Permanent Record

¹¹ The System

I’m going to press Pause here, for a moment, to explain something about my politics at age twenty-two: I didn’t have any. Instead, like most young people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren’t truly mine but rather a contradictory cluster of inherited principles. My mind was a mash-up of the values I was raised with and the ideals I encountered online. It took me until my late twenties to finally understand that so much of what I believed, or of what I thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting. We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.

My parents were, if not dismissive of politics in general, then certainly dismissive of politicians. To be sure, this dismissal had little in common with the disaffection of nonvoters or partisan disdain. Rather, it was a certain bemused detachment particular to their class, which nobler ages have called the federal civil service or the public sector, but which our own time tends to refer to as the deep state or the shadow government. None of those epithets, however, really captures what it is: a class of career officials (incidentally, perhaps one of the last functional middle classes in American life) who—nonelected and non-appointed—serve or work in government, either at one of the independent agencies (from the CIA and NSA to the IRS, the FCC, and so on) or at one of the executive departments (State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and the like).

These were my parents, these were my people: a nearly three-million-strong professional government workforce dedicated to assisting the amateurs chosen by the electorate, and appointed by the elected, in fulfilling their political duties—or, in the words of the oath, in faithfully executing their offices. These civil servants, who stay in their positions even as administrations come and go, work as diligently under Republicans as under Democrats because they ultimately work for the government itself, providing core continuity and stability of rule.

These were also the people who, when their country went to war, answered the call. That’s what I had done after 9/11, and I found that the patriotism my parents had taught me was easily converted into nationalist fervor. For a time, especially in my run-up to joining the army, my sense of the world came to resemble the duality of the least sophisticated video games, where good and evil are clearly defined and unquestionable.

However, once I returned from the Army and rededicated myself to computing, I gradually came to regret my martial fantasies. The more I developed my abilities, the more I matured and realized that the technology of communications had a chance of succeeding where the technology of violence had failed. Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber. In the early 2000s the Internet was still just barely out of its formative period, and, to my mind at least, it offered a more authentic and complete incarnation of American ideals than even America itself. A place where everyone was equal? Check. A place dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Check, check, check. It helped that nearly all the major founding documents of Internet culture framed it in terms reminiscent of American history: here was this wild, open new frontier that belonged to anyone bold enough to settle it, swiftly becoming colonized by governments and corporate interests that were seeking to regulate it for power and profit. The large companies that were charging large fees—for hardware, for software, for the long-distance phone calls that you needed back then to get online, and for knowledge itself, which was humanity’s common inheritance and so, by all rights, should have been freely available—were irresistible contemporary avatars of the British, whose harsh taxation ignited the fervor for independence.

This revolution wasn’t happening in history textbooks, but now, in my generation, and any of us could be part of it solely by dint of our abilities. This was thrilling—to participate in the founding of a new society, one based not on where we were born or how we grew up or our popularity at school but on our knowledge and technological ability. In school, I’d had to memorize the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: now its words were lodged in my memory alongside John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which employed the same self-evident, self-elect plural pronoun: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

This technological meritocracy was certainly empowering, but it could also be humbling, as I came to understand when I first went to work in the Intelligence Community. The decentralization of the Internet merely emphasized the decentralization of computing expertise. I might have been the top computer person in my family, or in my neighborhood, but to work for the IC meant testing my skills against everyone in the country and the world. The Internet showed me the sheer quantity and variety of talent that existed, and made clear that in order to flourish I had to specialize.

There were a few different careers available to me as a technologist. I could have become a software developer, or, as the job is more commonly called, a programmer, writing the code that makes computers work. Alternatively, I could have become a hardware or network specialist, setting up the servers in their racks and running the wires, weaving the massive fabric that connects every computer, every device, and every file. Computers and computer programs were interesting to me, and so were the networks that linked them together. But I was most intrigued by their total functioning at a deeper level of abstraction, not as individual components but as an overarching system.

I thought about this a lot while I was driving, to and from Lindsay’s house and to and from AACC. Car time has always been thinking time for me, and commutes are long on the crowded Beltway. To be a software developer was to run the rest stops off the exits and to make sure that all the fast-food and gas station franchises accorded with each other and with user expectations; to be a hardware specialist was to lay the infrastructure, to grade and pave the roads themselves; while to be a network specialist was to be responsible for traffic control, manipulating signs and lights to safely route the time-crunched hordes to their proper destinations. To get into systems, however, was to be an urban planner, to take all of the components available and ensure their interaction to maximum effect. It was, pure and simple, like getting paid to play God, or at least a tinpot dictator.

There are two main ways to be a systems guy. One is that you take possession of the whole of an existing system and maintain it, gradually making it more efficient and fixing it when it breaks. That position is called a systems administrator, or sysadmin. The second is that you analyze a problem, such as how to store data or how to search across databases, and solve it by engineering a solution from a combination of existing components or by inventing entirely new ones. This position is called a systems engineer. I eventually would do both of these jobs, working my way into administration and from there into engineering, oblivious throughout about how this intense engagement with the deepest levels of integration of computing technology was exerting an influence on my political convictions.

I’ll try not to be too abstract here, but I want you to imagine a system. It doesn’t matter what system: it can be a computer system, an ecosystem, a legal system, or even a system of government. Remember, a system is just a bunch of parts that function together as a whole, which most people are only reminded of when something breaks. It’s one of the great chastening facts of working with systems that the part of a system that malfunctions is almost never the part in which you notice the malfunction. In order to find what caused the system to collapse, you have to start from the point where you spotted the problem, and trace the problem’s effects logically through all of the system’s components. Because a sysadmin or engineer is responsible for such repairs, they have to be equally fluent in software, hardware, and networking. If the malfunction turns out to be a software issue, the repair might involve scrolling through line after line of code in a UN General Assembly’s worth of programming languages. If it’s a hardware issue, it might require going over a circuit board with a flashlight in the mouth and a soldering gun in hand, checking each connection. If networking is implicated, it might mean tracing every twist and turn of the cables that run above the ceiling and under the floor, connecting the distant data centers full of servers with an office full of laptops.

Because systems work according to instructions, or rules, such an analysis is ultimately a search for which rules failed, how, and why—an attempt to identify the specific points where the intention of a rule was not adequately expressed by its formulation or application. Did the system fail because something was not communicated, or because someone abused the system by accessing a resource they weren’t allowed to, or by accessing a resource they were allowed to but using it exploitatively? Was the job of one component stopped, or impeded, by another? Did one program, or computer, or group of people take over more than their fair share of the system?

Over the course of my career, it became increasingly difficult for me to ask these questions about the technologies I was responsible for and not about my country. And it became increasingly frustrating to me that I was able to repair the former but not the latter. I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.

¹² Homo contractus

I had hoped to serve my country, but instead I went to work for it. This is not a trivial distinction. The sort of honorable stability offered to my father and Pop wasn’t quite as available to me, or to anyone of my generation. Both my father and Pop entered the service of their country on the first day of their working lives and retired from that service on the last. That was the American government that was familiar to me, from earliest childhood—when it had helped to feed, clothe, and house me—to the moment when it had cleared me to go into the Intelligence Community. That government had treated a citizen’s service like a compact: it would provide for you and your family, in return for your integrity and the prime years of your life.

But I came into the IC during a different age.

By the time I arrived, the sincerity of public service had given way to the greed of the private sector, and the sacred compact of the soldier, officer, and career civil servant was being replaced by the unholy bargain of Homo contractus, the primary species of US Government 2.0. This creature was not a sworn servant but a transient worker, whose patriotism was incentivized by a better paycheck and for whom the federal government was less the ultimate authority than the ultimate client.

During the American Revolution, it had made sense for the Continental Congress to hire privateers and mercenaries to protect the independence of what was then barely a functioning republic. But for third-millennium hyperpower America to rely on privatized forces for the national defense struck me as strange and vaguely sinister. Indeed, today contracting is most often associated with its major failures, such as the fighting-for-hire work of Blackwater (which changed its name to Xe Services after its employees were convicted of killing fourteen Iraqi civilians, and then changed its name again to Academi after it was acquired by a group of private investors), or the torture-for-hire work of CACI and Titan (both of which supplied personnel who terrorized prisoners at Abu Ghraib).

These sensationalist cases can lead the public to believe that the government employs contractors in order to maintain cover and deniability, off-loading the illegal or quasi-legal dirty work to keep its hands clean and conscience clear. But that’s not entirely true, or at least not entirely true in the IC, which tends to focus less on deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC contracting is much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring. Every agency has a head count, a legislative limit that dictates the number of people it can hire to do a certain type of work. But contractors, because they’re not directly employed by the federal government, aren’t included in that number. The agencies can hire as many of them as they can pay for, and they can pay for as many of them as they want—all they have to do is testify to a few select congressional subcommittees that the terrorists are coming for our children, or the Russians are in our emails, or the Chinese are in our power grid. Congress never says no to this type of begging, which is actually a kind of threat, and reliably capitulates to the IC’s demands.

Among the documents that I provided to journalists was the 2013 Black Budget. This is a classified budget in which over 68 percent of its money, $52.6 billion, was dedicated to the IC, including funding for 107,035 IC employees—more than a fifth of whom, some 21,800 people, were full-time contractors. And that number doesn’t even include the tens of thousands more employed by companies that have signed contracts (or subcontracts, or sub-subcontracts) with the agencies for a specific service or project. Those contractors are never counted by the government, not even in the Black Budget, because to add their ranks to the contracting total would make one disturbing fact extraordinarily clear: the work of American Intelligence is done as frequently by private employees as it is by government servants.

To be sure, there are many, even in government, who maintain that this trickle-down scheme is advantageous. With contractors, they say, the government can encourage competitive bidding to keep costs down, and isn’t on the hook to pay pensions and benefits. But the real advantage for government officials is the conflict of interest inherent in the budgeting process itself. IC directors ask Congress for money to rent contract workers from private companies, congresspeople approve that money, and then those IC directors and congresspeople are rewarded, after they retire from office, by being given high-paying positions and consultancies with the very companies they’ve just enriched. From the vantage of the corporate boardroom, contracting functions as governmentally assisted corruption. It’s America’s most legal and convenient method of transferring public money to the private purse.

But however much the work of Intelligence is privatized, the federal government remains the only authority that can grant an individual clearance to access classified information. And because clearance candidates must be sponsored in order to apply for clearance—meaning they must already have a job offer for a position that requires clearance—most contractors begin their careers in a government position. After all, it’s rarely worth the expense for a private company to sponsor your clearance application and then pay you to wait around for a year for the government’s approval. It makes more financial sense for a company to just hire an already-cleared government employee. The situation created by this economy is one in which government bears all the burdens of background checks but reaps few of the benefits. It must do all of the work and assume all of the expense of clearing a candidate, who, the moment they have their clearance, more often than not bolts for the door, exchanging the blue badge of the government employee for the green badge of the contractor. The joke was that the green symbolized “money.”

The government job that had sponsored me for my TS/SCI clearance wasn’t the one I wanted, but the one I could find: I was officially an employee of the state of Maryland, working for the University of Maryland at College Park. The university was helping the NSA open a new institution called CASL, the Center for Advanced Study of Language.

CASL’s ostensible mission was to study how people learned languages and to develop computer-assisted methods to help them do so more quickly and better. The hidden corollary of this mission was that the NSA also wanted to develop ways to improve computer comprehension of language. If the other agencies were having difficulties finding competent Arabic (and Farsi and Dari and Pashto and Kurdish) speakers who passed their often ridiculous security checks to translate and interpret on the ground—I know too many Americans rejected merely because they had an inconvenient distant cousin they’d never even met—the NSA was having its own tough time ensuring that its computers could comprehend and analyze the massive amount of foreign-language communications that they were intercepting.

I don’t have a more granular idea of the kinds of things that CASL was supposed to do, for the simple reason that when I showed up for work with my bright, shiny clearance, the place wasn’t even open yet. In fact, its building was still under construction. Until it was finished and the tech was installed, my job was essentially that of a night-shift security guard. My responsibilities were limited to showing up every day to patrol the empty halls after the construction workers—those other contractors—were finished, making sure that nobody burned down the building or broke in and bugged it. I spent hour after hour making rounds through the half-completed shell, inspecting the day’s progress: trying out the chairs that had just been installed in the state-of-the-art auditorium, casting stones back and forth across the suddenly graveled roof, admiring the new drywall, and literally watching the paint dry.

This is the life of after-hours security at a top secret facility, and truthfully I didn’t mind it. I was getting paid to do basically nothing but wander in the dark with my thoughts, and I had all the time in the world to use the one functioning computer that I had access to on the premises to search for a new position. During the daytime, I caught up on my sleep and went out on photography expeditions with Lindsay, who—thanks to my wooing and scheming—had finally dumped her other boyfriends.

At the time I was still naive enough to think that my position with CASL would be a bridge to a full-time federal career. But the more I looked around, the more I was amazed to find that there were very few opportunities to serve my country directly, at least in a meaningful technical role. I had a better chance of working as a contractor for a private company that served my country for profit; and I had the best chance, it turned out, of working as a subcontractor for a private company that contracted with another private company that served my country for profit. The realization was dizzying.

It was particularly bizarre to me that most of the systems engineering and systems administration jobs that were out there were private, because these positions came with almost universal access to the employer’s digital existence. It’s unimaginable that a major bank or even a social media outfit would hire outsiders for systems-level work. In the context of the US government, however, restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who didn’t really work for you was what passed for innovation.

THE AGENCIES WERE hiring tech companies to hire kids, and then they were giving them the keys to the kingdom, because—as Congress and the press were told—the agencies didn’t have a choice. No one else knew how the keys, or the kingdom, worked. I tried to rationalize all this into a pretext for optimism. I swallowed my incredulity, put together a résumé, and went to the job fairs, which, at least in the early aughts, were the primary venues where contractors found new work and government employees were poached. These fairs went by the dubious name of “Clearance Jobs”—I think I was the only one who found that double meaning funny.

At the time, these events were held every month at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just down the road from the CIA’s headquarters, or at one of the grubbier Marriott-type hotels near the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade. They were pretty much like any other job fair, I’m told, with one crucial exception: here, it always felt like there were more recruiters than there were recruits. That should give you an indication of the industry’s appetite. The recruiters paid a lot of money to be at these fairs, because these were the only places in the country where everyone who walked through the door wearing their stickum name tag badge had supposedly already been prescreened online and cross-checked with the agencies—and so was presumed to already have a clearance, and probably also the requisite skills.

Once you left the well-appointed hotel lobby for the all-business ballroom, you entered Planet Contractor. Everybody would be there: this wasn’t the University of Maryland anymore—this was Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, DynCorp, Titan, CACI, SAIC, COMSO, as well as a hundred other different acronyms I’d never heard of. Some contractors had tables, but the larger ones had booths that were fully furnished and equipped with refreshments.

After you handed a prospective employer a copy of your résumé and small-talked a bit, in a sort of informal interview, they’d break out their binders, which contained lists of all the government billets they were trying to fill. But because this work touched on the clandestine, the billets were accompanied not by standardized job titles and traditional job descriptions but with intentionally obscure, coded verbiage that was often particular to each contractor. One company’s Senior Developer 3 might or might not be equivalent to another company’s Principal Analyst 2, for example. Frequently the only way to differentiate among these positions was to note that each specified its own requirements of years of experience, level of certifications, and type of security clearance.

