often, your phone quietly—silently—asks your service provider’s network, “Hey, do you have the time?” That network, in turn, asks a bigger network, which asks an even bigger network, and so on through a great succession of towers and wires until the request reaches one of the true masters of time, a Network Time Server run by or referenced against the atomic clocks kept at places like the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States, the Federal Institute of Meteorology and Climatology in Switzerland, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. That long invisible journey, accomplished in a fraction of a second, is why you don’t see a blinking 12:00 on your phone’s screen every time you power it up again after its battery runs out.

I was born in 1983, at the end of the world in which people set the time for themselves. That was the year that the US Department of Defense split its internal system of interconnected computers in half, creating one network for the use of the defense establishment, called MILNET, and another network for the public, called the Internet. Before the year was out, new rules defined the boundaries of this virtual space, giving rise to the Domain Name System that we still use today—the .govs, .mils, .edus, and, of course, .coms—and the country codes assigned to the rest of the world: .uk, .de, .fr, .cn, .ru, and so on. Already, my country (and so I) had an advantage, an edge. And yet it would be another six years before the World Wide Web was invented, and about nine years before my family got a computer with a modem that could connect to it.

Of course, the Internet is not a single entity, although we tend to refer to it as if it were. The technical reality is that there are new networks born every day on the global cluster of interconnected communications networks that you—and about three billion other people, or roughly 42 percent of the world’s population—use regularly. Still, I’m going to use the term in its broadest sense, to mean the universal network of networks connecting the majority of the world’s computers to one another via a set of shared protocols.

Some of you may worry that you don’t know a protocol from a hole in the wall, but all of us have made use of many. Think of protocols as languages for machines, the common rules they follow to be understood by one another. If you’re around my age, you might remember having to type the “http” at the beginning of a website’s address into the address bar of your Web browser. This refers to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the language you use to access the World Wide Web, that massive collection of mostly text-based but also audio- and video-capable sites like Google and YouTube and Facebook. Every time you check your email, you use a language like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), or POP3 (Post Office Protocol). File transfers pass through the Internet using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). And as for the time-setting procedure on your phone that I mentioned, those updates get fetched through NTP (Network Time Protocol).

All these protocols are known as application protocols, and comprise just one family of protocols among the myriad online. For example, in order for the data in any of these application protocols to cross the Internet and be delivered to your desktop, or laptop, or phone, it first has to be packaged up inside a dedicated transport protocol—think of how the regular snail-mail postal service prefers you to send your letters and parcels in their standard-size envelopes and boxes. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is used to route, among other applications, Web pages and email. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is used to route more time-sensitive, real-time applications, such as Internet telephony and live broadcasts.

Any recounting of the multilayered workings of what in my childhood was called cyberspace, the Net, the Infobahn, and the Information Superhighway is bound to be incomplete, but the takeaway is this: these protocols have given us the means to digitize and put online damn near everything in the world that we don’t eat, drink, wear, or dwell in. The Internet has become almost as integral to our lives as the air through which so many of its communications travel. And, as we’ve all been reminded—every time our social media feeds alert us to a post that tags us in a compromising light—to digitize something is to record it, in a format that will last forever.

Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine Internet-less years: I can’t account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. The data just doesn’t exist. When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle.

My generation was the last in American and perhaps even in world history for which this is true—the last undigitized generation, whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost irretrievably. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of the door frame of the house in which I grew up.

WE LIVED IN a grand old redbrick house on a little patch of lawn shaded by dogwood trees and strewn in summer with white magnolia flowers that served as cover for the plastic army men I used to crawl around with. The house had an atypical layout: its main entrance was on the second floor, accessed by a massive brick staircase. This floor was the primary living space, with the kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms.

Above this main floor was a dusty, cobwebbed, and forbidden attic given over to storage, haunted by what my mother promised me were squirrels, but what my father insisted were vampire werewolves that would devour any child foolish enough to venture up there. Below the main floor was a more or less finished basement—a rarity in North Carolina, especially so close to the coast. Basements tend to flood, and ours, certainly, was perennially damp, despite the constant workings of the dehumidifier and sump pump.

At the time my family moved in, the back of the main floor was extended and divided up into a laundry room, a bathroom, my bedroom, and a den outfitted with a TV and a couch. From my bedroom, I had a view of the den through the window set into what had originally been the exterior wall of the house. This window, which once looked outside, now looked inside.

For nearly all the years that my family spent in that house in Elizabeth City, this bedroom was mine, and its window was, too. Though the window had a curtain, it didn’t provide much, if any, privacy. From as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was to tug the curtain aside and peek through the window into the den. Which is to say, from as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was spying.

I spied on my older sister, Jessica, who was allowed to stay up later than I was and watch the cartoons that I was still too young for. I spied on my mother, Wendy, who’d sit on the couch to fold the laundry while watching the nightly news. But the person I spied on the most was my father, Lon—or, as he was called in the Southern style, Lonnie—who’d commandeer the den into the wee hours.

My father was in the Coast Guard, though at the time I didn’t have the slightest clue what that meant. I knew that sometimes he wore a uniform and sometimes he didn’t. He left home early and came home late, often with new gadgets—a Texas Instruments TI-30 scientific calculator, a Casio stopwatch on a lanyard, a single speaker for a home stereo system—some of which he’d show me, and some of which he’d hide. You can imagine which I was more interested in.

The gadget I was most interested in arrived one night, just after bedtime. I was in bed and about to drift off, when I heard my father’s footsteps coming down the hall. I stood up on my bed, tugged aside the curtain, and watched. He was holding a mysterious box, close in size to a shoe box, and he removed from it a beige object that looked like a cinder block, from which long black cables snaked like the tentacles of some deep-sea monster out of one of my nightmares.

Working slowly and methodically—which was partially his disciplined, engineer’s way of doing everything, and partially an attempt to stay quiet—my father untangled the cables and stretched one across the shag carpet from the back of the box to the back of the TV. Then he plugged the other cable into a wall outlet behind the couch.

Suddenly the TV lit up, and with it my father’s face lit up, too. Normally he would just spend his evenings sitting on the couch, cracking Sun Drop sodas and watching the people on TV run around a field, but this was different. It took me only a moment to come to the most amazing realization of my whole entire, though admittedly short, life: my father was controlling what was happening on TV.

I had come face-to-face with a Commodore 64—one of the first home computer systems on the market.

I had no idea what a computer was, of course, let alone whether what my father was doing on it was playing a game or working. Although he was smiling and seemed to be having fun, he was also applying himself to what was happening on-screen with the same intensity with which he applied himself to every mechanical task around the house. I knew only one thing: whatever he was doing, I wanted to do it, too.

After that, whenever my father came into the den to break out the beige brick, I’d stand up on my bed, tug away the curtain, and spy on his adventures. One night the screen showed a falling ball and a bar at the bottom; my father had to move the bar horizontally to hit the ball, bounce it up, and knock down a wall of multicolored bricks (Arkanoid). On another night, he sat before a screen of multicolored bricks in different shapes; they were always falling, and as they fell he moved and rotated them to assemble them into perfect rows, which immediately vanished (Tetris). I was truly confused, however, about what my father was doing—recreation or part of his job—when I peeked through the window one night and saw him flying.

My father—who’d always delighted me by pointing out the real helicopters from the Coast Guard Air Base when they flew by the house—was piloting his own helicopter right here, right in front of me, in our den. He took off from a little base, complete with a tiny waving American flag, into a black night sky full of twinkling stars, and then immediately crashed to the ground. He gave a little cry that masked my own, but just when I thought the fun was over, he was right back at the little base again with the tiny flag, taking off one more time.

The game was called Choplifter! and that exclamation point wasn’t just part of its name, it was also part of the experience of playing it. Choplifter! was thrilling. Again and again I watched these sorties fly out of our den and over a flat desert moon, shooting at, and being shot at by, enemy jets and enemy tanks. The helicopter kept landing and lifting off, as my father tried to rescue a flashing crowd of people and ferry them to safety. That was my earliest sense of my father: he was a hero.

The cheer that came from the couch the first time that the diminutive helicopter touched down intact with a full load of miniature people was just a little too loud. My father’s head snapped to the window to check whether he’d disturbed me, and he caught me dead in the eyes.

I leaped into bed, pulled up the blanket, and lay perfectly still as my father’s heavy steps approached my room.

He tapped on the window. “It’s past your bedtime, buddy. Are you still up?”

I held my breath. Suddenly, he opened the window, reached into my bedroom, picked me up—blanket and all—and pulled me through into the den. It all happened so quickly, my feet never even touched the carpet.

Before I knew it, I was sitting on my father’s lap as his copilot. I was too young and too excited to realize that the joystick he’d given me wasn’t plugged in. All that mattered was that I was flying alongside my father.

² The Invisible Wall

Elizabeth City is a quaint, midsize port town with a relatively intact historic core. Like most other early American settlements, it grew around the water, in this case around the banks of the Pasquotank River, whose name is an English corruption of an Algonquin word meaning “where the current forks.” The river flows down from Chesapeake Bay, through the swamps of the Virginia–North Carolina border, and empties into Albemarle Sound alongside the Chowan, the Perquimans, and other rivers. Whenever I consider what other directions my life might have taken, I think of that watershed: no matter the particular course the water travels from its source, it still ultimately arrives at the same destination.

My family has always been connected to the sea, my mother’s side in particular. Her heritage is straight Pilgrim—her first ancestor on these shores was John Alden, the Mayflower’s cooper, or barrelmaker. He became the husband of a fellow passenger named Priscilla Mullins, who had the dubious distinction of being the only single woman of marriageable age onboard, and so the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony.

John and Priscilla’s Thanksgiving-time coupling almost never happened, however, due to the meddling of the commander of the Plymouth Colony, Myles Standish. His love for Priscilla, and Priscilla’s rejection of him and eventual marriage to John, became the basis of a literary work that was referenced throughout my youth, The Courtship of Miles Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (himself an Alden-Mullins descendant):

John and Priscilla’s daughter, Elizabeth, was the first Pilgrim child born in New England. My mother, whose name is also Elizabeth, is her direct descendant. Because the lineage is almost exclusively through the women, though, the surnames changed with nearly every generation—with an Alden marrying a Pabodie marrying a Grinnell marrying a Stephens marrying a Jocelin. These seafaring ancestors of mine sailed down the coast from what’s now Massachusetts to Connecticut and New Jersey—plying trade routes and dodging pirates between the Colonies and the Caribbean—until, with the Revolutionary War, the Jocelin line settled in North Carolina.

Amaziah Jocelin, also spelled Amasiah Josselyn, among other variants, was a privateer and war hero. As captain of the ten-gun barque The Firebrand, he was credited with the defense of Cape Fear. Following American independence, he became the US Navy Agent, or supply officer, of the Port of Wilmington, where he also established the city’s first chamber of commerce, which he called, funnily enough, the Intelligence-Office. The Jocelins and their descendants—the Moores and Halls and Meylands and Howells and Stevens and Restons and Stokleys—who comprise the rest of my mother’s side fought in every war in my country’s history, from the Revolution and the Civil War (in which the Carolinian relatives fought for the Confederacy against their New England/Union cousins), to both world wars. Mine is a family that has always answered the call of duty.

My maternal grandfather, whom I call Pop, is better known as Rear Admiral Edward J. Barrett. At the time of my birth he was deputy chief, aeronautical engineering division, Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. He’d go on to hold various engineering and operational commands, from Governors Island, New York City, to Key West, Florida, where he was director of the Joint Interagency Task Force East (a multiagency, multinational US Coast Guard–led force dedicated to the interdiction of narcotics trafficking in the Caribbean). I wasn’t aware of how high up the ranks Pop was rising, but I knew that the welcome-to-command ceremonies became more elaborate as time went on, with longer speeches and larger cakes. I remember the souvenir I was given by the artillery guard at one of them: the shell casing of a 40mm round, still warm and smelling like powdered hell, which had just been fired in a salute in Pop’s honor.

Then there’s my father, Lon, who at the time of my birth was a chief petty officer at the Coast Guard’s Aviation Technical Training Center in Elizabeth City, working as a curriculum designer and electronics instructor. He was often away, leaving my mother at home to raise my sister and me. To give us a sense of responsibility, she gave us chores; to teach us how to read, she labeled all our dresser drawers with their contents—SOCKS, UNDERWEAR. She would load us into our Red Flyer wagon and tow us to the local library, where I immediately made for my favorite section, the one that I called “Big Masheens.” Whenever my mother asked me if I was interested in any specific “Big Masheen,” I was unstoppable: “Dump trucks and steamrollers and forklifts and cranes and—”

“Is that all, buddy?”

“Oh,” I’d say, “and also cement mixers and bulldozers and—”

My mother loved giving me math challenges. At Kmart or Winn-Dixie, she’d have me pick out books and model cars and trucks and buy them for me if I was able to mentally add together their prices. Over the course of my childhood, she kept escalating the difficulty, first having me estimate and round to the nearest dollar, then having me figure out the precise dollar-and-cents amount, and then having me calculate 3 percent of that amount and add it on to the total. I was confused by that last challenge—not by the arithmetic so much as by the reasoning. “Why?”

“It’s called tax,” my mother explained. “Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.”

“What do they do with it?”

“You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?” she said. “The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money to fill the library with books.”

Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn’t match those on the cash register’s display. But once again, my mother explained. “They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent.”

“So now the library will get even more books?” I asked.

“Let’s hope,” my mother said.

My grandmother lived a few streets over from us, across from the Carolina Feed and Seed Mill and a towering pecan tree. After stretching out my shirt to make a basket to fill with fallen pecans, I’d go up to her house and lie on the carpet beside the long low bookshelves. My usual company was an edition of Aesop’s Fables and, perhaps my favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology. I would leaf through the pages, pausing only to crack a few nuts while I absorbed accounts of flying horses, intricate labyrinths, and serpent-haired Gorgons who turned mortals to stone. I was in awe of Odysseus, and liked Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena well enough, but the deity I admired most had to be Hephaestus: the ugly god of fire, volcanoes, blacksmiths, and carpenters, the god of tinkerers. I was proud of being able to spell his Greek name, and of knowing that his Roman name, Vulcan, was used for the home planet of Spock from Star Trek. The fundamental premise of the Greco-Roman pantheon always stuck with me. Up at the summit of some mountain there was this gang of gods and goddesses who spent most of their infinite existence fighting with each other and spying on the business of humanity. Occasionally, when they noticed something that intrigued or disturbed them, they disguised themselves, as lambs and swans and lions, and descended the slopes of Olympus to investigate and meddle. It was often a disaster—someone always drowned, or was struck by lightning, or was turned into a tree—whenever the immortals sought to impose their will and interfere in mortal affairs.