After the 2013 revelations, the US government would try to disparage me by referring to me as “only a contractor” or “a former Dell employee,” with the implication that I didn’t enjoy the same kinds of clearance and access as a blue-badged agency staffer. Once that discrediting characterization was established, the government proceeded to accuse me of “job-hopping,” hinting that I was some sort of disgruntled worker who didn’t get along with superiors or an exceptionally ambitious employee dead-set on getting ahead at all costs. The truth is that these were both lies of convenience. The IC knows better than anyone that changing jobs is part of the career track of every contractor: it’s a mobility situation that the agencies themselves created, and profit from.

In national security contracting, especially in tech contracting, you often find yourself physically working at an agency facility, but nominally—on paper—working for Dell, or Lockheed Martin, or one of the umpteen smaller firms that frequently get bought by a Dell or a Lockheed Martin. In such an acquisition, of course, the smaller firm’s contracts get bought, too, and suddenly there’s a different employer and job title on your business card. Your day-to-day work, though, remains the same: you’re still sitting at the agency facility, doing your tasks. Nothing has changed at all. Meanwhile, the dozen coworkers sitting to your left and right—the same coworkers you work with on the same projects daily—might technically be employed by a dozen different companies, and those companies might still be a few degrees removed from the corporate entities that hold the primary contracts with the agency.

I wish I remembered the exact chronology of my contracting, but I don’t have a copy of my résumé anymore—that file, Edward_Snowden_Resume.doc, is locked up in the Documents folder of one of my old home computers, since seized by the FBI. I do recall, however, that my first major contracting gig was actually a subcontracting gig: the CIA had hired BAE Systems, which had hired COMSO, which hired me.

BAE Systems is a midsize American subdivision of British Aerospace, set up expressly to win contracts from the American IC. COMSO was basically its recruiter, a few folks who spent all their time driving around the Beltway trying to find the actual contractors (“the asses”) and sign them up (“put the asses in chairs”). Of all the companies I talked to at the job fairs, COMSO was the hungriest, perhaps because it was among the smallest. I never learned what the company’s acronym stood for, or even if it stood for anything. Technically speaking, COMSO would be my employer, but I never worked a single day at a COMSO office, or at a BAE Systems office, and few contractors ever would. I’d only work at CIA headquarters.

In fact, I only ever visited the COMSO office, which was in Greenbelt, Maryland, maybe two or three times in my life. One of these was when I went down there to negotiate my salary and sign some paperwork. At CASL I’d been making around $30K/year, but that job didn’t have anything to do with technology, so I felt comfortable asking COMSO for $50K. When I named that figure to the guy behind the desk, he said, “What about $60K?”

At the time I was so inexperienced, I didn’t understand why he was trying to overpay me. I knew, I guess, that this wasn’t ultimately COMSO’s money, but I only later understood that some of the contracts that COMSO and BAE and others handled were of the type that’s called “cost-plus.” This meant that the middlemen contractors billed the agencies for whatever an employee got paid, plus a fee of 3 to 5 percent of that every year. Bumping up salaries was in everyone’s interest—everyone’s, that is, except the taxpayer’s.

The COMSO guy eventually talked me, or himself, up to $62K, as a result of my once again agreeing to work the night shift. He held out his hand and, as I shook it, he introduced himself to me as my “manager.” He went on to explain that the title was just a formality, and that I’d be taking my orders directly from the CIA. “If all goes well,” he said, “we’ll never meet again.”

In the spy movies and TV shows, when someone tells you something like that, it usually means that you’re about to go on a dangerous mission and might die. But in real spy life it just means, “Congratulations on the job.” By the time I was out the door, I’m sure he’d already forgotten my face.

I left that meeting in a buoyant mood, but on the drive back, reality set in: this, I realized, was going to be my daily commute. If I was going to still live in Ellicott City, Maryland, in proximity to Lindsay, but work at the CIA in Virginia, my commute could be up to an hour and a half each way in Beltway gridlock, and that would be the end of me. I knew it wouldn’t take long before I’d start to lose my mind. There weren’t enough books on tape in the universe.

I couldn’t ask Lindsay to move down to Virginia with me because she was still just in her sophomore year at MICA, and had class three days a week. We discussed this, and for cover referred to my job down there as COMSO—as in, “Why does COMSO have to be so far away?” Finally, we decided that I’d find a small place down there, near COMSO—just a small place to crash at during the days while I worked at night, at COMSO—and then I’d come up to Maryland again every weekend, or she’d come down to me.

I set off to find that place, something smack in the middle of that Venn diagram overlap of cheap enough that I could afford it and nice enough that Lindsay could survive it. It turned out to be a difficult search: Given the number of people who work at the CIA, and the CIA’s location in Virginia—where the housing density is, let’s say, semirural—the prices were through the roof. The 22100s are some of the most expensive zip codes in America.

Eventually, browsing on Craigslist, I found a room that was surprisingly within my budget, in a house surprisingly near—less than fifteen minutes from—CIA headquarters. I went to check it out, expecting a cruddy bachelor pad pigsty. Instead, I pulled up in front of a large glass-fronted McMansion, immaculately maintained with a topiary lawn that was seasonally decorated. I’m being completely serious when I say that as I approached the place, the smell of pumpkin spice got stronger.

A guy named Gary answered the door. He was older, which I expected from the “Dear Edward” tone of his email, but I hadn’t expected him to be so well dressed. He was very tall, with buzz-cut gray hair, and was wearing a suit, and over the suit, an apron. He asked me very politely if I didn’t mind waiting a moment. He was just then busy in the kitchen, where he was preparing a tray of apples, sticking cloves in them and dousing them with nutmeg, cinnamon, and sugar.

Once those apples were baking in the oven, Gary showed me the room, which was in the basement, and told me I could move in immediately. I accepted the offer and put down my security deposit and one month’s rent.

Then he told me the house rules, which helpfully rhymed:

No mess.

No pets.

No overnight guests.

I confess that I almost immediately violated the first rule, and that I never had any interest in violating the second. As for the third, Gary made an exception for Lindsay.

¹³ Indoc

You know that one establishing shot that’s in pretty much every spy movie and TV show that’s subtitled “CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia”? And then the camera moves through the marble lobby with the wall of stars and the floor with the agency’s seal? Well, Langley is the site’s historical name, which the agency prefers Hollywood to use; CIA HQ is officially in McLean, Virginia; and nobody really comes through that lobby except VIPs or outsiders on a tour.

That building is the OHB, the Old Headquarters Building. The building where almost everybody who works at the CIA enters is far less ready for its close-up: the NHB, the New Headquarters Building. My first day was one of the very few I spent there in daylight. That said, I spent most of the day underground—in a grimy, cinder-block-walled room with all the charm of a nuclear fallout shelter and the acrid smell of government bleach.

“So this is the Deep State,” one guy said, and almost everybody laughed. I think he’d been expecting a circle of Ivy League WASPs chanting in hoods, whereas I’d been expecting a group of normie civil service types who resembled younger versions of my parents. Instead, we were all computer dudes—and yes, almost uniformly dudes—who were clearly wearing “business casual” for the first time in our lives. Some were tattooed and pierced, or bore evidence of having removed their piercings for the big day. One still had punky streaks of dye in his hair. Almost all wore contractor badges, as green and crisp as new hundred-dollar bills. We certainly didn’t look like a hermetic power-mad cabal that controlled the actions of America’s elected officials from shadowy subterranean cubicles.

This session was the first stage in our transformation. It was called the Indoc, or Indoctrination, and its entire point was to convince us that we were the elite, that we were special, that we had been chosen to be privy to the mysteries of state and to the truths that the rest of the country—and, at times, even its Congress and courts—couldn’t handle.

I couldn’t help but think while I sat through this Indoc that the presenters were preaching to the choir. You don’t need to tell a bunch of computer whizzes that they possess superior knowledge and skills that uniquely qualify them to act independently and make decisions on behalf of their fellow citizens without any oversight or review. Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism.

This, to my thinking, actually represented the great nexus of the Intelligence Community and the tech industry: both are entrenched and unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. Both believe that they have the solutions for everything, which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose. Above all, they both believe that these solutions are inherently apolitical, because they’re based on data, whose prerogatives are regarded as preferable to the chaotic whims of the common citizen.

Being indoctrinated into the IC, like becoming expert at technology, has powerful psychological effects. All of a sudden you have access to the story behind the story, the hidden histories of well-known, or supposedly well-known, events. That can be intoxicating, at least for a teetotaler like me. Also, all of a sudden you have not just the license but the obligation to lie, conceal, dissemble, and dissimulate. This creates a sense of tribalism, which can lead many to believe that their primary allegiance is to the institution and not to the rule of law.

I wasn’t thinking any of these thoughts at my Indoc session, of course. Instead, I was just trying to keep myself awake as the presenters proceeded to instruct us on basic operational security practices, part of the wider body of spy techniques the IC collectively describes as “tradecraft.” These are often so obvious as to be mind-numbing: Don’t tell anyone who you work for. Don’t leave sensitive materials unattended. Don’t bring your highly insecure cell phone into the highly secure office—or talk on it about work, ever. Don’t wear your “Hi, I work for the CIA” badge to the mall.

Finally, the litany ended, the lights came down, the PowerPoint was fired up, and faces appeared on the screen that was bolted to the wall. Everyone in the room sat upright. These were the faces, we were told, of former agents and contractors who, whether through greed, malice, incompetence, or negligence failed to follow the rules. They thought they were above all this mundane stuff and their hubris resulted in their imprisonment and ruin. The people on the screen, it was implied, were now in basements even worse than this one, and some would be there until they died.

All in all, this was an effective presentation.

I’m told that in the years since my career ended, this parade of horribles—of incompetents, moles, defectors, and traitors—has been expanded to include an additional category: people of principle, whistleblowers in the public interest. I can only hope that the twenty-somethings sitting there today are struck by the government’s conflation of selling secrets to the enemy and disclosing them to journalists when the new faces—when my face—pop up on the screen.

I came to work for the CIA when it was at the nadir of its morale. Following the intelligence failures of 9/11, Congress and the executive had set out on an aggressive reorganization campaign. It included stripping the position of director of Central Intelligence of its dual role as both head of the CIA and head of the entire American IC—a dual role that the position had held since the founding of the agency in the aftermath of World War II. When George Tenet was forced out in 2004, the CIA’s half-century supremacy over all of the other agencies went with him.

The CIA’s rank and file considered Tenet’s departure and the directorship’s demotion as merely the most public symbols of the agency’s betrayal by the political class it had been created to serve. The general sense of having been manipulated by the Bush administration and then blamed for its worst excesses gave rise to a culture of victimization and retrenchment. This was only exacerbated by the appointment of Porter Goss, an undistinguished former CIA officer turned Republican congressman from Florida, as the agency’s new director—the first to serve in the reduced position. The installation of a politician was taken as a chastisement and as an attempt to weaponize the CIA by putting it under partisan supervision. Director Goss immediately began a sweeping campaign of firings, layoffs, and forced retirements that left the agency understaffed and more reliant than ever on contractors. Meanwhile, the public at large had never had such a low opinion of the agency, or such insight into its inner workings, thanks to all the leaks and disclosures about its extraordinary renditions and black site prisons.

At the time, the CIA was broken into five directorates. There was the DO, the Directorate of Operations, which was responsible for the actual spying; the DI, the Directorate of Intelligence, which was responsible for synthesizing and analyzing the results of that spying; the DST, the Directorate of Science and Technology, which built and supplied computers, communications devices, and weapons to the spies and showed them how to use them; the DA, the Directorate of Administration, which basically meant lawyers, human resources, and all those who coordinated the daily business of the agency and served as a liaison to the government; and, finally, the DS, the Directorate of Support, which was a strange directorate and, back then, the largest. The DS included everyone who worked for the agency in a support capacity, from the majority of the agency’s technologists and medical doctors to the personnel in the cafeteria and the gym and the guards at the gate. The primary function of the DS was to manage the CIA’s global communications infrastructure, the platform ensuring that the spies’ reports got to the analysts and that the analysts’ reports got to the administrators. The DS housed the employees who provided technical support throughout the agency, maintained the servers, and kept them secure—the people who built, serviced, and protected the entire network of the CIA and connected it with the networks of the other agencies and controlled their access.

These were, in short, the people who used technology to link everything together. It should be no surprise, then, that the bulk of them were young. It should also be no surprise that most of them were contractors.

My team was attached to the Directorate of Support and our task was to manage the CIA’s Washington-Metropolitan server architecture, which is to say the vast majority of the CIA servers in the continental United States—the enormous halls of expensive “big iron” computers that comprised the agency’s internal networks and databases, all of its systems that transmitted, received, and stored intelligence. Though the CIA had dotted the country with relay servers, many of the agency’s most important servers were situated on-site. Half of them were in the NHB, where my team was located; the other half were in the nearby OHB. They were set up on opposite sides of their respective buildings, so that if one side was blown up we wouldn’t lose too many machines.

My TS/SCI security clearance reflected my having been “read into” a few different “compartments” of information. Some of these compartments were SIGINT (signals intelligence, or intercepted communications), and another was HUMINT (human intelligence, or the work done and reports filed by agents and analysts)—the CIA’s work routinely involves both. On top of those, I was read into a COMSEC (communications security) compartment that allowed me to work with cryptographic key material, the codes that have traditionally been considered the most important agency secrets because they’re used to protect all the other agency secrets. This cryptographic material was processed and stored on and around the servers I was responsible for managing. My team was one of the few at the agency permitted to actually lay hands on these servers, and likely the only team with access to log in to nearly all othem.

In the CIA, secure offices are called “vaults,” and my team’s vault was located a bit past the CIA’s help desk section. During the daytime, the help desk was staffed by a busy contingent of older people, closer to my parents’ age. They wore blazers and slacks and even blouses and skirts; this was one of the few places in the CIA tech world at the time where I recall seeing a sizable number of women. Some of them had the blue badges that identified them as government employees, or, as contractors called them, “govvies.” They spent their shifts picking up banks of ringing phones and talking people in the building or out in the field through their tech issues. It was a sort of IC version of call-center work: resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, and going by rote through the troubleshooting checklists. “Can you log out and back in?” “Is the network cable plugged in?” If the govvies, with their minimal tech experience, couldn’t deal with a particular issue themselves, they’d escalate it to more specialized teams, especially if the problem was happening in the “Foreign Field,” meaning CIA stations overseas in places like Kabul or Baghdad or Bogotá or Paris.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit how proud I felt when I first walked through this gloomy array. I was decades younger than the help desk folks and heading past them into a vault to which they didn’t have access and never would. At the time it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the extent of my access meant that the process itself might be broken, that the government had simply given up on meaningfully managing and promoting its talent from within because the new contracting culture meant they no longer had to care. More than any other memory I have of my career, this route of mine past the CIA help desk has come to symbolize for me the generational and cultural change in the IC of which I was a part—the moment when the old-school prepster clique that traditionally staffed the agencies, desperate to keep pace with technologies they could not be bothered to understand, welcomed a new wave of young hackers into the institutional fold and let them develop, have complete access to, and wield complete power over unparalleled technological systems of state control.

In time I came to love the help desk govvies, who were kind and generous to me, and always appreciated my willingness to help even when it wasn’t my job. I, in turn, learned much from them, in bits and pieces, about how the larger organization functioned beyond the Beltway. Some of them had actually worked out in the foreign field themselves once upon a time, like the agents they now assisted over the phone. After a while, they’d come back home to the States, not always with their families intact, and they’d been relegated to the help desk for the remaining years of their careers because they lacked the computer skills required to compete in an agency increasingly focused on expanding its technological capabilities.

I was proud to have won the govvies’ respect, and I was never quite comfortable with how many of my team members condescendingly pitied and even made fun of these bright and committed folks—men and women who for low pay and little glory had given the agency years of their lives, often in inhospitable and even outright dangerous places abroad, at the end of which their ultimate reward was a job picking up phones in a lonely hallway.

AFTER A FEW weeks familiarizing myself with the systems on the day shift, I moved to nights—6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.—when the help desk was staffed by a discreetly snoozing skeleton crew and the rest of the agency was pretty much dead.

At night, especially between, say, 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., the CIA was empty and lifeless, a vast and haunted complex with a postapocalyptic feel. All the escalators were stopped and you had to walk them like stairs. Only half of the elevators were working, and the pinging sounds they made, only barely audible during the bustle of daytime, now sounded alarmingly loud. Former CIA directors glared down from their portraits and the bald eagles seemed less like statues than like living predators waiting patiently to swoop in for the kill. American flags billowed like ghosts—spooks in red, white, and blue. The agency had recently committed to a new eco-friendly energy-saving policy and installed motion-sensitive overhead lights: the corridor ahead of you would be swathed in darkness and the lights would switch on when you approached, so that you felt followed, and your footsteps would echo endlessly.

For twelve hours each night, three days on and two days off, I sat in the secure office beyond the help desk, among the twenty desks each bearing two or three computer terminals reserved for the sysadmins who kept the CIA’s global network online. Regardless of how fancy that might sound, the job itself was relatively banal, and can basically be described as waiting for catastrophe to happen. The problems generally weren’t too difficult to solve. The moment something went wrong, I had to log in to try to fix it remotely. If I couldn’t, I had to physically descend into the data center hidden a floor below my own in the New Headquarters Building—or walk the eerie half mile through the connecting tunnel over to the data center in the Old Headquarters Building—and tinker around with the machinery itself.

My partner in this task—the only other person responsible for the nocturnal functioning of the CIA’s entire server architecture—was a guy I’m going to call Frank. He was our team’s great outlier and an exceptional personality in every sense. Besides having a political consciousness (libertarian to the point of stockpiling Krugerrands) and an abiding interest in subjects outside of tech (he read vintage mysteries and thrillers in paperback), he was a fifty-something been-there-done-that ex-navy radio operator who’d managed to graduate from the call center’s ranks thanks to being a contractor.

I have to say, when I first met Frank, I thought: Imagine if my entire life were like the nights I spent at CASL. Because, to put it frankly, Frank did hardly any work at all. At least, that was the impression he liked to project. He enjoyed telling me, and everyone else, that he didn’t really know anything about computing and didn’t understand why they’d put him on such an important team. He used to say that “contracting was the third biggest scam in Washington,” after the income tax and Congress. He claimed he’d advised his boss that he’d be “next to useless” when they suggested moving him to the server team, but they moved him just the same. By his own account, all he’d done at work for the better part of the last decade was sit around and read books, though sometimes he’d also play games of solitaire—with a real deck of cards, not on the computer, of course—and reminisce about former wives (“she was a keeper”) and girlfriends (“she took my car but it was worth it”). Sometimes he’d just pace all night and reload the Drudge Report.

When the phone rang to signal that something was broken, and bouncing a server didn’t fix it, he’d just report it to the day shift. Essentially, his philosophy (if you could call it that) was that the night shift had to end sometime and the day shift had a deeper bench. Apparently, however, the day shift had gotten tired of coming in to work every morning to find Frank’s feet up in front of the digital equivalent of a dumpster fire, and so I’d been hired.

For some reason, the agency had decided that it was preferable to bring me in than to let this old guy go. After a couple of weeks of working together, I was convinced that his continued employment had to be the result of some personal connection or favor. To test this hypothesis I tried to draw Frank out, and asked him which CIA directors or other agency brass he’d been with in the navy. But my question only provoked a tirade about how basically none of the navy vets high up at the agency had been enlisted men—they’d all been officers, which explained so much about the agency’s dismal record. This lecture went on and on, until suddenly a panicked expression came over his face and he jumped up and said, “I gotta change the tape!”

I had no idea what he was talking about. But Frank was already heading to the gray door at the back of our vault, which opened onto a dingy stairwell that gave direct access to the data center itself—the humming, freezing night-black chamber that we sat directly on top of.

Going down into a server vault—especially the CIA’s—can be a disorienting experience. You descend into darkness blinking with green and red LEDs like an evil Christmas, vibrating with the whir of the industrial fans cooling the precious rack-mounted machinery to prevent it from melting down. Being there was always a bit dizzying—even without a manic older guy cursing like the sailor he was as he dashed down the server hall.

Frank stopped by a shabby corner that housed a makeshift cubicle of reclaimed equipment, marked as belonging to the Directorate of Operations. Taking up almost the entirety of the sad, rickety desk was an old computer. On closer inspection, it was something from the early ’90s, or even the late ’80s, older than anything I remembered from my father’s Coast Guard lab—a computer so ancient that it shouldn’t even have been called a computer. It was more properly a machine, running a miniature tape format that I didn’t recognize but was pretty sure would have been welcomed by the Smithsonian.

Next to this machine was a massive safe, which Frank unlocked.

He fussed with the tape that was in the machine, pried it free, and put it in the safe. Then he took another antique tape out of the safe and inserted it into the machine as a replacement, threading it through by touch alone. He carefully tapped a few times on the old keyboard—down, down, down, tab, tab, tab. He couldn’t actually see the effect of those keystrokes, because the machine’s monitor no longer worked, but he struck the Enter key with confidence.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But the itty-bitty tape began to tick-tick-tick and then spin, and Frank grinned with satisfaction.

“This is the most important machine in the building,” he said. “The agency doesn’t trust this digital technology crap. They don’t trust their own servers. You know they’re always breaking. But when the servers break down they risk losing what they’re storing, so in order not to lose anything that comes in during the day, they back everything up on tape at night.”

“So you’re doing a storage backup here?”

“A storage backup to tape. The old way. Reliable as a heart attack. Tape hardly ever crashes.”

“But what’s on the tape? Like personnel stuff, or like the actual incoming intelligence?”

Frank put a hand to his chin in a thinking pose and pretended to take the question seriously. Then he said, “Man, Ed, I didn’t want to have to tell you. But it’s field reports from your girlfriend, and we’ve got a lot of agents filing. It’s raw intelligence. Very raw.”

He laughed his way upstairs, leaving me speechless and blushing in the darkness of the vault.

It was only when Frank repeated this same tape-changing ritual the next night, and the night after that, and on every night we worked together thereafter, that I began to understand why the agency kept him around—and it wasn’t just for his sense of humor. Frank was the only guy willing to stick around between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. who was also old enough to know how to handle that proprietary tape system. All the other techs who’d come up in the dark ages when tape was the medium now had families and preferred to be home with them at night. But Frank was a bachelor and remembered the world before the Enlightenment.

After I found a way to automate most of my own work—writing scripts to automatically update servers and restore lost network connections, mostly—I started having what I came to call a Frank amount of time. Meaning, I had all night to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I passed a fair number of hours in long talks with Frank, especially about the more political stuff he was reading: books about how the country should return to the gold standard, or about the intricacies of the flat tax. But there were always periods of every shift when Frank would disappear. He’d either put his head into a whodunit novel and not lift it until morning, or he’d go strolling the halls of the agency, hitting the cafeteria for a lukewarm slice of pizza or the gym to lift weights. I had my own way of keeping to myself, of course. I went online.

When you go online at the CIA, you have to check a box for a Consent to Monitoring Agreement, which basically says that everything you do is being recorded and that you agree that you have no expectation of any privacy whatsoever. You end up checking this box so often that it becomes second nature. These agreements become invisible to you when you’re working at the agency, because they pop up constantly and you’re always trying to just click them down and get back to what you were doing. This, to my mind, is a major reason why most IC workers don’t share civilian concerns about being tracked online: not because they have any insider information about how digital surveillance helps to protect America, but because to those in the IC, being tracked by the boss just comes with the job.

Anyway, it’s not like there’s a lot to be found out there on the public Internet that’s more interesting than what the agency already has internally. Few realize this, but the CIA has its own Internet and Web. It has its own kind of Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia, which provides agents with information about agency teams, projects, and missions; and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network. Every CIA component has its own website on this network that discusses what it does and posts meeting minutes and presentations. For hours and hours every night, this was my education.

According to Frank, the first things everyone looks up on the CIA’s internal networks are aliens and 9/11, and that’s why, also according to Frank, you’ll never get any meaningful search results for them. I looked them up anyway. The CIA-flavored Google didn’t return anything interesting for either, but hey—maybe the truth was out there on another network drive. For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence. But al-Qaeda did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the Saudis, a fact that the Bush White House worked suspiciously hard to suppress as we went to war with two other countries.

Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didn’t quite understand at the time, and that no major American employer outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The higher up this employee is, and the more systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to virtually every byte of his employer’s digital existence. Of course, not everyone is curious enough to take advantage of this education, and not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity. My forays through the CIA’s systems were natural extensions of my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit together into the whole. And with the official title and privileges of a systems administrator, and technical prowess that enabled my clearance to be used to its maximum potential, I was able to satisfy my every informational deficiency and then some. In case you were wondering: Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails are not a thing.

On the CIA’s internal news sites I read top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still unfolding. These agency accounts of events were often very similar to the accounts that would eventually show up on network news, CNN, or Fox days later. The primary differences were merely in the sourcing and the level of detail. Whereas a newspaper or magazine account of an upheaval abroad might be attributed to “a senior official speaking on condition of anonymity,” the CIA version would have explicit sourcing—say, “ZBSMACKTALK/1, an employee of the interior ministry who regularly responds to specific tasking, claims secondhand knowledge, and has proven reliable in the past.” And the true name and complete personal history of ZBSMACKTALK/1, called a case file, would be only a few clicks away.

Sometimes an internal news item would never show up in the media at all, and the excitement and significance of what I was reading both increased my appreciation of the importance of our work and made me feel like I was missing out by just sitting at a workstation. This may come off as naive, but I was surprised to learn how truly international the CIA was—and I don’t mean its operations, I mean its workforce. The number of languages I heard in the cafeteria was astounding. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of my own provincialism. Working at CIA Headquarters was a thrill, but it was still only a few hours away from where I’d grown up, which in many ways was a similar environment. I was in my early twenties and, apart from stints in North Carolina, childhood trips to visit my grandfather at Coast Guard bases where he’d held commands, and my few weeks in the army at Fort Benning, I’d never really left the Beltway.

As I read about events happening in Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, and other exotic cities I could never have found on a noncomputerized map, I realized that as long as I was still young I had to serve my country by doing something truly meaningful abroad. The alternative, I thought, was just becoming a more successful Frank: sitting at progressively bigger desks, making progressively more money, until eventually I, too, would be obsolesced and kept around only to handle the future’s equivalent of a janky tape machine.

It was then that I did the unthinkable. I set about going govvy.

I think some of my supervisors were puzzled by this, but they were also flattered, because the typical route is the reverse: a public servant at the end of their tenure goes private and cashes in. No tech contractor just starting out goes public and takes a pay cut. To my mind, however, becoming a govvy was logical: I’d be getting paid to travel.

I got lucky, and a position opened up. After nine months as a systems administrator, I applied for a CIA tech job abroad, and in short order I was accepted.

My last day at CIA Headquarters was just a formality. I’d already done all my paperwork and traded in my green badge for a blue. All that was left to do was to sit through another indoctrination, which now that I was a govvy was held in an elegant conference room next to the cafeteria’s Dunkin’ Donuts. It was here that I performed the sacred rite in which contractors never participate. I raised my hand to swear an oath of loyalty—not to the government or agency that now employed me directly, but to the US Constitution. I solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The next day, I drove my trusty old Honda Civic out into the Virginia countryside. In order to get to the foreign station of my dreams, I first had to go back to school—to the first sit-in-a-classroom schooling I’d ever really finish.

¹⁴ The Count of the Hill

My first orders as a freshly minted officer of the government were to head for the Comfort Inn in Warrenton, Virginia, a sad, dilapidated motel whose primary client was the “State Department,” by which I mean the CIA. It was the worst motel in a town of bad motels, which was probably why the CIA chose it. The fewer other guests, the lower the chances that anybody would notice that this particular Comfort Inn served as a makeshift dormitory for the Warrenton Training Center—or, as folks who work there call it, the Hill.

When I checked in, the desk clerk warned me not to use the stairs, which were blocked off by police tape. I was given a room on the second floor of the main building, with a view of the inn’s auxiliary buildings and parking lot. The room was barely lit, there was mold in the bathroom, the carpets were filthy with cigarette burns under the No Smoking sign, and the flimsy mattress was stained dark purple with what I hoped was booze. Nevertheless, I liked it—I was still at the age when I could find this seediness romantic—and I spent my first night lying awake in bed, watching the bugs swarm the single domed overhead light fixture and counting down the hours to the free continental breakfast I’d been promised.

The next morning, I discovered that on the continent of Warrenton, breakfast meant individual-size boxes of Froot Loops and sour milk. Welcome to the government.

The Comfort Inn was to be my home for the next six months. My fellow Innmates and I, as we called ourselves, were discouraged from telling our loved ones where we were staying and what we were doing. I leaned hard into those protocols, rarely heading back to Maryland or even talking to Lindsay on the phone. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to take our phones to school, since class was classified, and we had classes all the time. Warrenton kept most of us too busy to be lonely.

If the Farm, down by Camp Peary, is the CIA’s most famous training institution, chiefly because it’s the only one that the agency’s PR staff is allowed to talk to Hollywood about, the Hill is without a doubt the most mysterious. Connected via microwave and fiber optics to the satellite relay facility at Brandy Station—part of the Warrenton Training Center’s constellation of sister sites—the Hill serves as the heart of the CIA’s field communications network, carefully located just out of nuke range from DC. The salty old techs who worked there liked to say that the CIA could survive losing its headquarters to a catastrophic attack, but it would die if it ever lost Warrenton, and now that the top of the Hill holds two enormous top secret data centers—one of which I later helped to construct—I’m inclined to agree.

The Hill earned its name because of its location, which is atop, yes, a massive steepness. When I arrived, there was just one road that led in, past a purposely under-marked perimeter fence, and then up a grade so severe that whenever the temperature dropped and the road iced over, vehicles would lose traction and slide backward downhill.

Just beyond the guarded checkpoint lies the State Department’s decaying diplomatic communications training facility, whose prominent location was meant to reinforce its role as cover: making the Hill appear as if it’s merely a place where the American foreign service trains technologists. Beyond it, amid the back territory, were the various low, unlabeled buildings I studied in, and even farther on was the shooting range that the IC’s trigger pullers used for special training. Shots would ring out, in a style of firing I wasn’t familiar with: pop-pop, pop; pop-pop, pop. A double-tap meant to incapacitate, followed by an aimed shot meant to execute.