Once, I picked up an illustrated version of the legends of King Arthur and his knights, and found myself reading about another legendary mountain, this one in Wales. It served as the fortress of a tyrannical giant named Rhitta Gawr, who refused to accept that the age of his reign had passed and that in the future the world would be ruled by human kings, whom he considered tiny and weak. Determined to keep himself in power, he descended from his peak, attacking kingdom after kingdom and vanquishing their armies. Eventually he managed to defeat and kill every single king of Wales and Scotland. Upon killing them he shaved off their beards and wove them together into a cloak, which he wore as a gory trophy. Then he decided to challenge the strongest king of Britain, King Arthur, giving him a choice: Arthur could either shave off his own beard and surrender, or Rhitta Gawr would decapitate the king and remove the beard himself. Enraged at this hubris, Arthur set off for Rhitta Gawr’s mountain fortress. The king and the giant met on the highest peak and battled each other for days, until Arthur was gravely wounded. Just as Rhitta Gawr grabbed the king by the hair and prepared to cut off his head, Arthur summoned a last measure of strength and sank his fabled sword through the eye of the giant, who toppled over dead. Arthur and his knights then went about piling up a funeral cairn atop Rhitta Gawr’s corpse, but before they could complete the work, snow began to fall. As they departed, the giant’s bloodstained beard-cloak was returned to perfect whiteness.

The mountain was called Snaw Dun, which, a note explained, was Old English for “snow mound.” Today, Snaw Dun is called Mount Snowdon. A long-extinct volcano, it is, at approximately 3,560 feet, the highest peak in Wales. I remember the feeling of encountering my name in this context—it was thrilling—and the archaic spelling gave me my first palpable sense that the world was older than I was, even older than my parents were. The name’s association with the heroic exploits of Arthur and Lancelot and Gawain and Percival and Tristan and the other Knights of the Round Table gave me pride—until I learned that these exploits weren’t historical, but legendary.

Years later, with my mother’s help, I would scour the library in the hopes of separating the mythical from the factual. I found out that Stirling Castle in Scotland had been renamed Snowdon Castle, in honor of this Arthurian victory, as part of an attempt by the Scots to shore up their claim to the throne of England. Reality, I learned, is nearly always messier and less flattering than we might want it to be, but also in some strange way often richer than the myths.

By the time I uncovered the truth about Arthur, I had long been obsessed with a new and different type of story, or a new and different type of storytelling. On Christmas 1989, a Nintendo appeared in the house. I took to that two-tone-gray console so completely that my alarmed mother imposed a rule: I could only rent a new game when I finished reading a book. Games were expensive, and, having already mastered the ones that had come with the console—a single cartridge combining Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt—I was eager for other challenges. The only snag was that, at six years old, I couldn’t read as fast as I could complete a game. It was time for another of my neophyte hacks. I started coming home from the library with shorter books, and books with lots of pictures. There were visual encyclopedias of inventions, with crazy drawings of velocipedes and blimps, and comic books that I realized only later were abridged, for-kids versions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.

It was the NES—the janky but genius 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System—that was my real education. From The Legend of Zelda, I learned that the world exists to be explored; from Mega Man, I learned that my enemies have much to teach; and from Duck Hunt, well, Duck Hunt taught me that even if someone laughs at your failures, it doesn’t mean you get to shoot them in the face. Ultimately, though, it was Super Mario Bros. that taught me what remains perhaps the most important lesson of my life. I am being perfectly sincere. I am asking you to consider this seriously. Super Mario Bros., the 1.0 edition, is perhaps the all-time masterpiece of side-scrolling games. When the game begins, Mario is standing all the way to the left of the legendary opening screen, and he can only go in one direction: He can only move to the right, as new scenery and enemies scroll in from that side. He progresses through eight worlds of four levels each, all of them governed by time constraints, until he reaches the evil Bowser and frees the captive Princess Toadstool. Throughout all thirty-two levels, Mario exists in front of what in gaming parlance is called “an invisible wall,” which doesn’t allow him to go backward. There is no turning back, only going forward—for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown. A small kid growing up in small-town North Carolina in the 1980s has to get a sense of mortality from somewhere, so why not from two Italian-immigrant plumber brothers with an appetite for sewer mushrooms?

One day my much-used Super Mario Bros. cartridge wasn’t loading, no matter how much I blew into it. That’s what you had to do back then, or what we thought you had to do: you had to blow into the open mouth of the cartridge to clear it of the dust, debris, and pet hair that tended to accumulate there. But no matter how much I blew, both into the cartridge and into the cartridge slot of the console itself, the TV screen was full of blotches and waves, which were not reassuring in the least.

In retrospect, the Nintendo was probably just suffering from a faulty pin connection, but given that my seven-year-old self didn’t even know what a pin connection was, I was frustrated and desperate. Worst of all, my father had only just left on a Coast Guard trip and wouldn’t be back to help me fix it for two weeks. I knew of no Mario-style time-warping tricks or pipes to dive into that would make those weeks pass quicker, so I resolved to fix the thing myself. If I succeeded, I knew my father would be impressed. I went out to the garage to find his gray metal toolbox.

I decided that to figure out what was wrong with the thing, first I had to take it apart. Basically, I was just copying, or trying to copy, the same motions that my father went through whenever he sat at the kitchen table repairing the house’s VCR or cassette deck—the two household machines that, to my eye, the Nintendo console most closely resembled. It took me about an hour to dismantle the console, with my uncoordinated and very small hands trying to twist a flat screwdriver into Philips-head screws, but eventually I succeeded.

The console’s exterior was a dull, monochrome gray, but the interior was a welter of colors. It seemed like there was an entire rainbow of wires and glints of silver and gold jutting out of the green-as-grass circuitboard. I tightened a few things here, loosened a few things there—more or less at random—and blew on every part. After that, I wiped them all down with a paper towel. Then I had to blow on the circuitboard again to remove the bits of paper towel that had gotten stuck to what I now know were the pins.

Once I’d finished my cleaning and repairs, it was time for reassembly. Our golden Lab, Treasure, might have swallowed one of the tiny screws, or maybe it just got lost in the carpet or under the couch. And I must not have put all the components back in the same way I’d found them, because they barely fit into the console’s shell. The shell’s lid kept popping off, so I found myself squeezing the components down, the way you try to shut an overstuffed suitcase. Finally the lid snapped into place, but only on one side. The other side bulged up, and snapping that side into place only caused the first side to bulge. I went back and forth like that for a while, until I finally gave up and plugged the unit in again.

I pressed the Power button—and nothing. I pressed the Reset button—and nothing. Those were the only two buttons on the console. Before my repairs, the light next to the buttons had always glowed molten red, but now even that was dead. The console just sat there lopsided and useless, and I felt a surge of guilt and dread.

My father, when he came home from his Coast Guard trip, wasn’t going to be proud of me: he was going to jump on my head like a Goomba. But it wasn’t his anger I feared so much as his disappointment. To his peers, my father was a master electronics systems engineer who specialized in avionics. To me, he was a household mad scientist who’d try to fix everything himself—electrical outlets, dishwashers, hot-water heaters, and AC units. I’d work as his helper whenever he’d let me, and in the process I’d come to know both the physical pleasures of manual work and the intellectual pleasures of basic mechanics, along with the fundamental principles of electronics—the differences between voltage and current, between power and resistance. Every job we undertook together would end either in a successful act of repair or a curse, as my father would fling the unsalvageable piece of equipment across the room and into the cardboard box of things-that-can’t-be-unbroken. I never judged him for these failures—I was always too impressed by the fact that he had dared to hazard an attempt.

When he returned home and found out what I’d done to the NES, he wasn’t angry, much to my surprise. He wasn’t exactly pleased, either, but he was patient. He explained that understanding why and how things had gone wrong was every bit as important as understanding what component had failed: figuring out the why and how would let you prevent the same malfunction from happening again in the future. He pointed to each of the console’s parts in turn, explaining not just what it was, but what it did, and how it interacted with all the other parts to contribute to the correct working of the mechanism. Only by analyzing a mechanism in its individual parts were you able to determine whether its design was the most efficient to achieve its task. If it was the most efficient, just malfunctioning, then you fixed it. But if not, then you made modifications to improve the mechanism. This was the only proper protocol for repair jobs, according to my father, and nothing about it was optional—in fact, this was the fundamental responsibility you had to technology.

Like all my father’s lessons, this one had broad applications beyond our immediate task. Ultimately, it was a lesson in the principle of self-reliance, which my father insisted that America had forgotten sometime between his own childhood and mine. Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing a broken machine with a newer model was typically lower than the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was typically lower than the cost of sourcing the parts and figuring out how to fix it yourself. This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.

It turned out that I had probably just broken a solder joint, but to find out exactly which one, my father wanted to use special test equipment that he had access to at his laboratory at the Coast Guard base. I suppose he could have brought the test equipment home with him, but for some reason he brought me to work instead. I think he just wanted to show me his lab. He’d decided I was ready.

I wasn’t. I’d never been anywhere so impressive. Not even the library. Not even the Radio Shack at the Lynnhaven Mall. What I remember most are the screens. The lab itself was dim and empty, the standard-issue beige and white of government construction, but even before my father hit the lights I couldn’t help but be transfixed by the pulsating glow of electric green. Why does this place have so many TVs? was my first thought, quickly followed up by, And why are they all tuned to the same channel? My father explained that these weren’t TVs but computers, and though I’d heard the word before, I didn’t know what it meant. I think I initially assumed that the screens—the monitors—were the computers themselves.

He went on to show them to me, one by one, and tried to explain what they did: this one processed radar signals, and that one relayed radio transmissions, and yet another one simulated the electronic systems on aircraft. I won’t pretend that I understood even half of it. These computers were more advanced than nearly everything in use at that time in the private sector, far ahead of almost anything I had ever imagined. Sure, their processing units took a full five minutes to boot, their displays only showed one color, and they had no speakers for sound effects or music. But those limitations only marked them as serious.

My father plopped me down in a chair, raising it until I could just about reach the desk, and the rectangular hunk of plastic that was on it. For the first time in my life, I found myself in front of a keyboard. My father had never let me type on his Commodore 64, and my screen time had been restricted to video game consoles with their purpose-built controllers. But these computers were professional, general-purpose machines, not gaming devices, and I didn’t understand how to make them work. There was no controller, no joystick, no gun—the only interface was that flat hunk of plastic set with rows of keys printed with letters and numbers. The letters were even arranged in a different order than the one that I’d been taught at school. The first letter was not A but Q, followed by W, E, R, T, and Y. At least the numbers were in the same order in which I’d learned them.

My father told me that every key on the keyboard had a purpose—every letter, every number—and that their combinations had purposes, too. And just like with the buttons on a controller or joystick, if you could figure out the right combinations, you could work miracles. To demonstrate, he reached over me, typed a command, and pressed the Enter key. Something popped up on-screen that I now know is called a text editor. Then he grabbed a Post-it note and a pen and scribbled out some letters and numbers, and told me to type them up exactly while he went off to repair the broken Nintendo.

The moment he was gone, I began reproducing his scribbles on-screen by pecking away at the keys. A left-handed kid raised to be a rightie, I immediately found this to be the most natural method of writing I’d ever encountered.

10 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”; NAME$

20 PRINT “HELLO, “+ NAME$ + “!”

It may sound easy to you, but you’re not a young child. I was. I was a young child with chubby, stubby fingers who didn’t even know what quotation marks were, let alone that I had to hold down the Shift key in order to type them. After a whole lot of trial, and a whole lot of error, I finally succeeded in finishing the file. I pressed Enter and, in a flash, the computer was asking me a question: WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

I was fascinated. The note didn’t say what I was supposed do next, so I decided to answer, and pressed my new friend Enter once more. Suddenly, out of nowhere, HELLO, EDDIE! wrote itself on-screen in a radioactive green that floated atop the blackness.

This was my introduction to programming and to computing in general: a lesson in the fact that these machines do what they do because somebody tells them to, in a very special, very careful way. And that somebody can even be seven years old.

Almost immediately, I grasped the limitations of gaming systems. They were stifling in comparison to computer systems. Nintendo, Atari, Sega—they all confined you to levels and worlds that you could advance through, even defeat, but never change. The repaired Nintendo console went back to the den, where my father and I competed in two-player Mario Kart, Double Dragon, and Street Fighter. By that point, I was significantly better than him at all those games—the first pursuit at which I proved more adept than my father—but every so often I’d let him beat me. I didn’t want him to think that I wasn’t grateful.

I’m not a natural programmer, and I’ve never considered myself any good at it. But I did, over the next decade or so, become good enough to be dangerous. To this day, I still find the process magical: typing in the commands in all these strange languages that the processor then translates into an experience that’s available not just to me but to everyone. I was fascinated by the thought that one individual programmer could code something universal, something bound by no laws or rules or regulations except those essentially reducible to cause and effect. There was an utterly logical relationship between my input and the output. If my input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was flawless, the computer’s output was, too. I’d never before experienced anything so consistent and fair, so unequivocally unbiased. A computer would wait forever to receive my command but would process it the very moment I hit Enter, no questions asked. No teacher had ever been so patient, yet so responsive. Nowhere else—certainly not at school, and not even at home—had I ever felt so in control. That a perfectly written set of commands would perfectly execute the same operations time and again would come to seem to me—as it did to so many smart, tech-inclined children of the millennium—the one stable saving truth of our generation.

³ Beltway Boy

I was just shy of my ninth birthday when my family moved from North Carolina to Maryland. To my surprise, I found that my name had preceded me. “Snowden” was everywhere throughout Anne Arundel, the county we settled in, though it was a while before I learned why.

Richard Snowden was a British major who arrived in the province of Maryland in 1658 with the understanding that Lord Baltimore’s guarantee of religious freedom for both Catholics and Protestants would also be extended to Quakers. In 1674, Richard was joined by his brother John, who’d agreed to leave Yorkshire in order to shorten his prison sentence for preaching the Quaker faith. When William Penn’s ship, the Welcome, sailed up the Delaware in 1682, John was one of the few Europeans to greet it.

Three of John’s grandsons went on to serve in the Continental Army during the Revolution. As the Quakers are pacifists, they came in for community censure for deciding to join the fight for independence, but their conscience demanded a reconsideration of their pacifism. William Snowden, my direct paternal ancestor, served as a captain, was taken prisoner by the British in the Battle of Fort Washington in New York, and died in custody at one of the notorious sugar house prisons in Manhattan. (Legend has it that the British killed their POWs by forcing them to eat gruel laced with ground glass.) His wife, Elizabeth née Moor, was a valued adviser to General Washington, and the mother to another John Snowden—a politician, historian, and newspaper publisher in Pennsylvania whose descendants dispersed southward to settle amid the Maryland holdings of their Snowden cousins.

Anne Arundel County encompasses nearly all of the 1,976 acres of woodland that King Charles II granted to the family of Richard Snowden in 1686. The enterprises the Snowdens established there include the Patuxent Iron Works, one of colonial America’s most important forges and a major manufacturer of cannonballs and bullets, and Snowden Plantation, a farm and dairy run by Richard Snowden’s grandsons. After serving in the heroic Maryland Line of the Continental Army, they returned to the plantation and—most fully living the principles of independence—abolished their family’s practice of slavery, freeing their two hundred African slaves nearly a full century before the Civil War.