I was there as a member of class 6-06 of the BTTP, the Basic Telecommunications Training Program, whose intentionally beige name disguises one of the most classified and unusual curricula in existence. The purpose of the program is to train TISOs (Technical Information Security Officers)—the CIA’s cadre of elite “communicators,” or, less formally, “commo guys.” A TISO is trained to be a jack-of-all-trades, a one-person replacement for previous generations’ specialized roles of code clerk, radioman, electrician, mechanic, physical and digital security adviser, and computer technician. The main job of this undercover officer is to manage the technical infrastructure for CIA operations, most commonly overseas at stations hidden inside American missions, consulates, and embassies—hence the State Department connection. The idea is, if you’re in an American embassy, which is to say if you’re far from home and surrounded by untrustworthy foreigners—whether hostiles or allies, they’re still untrustworthy foreigners to the CIA—you’re going to have to handle all of your technical needs internally. If you ask a local repairman to fix your secret spy base, he’ll definitely do it, even for cheap, but he’s also going to install hard-to-find bugs on behalf of a foreign power.

As a result, TISOs are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every machine in the building, from individual computers and computer networks to CCTV and HVAC systems, solar panels, heaters and coolers, emergency generators, satellite hookups, military encryption devices, alarms, locks, and so on. The rule is that if it plugs in or gets plugged into, it’s the TISO’s problem.

TISOs also have to know how to build some of these systems themselves, just as they have to know how to destroy them—when an embassy is under siege, say, after all the diplomats and most of their fellow CIA officers have been evacuated. The TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final “off the air” message to headquarters after they’ve shredded, burned, wiped, degaussed, and disintegrated anything that has the CIA’s fingerprints on it, from operational documents in safes to disks with cipher material, to ensure that nothing of value remains for an enemy to capture.

Why this was a job for the CIA and not for the State Department—the entity that actually owns the embassy building—is more than the sheer difference in competence and trust: the real reason is plausible deniability. The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered aircraft. Today, the most meaningful diplomacy happens directly between ministries and ministers. Sure, embassies do still send the occasional démarche and help support their citizens abroad, and then there are the consular sections that issue visas and renew passports. But those are often in a completely different building, and anyway, none of those activities can even remotely justify the expense of maintaining all that infrastructure. Instead, what justifies the expense is the ability for a country to use the cover of its foreign service to conduct and legitimize its spying.

TISOs work under diplomatic cover with credentials that hide them among these foreign service officers, usually under the identity of “attachés.” The largest embassies would have maybe five of these people, the larger embassies would have maybe three, but most just have one. They’re called “singletons,” and I remember being told that of all the posts the CIA offers, these have the highest rates of divorce. To be a singleton is to be the lone technical officer, far from home, in a world where everything is always broken.

My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one before graduation—which I was told was fairly uncommon. And this motley crew was uncommon, too, though pretty well representative of the kind of malcontents who voluntarily sign up for a career track that all but guarantees they’ll spend the majority of their service undercover in a foreign country. For the first time in my IC career, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. At age twenty-four, I’d say I was around the mean, though my experience doing systems work at headquarters certainly gave me a boost in terms of familiarity with the agency’s operations. Most of the others were just tech-inclined kids straight out of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.

In a nod to the paramilitary aspirations of the CIA’s foreign field branches, we called each other by nicknames—quickly assigned based on eccentricities—more often than by our true names. Taco Bell was a suburb: wide, likable, and blank. At twenty years old, the only job he’d had prior to the CIA was as the night-shift manager at a branch of the eponymous restaurant in Pennsylvania. Rainman was in his late twenties and spent the term bouncing around the autism spectrum between catatonic detachment and shivering fury. He wore the name we gave him proudly and claimed it was a Native American honorific. Flute earned his name because his career in the Marines was far less interesting to us than his degree in panpipes from a music conservatory. Spo was one of the older guys, at thirty-five or so. He was called what he was called because he’d been an SPO—a Special Police Officer—at the CIA’s headquarters, where he got so bored out of his mind guarding the gate at McLean that he was determined to escape overseas even if it meant cramming his entire family into a single motel room (a situation that lasted until the management found his kids’ pet snake living in a dresser drawer). Our elder was the Colonel, a midforties former Special Forces commo sergeant who, after numerous tours in the sandbox, was trying out for his second act. We called him the Colonel, even though he was just an enlisted guy, not an officer, mostly out of his resemblance to that friendly Kentuckian whose fried chicken we preferred to the regular fare of the Warrenton cafeteria.

My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count. Not because of my aristocratic bearing or dandyish fashion sense, but because, like the felt vampire puppet of Sesame Street, I had a tendency to signal my intention to interrupt class by raising my forefinger, as if to say: “One, two, three, ah, ha, ha, three things you forgot!”

These were the folks with whom I’d cycle through some twenty different classes, each in its own specialty, but most having to do with how to make the technology available in any given environment serve the government of the United States, whether in an embassy or on the run.

One drill involved lugging the “off-site package,” which was an eighty-pound suitcase of communications equipment that was older than I was, up onto a building’s roof. With just a compass and a laminated sheet of coordinates, I’d have to find in all that vast sky of twinkling stars one of the CIA’s stealth satellites, which would connect me to the agency’s mothership, its Crisis Communications Center in McLean—call sign “Central”—and then I’d use the Cold War–era kit inside the package to establish an encrypted radio channel. This drill was a practical reminder of why the commo officer is always the first in and last out: the chief of station can steal the deepest secret in the world, but it doesn’t mean squat until somebody gets it home.

That night I stayed on base after dark, and drove my car up to the very top of the Hill, parking outside the converted barn where we studied electrical concepts meant to prevent adversaries from monitoring our activities. The methods we learned about at times seemed close to voodoo—such as the ability to reproduce what’s being displayed on any computer monitor by using only the tiny electromagnetic emissions caused by the oscillating currents in its internal components, which can be captured using a special antenna, a method called Van Eck phreaking. If this sounds hard to understand, I promise we all felt the same way. The instructor himself readily admitted he never fully comprehended the details and couldn’t demonstrate it for us, but he knew the threat was real: the CIA was doing it to others, which meant others could do it to us.

I sat on the roof of my car, that same old white Civic, and, as I gazed out over what felt like all of Virginia, I called Lindsay for the first time in weeks, or even a month. We talked until my phone’s battery died, my breath becoming visible as the night got colder. There was nothing I wanted more than to share the scene with her—the dark fields, the undulating hills, the high astral shimmer—but describing it to her was the best I could do. I was already breaking the rules by using my phone; I would’ve been breaking the law by taking a picture.

One of Warrenton’s major subjects of study involved how to service the terminals and cables, the basic—in many ways, the primitive—components of any CIA station’s communications infrastructure. A “terminal,” in this context, is just a computer used to send and receive messages over a single secure network. In the CIA, the word “cables” tends to refer to the messages themselves, but technical officers know that “cables” are also far more tangible: they’re the cords or wires that for the last half century or so have linked the agency’s terminals—specifically its ancient Post Communications Terminals—all over the world, tunneling underground across national borders, buried at the bottom of the ocean.

Ours was the last year that TISOs had to be fluent in all of this: the terminal hardware, the multiple software packages, and the cables, too, of course. For some of my classmates, it felt a bit crazy to have to deal with issues of insulation and sheathing in what was supposed to be the age of wireless. But if any of them voiced doubts about the relevance of any of the seemingly antiquated tech that we were being taught, our instructors would remind us that ours was also the first year in the history of the Hill that TISOs weren’t required to learn Morse code.

Closing in on graduation, we had to fill out what were called dream sheets. We were given a list of the CIA stations worldwide that needed personnel, and were told to rank them in the order of our preferences. These dream sheets then went to the Requirements Division, which promptly crumpled them up and tossed them in the trash—at least according to rumor.

My dream sheet started with what was called the SRD, the Special Requirements Division. This was technically a posting not at any embassy but here in Virginia, from which I would be sent out on periodic tours of all the uglier spots in the sandbox, places where the agency judged a permanent posting too harsh or too dangerous—tiny, isolated forward operating bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the border regions of Pakistan, for example. By choosing SRD, I was opting for challenge and variety over being stuck in just one city for the entire duration of what was supposed to be an up-to-three-years stint. My instructors were all pretty confident that SRD would jump at the chance to bring me on, and I was pretty confident in my newly honed abilities. But things didn’t quite go as expected.

As was evident from the condition of the Comfort Inn, the school had been cutting some corners. Some of my classmates had begun to suspect that the administration was actually, believe it or not, violating federal labor laws. As a work-obsessed recluse, I initially wasn’t bothered by this, nor was anyone around my age. For us, this was the sort of low-level exploitation we’d experienced so often that we already mistook it for normal. But unpaid overtime, denied leave, and refusals to honor family benefits made a difference to the older classmates. The Colonel had alimony payments, and Spo had a family: every dollar counted, every minute mattered.

These grievances came to a head when the decrepit stairs at the Comfort Inn finally collapsed. Luckily no one was injured, but everyone was spooked, and my classmates started grumbling that if the building had been bankrolled by any entity other than the CIA, it would’ve been condemned for fire-code violations years ago. The discontent spread, and soon enough what was basically a school for saboteurs was close to unionizing. Management, in response, dug in its heels and decided to wait us out, since everybody involved eventually had to either graduate or be fired.

A few of my classmates approached me. They knew that I was well liked by the instructors, since my skills put me near the top of my class. They were also aware, because I’d worked at headquarters, that I knew my way around the bureaucracy. Plus I could write pretty well—at least by tech standards. They wanted me to act as a sort of class representative, or class martyr, by formally bringing their complaints to the head of the school.

I’d like to say that I was motivated to take on this cause solely by my aggrieved sense of justice. But while that certainly did factor into the decision, I can’t deny that for a young man who was suddenly excelling at nearly everything he attempted, challenging the school’s crooked administration just sounded like fun. Within an hour I was compiling policies to cite from the internal network, and before the day was done my email was sent.

The next morning the head of the school had me come into his office. He admitted the school had gone off the rails, but said the problems weren’t anything he could solve. “You’re only here for twelve more weeks—do me a favor and just tell your classmates to suck it up. Assignments are coming up soon, and then you’ll have better things to worry about. All you’ll remember from your time here is who had the best performance review.”

What he said had been worded in such a way that it might’ve been a threat, and it might’ve been a bribe. Either way, it bothered me. By the time I left his office the fun was over, and it was justice I was after.

I walked back into a class that had expected to lose. I remember Spo noticing my frown and saying, “Don’t feel bad, man. At least you tried.”

He’d been at the agency longer than any of my other classmates; he knew how it worked, and how ludicrous it was to trust management to fix something that management itself had broken. I was a bureaucratic innocent by comparison, disturbed by the loss and by the ease with which Spo and the others accepted it. I hated the feeling that the mere fiction of process was enough to dispel a genuine demand for results. It wasn’t that my classmates didn’t care enough to fight, it was that they couldn’t afford to: the system was designed so that the perceived cost of escalation exceeded the expected benefit of resolution. At age twenty-four, though, I thought as little of the costs as I did of the benefits; I just cared about the system. I wasn’t finished.

I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service Group. Though he was higher up the totem pole than the head of the school, the D/FSG was pretty much equivalent in rank and seniority to a few of the personnel I’d dealt with at headquarters. Then I copied the email to his boss, who definitely was not.

A few days later, we were in a class on something like false subtraction as a form of field-expedient encryption, when a front-office secretary came in and declared that the old regime had fallen. Unpaid overtime would no longer be required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer hotel. I remember the giddy pride with which she announced, “A Hampton Inn!”

I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was at the door, summoning me back to his office. Spo immediately leaped from his seat, enveloped me in a hug, mimed wiping away a tear, and declared that he’d never forget me. The head of the school rolled his eyes.

There, waiting in the school head’s office was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed. He was exceptionally cordial, and didn’t project any of the school head’s clenched-jaw irritation. This unnerved me.

I tried to keep a calm exterior, but inside I was sweating. The head of the school began our chat by reiterating how the issues the class had brought to light were in the process of being resolved. His superior cut him off. “But why we’re here is not to talk about that. Why we’re here is to talk about insubordination and the chain of command.”

If he’d slapped me, I would’ve been less shocked.

I had no idea what the director meant by insubordination, but before I had the opportunity to ask, he continued. The CIA was quite different from the other civilian agencies, he said, even if, on paper, the regulations insisted it wasn’t. And in an agency that did such important work, there was nothing more important than the chain of command.

Raising a forefinger, automatically but politely, I pointed out that before I emailed above my station, I’d tried the chain of command and been failed by it. Which was precisely the last thing I should have been explaining to the chain of command itself, personified just across a desk from me.

The head of the school just stared at his shoes and occasionally glanced out the window.

“Listen,” his boss said. “Ed, I’m not here to file a ‘hurt feelings report.’ Relax. I recognize that you’re a talented guy, and we’ve gone around and talked to all of your instructors and they say you’re talented and sharp. Even volunteered for the war zone. That’s something we appreciate. We want you here, but we need to know that we can count on you. You’ve got to understand that there’s a system here. Sometimes we’ve all got to put up with things we don’t like, because the mission comes first, and we can’t complete that mission if every guy on the team is second-guessing.” He took a pause, swallowed, and said, “Nowhere is this more true than in the desert. A lot of things happen out in the desert, and I’m not sure that we’re at a stage yet where I’m comfortable you’ll know how to handle them.”

This was their gotcha, their retaliation. And though it was entirely self-defeating, the head of the school was now smiling at the parking lot. No one besides me—and I mean no one—had put down SRD, or any other active combat situation for that matter, as their first or second or even third choice on their dream sheets. Everyone else had prioritized all the stops on the European champagne circuit, all the neat sweet vacation-station burgs with windmills and bicycles, where you rarely hear explosions.

Almost perversely, they now gave me one of these assignments. They gave me Geneva. They punished me by giving me what I’d never asked for, but what everybody else had wanted.

As if he were reading my mind, the director said, “This isn’t a punishment, Ed. It’s an opportunity—really. Someone with your level of expertise would be wasted in the war zone. You need a bigger station, that pilots the newest projects, to really keep you busy and stretch your skills.”

Everybody in class who’d been congratulating me would later turn jealous and think that I’d been bought off with a luxury position to avoid further complaints. My reaction, in the moment, was the opposite: I thought that the head of the school must have had an informant in the class, who’d told him exactly the type of station I’d hoped to avoid.

The director got up with a smile, which signaled that the meeting was over. “All right, I think we’ve got a plan. Before I leave, I just want to make sure we’re clear here: I’m not going to have another Ed Snowden moment, am I?”

¹⁵ Geneva

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is largely set in Geneva, the bustling, neat, clean, clockwork-organized Swiss city where I now made my home. Like many Americans, I’d grown up watching the various movie versions and TV cartoons, but I’d never actually read the book. In the days before I left the States, however, I’d been searching for what to read about Geneva, and in nearly all the lists I found online, Frankenstein stood out from among the tourist guides and histories. In fact, I think the only PDFs I downloaded for the flight over were Frankenstein and the Geneva Conventions, and I only finished the former. I did my reading at night over the long, lonely months I spent by myself before Lindsay moved over to join me, stretched out on a bare mattress in the living room of the comically fancy, comically vast, but still almost entirely unfurnished apartment that the embassy was paying for on the Quai du Seujet, in the Saint-Jean Falaises district, with the Rhône out one window and the Jura Mountains out the other.

Suffice it to say, the book wasn’t what I expected. Frankenstein is an epistolary novel that reads like a thread of overwritten emails, alternating scenes of madness and gory murder with a cautionary account of the way technological innovation tends to outpace all moral, ethical, and legal restraints. The result is the creation of an uncontrollable monster.

In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited, though the more popular military term for it is “blowback”: situations in which policy decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them irreparably. Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state. Without a doubt, however, the major instance of the Frankenstein effect over the course of my brief career can be found in the US government’s clandestine drive to restructure the world’s communications. In Geneva, in the same landscape where Mary Shelley’s creature ran amok, America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a life and mission of its own and wreak havoc on the lives of its creators—mine very much included.

The CIA station in the American embassy in Geneva was one of the prime European laboratories of this decades-long experiment. This city, the refined Old World capital of family banking and an immemorial tradition of financial secrecy, also lay at the intersection of EU and international fiber-optic networks, and happened to fall just within the shadow of key communications satellites circling overhead.

The CIA is the primary American intelligence agency dedicated to HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact—person to person, face-to-face, unmediated by a screen. The COs (case officers) who specialized in this were terminal cynics, charming liars who smoked, drank, and harbored deep resentment toward the rise of SIGINT (signals intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of intercepted communications, which with each passing year reduced their privilege and prestige. But though the COs had a general distrust of digital technology reminiscent of Frank’s back at headquarters, they certainly understood how useful it could be, which produced a productive camaraderie and a healthy rivalry. Even the most cunning and charismatic CO will, over the course of their career, come across at least a few zealous idealists whose loyalties they can’t purchase with envelopes stuffed with cash. That was typically the moment when they’d turn to technical field officers like myself—with questions, compliments, and party invitations.

To serve as a technical field officer among these people was to be as much a cultural ambassador as an expert adviser, introducing the case officers to the folkways and customs of a new territory no less foreign to most Americans than Switzerland’s twenty-six cantons and four official languages. On Monday, a CO might ask my advice on how to set up a covert online communications channel with a potential turncoat they were afraid to spook. On Tuesday, another CO might introduce me to someone they’d say was a “specialist” in from Washington—though this was in fact the same CO from the day before, now testing out a disguise that I’m still embarrassed to say I didn’t suspect in the least, though I suppose that was the point. On Wednesday, I might be asked how best to destroy-after-transmitting (the technological version of burn-after-reading) a disc of customer records that a CO had managed to purchase from a crooked Swisscom employee. On Thursday, I might have to write up and transmit security violation reports on COs, documenting minor infractions like forgetting to lock the door to a vault when they’d gone to the bathroom—a duty I’d perform with considerable compassion, since I once had had to write up myself for exactly the same mistake. Come Friday, the chief of operations might call me into his office and ask me if, “hypothetically speaking,” headquarters could send over an infected thumb drive that could be used by “someone” to hack the computers used by delegates to the United Nations, whose main building was just up the street—did I think there was much of a chance of this “someone” being caught?

I didn’t and they weren’t.

In sum, during my time in the field, the field was rapidly changing. The agency was increasingly adamant that COs enter the new millennium, and technical field officers like myself were tasked with helping them do that in addition to all of our other duties. We put them online, and they put up with us.

Geneva was regarded as ground zero for this transition because it contained the world’s richest environment of sophisticated targets, from the global headquarters of the United Nations to the home offices of numerous specialized UN agencies and international nongovernmental organizations. There was the International Atomic Energy Agency, which promotes nuclear technology and safety standards worldwide, including those that relate to nuclear weaponry; the International Telecommunication Union, which—through its influence over technical standards for everything from the radio spectrum to satellite orbits—determines what can be communicated and how; and the World Trade Organization, which—through its regulation of the trade of goods, services, and intellectual property among participating nations—determines what can be sold and how. Finally, there was Geneva’s role as the capital of private finance, which allowed great fortunes to be stashed and spent without much public scrutiny regardless of whether those fortunes were ill-gotten or well earned.

The notoriously slow and meticulous methods of traditional spycraft certainly had their successes in manipulating these systems for America’s benefit, but ultimately too few to satisfy the ever-increasing appetite of the American policy makers who read the IC’s reports, especially as the Swiss banking sector—along with the rest of the world—went digital. With the world’s deepest secrets now stored on computers, which were more often than not connected to the open Internet, it was only logical that America’s intelligence agencies would want to use those very same connections to steal them.

Before the advent of the Internet, if an agency wanted to gain access to a target’s computer it had to recruit an asset who had physical access to it. This was obviously a dangerous proposition: the asset might be caught in the act of downloading the secrets, or of implanting the exploitative hardware and software that would radio the secrets to their handlers. The global spread of digital technology simplified this process enormously. This new world of “digital network intelligence” or “computer network operations” meant that physical access was almost never required, which reduced the level of human risk and permanently realigned the HUMINT/SIGINT balance. An agent now could just send the target a message, such as an email, with attachments or links that unleashed malware that would allow the agency to surveil not just the target’s computer but its entire network. Given this innovation, the CIA’s HUMINT would be dedicated to the identification of targets of interest, and SIGINT would take care of the rest. Instead of a CO cultivating a target into an asset—through cash-on-the-barrel bribery, or coercion and blackmail if the bribery failed—a few clever computer hacks would provide a similar benefit. What’s more, with this method the target would remain unwitting, in what would inevitably be a cleaner process.

That, at least, was the hope. But as intelligence increasingly became “cyberintelligence” (a term used to distinguish it from the old phone-and-fax forms of off-line SIGINT), old concerns also had to be updated to the new medium of the Internet. For example: how to research a target while remaining anonymous online.

This issue would typically emerge when a CO would search the name of a person from a country like Iran or China in the agency’s databases and come up empty-handed. For casual searches of prospective targets like these, No Results was actually a fairly common outcome: the CIA’s databases were mostly filled with people already of interest to the agency, or citizens of friendly countries whose records were more easily available. When faced with No Results, a CO would have to do the same thing you do when you want to look someone up: they’d turn to the public Internet. This was risky.

Normally when you go online, your request for any website travels from your computer more or less directly to the server that hosts your final destination—the website you’re trying to visit. At every stop along the way, however, your request cheerfully announces exactly where on the Internet it came from, and exactly where on the Internet it’s going, thanks to identifiers called source and destination headers, which you can think of as the address information on a postcard. Because of these headers, your Internet browsing can easily be identified as yours by, among others, webmasters, network administrators, and foreign intelligence services.

It may be hard to believe, but the agency at the time had no good answer for what a case officer should do in this situation, beyond weakly recommending that they ask CIA headquarters to take over the search on their behalf. Formally, the way this ridiculous procedure was supposed to work was that someone back in McLean would go online from a specific computer terminal and use what was called a “nonattributable research system.” This was set up to proxy—that is, fake the origin of—a query before sending it to Google. If anyone tried to look into who had run that particular search, all they would find would be an anodyne business located somewhere in America—one of the myriad fake executive-headhunter or personnel-services companies the CIA used as cover.

I can’t say that anyone ever definitively explained to me why the agency liked to use “job search” businesses as a front; presumably they were the only companies that might plausibly look up a nuclear engineer in Pakistan one day and a retired Polish general the next. I can say with absolute certainty, however, that the process was ineffective, onerous, and expensive. To create just one of these covers, the agency had to invent the purpose and name of a company, secure a credible physical address somewhere in America, register a credible URL, put up a credible website, and then rent servers in the company’s name. Furthermore, the agency had to create an encrypted connection from those servers that allowed it to communicate with the CIA network without anyone noticing the connection. Here’s the kicker: After all of that effort and money was expended just to let us anonymously Google a name, whatever front business was being used as a proxy would immediately be burned—by which I mean its connection to the CIA would be revealed to our adversaries—the moment some analyst decided to take a break from their research to log in to their personal Facebook account on that same computer. Since few of the people at headquarters were undercover, that Facebook account would often openly declare, “I work at the CIA,” or just as tellingly, “I work at the State Department, but in McLean.”

Go ahead and laugh. Back then, it happened all the time.

During my stint in Geneva, whenever a CO would ask me if there was a safer, faster, and all-around more efficient way to do this, I introduced them to Tor.

The Tor Project was a creation of the state that ended up becoming one of the few effective shields against the state’s surveillance. Tor is free and open-source software that, if used carefully, allows its users to browse online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity that can be practically achieved at scale. Its protocols were developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory throughout the mid-1990s, and in 2003 it was released to the public—to the worldwide civilian population on whom its functionality depends. This is because Tor operates on a cooperative community model, relying on tech-savvy volunteers all over the globe who run their own Tor servers out of their basements, attics, and garages. By routing its users’ Internet traffic through these servers, Tor does the same job of protecting the origin of that traffic as the CIA’s “non-attributable research” system, with the primary difference being that Tor does it better, or at least more efficiently. I was already convinced of this, but convincing the gruff COs was another matter altogether.

With the Tor protocol, your traffic is distributed and bounced around through randomly generated pathways from Tor server to Tor server, with the purpose being to replace your identity as the source of a communication with that of the last Tor server in the constantly shifting chain. Virtually none of the Tor servers, which are called “layers,” know the identity of, or any identifying information about, the origin of the traffic. And in a true stroke of genius, the one Tor server that does know the origin—the very first server in the chain—does not know where that traffic is headed. Put more simply: the first Tor server that connects you to the Tor network, called a gateway, knows you’re the one sending a request, but because it isn’t allowed to read that request, it has no idea whether you’re looking for pet memes or information about a protest, and the final Tor server that your request passes through, called an exit, knows exactly what’s being asked for, but has no idea who’s asking for it.

This layering method is called onion routing, which gives Tor its name: it’s The Onion Router. The classified joke was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry. Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US military–developed technology that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know-how to protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to average users across the globe. In this sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland. For me personally, Tor was a life changer, bringing me back to the Internet of my childhood by giving me just the slightest taste of freedom from being observed.

NONE OF THIS account of the CIA’s pivot to cyberintelligence, or SIGINT on the Internet, is meant to imply that the agency wasn’t still doing some significant HUMINT, in the same manner in which it had always done so, at least since the advent of the modern IC in the aftermath of World War II. Even I got involved, though my most memorable operation was a failure. Geneva was the first and only time in my intelligence career in which I made the personal acquaintance of a target—the first and only time that I looked directly into the eyes of a human being rather than just recording their life from afar. I have to say, I found the whole experience unforgettably visceral and sad.

Sitting around discussing how to hack a faceless UN complex was psychologically easier by a wide margin. Direct engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn’t happen that much on the technical side of intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful confrontation with their consequences.

I met the man at an embassy function, a party. The embassy had lots of those, and the COs always went, drawn as much by the opportunities to spot and assess potential candidates for recruitment as by the open bars and cigar salons.

Sometimes the COs would bring me along. I’d lectured them on my specialty long enough, I guess, that now they were all too happy to lecture me on theirs, cross-training me to help them play “spot the sap” in an environment where there were always more people to meet than they could possibly handle on their own. My native geekiness meant I could get the young researchers from CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire: European Council for Nuclear Research) talking about their work with a voluble excitement that the MBAs and political science majors who comprised the ranks of our COs had trouble provoking on their own.

As a technologist, I found it incredibly easy to defend my cover. The moment some bespoke-suited cosmopolite asked me what I did, and I responded with the four words “I work in IT” (or, in my improving French, je travaille dans l’informatique), their interest in me was over. Not that this ever stopped the conversation. When you’re a fresh-faced professional in a conversation outside your field, it’s never that surprising when you ask a lot of questions, and in my experience most people will jump at the chance to explain exactly how much more they know than you do about something they care about deeply.

The party I’m recalling took place on a warm night on the outside terrace of an upscale café on one of the side streets alongside Lake Geneva. Some of the COs wouldn’t hesitate to abandon me at such a gathering if they had to in order to sit as close as possible to whatever woman happened to match their critical intelligence-value indicators of being highly attractive and no older than a student, but I wasn’t about to complain. For me, spotting targets was a hobby that came with a free dinner.

I took my plate and sat down at a table next to a well-dressed Middle Eastern man in a cuff-linked, demonstratively Swiss pink shirt. He seemed lonely, and totally exasperated that no one seemed interested in him, so I asked him about himself. That’s the usual technique: just be curious and let them talk. In this case, the man did so much talking that it was like I wasn’t even there. He was Saudi, and told me about how much he loved Geneva, the relative beauties of the French and Arabic languages, and the absolute beauty of this one Swiss girl with whom he—yes—had a regular date playing laser tag. With a touch of a conspiratorial tone, he said that he worked in private wealth management. Within moments I was getting a full-on polished presentation about what, exactly, makes a private bank private, and the challenge of investing without moving markets when your clients are the size of sovereign wealth funds.

“Your clients?” I asked.

That’s when he said, “Most of my work is on Saudi accounts.”

After a few minutes, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and on the way there I leaned over to tell the CO who worked finance targets what I’d learned. After a necessarily too-long interval “fixing my hair,” or texting Lindsay in front of the bathroom mirror, I returned to find the CO sitting in my chair. I waved to my new Saudi friend before sitting down beside the CO’s discarded, smoky-eyed date. Rather than feeling bad, I felt like I’d really earned the Pavés de Genève that were passed around for dessert. My job was done.

The next day, the CO, whom I’ll call Cal, heaped me with praise and thanked me effusively. COs are promoted or passed over based primarily on how effective they are at recruiting assets with access to information on matters substantial enough to be formally reported back to headquarters, and given Saudi Arabia’s suspected involvement in financing terror, Cal felt under tremendous pressure to cultivate a qualifying source. I was sure that in no time at all our fellow party guest would be getting a second paycheck from the agency.

That was not quite how it worked out, however. Despite Cal’s regular forays with the banker to strip clubs and bars, the banker wasn’t warming up to him—at least not to the point where a pitch could be made—and Cal was getting impatient.

After a month of failures, Cal was so frustrated that he took the banker out drinking and got him absolutely plastered. Then he pressured the guy to drive home drunk instead of taking a cab. Before the guy had even left the last bar of the night, Cal was calling the make and plate number of his car to the Geneva police, who not fifteen minutes later arrested him for driving under the influence. The banker faced an enormous fine, since in Switzerland fines aren’t flat sums but based on a percentage of income, and his driver’s license was suspended for three months—a stretch of time that Cal would spend, as a truly wonderful friend with a fake-guilty conscience, driving the guy back and forth between his home and work, daily, so that the guy could “keep his office from finding out.” When the fine was levied, causing his friend cash-flow problems, Cal was ready with a loan. The banker had become dependent, the dream of every CO.

There was only one hitch: when Cal finally made the pitch, the banker turned him down. He was furious, having figured out the planned crime and the engineered arrest, and felt betrayed that Cal’s generosity hadn’t been genuine. He cut off all contact. Cal made a halfhearted attempt to follow up and do damage control, but it was too late. The banker who’d loved Switzerland had lost his job and was returning—or being returned—to Saudi Arabia. Cal himself was rotated back to the States.

Too much had been hazarded, too little had been gained. It was a waste, which I myself had put in motion and then was powerless to stop. After that experience, the prioritizing of SIGINT over HUMINT made all the more sense to me.