Today, the former Snowden fields are bisected by Snowden River Parkway, a busy four-lane commercial stretch of upmarket chain restaurants and car dealerships. Nearby, Route 32/Patuxent Freeway leads directly to Fort George G. Meade, the second-largest army base in the country and the home of the NSA. Fort Meade, in fact, is built atop land that was once owned by my Snowden cousins, and that was either bought from them (in one account) or expropriated from them (according to others) by the US government.

I knew nothing of this history at the time: my parents joked that the state of Maryland changed the name on the signs every time somebody new moved in. They thought that was funny but I just found it spooky. Anne Arundel County is only a bit more than 250 miles away from Elizabeth City via I-95, yet it felt like a different planet. We’d exchanged the leafy riverside for a concrete sidewalk, and a school where I’d been popular and academically successful for one where I was constantly mocked for my glasses, my disinterest in sports, and, especially, for my accent—a strong Southern drawl that led my new classmates to call me “retarded.”

I was so sensitive about my accent that I stopped speaking in class and started practicing alone at home until I managed to sound “normal”—or, at least, until I managed not to pronounce the site of my humiliation as “Anglish clay-iss” or say that I’d gotten a paper cut on my “fanger.” Meanwhile, all that time I’d been afraid to speak freely had caused my grades to plummet, and some of my teachers decided to have me IQ-tested as a way of diagnosing what they thought was a learning disability. When my score came back, I don’t remember getting any apologies, just a bunch of extra “enrichment assignments.” Indeed, the same teachers who’d doubted my ability to learn now began to take issue with my newfound interest in speaking up.

My new home was on the Beltway, which traditionally referred to Interstate 495, the highway that encircles Washington, DC, but now describes the vast and ever-expanding blast radius of bedroom communities around the nation’s capital, stretching north to Baltimore, Maryland, and south to Quantico, Virginia. The inhabitants of these suburbs almost invariably either serve in the US government or work for one of the companies that do business with the US government. There is, to put it plainly, no other reason to be there.

We lived in Crofton, Maryland, halfway between Annapolis and Washington, DC, at the western edge of Anne Arundel County, where the residential developments are all in the vinyl-sided Federalist style and have quaint ye-olde names like Crofton Towne, Crofton Mews, The Preserve, The Ridings. Crofton itself is a planned community fitted around the curves of the Crofton Country Club. On a map, it resembles nothing so much as the human brain, with the streets coiling and kinking and folding around one another like the ridges and furrows of the cerebral cortex. Our street was Knights Bridge Turn, a broad, lazy loop of split-level housing, wide driveways, and two-car garages. The house we lived in was seven down from one end of the loop, seven down from the other—the house in the middle. I got a Huffy ten-speed bike and with it, a paper route, delivering the Capital, a venerable newspaper published in Annapolis, whose daily distribution became distressingly erratic, especially in the winter, especially between Crofton Parkway and Route 450, which, as it passed by our neighborhood, acquired a different name: Defense Highway.

For my parents this was an exciting time. Crofton was a step up for them, both economically and socially. The streets were tree-lined and pretty much crime-free, and the multicultural, multiracial, multilingual population, which reflected the diversity of the Beltway’s diplomatic corps and intelligence community, was well-to-do and well educated. Our backyard was basically a golf course, with tennis courts just around the corner, and beyond those an Olympic-size pool. Commuting-wise, too, Crofton was ideal. It took my father just forty minutes to get to his new posting as a chief warrant officer in the Aeronautical Engineering Division at Coast Guard Headquarters, which at the time was located at Buzzard Point in southern Washington, DC, adjacent to Fort Lesley J. McNair. And it took my mother just twenty or so minutes to get to her new job at the NSA, whose boxy futuristic headquarters, topped with radomes and sheathed in copper to seal in the communications signals, forms the heart of Fort Meade.

I can’t stress this enough, for outsiders: this type of employment was normal. Neighbors to our left worked for the Defense Department; neighbors to the right worked in the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. For a while, nearly every girl at school on whom I had a crush had a father in the FBI. Fort Meade was just the place where my mother worked, along with about 125,000 other employees, approximately 40,000 of whom resided on-site, many with their families. The base was home to over 115 government agencies, in addition to forces from all five branches of the military. To put it in perspective, in Anne Arundel County, population just over half a million, every eight hundredth person works for the post office, every thirtieth person works for the public school system, and every fourth person works for, or serves in, a business, agency, or branch connected to Fort Meade. The base has its own post offices, schools, police, and fire departments. Area children, military brats and civilians alike, would flock to the base daily to take golf, tennis, and swimming lessons. Though we lived off base, my mother still used its commissary as our grocery store, to stock up on items in bulk. She also took advantage of the base’s PX, or Post Exchange, as a one-stop shop for the sensible and, most important, tax-free clothing that my sister and I were constantly outgrowing. Perhaps it’s best, then, for readers not raised in this milieu to imagine Fort Meade and its environs, if not the entire Beltway, as one enormous boom-or-bust company town. It is a place whose monoculture has much in common with, say, Silicon Valley’s, except that the Beltway’s product isn’t technology but government itself.

I should add that both my parents had top secret clearances, but my mother also had a full-scope polygraph—a higher-level security check that members of the military aren’t subject to. The funny thing is, my mother was the farthest thing from a spy. She was a clerk at an independent insurance and benefits association that serviced employees of the NSA—essentially, providing spies with retirement plans. But still, to process pension forms she had to be vetted as if she were about to parachute into a jungle to stage a coup.

My father’s career remains fairly opaque to me to this day, and the fact is that my ignorance here isn’t anomalous. In the world I grew up in, nobody really talked about their jobs—not just to children, but to each other. It is true that many of the adults around me were legally prohibited from discussing their work, even with their families, but to my mind a more accurate explanation lies in the technical nature of their labor and the government’s insistence on compartmentalization. Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned. And the work that consumes them tends to require such specialized knowledge that to bring it up at a barbecue would get them disinvited from the next one, because nobody cared.

In retrospect, maybe that’s what got us here.

⁴ American Online

It was soon after we moved to Crofton that my father brought home our first desktop computer, a Compaq Presario 425, list price $1,399 but purchased at his military discount, and initially set up—much to my mother’s chagrin—smack in the middle of the dining-room table. From the moment it appeared, the computer and I were inseparable. If previously I’d been loath to go outside and kick around a ball, now the very idea seemed ludicrous. There was no outside greater than what I could find inside this drab clunky PC clone, with what felt at the time like an impossibly fast 25-megahertz Intel 486 CPU and an inexhaustible 200-megabyte hard disk. Also, get this, it had a color monitor—an 8-bit color monitor, to be precise, which means that it could display up to 256 different colors. (Your current device can probably display in the millions.)

This Compaq became my constant companion—my second sibling, and first love. It came into my life just at the age when I was first discovering an independent self and the multiple worlds that can simultaneously exist within this world. That process of exploration was so exciting that it made me take for granted and even neglect, for a while at least, the family and life that I already had. Another way of saying this is, I was just experiencing the early throes of puberty. But this was a technologized puberty, and the tremendous changes that it wrought in me were, in a way, being wrought everywhere, in everyone.

My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them. They’d call my name to tell me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them. And whenever I was reminded that the computer was a shared computer and not my personal machine, I’d relinquish my seat with such reluctance that as my father, or mother, or sister took their turn, they’d have to order me out of the room entirely lest I hover moodily over their shoulders and offer advice—showing my sister word-processing macros and shortcuts when she was writing a research paper, or giving my parents spreadsheet tips when they tried to do their taxes.

I’d try to rush them through their tasks, so I could get back to mine, which were so much more important—like playing Loom. As technology had advanced, games involving Pong paddles and helicopters—the kind my father had played on that by now superannuated Commodore—had lost ground to ones that realized that at the heart of every computer user was a book reader, a being with the desire not just for sensation but for story. The crude Nintendo, Atari, and Sega games of my childhood, with plots along the lines of (and this is a real example) rescuing the president of the United States from ninjas, now gave way to detailed reimaginings of the ancient tales that I’d paged through while lying on the carpet of my grandmother’s house.

Loom was about a society of Weavers whose elders (named after the Greek Fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) create a secret loom that controls the world, or, according to the script of the game, that weaves “subtle patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality.” When a young boy discovers the loom’s power, he’s forced into exile, and everything spirals into chaos until the world decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea, after all.

Unbelievable, sure. But then again, it’s just a game.

Still, it wasn’t lost on me, even at that young age, that the titular machine of the game was a symbol of sorts for the computer on which I was playing it. The loom’s rainbow-colored threads were like the computer’s rainbow-colored internal wires, and the lone gray thread that foretold an uncertain future was like the long gray phone cord that came out of the back of the computer and connected it to the great wide world beyond. There, for me, was the true magic: with just this cord, the Compaq’s expansion card and modem, and a working phone, I could dial up and connect to something new called the Internet.

Readers who were born postmillennium might not understand the fuss, but trust me, this was a goddamned miracle. Nowadays, connectivity is just presumed. Smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always. Connected to what exactly? How? It doesn’t matter. You just tap the icon your older relatives call “the Internet button” and boom, you’ve got it: the news, pizza delivery, streaming music, and streaming video that we used to call TV and movies. Back then, however, we walked uphill both ways, to and from school, and plugged our modems directly into the wall, with manly twelve-year-old hands.

I’m not saying that I knew much about what the Internet was, or how exactly I was connecting to it, but I did understand the miraculousness of it all. Because in those days, when you told the computer to connect, you were setting off an entire process wherein the computer would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of snakes, after which—and it could take lifetimes, or at least whole minutes—you could pick up any other phone in the house on an extension line and actually hear the computers talking. You couldn’t actually understand what they were saying to each other, of course, since they were speaking in a machine language that transmitted up to fourteen thousand symbols per second. Still, even that incomprehension was an astonishingly clear indication that phone calls were no longer just for older teenage sisters.

Internet access, and the emergence of the Web, was my generation’s big bang or Precambrian explosion. It irrevocably altered the course of my life, as it did the lives of everyone. From the age of twelve or so, I tried to spend my every waking moment online. Whenever I couldn’t, I was busy planning my next session. The Internet was my sanctuary; the Web became my jungle gym, my treehouse, my fortress, my classroom without walls. If it were possible, I became more sedentary. If it were possible, I became more pale. Gradually, I stopped sleeping at night and instead slept by day in school. My grades went back into free fall.

I wasn’t worried by this academic setback, however, and I’m not sure that my parents were, either. After all, the education that I was getting online seemed better and even more practical for my future career prospects than anything provided by school. That, at least, was what I kept telling my mother and father.

My curiosity felt as vast as the Internet itself: a limitless space that was growing exponentially, adding webpages by the day, by the hour, by the minute, on subjects I knew nothing about, on subjects I’d never heard of before—yet the moment that I did hear about them, I’d develop an insatiable desire to understand them in their every detail, with few rests or snacks or even toilet breaks allowed. My appetite wasn’t limited to serious tech subjects like how to fix a CD-ROM drive, of course. I also spent plenty of time on gaming sites searching for god-mode cheat codes for Doom and Quake. But I was generally just so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information immediately available that I’m not sure I was able to say where one subject ended and another began. A crash course on how to build my own computer led to a crash course in processor architecture, with side excursions into information about martial arts, guns, sports cars, and—full disclosure—softcore-ish goth-y porn.

I sometimes had the feeling that I had to know everything and wasn’t going to sign off until I did. It was like I was in a race with the technology, in the same way that some of the teenage boys around me were in a race with one another to see who’d grow the tallest, or who’d get facial hair first. At school I was surrounded by kids, some from foreign countries, who were just trying to fit in and would expend enormous effort to seem cool, to keep up with the trends. But owning the latest No Fear hat and knowing how to bend its brim was child’s play—literally, child’s play—compared to what I was doing. I found it so thoroughly demanding to keep pace with all of the sites and how-to tutorials I followed that I started to resent my parents whenever they—in response to a particularly substandard report card or a detention I received—would force me off the computer on a school night. I couldn’t bear to have those privileges revoked, disturbed by the thought that every moment that I wasn’t online more and more material was appearing that I’d be missing. After repeated parental warnings and threats of grounding, I’d finally relent and print out whatever file I was reading and bring the dot-matrix pages up to bed. I’d continue studying in hard copy until my parents had gone to bed themselves, and then I’d tiptoe out into the dark, wary of the squeaky door and the creaky floorboards by the stairs. I’d keep the lights off and, guiding myself by the glow of the screen saver, I’d wake the computer up and go online, holding my pillows against the machine to stifle the dial tone of the modem and the ever-intensifying hiss of its connection.

How can I explain it, to someone who wasn’t there? My younger readers, with their younger standards, might think of the nascent Internet as way too slow, the nascent Web as too ugly and un-entertaining. But that would be wrong. Back then, being online was another life, considered by most to be separate and distinct from Real Life. The virtual and the actual had not yet merged. And it was up to each individual user to determine for themselves where one ended and the other began.

It was precisely this that was so inspiring: the freedom to imagine something entirely new, the freedom to start over. Whatever Web 1.0 might’ve lacked in user-friendliness and design sensibility, it more than made up for by its fostering of experimentation and originality of expression, and by its emphasis on the creative primacy of the individual. A typical GeoCities site, for example, might have a flashing background that alternated between green and blue, with white text scrolling like an exclamatory chyron across the middle—Read This First!!!—below the .gif of a dancing hamster. But to me, all these kludgy quirks and tics of amateur production merely indicated that the guiding intelligence behind the site was human, and unique. Computer science professors and systems engineers, moonlighting English majors and mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling armchair political economists were all only too happy to share their research and convictions—not for any financial reward, but merely to win converts to their cause. And whether that cause was PC or Mac, macrobiotic diets or the abolition of the death penalty, I was interested. I was interested because they were enthused. Many of these strange and brilliant people could even be contacted and were quite pleased to answer my questions via the forms (“click this hyperlink or copy and paste it into your browser”) and email addresses (@usenix.org, @frontier.net) provided on their sites.

As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time—a stretch that, fortunately for me, coincided almost exactly with my adolescence—the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people. Its purpose was to enlighten, not to monetize, and it was administered more by a provisional cluster of perpetually shifting collective norms than by exploitative, globally enforceable terms of service agreements. To this day, I consider the 1990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy I’ve ever experienced.

I was especially involved with the Web-based bulletin-board systems or BBSes. On these, you could pick a username and type out whatever message you wanted to post, either adding to a preexisting group discussion or starting a new one. Any and all messages that replied to your post would be organized by thread. Imagine the longest email chain you’ve ever been on, but in public. These were also chat applications, like Internet Relay Chat, which provided an immediate-gratification instant-message version of the same experience. There you could discuss any topic in real time, or at least as close to real time as a telephone conversation, live radio, or TV news.

Most of the messaging and chatting I did was in search of answers to questions I had about how to build my own computer, and the responses I received were so considered and thorough, so generous and kind, they’d be unthinkable today. My panicked query about why a certain chipset for which I’d saved up my allowance didn’t seem to be compatible with the motherboard I’d already gotten for Christmas would elicit a two-thousand-word explanation and note of advice from a professional tenured computer scientist on the other side of the country. Not cribbed from any manual, this response was composed expressly for me, to troubleshoot my problems step-by-step until I’d solved them. I was twelve years old, and my correspondent was an adult stranger far away, yet he treated me like an equal because I’d shown respect for the technology. I attribute this civility, so far removed from our current social-media sniping, to the high bar for entry at the time. After all, the only people on these boards were the people who could be there—who wanted to be there badly enough—who had the proficiency and passion, because the Internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.

Once, a certain BBS that I was on tried to coordinate casual in-the-flesh meetings of its regular members throughout the country: in DC, in New York, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After being pressured rather hard to attend—and promised extravagant evenings of eating and drinking—I finally just told everyone how old I was. I was afraid that some of my correspondents might stop interacting with me, but instead they became, if anything, even more encouraging. I was sent updates from the electronics show and images of its catalog; one guy offered to ship me secondhand computer parts through the mail, free of charge.

I MIGHT HAVE told the BBSers my age, but I never told them my name, because one of the greatest joys of these platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. The anonymizing or pseudonymizing features brought equilibrium to all relationships, correcting their imbalances. I could take cover under virtually any handle, or “nym,” as they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking what I sensed were my more amateur questions on what seemed to me the more amateur boards, under different personas each time. My computer skills were improving so swiftly that instead of being proud of all the progress I’d made, I was embarrassed by my previous ignorance and wanted to distance myself from it. I wanted to disassociate my selves. I’d tell myself that squ33ker had been so dumb when “he” had asked that question about chipset compatibility way back, long ago, last Wednesday.

For all of this cooperative, collectivist free-culture ethos, I’m not going to pretend that the competition wasn’t merciless, or that the population—almost uniformly male, heterosexual, and hormonally charged—didn’t occasionally erupt into cruel and petty squabbles. But in the absence of real names, the people who claimed to hate you weren’t real people. They didn’t know anything about you beyond what you argued, and how you argued it. If, or rather when, one of your arguments incurred some online wrath, you could simply drop that screen name and assume another mask, under the cover of which you could even join in the mimetic pile-on, beating up on your disowned avatar as if it were a stranger. I can’t tell you what sweet relief that sometimes was.

In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in digital history: the move by both government and businesses to link, as intimately as possible, users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.

Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world. Imagine that you could choose a new voice and new words to speak in it, as if the “Internet button” were actually a reset button for your life. In the new millennium, Internet technology would be turned to very different ends: enforcing fidelity to memory, identarian consistency, and so ideological conformity. But back then, for a while at least, it protected us by forgetting our transgressions and forgiving our sins.

My most significant early encounters with online self-presentation happened not on BBSes, however, but in a more fantastical realm: the pseudo-feudal lands and dungeons of role-playing games, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) in particular. In order to play Ultima Online, which was my favorite MMORPG, I had to create and assume an alternative identity, or “alt.” I could choose, for example, to be a wizard or warrior, a tinkerer or thief, and I could toggle between these alts with a freedom that was unavailable to me in off-line life, whose institutions tend to regard all mutability as suspicious.

I’d roam the Ultima gamescape as one of my alts, interacting with the alts of others. As I got to know these other alts, by collaborating with them on certain quests, I’d sometimes come to realize that I’d met their users before, just under different identities, while they, in turn, might realize the same about me. They’d read my messages and figure out, through a characteristic phrase I’d used, or a particular quest that I’d suggest, that I—who was currently, say, a knight who called herself Shrike—was also, or had also been, a bard who called himself Corwin, and a smith who called himself Belgarion. Sometimes I just enjoyed these interactions as opportunities for banter, but more often than not I treated them competitively, measuring my success by whether I was able to identify more of another user’s alts than they were able to identify of mine. These contests to determine whether I could unmask others without being unmasked myself required me to be careful not to fall into any messaging patterns that might expose me, while simultaneously engaging others and remaining alert to the ways in which they might inadvertently reveal their true identities.

While the alts of Ultima were multifarious in name, they were essentially stabilized by the nature of their roles, which were well defined, even archetypal, and so enmeshed within the game’s established social order as to make playing them sometimes feel like discharging a civic duty. After a day at school or at a job that might seem purposeless and unrewarding, it could feel as if you were performing a useful service by spending the evening as a healer or shepherd, a helpful alchemist or mage. The relative stability of the Ultima universe—its continued development according to defined laws and codes of conduct—ensured that each alt had their role-specific tasks, and would be judged according to their ability, or willingness, to complete them and fulfill the societal expectations of their function.

I loved these games and the alternative lives they let me live, though love wasn’t quite as liberating for the other members of my family. Games, especially of the massively multiplayer variety, are notoriously time-consuming, and I was spending so many hours playing Ultima that our phone bills were becoming exorbitant and no calls were getting through. The line was always busy. My sister, now deep into her teen years, became furious when she found out that my online life had caused her to miss some crucial high-school gossip. However, it didn’t take her long to figure out that all she had to do to get her revenge was pick up the phone, which would break the Internet connection. The modem’s hiss would stop, and before she’d even received a normal dial tone, I’d be screaming my head off downstairs.

If you’re interrupted in the middle of, say, reading the news online, you can always go back and pick up wherever you left off. But if you’re interrupted while playing a game that you can’t pause or save—because a hundred thousand others are playing it at the same time—you’re ruined. You could be on top of the world, some legendary dragon-slayer with your own castle and an army, but after just thirty seconds of CONNECTION LOST you’d find yourself reconnecting to a bone-gray screen that bore a cruel epitaph: YOU ARE DEAD.

I’m a bit embarrassed nowadays at how seriously I took all of this, but I can’t avoid the fact that I felt, at the time, as if my sister was intent on destroying my life—particularly on those occasions when she’d make sure to catch my eye from across the room and smile before picking up the downstairs receiver, not because she wanted to make a phone call but purely because she wanted to remind me who was boss. Our parents got so fed up with our shouting matches that they did something uncharacteristically indulgent. They switched our Internet billing plan from pay-by-the-minute to flat-fee unlimited access, and installed a second phone line.

Peace smiled upon our abode.

⁵ Hacking

All teenagers are hackers. They have to be, if only because their life circumstances are untenable. They think they’re adults, but the adults think they’re kids.

Remember, if you can, your own teen years. You were a hacker, too, willing to do anything to evade parental supervision. Basically, you were fed up with being treated like a child.

Recall how it felt when anyone older and bigger than you sought to control you, as if age and size were identical with authority. At one time or another, your parents, teachers, coaches, scoutmasters, and clergy would all take advantage of their position to invade your private life, impose their expectations on your future, and enforce your conformity to past standards. Whenever these adults substituted their hopes, dreams, and desires for your own, they were doing so, by their account, “for your own good” or “with your best interests at heart.” And while sometimes this was true, we all remember those other times when it wasn’t—when “because I said so” wasn’t enough and “you’ll thank me one day” rang hollow. If you’ve ever been an adolescent, you’ve surely been on the receiving end of one of these clichés, and so on the losing end of an imbalance of power.

To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.

If you were anything like me, you were scandalized.

If you were anything like me, you were nearsighted, scrawny, and, age-wise, barely entering the double digits when you first started to wonder about politics.

In school, you were told that in the system of American politics, citizens give consent through the franchise to be governed by their equals. This is democracy. But democracy certainly wasn’t in place in my US history class, where, if my classmates and I had the vote, Mr. Martin would have been out of a job. Instead, Mr. Martin made the rules for US history, Ms. Evans made the rules for English, Mr. Sweeney made the rules for science, Mr. Stockton made the rules for math, and all of those teachers constantly changed those rules to benefit themselves and maximize their power. If a teacher didn’t want you to go to the bathroom, you’d better hold it in. If a teacher promised a field trip to the Smithsonian Institution but then canceled it for an imaginary infraction, they’d offer no explanation beyond citing their broad authority and the maintenance of proper order. Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be difficult, not least because getting its rules changed to serve the interests of the majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a purposeful disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.

What convinced me that school, at least, was an illegitimate system was that it wouldn’t recognize any legitimate dissent. I could plead my case until I lost my voice, or I could just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to begin with.

However, the benevolent tyranny of school, like all tyrannies, has a limited shelf life. At a certain point, the denial of agency becomes a license to resist, though it’s characteristic of adolescence to confuse resistance with escapism or even violence. The most common outlets for a rebellious teen were useless to me, because I was too cool for vandalism and not cool enough for drugs. (To this day, I’ve never even gotten drunk on liquor or smoked a cigarette.) Instead, I started hacking—which remains the sanest, healthiest, and most educational way I know for kids to assert autonomy and address adults on equal terms.

Like most of my classmates, I didn’t like the rules but was afraid of breaking them. I knew how the system worked: you corrected a teacher’s mistake, you got a warning; you confronted the teacher when they didn’t admit the mistake, you got detention; someone cheated off your exam, and though you didn’t expressly let them cheat, you got detention and the cheater got suspended. This is the origin of all hacking: the awareness of a systemic linkage between input and output, between cause and effect. Because hacking isn’t just native to computing—it exists wherever rules do. To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as much as debunking them.

Humans are hardwired to recognize patterns. All the choices we make are informed by a cache of assumptions, both empirical and logical, unconsciously derived and consciously developed. We use these assumptions to assess the potential consequences of each choice, and we describe the ability to do all of this, quickly and accurately, as intelligence. But even the smartest among us rely on assumptions that we’ve never put to the test—and because we do, the choices we make are often flawed. Anyone who knows better, or thinks more quickly and more accurately than we do, can take advantage of those flaws to create consequences that we never expected. It’s this egalitarian nature of hacking—which doesn’t care who you are, just how you reason—that makes it such a reliable method of dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of their system’s righteousness that it never occurred to them to test it.

I didn’t learn any of this at school, of course. I learned it online. The Internet gave me the chance to pursue all the topics I was interested in, and all the links between them, unconstrained by the pace of my classmates and my teachers. The more time I spent online, however, the more my schoolwork felt extracurricular.

The summer I turned thirteen, I resolved never to return, or at least to seriously reduce my classroom commitments. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d swing that, though. All the plans I came up with were likely to backfire. If I was caught skipping class, my parents would revoke my computer privileges; if I decided to drop out, they’d bury my body deep in the woods and tell the neighbors I’d run away. I had to come up with a hack—and then, on the first day of the new school year, I found one. Indeed, it was basically handed to me.

At the start of each class, the teachers passed out their syllabi, detailing the material to be covered, the required reading, and the schedule of tests and quizzes and assignments. Along with these, they gave us their grading policies, which were essentially explanations of how As, Bs, Cs, and Ds were calculated. I’d never encountered information like this. Their numbers and letters were like a strange equation that suggested a solution to my problem.

After school that day, I sat down with the syllabi and did the math to figure out which aspects of each class I could simply ignore and still expect to receive a passing grade. Take my US history class, for example. According to the syllabus, quizzes were worth 25 percent, tests were worth 35 percent, term papers were worth 15 percent, homework was worth 15 percent, and class participation—that most subjective of categories, in every subject—was worth 10 percent. Because I usually did well on my quizzes and tests without having to do too much studying, I could count on them for a reliable pool of time-efficient points. Term papers and homework, however, were the major time-sucks: low-value, high-cost impositions on Me Time.

What all of those numbers told me was that if I didn’t do any homework but aced everything else, I’d wind up with a cumulative grade of 85, a B. If I didn’t do any homework or write any term papers but aced everything else, I’d wind up with a cumulative grade of 70, a C-minus. The 10 percent that was class participation would be my buffer. Even if the teacher gave me a zero in that—if they interpreted my participation as disruption—I could still manage a 65, a D-minus. I’d still pass.

My teachers’ systems were terminally flawed. Their instructions for how to achieve the highest grade could be used as instructions for how to achieve the highest freedom—a key to how to avoid doing what I didn’t like to do and still slide by.

The moment I figured that out, I stopped doing homework completely. Every day was bliss, the kind of bliss forbidden to anybody old enough to work and pay taxes, until Mr. Stockton asked me in front of the entire class why I hadn’t handed in the past half-dozen or so homework assignments. Untouched as I was by the guile of age—and forgetting for a moment that by giving away my hack, I was depriving myself of an advantage—I cheerfully offered my equation to the math teacher. My classmates’ laughter lasted just a moment before they set about scribbling, calculating whether they, too, could afford to adopt a post-homework life.

“Pretty clever, Eddie,” Mr. Stockton said, moving on to the next lesson with a smile.

I was the smartest kid in school—until about twenty-four hours later, when Mr. Stockton passed out the new syllabus. This stated that any student who failed to turn in more than six homeworks by the end of the semester would get an automatic F.

Pretty clever, Mr. Stockton.

Then, he took me aside after class and said, “You should be using that brain of yours not to figure out how to avoid work, but how to do the best work you can. You have so much potential, Ed. But I don’t think you realize that the grades you get here will follow you for the rest of your life. You have to start thinking about your permanent record.”

UNSHACKLED FROM HOMEWORK, at least for a while, and so with more time to spare, I also did some more conventional—computer-based—hacking. As I did, my abilities improved. At the bookstore, I’d page through tiny, blurrily photocopied, stapled-together hacker zines with names like 2600 and Phrack, absorbing their techniques, and in the process absorbing their antiauthoritarian politics.

I was at the bottom of the technical totem pole, a script kiddie n00b working with tools I didn’t understand that functioned according to principles that were beyond me. People still ask me why, when I finally did gain some proficiency, I didn’t race out to empty bank accounts or steal credit card numbers. The honest answer is that I was too young and dumb to even know that this was an option, let alone to know what I’d do with the stolen loot. All I wanted, all I needed, I already had for free. Instead, I figured out simple ways to hack some games, giving myself extra lives and letting me do things like see through walls. Also, there wasn’t a lot of money on the Internet back then, at least not by today’s standards. The closest that anyone I knew or anything I read ever came to theft was “phreaking,” or making free phone calls.

If you asked some of the big-shot hackers of the day why, for example, they’d hacked into a major news site only to do nothing more meaningful than replace the headlines with a trippy GIF proclaiming the skills of Baron von Hackerface that would be taken down in less than half an hour, the reply would’ve been a version of the answer given by the mountaineer who was asked his reason for climbing Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.” Most hackers, particularly young ones, set out to search not for lucre or power, but for the limits of their talent and any opportunity to prove the impossible possible.

I was young, and while my curiosity was pure, it was also, in retrospect, pretty psychologically revealing, in that some of my earliest hacking attempts were directed toward allaying my neuroses. The more I came to know about the fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of trusting the wrong machine. As a teenager, my first hack that ever courted trouble dealt with a fear that suddenly became all I could think about: the threat of a full-on, scorched-earth nuclear holocaust.

I’d been reading some article about the history of the American nuclear program, and before I knew it, with just a couple of clicks, I was at the website of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the country’s nuclear research facility. That’s just the way the Internet works: you get curious, and your fingers do the thinking for you. But suddenly I was legitimately freaked out: the website of America’s largest and most significant scientific research and weapons development institution, I noticed, had a glaring security hole. Its vulnerability was basically the virtual version of an unlocked door: an open directory structure.