In the summer of 2008, the city celebrated its annual Fêtes de Genève, a giant carnival that culminates in fireworks. I remember sitting on the left bank of Lake Geneva with the local personnel of the SCS, or Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. These guys worked down the hall from my vault at the embassy, but they were older than I was, and their work was not just way above my pay grade but way beyond my abilities—they had access to NSA tools that I didn’t even know existed. Still, we were friendly: I looked up to them, and they looked out for me.

As the fireworks exploded overhead, I was talking about the banker’s case, lamenting the disaster it had been, when one of the guys turned to me and said, “Next time you meet someone, Ed, don’t bother with the COs—just give us his email address and we’ll take care of it.” I remember nodding somberly to this, though at the time I barely had a clue of the full implications of what that comment meant.

I steered clear of parties for the rest of the year and mostly just hung around the cafés and parks of Saint-Jean Falaises with Lindsay, taking occasional vacations with her to Italy, France, and Spain. Still, something had soured my mood, and it wasn’t just the banker debacle. Come to think of it, maybe it was banking in general. Geneva is an expensive city and unabashedly posh, but as 2008 drew to a close its elegance seemed to tip over into extravagance, with a massive influx of the superrich—most of them from the Gulf states, many of them Saudi—enjoying the profits of peak oil prices on the cusp of the global financial crisis. These royal types were booking whole floors of five-star grand hotels and buying out the entire inventories of the luxury stores just across the bridge. They were putting on lavish banquets at the Michelin-starred restaurants and speeding their chrome-plated Lamborghinis down the cobbled streets. It would be hard at any time to miss Geneva’s display of conspicuous consumption, but the profligacy now on display was particularly galling—coming as it did during the worst economic disaster, as the American media kept telling us, since the Great Depression, and as the European media kept telling us, since the interwar period and Versailles.

It wasn’t that Lindsay and I were hurting: after all, our rent was being paid by Uncle Sam. Rather, it’s that every time she or I would talk to our folks back home, the situation seemed grimmer. Both of our families knew people who’d worked their entire lives, some of them for the US government, only to have their homes taken away by banks after an unexpected illness made a few mortgage payments impossible.

To live in Geneva was to live in an alternative, even opposite, reality. As the rest of the world became more and more impoverished, Geneva flourished, and while the Swiss banks didn’t engage in many of the types of risky trades that caused the crash, they gladly hid the money of those who’d profited from the pain and were never held accountable. The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.

¹⁶ Tokyo

The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage. The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory. Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will.

It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software (Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud services to the US government along with half the Internet). Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. The problem is, they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.

Given the American nature of the planet’s communications infrastructure, it should have been obvious that the US government would engage in this type of mass surveillance. It should have been especially obvious to me. Yet it wasn’t—mostly because the government kept insisting that it did nothing of the sort, and generally disclaimed the practice in courts and in the media in a manner so adamant that the few remaining skeptics who accused it of lying were treated like wild-haired conspiracy junkies. Their suspicions about secret NSA programs seemed hardly different from paranoid delusions involving alien messages being beamed to the radios in our teeth. We—me, you, all of us—were too trusting. But what makes this all the more personally painful for me was that the last time I’d made this mistake, I’d supported the invasion of Iraq and joined the army. When I arrived in the IC, I felt sure that I’d never be fooled again, especially given my top secret clearance. Surely that had to count for some degree of transparency. After all, why would the government keep secrets from its secret keepers? This is all to say that the obvious didn’t even become the thinkable for me until some time after I moved to Japan in 2009 to work for the NSA, America’s premier signals intelligence agency.

It was a dream job, not only because it was with the most advanced intelligence agency on the planet, but also because it was based in Japan, a place that had always fascinated Lindsay and me. It felt like a country from the future. Though mine was officially a contractor position, its responsibilities and, especially, its location were more than enough to lure me. It’s ironic that only by going private again was I put in a position to understand what my government was doing.

On paper, I was an employee of Perot Systems, a company founded by that diminutive hyperactive Texan who founded the Reform Party and twice ran for the presidency. But almost immediately after my arrival in Japan, Perot Systems was acquired by Dell, so on paper I became an employee of Dell. As in the CIA, this contractor status was all just formality and cover, and I only ever worked in an NSA facility.

The NSA’s Pacific Technical Center (PTC) occupied one-half of a building inside the enormous Yokota Air Base. As the headquarters of US Forces Japan, the base was surrounded by high walls, steel gates, and guarded checkpoints. Yokota and the PTC were just a short bike ride from where Lindsay and I got an apartment in Fussa, a city at the western edge of Tokyo’s vast metropolitan spread.

The PTC handled the NSA’s infrastructure for the entire Pacific, and provided support for the agency’s spoke sites in nearby countries. Most of these were focused on managing the secret relationships that let the NSA cover the Pacific Rim with spy gear, as long as the agency promised to share some of the intelligence it gleaned with regional governments—and so long as their citizens didn’t find out what the agency was doing. Communications interception was the major part of the mission. The PTC would amass “cuts” from captured signals and push them back across the ocean to Hawaii, and Hawaii, in turn, would push them back to the continental United States.

My official job title was systems analyst, with responsibility for maintaining the local NSA systems, though much of my initial work was that of a systems administrator, helping to connect the NSA’s systems architecture with the CIA’s. Because I was the only one in the region who knew the CIA’s architecture, I’d also travel out to US embassies, like the one I’d left in Geneva, establishing and maintaining the links that enabled the agencies to share intelligence in ways that hadn’t previously been possible. This was the first time in my life that I truly realized the power of being the only one in a room with a sense not just of how one system functioned internally, but of how it functioned together with multiple systems—or didn’t. Later, as the chiefs of the PTC came to recognize that I had a knack for hacking together solutions to their problems, I was given enough of a leash to propose projects of my own.

Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security in its every iteration, from the compartmentalization of information to data encryption. In Geneva, we’d had to haul the hard drives out of the computer every night and lock them up in a safe—and what’s more, those drives were encrypted. The NSA, by contrast, hardly bothered to encrypt anything.

In fact, it was rather disconcerting to find out that the NSA was so far ahead of the game in terms of cyberintelligence yet so far behind it in terms of cybersecurity, including the most basic: disaster recovery, or backup. Each of the NSA’s spoke sites collected its own intel, stored the intel on its own local servers, and, because of bandwidth restrictions—limitations on the amount of data that could be transmitted at speed—often didn’t send copies back to the main servers at NSA headquarters. This meant that if any data were destroyed at a particular site, the intelligence that the agency had worked hard to collect could be lost.

My chiefs at the PTC understood the risks the agency was taking by not keeping copies of many of its files, so they tasked me with engineering a solution and pitching it to the decision makers at headquarters. The result was a backup and storage system that would act as a shadow NSA: a complete, automated, and constantly updating copy of all of the agency’s most important material, which would allow the agency to reboot and be up and running again, with all its archives intact, even if Fort Meade were reduced to smoldering rubble.

The major problem with creating a global disaster-recovery system—or really with creating any type of backup system that involves a truly staggering number of computers—is dealing with duplicated data. In plain terms, you have to handle situations in which, say, one thousand computers all have copies of the same single file: you have to make sure you’re not backing up that same file one thousand times, because that would require one thousand times the amount of bandwidth and storage space. It was this wasteful duplication, in particular, that was preventing the agency’s spoke sites from transmitting daily backups of their records to Fort Meade: the connection would be clogged with a thousand copies of the same file containing the same intercepted phone call, 999 of which the agency did not need.

The way to avoid this was “deduplication”: a method to evaluate the uniqueness of data. The system that I designed would constantly scan the files at every facility at which the NSA stored records, testing each “block” of data down to the slightest fragment of a file to find out whether or not it was unique. Only if the agency lacked a copy of it back home would the data be automatically queued for transmission—reducing the volume that flowed over the agency’s transpacific fiber-optic connection from a waterfall to a trickle.

The combination of deduplication and constant improvements in storage technology allowed the agency to store intelligence data for progressively longer periods of time. Just over the course of my career, the agency’s goal went from being able to store intelligence for days, to weeks, to months, to five years or more after its collection. By the time of this book’s publication, the agency might already be able to store it for decades. The NSA’s conventional wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there was no way to predict when exactly that would be. This rationalization was fuel for the agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency—to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.

The NSA has a whole protocol you’re supposed to follow when you give a program a code name. It’s basically an I Ching–like stochastic procedure that randomly picks words from two columns. An internal website throws imaginary dice to pick one name from column A, and throws again to pick one name from column B. This is how you end up with names that don’t mean anything, like FOXACID and EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE. The point of a code name is that it’s not supposed to refer to what the program does. (As has been reported, FOXACID was the code name for NSA servers that host malware versions of familiar websites; EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE was an NSA program intended to exploit a vulnerability in certain Web browsers running Tor, since they couldn’t break Tor itself.) But agents at the NSA were so confident of their power and the agency’s absolute invulnerability that they rarely complied with the regulations. In short, they’d cheat and redo their dice throws until they got the name combination they wanted, whatever they thought was cool: TRAFFICTHIEF, the VPN Attack Orchestrator.

I swear I never did that when I went about finding a name for my backup system. I swear that I just rolled the bones and came up with EPICSHELTER.

Later, once the agency adopted the system, they renamed it something like the Storage Modernization Plan or Storage Modernization Program. Within two years of the invention of EPICSHELTER, a variant had been implemented and was in standard use under yet another name.

THE MATERIAL THAT I disseminated to journalists in 2013 documented such an array of abuses by the NSA, accomplished through such a diversity of technological capabilities, that no one agent in the daily discharge of their responsibilities was ever in the position to know about all of them—not even a systems administrator. To find out about even a fraction of the malfeasance, you had to go searching. And to go searching, you had to know that it existed.

It was something as banal as a conference that first clued me in to that existence, sparking my initial suspicion about the full scope of what the NSA was perpetrating.

In the midst of my EPICSHELTER work, the PTC hosted a conference on China sponsored by the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA) for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an agency connected to the Department of Defense that specializes in spying on foreign militaries and foreign military–related matters. This conference featured briefings given by experts from all the intelligence components, the NSA, CIA, FBI, and military, about how the Chinese intelligence services were targeting the IC and what the IC could do to cause them trouble. Though China certainly interested me, this wasn’t the kind of work I would ordinarily have been involved in, so I didn’t pay the conference much mind until it was announced that the only technology briefer was unable to attend at the last minute. I’m not sure what the reason was for that absence—maybe flu, maybe kismet—but the course chair for the conference asked if there was anyone at the PTC who might be able to step in as a replacement, since it was too late to reschedule. One of the chiefs mentioned my name, and when I was asked if I wanted to give it a shot, I said yes. I liked my boss, and wanted to help him out. Also, I was curious, and relished the opportunity to do something that wasn’t about data deduplication for a change.

My boss was thrilled. Then he told me the catch: the briefing was the next day.

I called Lindsay and told her I wouldn’t be home. I was going to be up all night preparing the presentation, whose nominal topic was the intersection between a very old discipline, counterintelligence, and a very new discipline, cyberintelligence, coming together to try to exploit and thwart the adversary’s attempts to use the Internet to gather surveillance. I started pulling everything off the NSA network (and off the CIA network, to which I still had access), trying to read every top secret report I could find about what the Chinese were doing online. Specifically, I read up on so-called intrusion sets, which are bundles of data about particular types of attacks, tools, and targets. IC analysts used these intrusion sets to identify specific Chinese military cyberintelligence or hacking groups, in the same way that detectives might try to identify a suspect responsible for a string of burglaries by a common set of characteristics or modus operandi.

The point of my researching this widely dispersed material was to do more than merely report on how China was hacking us, however. My primary task was to provide a summary of the IC’s assessment of China’s ability to electronically track American officers and assets operating in the region.

Everyone knows (or thinks they know) about the draconian Internet measures of the Chinese government, and some people know (or think they know) the gravamen of the disclosures I gave to journalists in 2013 about my own government’s capabilities. But listen: It’s one thing to casually say, in a science-fiction dystopic type of way, that a government can theoretically see and hear everything that all of its citizens are doing. It’s a very different thing for a government to actually try to implement such a system. What a science-fiction writer can describe in a sentence might take the concerted work of thousands of technologists and millions of dollars of equipment. To read the technical details of China’s surveillance of private communications—to read a complete and accurate accounting of the mechanisms and machinery required for the constant collection, storage, and analysis of the billions of daily telephone and Internet communications of over a billion people—was utterly mind-boggling. At first I was so impressed by the system’s sheer achievement and audacity that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian controls.

After all, China’s government was an explicitly antidemocratic single-party state. NSA agents, even more than most Americans, just took it for granted that the place was an authoritarian hellhole. Chinese civil liberties weren’t my department. There wasn’t anything I could do about them. I worked, I was sure of it, for the good guys, and that made me a good guy, too.

But there were certain aspects of what I was reading that disturbed me. I was reminded of what is perhaps the fundamental rule of technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been. There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself, and I had the sneaking sense while I was looking through all this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America. What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be—could be—doing secretly to the world.

And although you should hate me for it, I have to say that at the time I tamped down my unease. Indeed, I did my best to ignore it. The distinctions were still fairly clear to me. China’s Great Firewall was domestically censorious and repressive, intended to keep its citizens in and America out in the most chilling and demonstrative way, while the American systems were invisible and purely defensive. As I then understood US surveillance, anyone in the world could come in through America’s Internet infrastructure and access whatever content they pleased, unblocked and unfiltered—or at least only blocked and filtered by their home countries and American businesses, which are, presumptively, not under US government control. It was only those who’d been expressly targeted for visiting, for example, jihadist bombing sites or malware marketplaces who would find themselves tracked and scrutinized.

Understood this way, the US surveillance model was perfectly okay with me. It was more than okay, actually—I fully supported defensive and targeted surveillance, a “firewall” that didn’t keep anybody out, but just burned the guilty.

But in the sleepless days after that sleepless night, some dim suspicion still stirred in my mind. Long after I gave my China briefing, I couldn’t help but keep digging around.

AT THE START of my employment with the NSA, in 2009, I was only slightly more knowledgeable about its practices than the rest of the world. From journalists’ reports, I was aware of the agency’s myriad surveillance initiatives authorized by President George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In particular, I knew about its most publicly contested initiative, the warrantless wiretapping component of the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), which had been disclosed by the New York Times in 2005 thanks to the courage of a few NSA and Department of Justice whistleblowers.

Officially speaking, the PSP was an “executive order,” essentially a set of instructions set down by the American president that the government has to consider the equal of public law—even if they’re just scribbled secretly on a napkin. The PSP empowered the NSA to collect telephone and Internet communications between the United States and abroad. Notably, the PSP allowed the NSA to do this without having to obtain a special warrant from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret federal court established in 1978 to oversee IC requests for surveillance warrants after the agencies were caught domestically spying on the anti–Vietnam War and civil rights movements.

Following the outcry that attended the Times revelations, and American Civil Liberties Union challenges to the constitutionality of the PSP in non-secret, regular courts, the Bush administration claimed to have let the program expire in 2007. But the expiration turned out to be a farce. Congress spent the last two years of the Bush administration passing legislation that retroactively legalized the PSP. It also retroactively immunized from prosecution the telecoms and Internet service providers that had participated in it. This legislation—the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008—employed intentionally misleading language to reassure US citizens that their communications were not being explicitly targeted, even as it effectively extended the PSP’s remit. In addition to collecting inbound communications coming from foreign countries, the NSA now also had policy approval for the warrantless collection of outbound telephone and Internet communications originating within American borders.