I’ll explain. Imagine I sent you a link to download a .pdf file that’s kept on its own page of a multipage website. The URL for this file would typically be something like website.com/files/pdfs/filename.pdf. Now, as the structure of a URL derives directly from directory structure, each part of this URL represents a distinct “branch” of the directory “tree.” In this instance, within the directory of website.com is a folder of files, within which is a subfolder of pdfs, within which is the specific filename.pdf that you’re seeking to download. Today, most websites will confine your visit to that specific file, keeping their directory structures closed and private. But back in those dinosaur days, even major websites were created and run by folks who were new to the technology, and they often left their directory structures wide open, which meant that if you truncated your file’s URL—if you simply changed it to something like website.com/files—you’d be able to access every file on the site, pdf or otherwise, including those that weren’t necessarily meant for visitors. This was the case with the Los Alamos site.

In the hacking community, this is basically Baby’s First Hack—a totally rudimentary traversal procedure known as “dirwalking,” or “directory walking.” And that’s just what I did: I walked as fast as I could from file to subfolder to upper-level folder and back again, a teen let loose through the parent directories. Within a half hour of reading an article about the threat of nuclear weapons, I’d stumbled upon a trove of files meant only for the lab’s security-cleared workers.

To be sure, the documents I accessed weren’t exactly the classified plans for building a nuclear device in my garage. (And, anyway, it’s not as if those plans weren’t already available on about a dozen DIY websites.) Instead, what I got was more along the lines of confidential interoffice memoranda and other personal employee information. Still, as someone suddenly acutely worried about mushroom clouds on the horizon, and also—especially—as the child of military parents, I did what I figured I was supposed to: I told an adult. I sent an explanatory email to the laboratory’s webmaster about the vulnerability, and waited for a response that never came.

Every day after school I visited the site to check if the directory structure had changed, and it hadn’t—nothing had changed, except my capacity for shock and indignation. I finally got on the phone, my house’s second line, and called the general information phone number listed at the bottom of the laboratory’s site.

An operator picked up, and the moment she did I started stammering. I don’t even think I got to the end of the phrase “directory structure” before my voice broke. The operator interrupted with a curt “please hold for IT,” and before I could thank her she’d transferred me to a voice mail.

By the time the beep came, I’d regained some modicum of confidence and, with a steadier larynx, I left a message. All I recall now of that message was how I ended it—with relief, and by repeating my name and phone number. I think I even spelled out my name, like my father sometimes did, using the military phonetic alphabet: “Sierra November Oscar Whiskey Delta Echo November.” Then I hung up and went on with my life, which for a week consisted pretty much exclusively of checking the Los Alamos website.

Nowadays, given the government’s cyberintelligence capabilities, anyone who was pinging the Los Alamos servers a few dozen times a day would almost certainly become a person of interest. Back then, however, I was merely an interested person. I couldn’t understand—didn’t anybody care?

Weeks passed—and weeks can feel like months to a teenager—until one evening, just before dinner, the phone rang. My mother, who was in the kitchen making dinner, picked up.

I was at the computer in the dining room when I heard it was for me: “Yes, uh-huh, he’s here.” Then, “May I ask who’s calling?”

I turned around in my seat and she was standing over me, holding the phone against her chest. All the color had left her face. She was trembling.

Her whisper had a mournful urgency I’d never heard before, and it terrified me: “What did you do?”

Had I known, I would have told her. Instead, I asked, “Who is it?”

“Los Alamos, the nuclear laboratory.”

“Oh, thank God.”

I gently pried the phone away from her and sat her down. “Hello?”

On the line was a friendly representative from Los Alamos IT, who kept calling me Mr. Snowden. He thanked me for reporting the problem and informed me that they’d just fixed it. I restrained myself from asking what had taken so long—I restrained myself from reaching over to the computer and immediately checking the site.

My mother hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She was trying to piece together the conversation, but could only hear one side. I gave her a thumbs-up, and then, to further reassure her, I affected an older, serious, and unconvincingly deep voice and stiffly explained to the IT rep what he already knew: how I’d found the directory traversal problem, how I’d reported it, how I hadn’t received any response until now. I finished up with, “I really appreciate you telling me. I hope I didn’t cause any problems.”

“Not at all,” the IT rep said, and then asked what I did for a living.

“Nothing really,” I said.

He asked whether I was looking for a job and I said, “During the school year, I’m pretty busy, but I’ve got a lot of vacation and the summers are free.”

That’s when the lightbulb went off, and he realized that he was dealing with a teenager. “Well, kid,” he said, “you’ve got my contact. Be sure and get in touch when you turn eighteen. Now pass me along to that nice lady I spoke to.”

I handed the phone to my anxious mother and she took it back with her into the kitchen, which was filling up with smoke. Dinner was burnt, but I’m guessing the IT rep said enough complimentary things about me that any punishment I was imagining went out the window.

⁶ Incomplete

I don’t remember high school very well, because I spent so much of it asleep, compensating for all my insomniac nights on the computer. At Arundel High most of my teachers didn’t mind my little napping habit, and left me alone so long as I wasn’t snoring, though there were still a cruel, joyless few who considered it their duty to always wake me—with the screech of chalk or the clap of erasers—and ambush me with a question: “And what do you think, Mr. Snowden?”

I’d lift my head off my desk, sit up in my chair, yawn, and—as my classmates tried to stifle their laughter—I’d have to answer.

The truth is, I loved these moments, which were among the greatest challenges high school had to offer. I loved being put on the spot, groggy and dazed, with thirty pairs of eyes and ears trained on me and expecting my failure, while I searched for a clue on the half-empty blackboard. If I could think quickly enough to come up with a good answer, I’d be a legend. But if I was too slow, I could always crack a joke—it’s never too late for a joke. In the absolute worst case, I’d sputter, and my classmates would think I was stupid. Let them. You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities—the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.

When I was a teen, I think I was a touch too enamored of the idea that life’s most important questions are binary, meaning that one answer is always Right, and all the rest of the answers are Wrong. I think I was enchanted by the model of computer programming, whose questions can only be answered in one of two ways: 1 or 0, the machine-code version of Yes or No, True or False. Even the multiple-choice questions of my quizzes and tests could be approached through the oppositional logic of the binary. If I didn’t immediately recognize one of the possible answers as correct, I could always try to reduce my choices by a process of elimination, looking for terms such as “always” or “never” and seeking out invalidating exceptions.

Toward the end of my freshman year, however, I was faced with a very different kind of assignment—a question that couldn’t be answered by filling in bubbles with a #2 pencil, but only by rhetoric: full sentences in full paragraphs. In plain terms, it was an English class assignment, a writing prompt: “Please produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1,000 words.” I was being ordered by strangers to divulge my thoughts on perhaps the only subject on which I didn’t have any thoughts: the subject of me, whoever he was. I just couldn’t do it. I was blocked. I didn’t turn anything in and received an Incomplete.

My problem, like the prompt itself, was personal. I couldn’t “produce an autobiographical statement” because my life at the time was too confusing. This was because my family was falling apart. My parents were getting a divorce. It all happened so fast. My father moved out and my mother put the house in Crofton on the market, and then moved with my sister and me into an apartment, and then into a condominium in a development in nearby Ellicott City. I’ve had friends tell me that you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become one yourself. But what no one ever mentions is that for kids of a certain age, divorce is like both of those happening simultaneously. Suddenly, the invulnerable icons of your childhood are gone. In their stead, if there’s anyone at all, is a person even more lost than you are, full of tears and rage, who craves your reassurance that everything will turn out okay. It won’t, though, at least not for a while.

As the custody and visitation rights were being sorted by the courts, my sister threw herself into college applications, was accepted, and started counting down the days until she’d leave for the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. Losing her meant losing my closest tie to what our family had been.

I reacted by turning inward. I buckled down and willed myself into becoming another person, a shape-shifter putting on the mask of whoever the people I cared about needed at the time. Among family, I was dependable and sincere. Among friends, mirthful and unconcerned. But when I was alone, I was subdued, even morose, and constantly worried about being a burden. I was haunted by all the road trips to North Carolina I’d complained through, all the Christmases I’d ruined by bringing home bad report cards, all the times I’d refused to get off-line and do my chores. Every childhood fuss I’d ever made flickered in my mind like crime-scene footage, evidence that I was responsible for what had happened.

I tried to throw off the guilt by ignoring my emotions and feigning self-sufficiency, until I projected a sort of premature adulthood. I stopped saying that I was “playing” with the computer, and started saying that I was “working” on it. Just changing those words, without remotely changing what I was doing, made a difference in how I was perceived, by others and even by myself.

I stopped calling myself “Eddie.” From now on, I was “Ed.” I got my first cell phone, which I wore clipped to my belt like a grown-ass man.

The unexpected blessing of trauma—the opportunity for reinvention—taught me to appreciate the world beyond the four walls of home. I was surprised to find that as I put more and more distance between myself and the two adults who loved me the most, I came closer to others, who treated me like a peer. Mentors who taught me to sail, trained me to fight, coached me in public speaking, and gave me the confidence to stand onstage—all of them helped to raise me.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, though, I started getting tired a lot and falling asleep more than usual—not just at school anymore, but now even at the computer. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a more or less upright position, the screen in front of me full of gibberish because I’d passed out atop the keys. Soon enough my joints were aching, my nodes were swollen, the whites of my eyes turned yellow, and I was too exhausted to get out of bed, even after sleeping for twelve hours or more at a stretch.

After having had more blood taken from me than I’d ever imagined was in my body, I was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. It was both a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not least because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,” and at age fifteen the only “hooking up” I’d ever done involved a modem. School was totally forgotten, my absences piled up, and not even that made me happy. Not even an all-ice-cream diet made me happy. I barely had the energy to do anything but play the games my parents gave me—each of them trying to bring the cooler game, the newer game, as if they were in a competition to perk me up or mitigate their guilt about the divorce. When I no longer had it in me to even work a joystick, I wondered why I was alive. Sometimes I’d wake up unable to recognize my surroundings. It would take me a while to figure out whether the dimness meant that I was at my mother’s condo or my father’s one-bedroom, and I’d have no recollection of having been driven between them. Every day became the same.

It was a haze. I remember reading The Conscience of a Hacker (aka The Hacker’s Manifesto), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and reams of J. R. R. Tolkien, falling asleep midchapter and getting the characters and action confused, until I was dreaming that Gollum was by my bedside and whining, “Master, Master, information wants to be free.”

While I was resigned to all the fever dreams sleep brought me, the thought of having to catch up on my schoolwork was the true nightmare. After I’d missed approximately four months of class, I got a letter in the mail from Arundel High informing me that I’d have to repeat my sophomore year. I’d say I was shocked, but the moment I read the letter, I realized that I’d known this was inevitable and had been dreading it for weeks. The prospect of returning to school, let alone of repeating two semesters, was unimaginable to me, and I was ready to do whatever it took to avoid it.

Just at the point when my glandular disease had developed into a full-on depression, receiving the school news shook me out of my slump. Suddenly I was upright and getting dressed in something other than pajamas. Suddenly I was online and on the phone, searching for the system’s edges, searching for a hack. After a bit of research, and a lot of form-filling, my solution landed in the mailbox: I’d gotten myself accepted to college. Apparently, you don’t need a high school diploma to apply.

Anne Arundel Community College was a local institution, certainly not as venerable as my sister’s school, but it would do the trick. All that mattered was that it was accredited. I took the offer of admission to my high school administrators, who, with a curious and barely concealed mixture of resignation and glee, agreed to let me enroll. I’d attend college classes two days a week, which was just about the most that I could manage to stay upright and functional. By taking classes above my grade level, I wouldn’t have to suffer through the year I’d missed. I’d just skip it.

AACC was about twenty-five minutes away, and the first few times I drove myself were perilous—I was a newly licensed driver who could barely stay awake at the wheel. I’d go to class and then come directly home to sleep. I was the youngest person in all my classes, and might even have been the youngest person at the school, alternately a mascot-like object of novelty and a discomfiting presence. This, along with the fact that I was still recovering, meant that I didn’t hang out much. Also, because AACC was a commuter school, it had no active campus life. The anonymity of the school suited me fine, though, as did my classes, most of which were distinctly more interesting than anything I’d napped through at Arundel High.

BEFORE I GO any further and leave high school forever, I should note that I still owe that English class assignment, the one marked Incomplete. My autobiographical statement. The older I get, the heavier it weighs on me, and yet writing it hasn’t gotten any easier.

The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably to autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures” in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality upon which to inscribe secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house, you drive the most ordinary car, you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover. This is the perverse reward of a self-denying career that brings no public glory: the private glory comes not during work, but after, when you can go back out among other people again and successfully convince them that you’re one of them.

Though there are a score of more popular and surely more accurate psychological terms for this type of identity split, I tend to think of it as human encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material—your core identity—still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form. The equation that enables this ciphering is a simple proportion: the more you know about others, the less you know about yourself. After a time, you might forget your likes and even your dislikes. You can lose your politics, along with any and all respect for the political process that you might have had. Everything gets subsumed by the job, which begins with a denial of character and ends with a denial of conscience. “Mission First.”

Some version of the above served me for years as an explanation of my dedication to privacy, and my inability or unwillingness to get personal. It’s only now, when I’ve been out of the IC almost as long as I was in it, that I realize: it isn’t nearly enough. After all, I was hardly a spy—I wasn’t even shaving—when I failed to turn in my English class assignment. Instead, I was a kid who’d been practicing spycraft for a while already—partly through my online experiments with game-playing identities, but more than anything through dealing with the silence and lies that followed my parents’ divorce.

With that rupture, we became a family of secret-keepers, experts at subterfuge and hiding. My parents kept secrets from each other, and from me and my sister. My sister and I would eventually keep our own secrets, too, when one of us was staying with our father for the weekend and the other was staying with our mother. One of the most difficult trials that a child of divorce has to face is being interrogated by one parent about the new life of the other.

My mother would be gone for stretches, back on the dating scene. My father tried his best to fill the void, but, at times, he would become enraged by the protracted and expensive divorce process. Whenever that happened, it would seem to me as if our roles had reversed. I had to be assertive and stand up to him, to reason with him.

It’s painful to write this, though not so much because the events of this period are painful to recall as because they’re in no way indicative of my parents’ fundamental decency—or of how, out of love for their children, they were eventually able to bury their differences, reconcile with respect, and flourish separately in peace.

This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux. This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge—a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.

I’d enrolled in community college to save myself time after a setback, not because I intended to continue with my higher education. But I made a pledge to myself that I’d at least complete my high school degree. It was a weekend when I finally kept that promise, driving out to a public school near Baltimore to take the last test I’d ever take for the state of Maryland: the exam for the General Education Development (GED) degree, which the US government recognizes as the standard equivalent to a high school diploma.

I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied the two years of schooling that I still owed to the state just by taking a two-day exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying true to my word.

⁷ 9/11

From the age of sixteen, I was pretty much living on my own. With my mother throwing herself into her work, I often had her condo to myself. I set my own schedule, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I was responsible for everything but paying the bills.