That, at least, was the picture I got after reading the government’s own summary of the situation, which was issued to the public in an unclassified version in July 2009, the very same summer that I spent delving into Chinese cyber-capabilities. This summary, which bore the nondescript title Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance Program, was compiled by the Offices of the Inspector Generals of five agencies (Department of Defense, Department of Justice, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) and was offered to the public in lieu of a full congressional investigation of Bush-era NSA overreach. The fact that President Obama, once in office, refused to call for a full congressional investigation was the first sign, to me at least, that the new president—for whom Lindsay had enthusiastically campaigned—intended to move forward without a proper reckoning with the past. As his administration rebranded and recertified PSP-related programs, Lindsay’s hope in him, as well as my own, would prove more and more misplaced.

While the unclassified report was mostly just old news, I found it informative in a few respects. I remember being immediately struck by its curious, they-do-protest-too-much tone, along with more than a few twists of logic and language that didn’t compute. As the report laid out its legal arguments in support of various agency programs—rarely named, and almost never described—I couldn’t help but notice the fact that hardly any of the executive branch officials who had actually authorized these programs had agreed to be interviewed by the inspector generals. From Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington to Attorney General John Ashcroft and DOJ lawyer John Yoo, nearly every major player had refused to cooperate with the very offices responsible for holding the IC accountable, and the IGs couldn’t compel them to cooperate, because this wasn’t a formal investigation involving testimony. It was hard for me to interpret their absence from the record as anything other than an admission of malfeasance.

Another aspect of the report that threw me was its repeated, obscure references to “Other Intelligence Activities” (the capitalization is the report’s) for which no “viable legal rationale” or no “legal basis” could be found beyond President Bush’s claim of executive powers during wartime—a wartime that had no end in sight. Of course, these references gave no description whatsoever of what these Activities might actually be, but the process of deduction pointed to warrantless domestic surveillance, as it was pretty much the only intelligence activity not provided for under the various legal frameworks that appeared subsequent to the PSP.

As I read on, I wasn’t sure that anything disclosed in the report completely justified the legal machinations involved, let alone the threats by then deputy attorney general James Comey and then FBI director Robert Mueller to resign if certain aspects of the PSP were reauthorized. Nor did I notice anything that fully explained the risks taken by so many fellow agency members—agents much senior to me, with decades of experience—and DOJ personnel to contact the press and express their misgivings about how aspects of the PSP were being abused. If they were putting their careers, their families, and their lives on the line, it had to be over something graver than the warrantless wiretapping that had already made headlines.

That suspicion sent me searching for the classified version of the report, and it was not in the least dispelled by the fact that such a version appeared not to exist. I didn’t understand. If the classified version was merely a record of the sins of the past, it should have been easily accessible. But it was nowhere to be found. I wondered whether I was looking in the wrong places. After a while of ranging fairly widely and still finding nothing, though, I decided to drop the issue. Life took over and I had work to do. When you get asked to give recommendations on how to keep IC agents and assets from being uncovered and executed by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, it’s hard to remember what you were Googling the week before.

It was only later, long after I’d forgotten about the missing IG report, that the classified version came skimming across my desktop, as if in proof of that old maxim that the best way to find something is to stop looking for it. Once the classified version turned up, I realized why I hadn’t had any luck finding it previously: it couldn’t be seen, not even by the heads of agencies. It was filed in an Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment, an extremely rare classification used only to make sure that something would remain hidden even from those holding top secret clearance. Because of my position, I was familiar with most of the ECIs at the NSA, but not this one. The report’s full classification designation was TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCON/NOFORN, which translates to: pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed to read this.

I was most definitely not one of them. The report came to my attention by mistake: someone in the NSA IG’s office had left a draft copy on a system that I, as a sysadmin, had access to. Its caveat of STLW, which I didn’t recognize, turned out to be what’s called a “dirty word” on my system: a label signifying a document that wasn’t supposed to be stored on lower-security drives. These drives were being constantly checked for any newly appearing dirty words, and the moment one was found I was alerted so that I could decide how best to scrub the document from the system. But before I did, I’d have to examine the offending file myself, just to confirm that the dirty word search hadn’t flagged anything accidentally. Usually I’d take just the briefest glance at the thing. But this time, as soon I opened the document and read the title, I knew I’d be reading it all the way through.

Here was everything that was missing from the unclassified version. Here was everything that the journalism I’d read had lacked, and that the court proceedings I’d followed had been denied: a complete accounting of the NSA’s most secret surveillance programs, and the agency directives and Department of Justice policies that had been used to subvert American law and contravene the US Constitution. After reading the thing, I could understand why no IC employee had ever leaked it to journalists, and no judge would be able to force the government to produce it in open court. The document was so deeply classified that anybody who had access to it who wasn’t a sysadmin would be immediately identifiable. And the activities it outlined were so deeply criminal that no government would ever allow it to be released unredacted.

One issue jumped out at me immediately: it was clear that the unclassified version I was already familiar with wasn’t a redaction of the classified version, as would usually be the practice. Rather, it was a wholly different document, which the classified version immediately exposed as an outright and carefully concocted lie. The duplicity was stupefying, especially given that I’d just dedicated months of my time to deduplicating files. Most of the time, when you’re dealing with two versions of the same document, the differences between them are trivial—a few commas here, a few words there. But the only thing these two particular reports had in common was their title.

Whereas the unclassified version merely made reference to the NSA being ordered to intensify its intelligence-gathering practices following 9/11, the classified version laid out the nature, and scale, of that intensification. The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from targeted collection of communications to “bulk collection,” which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance. And whereas the unclassified version obfuscated this shift, advocating for expanded surveillance by scaring the public with the specter of terror, the classified version made this shift explicit, justifying it as the legitimate corollary of expanded technological capability.

The NSA IG’s portion of the classified report outlined what it called “a collection gap,” noting that existing surveillance legislation (particularly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) dated from 1978, a time when most communications signals traveled via radio or telephone lines, rather than fiber-optic cables and satellites. In essence, the agency was arguing that the speed and volume of contemporary communication had outpaced, and outgrown, American law—no court, not even a secret court, could issue enough individually targeted warrants fast enough to keep up—and that a truly global world required a truly global intelligence agency. All of this pointed, in the NSA’s logic, to the necessity of the bulk collection of Internet communications. The code name for this bulk collection initiative was indicated in the very “dirty word” that got it flagged on my system: STLW, an abbreviation of STELLARWIND. This turned out to be the single major component of the PSP that had continued, and even grown, in secret after the rest of the program had been made public in the press.

STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.

Such fraudulent redefinitions ran throughout the report, but perhaps the most fundamental and transparently desperate involved the government’s vocabulary. STELLARWIND had been collecting communications since the PSP’s inception in 2001, but in 2004—when Justice Department officials balked at the continuation of the initiative—the Bush administration attempted to legitimize it ex post facto by changing the meanings of basic English words, such as “acquire” and “obtain.” According to the report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency “searched for and retrieved” them from its database.

This lexical sophistry was particularly galling to me, as I was well aware that the agency’s goal was to be able to retain as much data as it could for as long as it could—for perpetuity. If communications records would only be considered definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but collected in storage forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation. By redefining the terms “acquire” and “obtain”—from describing the act of data being entered into a database, to describing the act of a person (or, more likely, an algorithm) querying that database and getting a “hit” or “return” at any conceivable point in the future—the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.

THE TERM “MASS surveillance” is more clear to me, and I think to most people, than the government’s preferred “bulk collection,” which to my mind threatens to give a falsely fuzzy impression of the agency’s work. “Bulk collection” makes it sound like a particularly busy post office or sanitation department, as opposed to a historic effort to achieve total access to—and clandestinely take possession of—the records of all digital communications in existence.

But even once a common ground of terminology is established, misperceptions can still abound. Most people, even today, tend to think of mass surveillance in terms of content—the actual words they use when they make a phone call or write an email. When they find out that the government actually cares comparatively little about that content, they tend to care comparatively little about government surveillance. This relief is understandable, to a degree, due to what each of us must regard as the uniquely revealing and intimate nature of our communications: the sound of our voice, almost as personal as a thumbprint; the inimitable facial expression we put on in a selfie sent by text. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is rarely as revealing as its other elements—the unwritten, unspoken information that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.

The NSA calls this “metadata.” The term’s prefix, “meta,” which traditionally is translated as “above” or “beyond,” is here used in the sense of “about”: metadata is data about data. It is, more accurately, data that is made by data—a cluster of tags and markers that allow data to be useful. The most direct way of thinking about metadata, however, is as “activity data,” all the records of all the things you do on your devices and all the things your devices do on their own. Take a phone call, for example: its metadata might include the date and time of the call, the call’s duration, the number from which the call was made, the number being called, and their locations. An email’s metadata might include information about what type of computer it was generated on, where, and when, who the computer belonged to, who sent the email, who received it, where and when it was sent and received, and who if anyone besides the sender and recipient accessed it, and where and when. Metadata can tell your surveillant the address you slept at last night and what time you got up this morning. It reveals every place you visited during your day and how long you spent there. It shows who you were in touch with and who was in touch with you.

It’s this fact that obliterates any government claim that metadata is somehow not a direct window into the substance of a communication. With the dizzying volume of digital communications in the world, there is simply no way that every phone call could be listened to or email could be read. Even if it were feasible, however, it still wouldn’t be useful, and anyway, metadata makes this unnecessary by winnowing the field. This is why it’s best to regard metadata not as some benign abstraction, but as the very essence of content: it is precisely the first line of information that the party surveilling you requires.

There’s another thing, too: content is usually defined as something that you knowingly produce. You know what you’re saying during a phone call, or what you’re writing in an email. But you have hardly any control over the metadata you produce, because it is generated automatically. Just as it’s collected, stored, and analyzed by machine, it’s made by machine, too, without your participation or even consent. Your devices are constantly communicating for you whether you want them to or not. And, unlike the humans you communicate with of your own volition, your devices don’t withhold private information or use code words in an attempt to be discreet. They merely ping the nearest cell phone towers with signals that never lie.

One major irony here is that law, which always lags behind technological innovation by at least a generation, gives substantially more protections to a communication’s content than to its metadata—and yet intelligence agencies are far more interested in the metadata—the activity records that allow them both the “big picture” ability to analyze data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an individual person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior. In sum, metadata can tell your surveillant virtually everything they’d ever want or need to know about you, except what’s actually going on inside your head.

After reading this classified report, I spent the next weeks, even months, in a daze. I was sad and low, trying to deny everything I was thinking and feeling—that’s what was going on in my head, toward the end of my stint in Japan.

I felt far from home, but monitored. I felt more adult than ever, but also cursed with the knowledge that all of us had been reduced to something like children, who’d be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental supervision. I felt like a fraud, making excuses to Lindsay to explain my sullenness. I felt like a fool, as someone of supposedly serious technical skills who’d somehow helped to build an essential component of this system without realizing its purpose. I felt used, as an employee of the IC who only now was realizing that all along I’d been protecting not my country but the state. I felt, above all, violated. Being in Japan only accentuated the sense of betrayal.

I’ll explain.

The Japanese that I’d managed to pick up through community college and my interests in anime and manga was enough for me to speak and get through basic conversations, but reading was a different matter. In Japanese, each word can be represented by its own unique character, or a combination of characters, called kanji, so there were tens of thousands of them—far too many for me to memorize. Often, I was only able to decode particular kanji if they were written with their phonetic gloss, the furigana, which are most commonly meant for foreigners and young readers and so are typically absent from public texts like street signs. The result of all this was that I walked around functionally illiterate. I’d get confused and end up going right when I should have gone left, or left when I should have gone right. I’d wander down the wrong streets and misorder from menus. I was a stranger, is what I’m saying, and often lost, in more ways than one. There were times when I’d accompany Lindsay out on one of her photography trips into the countryside and I’d suddenly stop and realize, in the midst of a village or in the middle of a forest, that I knew nothing whatsoever about my surroundings.

And yet: everything was known about me. I now understood that I was totally transparent to my government. The phone that gave me directions, and corrected me when I went the wrong way, and helped me translate the traffic signs, and told me the times of the buses and trains, was also making sure that all of my doings were legible to my employers. It was telling my bosses where I was and when, even if I never touched the thing and just left it in my pocket.

I remember forcing myself to laugh about this once when Lindsay and I got lost on a hike and Lindsay—to whom I’d told nothing—just spontaneously said, “Why don’t you text Fort Meade and have them find us?” She kept the joke going, and I tried to find it funny but couldn’t. “Hello,” she mimicked me, “can you help us with directions?”

Later I would live in Hawaii, near Pearl Harbor, where America was attacked and dragged into what might have been its last just war. Here, in Japan, I was closer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where that war ignominiously ended. Lindsay and I had always hoped to visit those cities, but every time we planned to go we wound up having to cancel. On one of my first days off, we were all set to head down Honshu to Hiroshima, but I was called in to work and told to go in the opposite direction—to Misawa Air Base in the frozen north. On the day of our next scheduled attempt, Lindsay got sick, and then I got sick, too. Finally, the night before we intended to go to Nagasaki, Lindsay and I were woken by our first major earthquake, jumped up from our futon, ran down seven flights of stairs, and spent the rest of the night out on the street with our neighbors, shivering in our pajamas.

To my true regret, we never went. Those places are holy places, whose memorials honor the two hundred thousand incinerated and the countless poisoned by fallout while reminding us of technology’s amorality.

I think often of what’s called the “atomic moment”—a phrase that in physics describes the moment when a nucleus coheres the protons and neutrons spinning around it into an atom, but that’s popularly understood to mean the advent of the nuclear age, whose isotopes enabled advances in energy production, agriculture, water potability, and the diagnosis and treatment of deadly disease. It also created the atomic bomb.

Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can we,” not “should we.” And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.

I do not mean, of course, to compare nuclear weapons with cybersurveillance in terms of human cost. But there is a commonality when it comes to the concepts of proliferation and disarmament.

The only two countries I knew of that had previously practiced mass surveillance were those two other major combatants of World War II—one America’s enemy, the other America’s ally. In both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the earliest public indications of that surveillance took the superficially innocuous form of a census, the official enumeration and statistical recording of a population. The First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union, in 1926, had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count: it overtly queried Soviet citizens about their nationality. Its findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were in the minority when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed a Central Asian heritage, such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Georgians, and Armenians. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate these cultures, by “reeducating” their populations in the deracinating ideology of Marxism-Leninism.

The Nazi German census of 1939 took on a similar statistical project, but with the assistance of computer technology. It set out to count the Reich’s population in order to control it and to purge it—mainly of Jews and Roma—before exerting its murderous efforts on populations beyond its borders. To effect this, the Reich partnered with Dehomag, a German subsidiary of the American IBM, which owned the patent to the punch card tabulator, a sort of analog computer that counted holes punched into cards. Each citizen was represented by a card, and certain holes on the cards represented certain markers of identity. Column 22 addressed the religion rubric: hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, and hole 3 Jewish. Shortly thereafter, this census information was used to identify and deport Europe’s Jewish population to the death camps.