I had a 1992 white Honda Civic and drove it all over the state, listening to the indie alternative 99.1 WHFS—“Now Hear This” was one of its catchphrases—because that’s what everybody else did. I wasn’t very good at being normal, but I was trying.

My life became a circuit, tracing a route between my home, my college, and my friends, particularly a new group that I met in Japanese class. I’m not quite sure how long it took us to realize that we’d become a clique, but by the second semester we attended class as much to see each other as to learn the language. This, by the way, is the best way to “seem normal”: surround yourself with people just as weird, if not weirder, than you are. Most of these friends were aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed with then controversial anime, or Japanese animation. As our friendships deepened, so, too, did my familiarity with anime genres, until I could rattle off relatively informed opinions about a new library of shared experiences with titles like Grave of the Fireflies, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Vision of Escaflowne, Rurouni Kenshin, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Trigun, The Slayers, and my personal favorite, Ghost in the Shell.

One of these new friends—I’ll call her Mae—was an older woman, much older, at a comfortably adult twenty-five. She was something of an idol to the rest of us, as a published artist and avid cosplayer. She was my Japanese conversation partner and, I was impressed to find out, also ran a successful Web-design business that I’ll call Squirrelling Industries, after the pet sugar gliders she occasionally carried around in a purple felt Crown Royal bag.

That’s the story of how I became a freelancer: I started working as a Web designer for the girl I met in class. She, or I guess her business, hired me under the table at the then lavish rate of $30/hour in cash. The trick was how many hours I’d actually get paid for.

Of course, Mae could’ve paid me in smiles—because I was smitten, just totally in love with her. And though I didn’t do a particularly good job of concealing that, I’m not sure that Mae minded, because I never missed a deadline or even the slightest opportunity to do a favor for her. Also, I was a quick learner. In a company of two, you’ve got to be able to do everything. Though I could, and did, conduct my Squirrelling Industries business anywhere—that, after all, is the point of working online—she preferred that I come into the office, by which I mean her house, a two-story town house that she shared with her husband, a neat and clever man whom I’ll call Norm.

Yes, Mae was married. What’s more, the town house that she and Norm lived in was located on base at the southwestern edge of Fort Meade, where Norm worked as an air force linguist assigned to the NSA. I can’t tell you if it’s legal to run a business out of your home if your home is federal property on a military installation, but as a teenager infatuated with a married woman who was also my boss, I wasn’t exactly going to be a stickler for propriety.

It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade was almost entirely accessible to anyone. It wasn’t all bollards and barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate and show ID. It seemed like every other weekend or so a quarter of my Japanese class would congregate in Mae’s little house behind NSA headquarters to watch anime and create comics. That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days when “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every schoolyard and sitcom.

On workdays I’d show up at Mae’s in the morning, pulling into her cul-de-sac after Norm left for the NSA, and I’d stay through the day, until just before he returned. On the occasions that Norm and I happened to overlap during the two years or so I spent working for his wife, he was, all things considered, kind and generous to me. At first, I assumed that he was oblivious to my infatuation, or had such a low opinion of my chances as a seducer that he didn’t mind leaving me alone with his wife. But one day, when we happened to pass each other—him going, me coming—he politely mentioned that he kept a gun on the nightstand.

Squirrelling Industries, which was really just Mae and me, was pretty typical of basement start-ups circa the dot-com boom, small enterprises competing for scraps before everything went bust. How it worked was that a large company—a carmaker, for instance—would hire a major ad agency or PR firm to build their website and just generally spiff up their Internet presence. The large company would know nothing about building websites, and the ad agency or PR firm would know only slightly more—just enough to post a job description seeking a Web designer at one of the then proliferating freelance work portals.

Mom-and-pop operations—or, in this case, older-married-woman/young-single-man operations—would then bid for the jobs, and the competition was so intense that the quotes would be driven ridiculously low. Factor in the cut that the winning contractor would have to pay to the work portal, and the money was barely enough for an adult to survive on, let alone a family. On top of the lack of financial reward, there was also a humiliating lack of credit: the freelancers could rarely mention what projects they’d done, because the ad agency or PR firm would claim to have developed it all in-house.

I got to know a lot about the world, particularly the business world, with Mae as my boss. She was strikingly canny, working twice as hard as her peers to make it in what was then a fairly macho industry, where every other client was out to screw you for free labor. This culture of casual exploitation incentivized freelancers to find ways to hack around the system, and Mae had a talent for managing her relationships in such a way as to bypass the work portals. She tried to cut out the middlemen and third parties and deal directly with the largest clients possible. She was wonderful at this, particularly after my help on the technical side allowed her to focus exclusively on the business and art. She parlayed her illustration skills into logo design and offered basic branding services. As for my work, the methods and coding were simple enough for me to pick up on the fly, and although they could be brutally repetitive, I wasn’t complaining. I took to even the most menial Notepad++ job with pleasure. It’s amazing what you do for love, especially when it’s unrequited.

I can’t help but wonder whether Mae was fully aware of my feelings for her all along, and simply leveraged them to her best advantage. But if I was a victim, I was a willing one, and my time under her left me better off.

Still, about a year into my tenure with Squirrelling Industries, I realized I had to plan for my future. Professional industry certifications for the IT sector were becoming hard to ignore. Most job listings and contracts for advanced work were beginning to require that applicants be officially accredited by major tech companies like IBM and Cisco in the use and service of their products. At least, that was the gist of a radio commercial that I kept hearing. One day, coming home from my commute after hearing the commercial for what must have been the hundredth time, I found myself dialing the 1-800 number and signing up for the Microsoft certification course that was being offered by the Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The entire operation, from its embarrassingly high cost to its location at a “satellite campus” instead of at the main university, had the faint whiff of a scam, but I didn’t care. It was a nakedly transactional affair—one that would allow Microsoft to impose a tax on the massively rising demand for IT folks, HR managers to pretend that an expensive piece of paper could distinguish bona fide pros from filthy charlatans, and nobodies like me to put the magic words “Johns Hopkins” on their résumé and jump to the front of the hiring line.

The certification credentials were being adopted as industry standard almost as quickly as the industry could invent them. An “A+ Certification” meant that you were able to service and repair computers. A “Net+ Certification” meant that you were able to handle some basic networking. But these were just ways to become the guy who worked the Help Desk. The best pieces of paper were grouped under the rubric of the Microsoft Certified Professional series. There was the entry-level MCP, the Microsoft Certified Professional; the more accomplished MCSA, the Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator; and the top piece of printed-out technical credibility, the MCSE, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. This was the brass ring, the guaranteed meal ticket. At the lowest of the low end, an MCSE’s starting salary was $40,000 per year, a sum that—at the turn of the millennium and the age of seventeen—I found astonishing. But why not? Microsoft was trading above $100 per share, and Bill Gates had just been named the richest man in the world.

In terms of technical know-how, the MCSE wasn’t the easiest to get, but it also didn’t require what most self-respecting hackers would consider unicorn genius either. In terms of time and money, the commitment was considerable. I had to take seven separate tests, which cost $150 each, and pay something like $18,000 in tuition to Hopkins for the full battery of prep classes, which—true to form—I didn’t finish, opting to go straight to the testing after I felt I’d had enough. Unfortunately, Hopkins didn’t give refunds.

With payments looming on my tuition loan, I now had a more practical reason to spend time with Mae: money. I asked her to give me more hours. She agreed, and asked me to start coming in at 9:00 a.m. It was an egregiously early hour, especially for a freelancer, which was why I was running late one Tuesday morning.

I was speeding down Route 32 under a beautiful Microsoft-blue sky, trying not to get caught by any speed traps. With a little luck, I’d roll into Mae’s sometime before 9:30, and—with my window down and my hand riding the wind—it felt like a lucky day. I had the talk radio cranked and was waiting for the news to switch to the traffic.

Just as I was about to take the Canine Road shortcut into Fort Meade, an update broke through about a plane crash in New York City.

Mae came to the door and I followed her up the stairs from the dim entryway to the cramped office next to her bedroom. There wasn’t much to it: just our two desks side by side, a drawing table for her art, and a cage for her squirrels. Though I was slightly distracted by the news, we had work to do. I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. I was just opening the project’s files in a simple text editor—we wrote the code for websites by hand—when the phone rang.

Mae picked up. “What? Really?”

Because we were sitting so close together, I could hear her husband’s voice. And he was yelling.

Mae’s expression turned to alarm, and she loaded a news site on her computer. The only TV was downstairs. I was reading the site’s report about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, when Mae said, “Okay. Wow. Okay,” and hung up.

She turned to me. “A second plane just hit the other tower.”

Until that moment, I’d thought it had been an accident.

Mae said, “Norm thinks they’re going to close the base.”

“Like, the gates?” I said. “Seriously?” The scale of what had happened had yet to hit me. I was thinking about my commute.

“Norm said you should go home. He doesn’t want you to get stuck.”

I sighed, and saved the work I’d barely started. Just when I got up to leave, the phone rang again, and this time the conversation was even shorter. Mae was pale.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. They both refer to a collapse of order and the panic that rushes in to fill the void. For as long as I live, I’ll remember retracing my way up Canine Road—the road past the NSA’s headquarters—after the Pentagon was attacked. Madness poured out of the agency’s black glass towers, a tide of yelling, ringing cell phones, and cars revving up in the parking lots and fighting their way onto the street. At the moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the NSA—the major signals intelligence agency of the American IC—was abandoning its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.

NSA director Michael Hayden issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Subsequently, the NSA and the CIA—which also evacuated all but a skeleton crew from its own headquarters on 9/11—would explain their behavior by citing a concern that one of the agencies might potentially, possibly, perhaps be the target of the fourth and last hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, rather than, say, the White House or Capitol.

I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about the next likeliest targets as I crawled through the gridlock, with everyone trying to get their cars out of the same parking lot simultaneously. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. What I was doing was obediently following along, in what today I recall as one totalizing moment—a clamor of horns (I don’t think I’d ever heard a car horn at an American military installation before) and out-of-phase radios shrieking the news of the South Tower’s collapse while the drivers steered with their knees and feverishly pressed redial on their phones. I can still feel it—the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell network, and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.

The stoplights on Canine Road gave way to humans, as the NSA’s special police went to work directing traffic. In the ensuing hours, days, and weeks they’d be joined by convoys of Humvees topped with machine guns, guarding new roadblocks and checkpoints. Many of these new security measures became permanent, supplemented by endless rolls of wire and massive installations of surveillance cameras. With all this security, it became difficult for me to get back on base and drive past the NSA—until the day I was employed there.

These trappings of what would be called the War on Terror weren’t the only reason I gave up on Mae after 9/11, but they certainly played a part. The events of that day had left her shaken. In time, we stopped working together and grew distant. I’d chat her up occasionally, only to find that my feelings had changed and I’d changed, too. By the time Mae left Norm and moved to California, she felt like a stranger to me. She was too opposed to the war.

⁸ 9/12

Try to remember the biggest family event you’ve ever been to—maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? Maybe 30, 50? Though all of them together comprise your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know each and every individual member. Dunbar’s number, the famous estimate of how many relationships you can meaningfully maintain in life, is just 150. Now think back to school. How many people were in your class in grade school, and in high school? How many of them were friends, and how many others did you just know as acquaintances, and how many still others did you simply recognize? If you went to school in the United States, let’s say it’s a thousand. It certainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all “your people,” but you may still have felt a bond with them.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they’re gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.

Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: “Stop resisting.”

This is why whenever I try to understand how the last two decades happened, I return to that September—to that ground-zero day and its immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against a truth darker than the lies that tied the Taliban to al-Qaeda and conjured up Saddam Hussein’s illusory stockpile of WMDs. It means, ultimately, confronting the fact that the carnage and abuses that marked my young adulthood were born not only in the executive branch and the intelligence agencies, but also in the hearts and minds of all Americans, myself included.

I remember escaping the panicked crush of the spies fleeing Fort Meade just as the North Tower came down. Once on the highway, I tried to steer with one hand while pressing buttons with the other, calling family indiscriminately and never getting through. Finally I managed to get in touch with my mother, who at this point in her career had left the NSA and was working as a clerk for the federal courts in Baltimore. They, at least, weren’t evacuating.

Her voice scared me, and suddenly the only thing in the world that mattered to me was reassuring her.

“It’s okay. I’m headed off base,” I said. “Nobody’s in New York, right?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. I can’t get in touch with Gran.”

“Is Pop in Washington?”

“He could be in the Pentagon for all I know.”

The breath went out of me. By 2001, Pop had retired from the Coast Guard and was now a senior official in the FBI, serving as one of the heads of its aviation section. This meant that he spent plenty of time in plenty of federal buildings throughout DC and its environs.

Before I could summon any words of comfort, my mother spoke again. “There’s someone on the other line. It might be Gran. I’ve got to go.”

When she didn’t call me back, I tried her number endlessly but couldn’t get through, so I went home to wait, sitting in front of the blaring TV while I kept reloading news sites. The new cable modem we had was quickly proving more resilient than all of the telecom satellites and cell towers, which were failing across the country.

My mother’s drive back from Baltimore was a slog through crisis traffic. She arrived in tears, but we were among the lucky ones. Pop was safe.

The next time we saw Gran and Pop, there was a lot of talk—about Christmas plans, about New Year’s plans—but the Pentagon and the towers were never mentioned.

My father, by contrast, vividly recounted his 9/11 to me. He was at Coast Guard Headquarters when the towers were hit, and he and three of his fellow officers left their offices in the Operations Directorate to find a conference room with a screen so they could watch the news coverage. A young officer rushed past them down the hall and said, “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Met with expressions of disbelief, the young officer repeated, “I’m serious—they just bombed the Pentagon.” My father hustled over to a wall-length window that gave him a view across the Potomac of about two-fifths of the Pentagon and swirling clouds of thick black smoke.

The more that my father related this memory, the more intrigued I became by the line: “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Every time he said it, I recall thinking, “They”? Who were “They”?

America immediately divided the world into “Us” and “Them,” and everyone was either with “Us” or against “Us,” as President Bush so memorably remarked even while the rubble was still smoldering. People in my neighborhood put up new American flags, as if to show which side they’d chosen. People hoarded red, white, and blue Dixie cups and stuffed them through every chain-link fence on every overpass of every highway between my mother’s home and my father’s, to spell out phrases like UNITED WE STAND and STAND TOGETHER NEVER FORGET.

I sometimes used to go to a shooting range and now alongside the old targets, the bull’s-eyes and flat silhouettes, were effigies of men in Arab headdress. Guns that had languished for years behind the dusty glass of the display cases were now marked SOLD. Americans also lined up to buy cell phones, hoping for advance warning of the next attack, or at least the ability to say good-bye from a hijacked flight.

Nearly a hundred thousand spies returned to work at the agencies with the knowledge that they’d failed at their primary job, which was protecting America. Think of the guilt they were feeling. They had the same anger as everybody else, but they also felt the guilt. An assessment of their mistakes could wait. What mattered most at that moment was that they redeem themselves. Meanwhile, their bosses got busy campaigning for extraordinary budgets and extraordinary powers, leveraging the threat of terror to expand their capabilities and mandates beyond the imagination not just of the public but even of those who stamped the approvals.

September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world. In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity. It could have treated terror not as the theological phenomenon it purported to be, but as the crime it was. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public.

Instead, it went to war.

The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision. I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment. I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it. I wanted to be a liberator. I wanted to free the oppressed. I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my passion I confused with the good of the country. It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance. The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.

I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.

My options dismayed me, however. I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world of asymmetrical conflict. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinkenlights, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes. Unfortunately for me, the primary agencies that did that—the NSA, the CIA—had their hiring requirements written a half century ago and often rigidly required a traditional college degree, meaning that though the tech industry considered my AACC credits and MCSE certification acceptable, the government wouldn’t. The more I read around online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirement for military veterans. It’s then that I decided to join up.

You might be thinking that my decision made sense, or was inevitable, given my family’s record of service. But it didn’t and it wasn’t. By enlisting, I was as much rebelling against that well-established legacy as I was conforming to it—because after talking to recruiters from every branch, I decided to join the army, whose leadership some in my Coast Guard family had always considered the crazy uncles of the US military.

When I told my mother, she cried for days. I knew better than to tell my father, who’d already made it very clear during hypothetical discussions that I’d be wasting my technical talents there. I was twenty years old; I knew what I was doing.

The day I left, I wrote my father a letter—handwritten, not typed—that explained my decision, and slipped it under the front door of his apartment. It closed with a statement that still makes me wince. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I wrote, “but this is vital for my personal growth.”

⁹ X-Rays

I joined the army, as its slogan went, to be all I could be, and also because it wasn’t the Coast Guard. It didn’t hurt that I’d scored high enough on its entrance exams to qualify for a chance to come out of training as a Special Forces sergeant, on a track the recruiters called 18 X-Ray, which was designed to augment the ranks of the small flexible units that were doing the hardest fighting in America’s increasingly shadowy and disparate wars. The 18 X-Ray program was a considerable incentive, because traditionally, before 9/11, I would’ve had to already be in the army before being given a shot at attending the Special Forces’ exceedingly demanding qualification courses. The new system worked by screening prospective soldiers up front, identifying those with the highest levels of fitness, intelligence, and language-learning ability—the ones who might make the cut—and using the inducements of special training and a rapid advance in rank to enlist promising candidates who might otherwise go elsewhere. I’d put in a couple of months of grueling runs to prepare—I was in great shape, but I always hated running—before my recruiter called to say that my paperwork was approved: I was in, I’d made it. I was the first candidate he’d ever signed up for the program, and I could hear the pride and cheer in his voice when he told me that after training, I’d probably be made a Special Forces Communications, Engineering, or Intelligence sergeant.

Probably.

But first, I had to get through basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.

I sat next to the same guy the whole way down there, from bus to plane to bus, Maryland to Georgia. He was enormous, a puffy bodybuilder somewhere between two and three hundred pounds. He talked nonstop, his conversation alternating between describing how he’d slap the drill sergeant in the face if he gave him any lip and recommending the steroid cycles I should take to most effectively bulk up. I don’t think he took a breath until we arrived at Fort Benning’s Sand Hill training area—which in hindsight, I have to say, didn’t actually seem to have that much sand.

The drill sergeants greeted us with withering fury and gave us nicknames based on our initial infractions and grave mistakes, like getting off the bus wearing a brightly colored floral-patterned shirt, or having a name that could be modified slightly into something funnier. Soon I was Snowflake and my seatmate was Daisy and all he could do was clench his jaw—nobody dared to clench a fist—and fume.

Once the drill sergeants noticed that Daisy and I were already acquainted, and that I was the lightest in the platoon, at five foot nine and 124 pounds, and he the heaviest, they decided to entertain themselves by pairing us together as often as possible. I still remember the buddy carry, an exercise where you had to carry your supposedly wounded partner the length of a football field using a number of different methods like the “neck drag,” the “fireman,” and the especially comedic “bridal carry.” When I had to carry Daisy, you couldn’t see me beneath his bulk. It would look like Daisy was floating, though I’d be under him sweating and cursing, straining to get his gigantic ass to the other side of the goal line before collapsing myself. Daisy would then get up with a laugh, drape me around his neck like a damp towel, and go skipping along like a child in the woods.

We were always dirty and always hurting, but within weeks I was in the best shape of my life. My slight build, which had seemed like a curse, soon became an advantage, because so much of what we did were body-weight exercises. Daisy couldn’t climb a rope, which I scampered up like a chipmunk. He struggled to lift his incredible bulk above the bar for the bare minimum of pull-ups, while I could do twice the number with one arm. He could barely manage a handful of push-ups before breaking a sweat, whereas I could do them with claps, or with just a single thumb. When we did the two-minute push-up tests, they stopped me early for maxing the score.

Everywhere we went, we marched—or ran. We ran constantly. Miles before mess, miles after mess, down roads and fields and around the track, while the drill sergeant called cadence:

RUNNING IN UNIT formation, calling cadence—it lulls you, it puts you outside yourself, filling your ears with the din of dozens of men echoing your own shouting voice and forcing your eyes to fix on the footfalls of the runner in front of you. After a while you don’t think anymore, you merely count, and your mind dissolves into the rank and file as you pace out mile after mile. I would say it was serene if it wasn’t so deadening. I would say I was at peace if I weren’t so tired. This was precisely as the army intended. The drill sergeant goes unslapped not so much because of fear but because of exhaustion: he’s never worth the effort. The army makes its fighters by first training the fight out of them until they’re too weak to care, or to do anything besides obey.

It was only at night in the barracks that we could get some respite, which we had to earn by toeing the line in front of our bunks, reciting the Soldier’s Creed, and then singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Daisy would always forget the words. Also, he was tone-deaf.

Some guys would stay up late talking about what they were going to do to bin Laden once they found him, and they were all sure they were going to find him. Most of their fantasies had to do with decapitation, castration, or horny camels. Meanwhile, I’d have dreams about running, not through the lush and loamy Georgia landscape but through the desert.

Sometime during the third or fourth week we were out on a land navigation movement, which is when your platoon goes into the woods and treks over variegated terrain to predetermined coordinates, clambering over boulders and wading across streams, with just a map and a compass—no GPS, no digital technology. We’d done versions of this movement before, but never in full kit, with each of us lugging a rucksack stuffed with around fifty pounds of gear. Worse still, the raw boots the army had issued me were so wide that I floated in them. I felt my toes blister even as I set out, loping across the range.

Toward the middle of the movement, I was on point and scrambled atop a storm-felled tree that arched over the path at about chest height so that I could shoot an azimuth to check our bearings. After confirming that we were on track, I went to hop down, but with one foot extended I noticed the coil of a snake directly below me. I’m not exactly a naturalist, so I don’t know what species of snake it was, but then again, I didn’t really care. Kids in North Carolina grow up being told that all snakes are deadly and I wasn’t about to start doubting it now.

Instead, I started trying to walk on air. I widened the stride of my outstretched foot, once, twice, twisting for the extra distance, when suddenly I realized I was falling. When my feet hit the ground, some distance beyond the snake, a fire shot up my legs that was more painful than any viper bite I could imagine. A few stumbling steps, which I had to take in order to regain my balance, told me that something was wrong. Grievously wrong. I was in excruciating pain, but I couldn’t stop, because I was in the army and the army was in the middle of the woods. I gathered my resolve, pushed the pain away, and just focused on maintaining a steady pace—left, right, left, right—relying on the rhythm to distract me.

It got harder to walk as I went on, and although I managed to tough it out and finish, the only reason was that I didn’t have a choice. By the time I got back to the barracks, my legs were numb. My rack, or bunk, was up top, and I could barely get myself into it. I had to grab its post, hoist up my torso like I was getting out of a pool, and drag my lower half in after.

The next morning I was torn from a fitful sleep by the clanking of a metal trash can being thrown down the squad bay, a wake-up call that meant someone hadn’t done their job to the drill sergeant’s satisfaction. I shot up automatically, swinging myself over the edge and springing to the floor. When I landed, my legs gave way. They crumpled and I fell. It was like I had no legs at all.

I tried to get up, grabbing for the lower bunk to try my hoist-by-the-arms maneuver again, but as soon as I moved my legs every muscle in my body seized and I sank down immediately.

Meanwhile a crowd had gathered around me, with laughter that turned to concern and then to silence as the drill sergeant approached. “What’s the matter with you, broke-dick?” he said. “Get up off my floor before I make you a part of it, permanently.” When he saw the agony flash across my face as I immediately and unwisely struggled to respond to his commands, he put his hand to my chest to stop me. “Daisy! Get Snowflake here down to the bench.” Then he crouched down over me, as if he didn’t want the others to hear him being gentle, and said in a quiet rasp, “As soon as it opens, Private, you’re going to crutch your broken ass to Sick Call,” which is where the army sends its injured to be abused by professionals.

There’s a major stigma about getting injured in the army, mostly because the army is dedicated to making its soldiers feel invincible but also because it likes to protect itself from accusations of mis-training. This is why almost all training-injury victims are treated like whiners or, worse, malingerers.

After he carried me down to the bench, Daisy had to go. He wasn’t hurt, and those of us who were had to be kept separated. We were the untouchables, the lepers, the soldiers who couldn’t train because of anything from sprains, lacerations, and burns to broken ankles and deep necrotized spider bites. My new battle buddies would now come from this bench of shame. A battle buddy is the person who, by policy, goes everywhere you go, just as you go everywhere they go, if there’s even the remotest chance that either of you might be alone. Being alone might lead to thinking, and thinking can cause the army problems.

The battle buddy assigned to me was a smart, handsome, former catalog model Captain America type who’d injured his hip about a week earlier but hadn’t attended to it until the pain had become unbearable and left him just as gimpy as me. Neither of us felt up to talking, so we crutched along in grim silence—left, right, left, right, but slowly. At the hospital I was X-rayed and told that I had bilateral tibial fractures. These are stress fractures, fissures on the surface of the bones that can deepen with time and pressure until they crack the bones down to the marrow. The only thing I could do to help my legs heal was to get off my feet and stay off them. It was with those orders that I was dismissed from the examination room to get a ride back to the battalion.

Except I couldn’t go yet, because I couldn’t leave without my battle buddy. He’d gone in to be X-rayed after me and hadn’t returned. I assumed he was still being examined, so I waited. And waited. Hours passed. I spent the time reading newspapers and magazines, an unthinkable luxury for someone in basic training.

A nurse came over and said my drill sergeant was on the phone at the desk. By the time I hobbled over to take the call, he was livid. “Snowflake, you enjoying your reading? Maybe you could get some pudding while you’re at it, and some copies of Cosmo for the girls? Why in the hell haven’t you two dirtbags left yet?”

“Drill Sarn”—that’s how everybody said it in Georgia, where my Southern accent had resurfaced for the moment—“I’m still waiting on my battle buddy, Drill Sarn.”

“And where the fuck is he, Snowflake?”

“Drill Sarn, I don’t know. He went into the examination room and hasn’t come out, Drill Sarn.”

He wasn’t happy with the answer, and barked even louder. “Get off your crippled ass and go fucking find him, goddamnit.”

I got up and crutched over to the intake counter to make inquiries. My battle buddy, they told me, was in surgery.

It was only toward evening, after a barrage of calls from the drill sergeant, that I found out what had happened. My battle buddy had been walking around on a broken hip for the past week, apparently, and if he hadn’t been taken into surgery immediately and had it screwed back together, he might have been incapacitated for life. Major nerves could have been severed, because the break was as sharp as a knife.

I was sent back to Fort Benning alone, back to the bench. Anybody on the bench for more than three or four days was at serious risk of being “recycled”—forced to start basic training over from scratch—or, worse, of being transferred to the Medical Unit and sent home. These were guys who’d dreamed of being in the army their entire lives, guys for whom the army had been their only way out of cruel families and dead-end careers, who now had to face the prospect of failure and a return to civilian life irreparably damaged.

We were the cast-offs, the walking wounded hellguard who had no other duty than to sit on a bench in front of a brick wall twelve hours a day. We had been judged by our injuries as unfit for the army and now had to pay for this fact by being separated and shunned, as if the drill sergeants feared we’d contaminate others with our weakness or with the ideas that had occurred to us while benched. We were punished beyond the pain of our injuries themselves, excluded from petty joys like watching the fireworks on the Fourth of July. Instead, we pulled “fire guard” that night for the empty barracks, a task that involved watching to make sure that the empty building didn’t burn down.

We pulled fire guard two to a shift, and I stood in the dark on my crutches, pretending to be useful, alongside my partner. He was a sweet, simple, beefy eighteen-year-old with a dubious, perhaps self-inflicted injury. By his own account, he should never have enlisted to begin with. The fireworks were bursting in the distance while he told me how much of a mistake he’d made, and how agonizingly lonely he was—how much he missed his parents and his home, their family farm somewhere way out in Appalachia.

I sympathized, though there wasn’t much I could do but send him to speak to the chaplain. I tried to offer advice, suck it up, it might be better once you’re used to it. But then he put his bulk in front of me and, in an endearingly childlike way, told me point-blank that he was going AWOL—a crime in the military—and asked me whether I would tell anybody. It was only then that I noticed he’d brought his laundry bag. He meant that he was going AWOL that very moment.

I wasn’t sure how to deal with the situation, beyond trying to talk some sense into him. I warned him that going AWOL was a bad idea, that he’d end up with a warrant out for his arrest and any cop in the country could pick him up for the rest of his life. But the guy only shook his head. Where he lived, he said, deep in the mountains, they didn’t even have cops. This, he said, was his last chance to be free.

I understood, then, that his mind was made up. He was much more mobile than I was, and he was big. If he ran, I couldn’t chase him; if I tried to stop him, he might snap me in half. All I could do was report him, but if I did, I’d be penalized for having let the conversation get this far without calling for reinforcements and beating him with a crutch.

I was angry. I realized I was yelling at him. Why didn’t he wait until I was in the latrine to make a break for it? Why was he putting me in this position?

He spoke softly. “You’re the only one who listens,” he said, and began to cry.

The saddest part of that night is that I believed him. In the company of a quarter thousand, he was alone. We stood in silence as the fireworks popped and snapped in the distance. I sighed and said, “I’ve got to go to the latrine. I’m going to be a while.” Then I limped away and didn’t look back.

That was the last I ever saw of him. I think I realized, then and there, that I wasn’t long for the army, either.

My next doctor’s appointment was merely confirmation.

The doctor was a tall, lanky Southerner with a wry demeanor. After examining me and a new set of X-rays, he said that I was in no condition to continue with my company. The next phase of training was airborne, and he told me, “Son, if you jump on those legs, they’re going to turn into powder.”

I was despondent. If I didn’t finish the basic training cycle on time, I’d lose my slot in 18X, which meant that I’d be reassigned according to the needs of the army. They could make me into whatever they wanted: regular infantry, a mechanic, a desk jockey, a potato peeler, or—in my greatest nightmare—doing IT at the army’s help desk.

The doctor must have seen how dejected I was, because he cleared his throat and gave me a choice: I could get recycled and try my luck with reassignment, or he could write me a note putting me out on what was called “administrative separation.” This, he explained, was a special type of severance, not characterized as either honorable or dishonorable, only available to enlistees who’d been in the services fewer than six months. It was a clean break, more like an annulment than a divorce, and could be taken care of rather quickly.

I’ll admit, the idea appealed to me. In the back of my mind, I even thought it might be some kind of karmic reward for the mercy I’d shown to the Appalachian who’d gone AWOL. The doctor left me to think, and when he came back in an hour I accepted his offer.

Shortly thereafter I was transferred to the Medical Unit, where I was told that in order for the administrative separation to go through I had to sign a statement attesting that I was all better, that my bones were all healed. My signature was a requirement, but it was presented as a mere formality. Just a few scribbles and I could go.

As I held the statement in one hand and the pen in the other, a knowing smile crossed my face. I recognized the hack: what I’d thought was a kind and generous offer made by a caring army doctor to an ailing enlistee was the government’s way of avoiding liability and a disability claim. Under the military’s rules, if I’d received a medical discharge, the government would have had to pay the bills for any issues stemming from my injury, any treatments and therapies it required. An administrative discharge put the burden on me, and my freedom hinged on my willingness to accept that burden.

I signed, and left that same day, on crutches that the army let me keep.

¹⁰ Cleared and in Love

I can’t remember exactly when, in the midst of my convalescence, I started thinking clearly again. First the pain had to ebb away, then gradually the depression ebbed, too, and after weeks of waking to no purpose beyond watching the clock change I slowly began paying attention to what everyone around me was telling me: I was still young and I still had a future. I only felt that way myself, however, once I was finally able to stand upright and walk on my own. It was one of the myriad things that, like the love of my family, I’d simply taken for granted before.

As I made my first forays into the yard outside my mother’s condo, I came to realize that there was another thing I’d taken for granted: my talent for understanding technology.

Forgive me if I come off like a dick, but there’s no other way to say this: I’d always been so comfortable with computers that I almost didn’t take my abilities seriously, and didn’t want to be praised for them or to succeed because of them. I’d wanted, instead, to be praised for and to succeed at something else—something that was harder for me. I wanted to show that I wasn’t just a brain in a jar; I was also heart and muscle.

That explained my stint in the army. And over the course of my convalescence, I came to realize that although the experience had wounded my pride, it had improved my confidence. I was stronger now, not afraid of the pain as much as grateful to be improved by it. Life beyond the barbed wire was getting easier. In the final reckoning, all the army had cost me was my hair, which had grown back, and a limp, which was healing.

I was ready to face the facts: if I still had the urge to serve my country, and I most certainly did, then I’d have to serve it through my head and hands—through computing. That, and only that, would be giving my country my best. Though I wasn’t much of a veteran, having passed through the military’s vetting could only help my chances of working at an intelligence agency, which was where my talents would be most in demand and, perhaps, most challenged.

Thus I became reconciled to what in retrospect was inevitable: the need for a security clearance. There are, generally speaking, three levels of security clearance: from low to high, confidential, secret, and top secret. The last of these can be further extended with a Sensitive Compartmented Information qualifier, creating the coveted TS/SCI access required by positions with the top-tier agencies—CIA and NSA. The TS/SCI was by far the hardest access to get, but also opened the most doors, and so I went back to Anne Arundel Community College while I searched for jobs that would sponsor my application for the grueling Single Scope Background Investigation the clearance required. As the approval process for a TS/SCI can take a year or more, I heartily recommend it to anyone recovering from an injury. All it involves is filling out some paperwork, then sitting around with your feet up and trying not to commit too many crimes while the federal government renders its verdict. The rest, after all, is out of your hands.

On paper, I was a perfect candidate. I was a kid from a service family, nearly every adult member of which had some level of clearance; I’d tried to enlist and fight for my country until an unfortunate accident had laid me low. I had no criminal record, no drug habit. My only financial debt was the student loan for my Microsoft certification, and I hadn’t yet missed a payment.

None of this stopped me, of course, from being nervous.

I drove to and from classes at AACC as the National Background Investigations Bureau rummaged through nearly every aspect of my life and interviewed almost everyone I knew: my parents, my extended family, my classmates and friends. They went through my spotty school transcripts and, I’m sure, spoke to a few of my teachers. I got the impression that they even spoke to Mae and Norm, and to a guy I’d worked with one summer at a snow cone stand at Six Flags America. The goal of all this background checking was not only to find out what I’d done wrong, but also to find out how I might be compromised or blackmailed. The most important thing to the IC is not that you’re 100 percent perfectly clean, because if that were the case they wouldn’t hire anybody. Instead, it’s that you’re robotically honest—that there’s no dirty secret out there that you’re hiding that could be used against you, and thus against the agency, by an enemy power.

This, of course, set me thinking—sitting stuck in traffic as all the moments of my life that I regretted went spinning around in a loop inside my head. Nothing I could come up with would have raised even an iota of eyebrow from investigators who are used to finding out that the middle-aged analyst at a think tank likes to wear diapers and get spanked by grandmothers in leather. Still, there was a paranoia that the process created, because you don’t have to be a closet fetishist to have done things that embarrass you and to fear that strangers might misunderstand you if those things were exposed. I mean, I grew up on the Internet, for Christ’s sake. If you haven’t entered something shameful or gross into that search box, then you haven’t been online very long—though I wasn’t worried about the pornography. Everybody looks at porn, and for those of you who are shaking your heads, don’t worry: your secret is safe with me. My worries were more personal, or felt more personal: the endless conveyor belt of stupid jingoistic things I’d said, and the even stupider misanthropic opinions I’d abandoned, in the process of growing up online. Specifically, I was worried about my chat logs and forum posts, all the supremely moronic commentary that I’d sprayed across a score of gaming and hacker sites. Writing pseudonymously had meant writing freely, but often thoughtlessly. And since a major aspect of early Internet culture was competing with others to say the most inflammatory thing, I’d never hesitate to advocate, say, bombing a country that taxed video games, or corralling people who didn’t like anime into reeducation camps. Nobody on those sites took any of it seriously, least of all myself.

When I went back and reread the posts, I cringed. Half the things I’d said I hadn’t even meant at the time—I’d just wanted attention—but I didn’t fancy my odds of explaining that to a gray-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses peering over a giant folder labeled PERMANENT RECORD. The other half, the things I think I had meant at the time, were even worse, because I wasn’t that kid anymore. I’d grown up. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t recognize the voice as my own—it was that I now actively opposed its overheated, hormonal opinions. I found that I wanted to argue with a ghost. I wanted to fight with that dumb, puerile, and casually cruel self of mine who no longer existed. I couldn’t stand the idea of being haunted by him forever, but I didn’t know the best way to express my remorse and put some distance between him and me, or whether I should even try to do that. It was heinous to be so inextricably, technologically bound to a past that I fully regretted but barely remembered.

This might be the most familiar problem of my generation, the first to grow up online. We were able to discover and explore our identities almost totally unsupervised, with hardly a thought spared for the fact that our rash remarks and profane banter were being preserved for perpetuity, and that one day we might be expected to account for them. I’m sure everyone who had an Internet connection before they had a job can sympathize with this—surely everyone has that one post that embarrasses them, or that text or email that could get them fired.

My situation was somewhat different, however, in that most of the message boards of my day would let you delete your old posts. I could put together one tiny little script—not even a real program—and all of my posts would be gone in under an hour. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to do. Trust me, I considered it.

But ultimately, I couldn’t. Something kept preventing me. It just felt wrong. To blank my posts from the face of the earth wasn’t illegal, and it wouldn’t even have made me ineligible for a security clearance had anyone found out. But the prospect of doing so bothered me nonetheless. It would’ve only served to reinforce some of the most corrosive precepts of online life: that nobody is ever allowed to make a mistake, and anybody who does make a mistake must answer for it forever. What mattered to me wasn’t so much the integrity of the written record but that of my soul. I didn’t want to live in a world where everyone had to pretend that they were perfect, because that was a world that had no place for me or my friends. To erase those comments would have been to erase who I was, where I was from, and how far I’d come. To deny my younger self would have been to deny my present self’s validity.

I decided to leave the comments up and figure out how to live with them. I even decided that true fidelity to this stance would require me to continue posting. In time, I’d outgrow these new opinions, too, but my initial impulse remains unshakable, if only because it was an important step in my own maturity. We can’t erase the things that shame us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. All we can do is control our reactions—whether we let the past oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.

This was the first thing that you might call a principle that occurred to me during this idle but formative time, and though it would prove difficult, I’ve tried to live by it.

Believe it or not, the only online traces of my existence whose past iterations have never given me worse than a mild sense of embarrassment were my dating profiles. I suspect this is because I’d had to write them with the expectation that their words truly mattered—since the entire purpose of the enterprise was for somebody in Real Life to actually care about them, and, by extension, about me.

I’d joined a website called HotOrNot.com, which was the most popular of the rating sites of the early 2000s, like RateMyFace and AmIHot. (Their most effective features were combined by a young Mark Zuckerberg into a site called FaceMash, which later became Facebook.) HotOrNot was the most popular of these pre-Facebook rating sites for a simple reason: it was the best of the few that had a dating component.

Basically, how it worked was that users voted on each other’s photos: Hot or Not. An extra function for registered users such as myself was the ability to contact other registered users, if each had rated the other’s photos Hot and clicked “Meet Me.” This banal and crass process is how I met Lindsay Mills, my partner and the love of my life.

Looking at the photos now, I’m amused to find that nineteen-year-old Lindsay was gawky, awkward, and endearingly shy. To me at the time, though, she was a smoldering blonde, absolutely volcanic. What’s more, the photos themselves were beautiful: they had a serious artistic quality, self-portraits more than selfies. They caught the eye and held it. They played coyly with light and shade. They even had a hint of meta fun: there was one taken inside the photo lab where she worked, and another where she wasn’t even facing the camera.

I rated her Hot, a perfect ten. To my surprise, we matched (she rated me an eight, the angel), and in no time we were chatting. Lindsay was studying fine art photography. She had her own website, where she kept a journal and posted more shots: forests, flowers, abandoned factories, and—my favorite—more of her.

I scoured the Web and used each new fact I found about her to create a fuller picture: the town she was born in (Laurel, Maryland), her school’s name (MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art). Eventually, I admitted to cyberstalking her. I felt like a creep, but Lindsay cut me off. “I’ve been searching about you, too, mister,” she said, and rattled off a list of facts about me.

These were among the sweetest words I’d ever heard, yet I was reluctant to see her in person. We scheduled a date, and as the days ticked down my nervousness grew. It’s a scary proposition, to take an online relationship off-line. It would be scary even in a world without ax murderers and scammers. In my experience, the more you’ve communicated with someone online, the more disappointed you’ll be by meeting them in person. Things that are the easiest to say on-screen become the most difficult to say face-to-face. Distance favors intimacy: no one talks more openly than when they’re alone in a room, chatting with an unseen someone alone in a different room. Meet that person, however, and you lose your latitude. Your talk becomes safer and tamer, a common conversation on neutral ground.

Online, Lindsay and I had become total confidants, and I was afraid of losing our connection in person. In other words, I was afraid of being rejected.

I shouldn’t have been.

Lindsay—who’d insisted on driving—told me that she’d pick me up at my mother’s condo. The appointed hour found me standing outside in the twilight cold, guiding her by phone through the similarly named, identical-looking streets of my mother’s development. I was keeping an eye out for a gold ’98 Chevy Cavalier, when suddenly I was blinded, struck in the face by a beam of light from the curb. Lindsay was flashing her brights at me across the snow.

“Buckle up.” Those were the first words that Lindsay said to me in person, as I got into her car. Then she said, “What’s the plan?”

It’s then that I realized that despite all the thinking I had been doing about her, I’d done no thinking whatsoever about our destination.

If I’d been in this situation with any other woman, I’d have improvised, covering for myself. But with Lindsay it was different. With Lindsay, it didn’t matter. She drove us down her favorite road—she had a favorite road—and we talked until we ran out of miles on Guilford and ended up in the parking lot of the Laurel Mall. We just sat in her car and talked.

It was perfection. Talking face-to-face turned out to be just an extension of all our phone calls, emails, and chats. Our first date was a continuation of our first contact online and the start of a conversation that will last as long as we will. We talked about our families, or what was left of them. Lindsay’s parents were also divorced: her mother and father lived twenty minutes apart, and as a kid Lindsay had been shuttled back and forth between them. She’d lived out of a bag. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she slept in her room at her mother’s house. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays she slept in her room at her father’s house. Sundays were the dramatic day, because she had to choose.

She told me how bad my taste was, and criticized my date apparel: a button-down shirt decorated with metallic flames over a wifebeater and jeans (I’m sorry). She told me about the two other guys she was dating, whom she’d already mentioned online, and Machiavelli would’ve blushed at the ways in which I set about undermining them (I’m not sorry). I told her everything, too, including the fact that I wouldn’t be able to talk to her about my work—the work I hadn’t even started. This was ludicrously pretentious, which she made obvious to me by nodding gravely.

I told her I was worried about the upcoming polygraph required for my clearance and she offered to practice with me—a goofy kind of foreplay. The philosophy she lived by was the perfect training: say what you want, say who you are, never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem. I’d never been so comfortable around someone, and I’d never been so willing to be called out for my faults. I even let her take my photo.

I had her voice in my head on my drive to the NSA’s oddly named Friendship Annex complex for the final interview for my security clearance. I found myself in a windowless room, bound like a hostage to a cheap office chair. Around my chest and stomach were pneumographic tubes that measured my breathing. Finger cuffs on my fingertips measured my electrodermal activity, a blood pressure cuff around my arm measured my heart rate, and a sensor pad on the chair detected my every fidget and shift. All of these devices—wrapped, clamped, cuffed, and belted tightly around me—were connected to the large black polygraph machine placed on the table in front of me.

Behind the table, in a nicer chair, sat the polygrapher. She reminded me of a teacher I once had—and I spent much of the test trying to remember the teacher’s name, or trying not to. She, the polygrapher, began asking questions. The first ones were no-brainers: Was my name Edward Snowden? Was 6/21/83 my date of birth? Then: Had I ever committed a serious crime? Had I ever had a problem with gambling? Had I ever had a problem with alcohol or taken illegal drugs? Had I ever been an agent of a foreign power? Had I ever advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government? The only admissible answers were binary: “Yes” and “No.” I answered “No” a lot, and kept waiting for the questions I’d been dreading. “Have you ever impugned the competence and character of the medical staff at Fort Benning online?” “What were you searching for on the network of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory?” But those questions never came and, before I knew it, the test was over.

I’d passed with flying colors.

As required, I had to answer the series of questions three times in total, and all three times I passed, which meant that not only had I qualified for the TS/SCI, I’d also cleared the “full scope polygraph”—the highest clearance in the land.

I had a girlfriend I loved and I was on top of the world.

I was twenty-two years old.