A single current-model smartphone commands more computing power than all of the wartime machinery of the Reich and the Soviet Union combined. Recalling this is the surest way to contextualize not just the modern American IC’s technological dominance, but also the threat it poses to democratic governance. In the century or so since those census efforts, technology has made astounding progress, but the same could not be said for the law or human scruples that could restrain it.

The United States has a census, too, of course. The Constitution established the American census and enshrined it as the official federal count of each state’s population in order to determine its proportional delegation to the House of Representatives. That was something of a revisionist principle, in that authoritarian governments, including the British monarchy that ruled the colonies, had traditionally used the census as a method of assessing taxes and ascertaining the number of young men eligible for military conscription. It was the Constitution’s genius to repurpose what had been a mechanism of oppression into one of democracy. The census, which is officially under the jurisdiction of the Senate, was ordered to be performed every ten years, which was roughly the amount of time it took to process the data of most American censuses following the first census of 1790. This decade-long lag was shortened by the census of 1890, which was the world’s first census to make use of computers (the prototypes of the models that IBM later sold to Nazi Germany). With computing technology, the processing time was cut in half.

Digital technology didn’t just further streamline such accounting—it is rendering it obsolete. Mass surveillance is now a never-ending census, substantially more dangerous than any questionnaire sent through the mail. All our devices, from our phones to our computers, are basically miniature census-takers we carry in our backpacks and in our pockets—census-takers that remember everything and forgive nothing.

Japan was my atomic moment. It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and that if my generation didn’t intervene the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.

Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching—as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files—for evidence of a suitable crime.

¹⁷ Home on the Cloud

In 2011, I was back in the States, working for the same nominal employer, Dell, but now attached to my old agency, the CIA. One mild spring day, I came home from my first day at the new job and was amused to notice: the house I’d moved into had a mailbox. It was nothing fancy, just one of those subdivided rectangles common to town house communities, but still, it made me smile. I hadn’t had a mailbox in years, and hadn’t ever checked this one. I might not even have registered its existence had it not been overflowing—stuffed to bursting with heaps of junk mail addressed to “Mr. Edward J. Snowden or Current Resident.” The envelopes contained coupons and ad circulars for household products. Someone knew that I’d just moved in.

A memory surfaced from my childhood, a memory of checking the mail and finding a letter to my sister. Although I wanted to open it, my mother wouldn’t let me.

I remember asking why. “Because,” she said, “it’s not addressed to you.” She explained that opening mail intended for someone else, even if it was just a birthday card or a chain letter, wasn’t a very nice thing to do. In fact, it was a crime.

I wanted to know what kind of crime. “A big one, buddy,” my mother said. “A federal crime.”

I stood in the parking lot, tore the envelopes in half, and carried them to the trash.

I had a new iPhone in the pocket of my new Ralph Lauren suit. I had new Burberry glasses. A new haircut. Keys to this new town house in Columbia, Maryland, the largest place I’d ever lived in, and the first place that really felt like mine. I was rich, or at least my friends thought so. I barely recognized myself.

I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved—after all, wasn’t that what everybody else did? But it was easier said than done. The denial, I mean. The money—that came easy. So easy that I felt guilty.

Counting Geneva, and not counting periodic trips home, I’d been away for nearly four years. The America I returned to felt like a changed country. I won’t go as far as to say that I felt like a foreigner, but I did find myself mired in way too many conversations I didn’t understand. Every other word was the name of some TV show or movie I didn’t know, or a celebrity scandal I didn’t care about, and I couldn’t respond—I had nothing to respond with.

Contradictory thoughts rained down like Tetris blocks, and I struggled to sort them out—to make them disappear. I thought, pity these poor, sweet, innocent people—they’re victims, watched by the government, watched by the very screens they worship. Then I thought: Shut up, stop being so dramatic—they’re happy, they don’t care, and you don’t have to, either. Grow up, do your work, pay your bills. That’s life.

A normal life was what Lindsay and I were hoping for. We were ready for the next stage and had decided to settle down. We had a nice backyard with a cherry tree that reminded me of a sweeter Japan, a spot on the Tama River where Lindsay and I had laughed and rolled around atop the fragrant carpet of Tokyo blossoms as we watched the sakura fall.

Lindsay was getting certified as a yoga instructor. I, meanwhile, was getting used to my new position—in sales.

One of the external vendors I’d worked with on EPICSHELTER ended up working for Dell, and convinced me that I was wasting my time with getting paid by the hour. I should get into the sales side of Dell’s business, he said, where I could earn a fortune—for more ideas like EPICSHELTER. I’d be making an astronomical leap up the corporate ladder, and he’d be getting a substantial referral bonus. I was ready to be convinced, especially since it meant distracting myself from my growing sense of unease, which could only get me into trouble. The official job title was solutions consultant. It meant, in essence, that I had to solve the problems created by my new partner, whom I’m going to call Cliff, the account manager.

Cliff was supposed to be the face, and I was to be the brain. When we sat down with the CIA’s technical royalty and purchasing agents, his job was to sell Dell’s equipment and expertise by any means necessary. This meant reaching deep into the seat of his pants for unlimited slick promises as to how we’d do things for the agency, things that were definitely, definitely not possible for our competitors (and, in reality, not possible for us, either). My job was to lead a team of experts in building something that reduced the degree to which Cliff had lied by just enough that, when the person who signed the check pressed the Power button, we wouldn’t all be sent to jail.

No pressure.

Our main project was to help the CIA catch up with the bleeding edge—or just with the technical standards of the NSA—by building it the buzziest of new technologies, a “private cloud.” The aim was to unite the agency’s processing and storage while distributing the ways by which data could be accessed. In plain American, we wanted to make it so that someone in a tent in Afghanistan could do exactly the same work in exactly the same way as someone at CIA headquarters. The agency—and indeed the whole IC’s technical leadership—was constantly complaining about “silos”: the problem of having a billion buckets of data spread all over the world that they couldn’t keep track of or access. So I was leading a team of some of the smartest people at Dell to come up with a way that anyone, anywhere, could reach anything.

During the proof of concept stage, the working name of our cloud became “Frankie.” Don’t blame me: on the tech side, we just called it “The Private Cloud.” It was Cliff who named it, in the middle of a demo with the CIA, saying they were going to love our little Frankenstein “because it’s a real monster.”

The more promises Cliff made, the busier I became, leaving Lindsay and me only the weekends to catch up with our parents and old friends. We tried to furnish and equip our new home. The three-story place had come empty, so we had to get everything, or everything that our parents hadn’t generously handed down to us. This felt very mature, but was at the same time very telling about our priorities: we bought dishes, cutlery, a desk, and a chair, but we still slept on a mattress on the floor. I’d become allergic to credit cards, with all their tracking, so we bought everything outright, with hard currency. When we needed a car, I bought a ’98 Acura Integra from a classified ad for $3,000 cash. Earning money was one thing, but neither Lindsay nor I liked to spend it, unless it was for computer equipment—or a special occasion. For Valentine’s Day, I bought Lindsay the revolver she always wanted.

Our new condo was a twenty-minute drive from nearly a dozen malls, including the Columbia Mall, which has nearly 1.5 million square feet of shopping, occupied by some two hundred stores, a fourteen-screen AMC multiplex, a P.F. Chang’s, and a Cheesecake Factory. As we drove the familiar roads in the beat-up Integra, I was impressed, but also slightly taken aback, by all the development that had occurred in my absence. The post-9/11 government spending spree had certainly put a lot of money into a lot of local pockets. It was an unsettling and even overwhelming experience to come back to America after having been away for a while and to realize anew just how wealthy this part of the country was, and how many consumer options it offered—how many big-box retailers and high-end interior design showrooms. And all of them had sales. For Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day. Festive banners announced the latest discounts, just below all the flags.

Our mission was pretty much appliance-based on this one afternoon I’m recalling—we were at Best Buy. Having settled on a new microwave, we were checking out, on Lindsay’s healthful insistence, a display of blenders. She had her phone out and was in the midst of researching which of the ten or so devices had the best reviews, when I found myself wandering over to the computer department at the far end of the store.

But along the way, I stopped. There, at the edge of the kitchenware section, ensconced atop a brightly decorated and lit elevated platform, was a shiny new refrigerator. Rather, it was a “Smartfridge,” which was being advertised as “Internet-equipped.”

This, plain and simple, blew my mind.

A salesperson approached, interpreting my stupefaction as interest—“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”—and proceeded to demonstrate a few of the features. A screen was embedded in the door of the fridge, and next to the screen was a holder for a tiny stylus, which allowed you to scribble messages. If you didn’t want to scribble, you could record audio and video memos. You could also use the screen as you would your regular computer, because the refrigerator had Wi-Fi. You could check your email, or check your calendar. You could watch YouTube clips, or listen to MP3s. You could even make phone calls. I had to restrain myself from keying in Lindsay’s number and saying, from across the floor, “I’m calling from a fridge.”

Beyond that, the salesperson continued, the fridge’s computer kept track of internal temperature, and, through scanning barcodes, the freshness of your food. It also provided nutritional information and suggested recipes. I think the price was over $9,000. “Delivery included,” the salesperson said.

I remember driving home in a confused silence. This wasn’t quite the stunning moonshot tech-future we’d been promised. I was convinced the only reason that thing was Internet-equipped was so that it could report back to its manufacturer about its owner’s usage and about any other household data that was obtainable. The manufacturer, in turn, would monetize that data by selling it. And we were supposed to pay for the privilege.

I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes, allowing themselves to be tracked while browsing in their pantries as efficiently as if they were browsing the Web. It would still be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before “virtual assistants” like Amazon Echo and Google Home were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash. The data we generate just by living—or just by letting ourselves be surveilled while living—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and advertisers.

Meanwhile, it felt as if every major tech company, including Dell, was rolling out new civilian versions of what I was working on for the CIA: a cloud. (In fact, Dell had even tried four years previously to trademark the term “cloud computing” but was denied.) I was amazed at how willingly people were signing up, so excited at the prospect of their photos and videos and music and e-books being universally backed up and available that they never gave much thought as to why such an uber-sophisticated and convenient storage solution was being offered to them for “free” or for “cheap” in the first place.

I don’t think I’d ever seen such a concept be so uniformly bought into, on every side. “The cloud” was as effective a sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amazon and Apple and Google to sell to their users. I can still close my eyes and hear Cliff schmoozing some CIA suit about how “with the cloud, you’ll be able to push security updates across agency computers worldwide,” or “when the cloud’s up and running, the agency will be able to track who has read what file worldwide.” The cloud was white and fluffy and peaceful, floating high above the fray. Though many clouds make a stormy sky, a single cloud provided a benevolent bit of shade. It was protective. I think it made everyone think of heaven.

Dell—along with the largest cloud-based private companies, Amazon, Apple, and Google—regarded the rise of the cloud as a new age of computing. But in concept, at least, it was something of a regression to the old mainframe architecture of computing’s earliest history, where many users all depended upon a single powerful central core that could only be maintained by an elite cadre of professionals. The world had abandoned this “impersonal” mainframe model only a generation before, once businesses like Dell developed “personal” computers cheap enough, and simple enough, to appeal to mortals. The renaissance that followed produced desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—all devices that allowed people the freedom to make an immense amount of creative work. The only issue was—how to store it?

This was the genesis of “cloud computing.” Now it didn’t really matter what kind of personal computer you had, because the real computers that you relied upon were warehoused in the enormous data centers that the cloud companies built throughout the world. These were, in a sense, the new mainframes, row after row of racked, identical servers linked together in such a way that each individual machine acted together within a collective computing system. The loss of a single server or even of an entire data center no longer mattered, because they were mere droplets in the larger, global cloud.

From the standpoint of a regular user, a cloud is just a storage mechanism that ensures that your data is being processed or stored not on your personal device, but on a range of different servers, which can ultimately be owned and operated by different companies. The result is that your data is no longer truly yours. It’s controlled by companies, which can use it for virtually any purpose.

Read your terms of service agreements for cloud storage, which get longer and longer by the year—current ones are over six thousand words, twice the average length of one of these book chapters. When we choose to store our data online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us, and can willfully delete any data they object to. Unless we’ve kept a separate copy on our own machines or drives, this data will be lost to us forever. If any of our data is found to be particularly objectionable or otherwise in violation of the terms of service, the companies can unilaterally delete our accounts, deny us our own data, and yet retain a copy for their own records, which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately, the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data. There is no property less protected, and yet no property more private.

THE INTERNET I’D grown up with, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing. And with it, so was my youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught ordeal. Self-expression now required such strong self-protection as to obviate its liberties and nullify its pleasures. Every communication was a matter not of creativity but of safety. Every transaction was a potential danger.

Meanwhile, the private sector was busy leveraging our reliance on technology into market consolidation. The majority of American Internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by an imperial triumvirate of companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and the American IC was seeking to take advantage of that fact by obtaining access to their networks—both through direct orders that were kept secret from the public, and clandestine subversion efforts that were kept secret from the companies themselves. Our user data was turning vast profits for the companies, and the government pilfered it for free. I don’t think I’d ever felt so powerless.

Then there was this other emotion that I felt, a curious sense of being adrift and yet, at the same time, of having my privacy violated. It was as if I were dispersed—with parts of my life scattered across servers all over the globe—and yet intruded or imposed upon. Every morning when I left our town house, I found myself nodding at the security cameras dotted throughout our development. Previously I’d never paid them any attention, but now, when a light turned red on my commute, I couldn’t help but think of its leering sensor, keeping tabs on me whether I blew through the intersection or stopped. License-plate readers were recording my comings and goings, even if I maintained a speed of 35 miles per hour.

America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a core feature of democracy. In the American system, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another. In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force—including lethal force. Among the most important of these restraints are the prohibitions against law enforcement surveilling private citizens on their property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant. There are few laws, however, that restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes the vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks.

Law enforcement’s use of surveillance cameras on public property was originally conceived of as a crime deterrent and an aid to investigators after a crime had occurred. But as the cost of these devices continued to fall, they became ubiquitous, and their role became preemptive—with law enforcement using them to track people who had not committed, or were not even suspected of, any crime. And the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities such as facial and pattern recognition. An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be no mere recording device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer—a true robo-cop actively seeking out “suspicious” activity, such as apparent drug deals (that is, people embracing or shaking hands) and apparent gang affiliation (such as people wearing specific colors and brands of clothing). Even in 2011, it was clear to me that this was where technology was leading us, without any substantive public debate.

Potential monitoring abuses piled up in my mind to cumulatively produce a vision of an appalling future. A world in which all people were totally surveilled would logically become a world in which all laws were totally enforced, automatically, by computers. After all, it’s difficult to imagine an AI device that’s capable of noticing a person breaking the law not holding that person accountable. No policing algorithm would ever be programmed, even if it could be, toward leniency or forgiveness.

I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement. I imagined the future SmartFridge stationed in my kitchen, monitoring my conduct and habits, and using my tendency to drink straight from the carton or not wash my hands to evaluate the probability of my being a felon.

Such a world of total automated law enforcement—of, say, all pet-ownership laws, or all zoning laws regulating home businesses—would be intolerable. Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow, along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about. According to Maryland Criminal Law Section 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine. In North Carolina, statute 14-309.8 makes it illegal for a bingo game to last more than five hours. Both of these laws come from a more prudish past and yet, for one reason or another, were never repealed. Most of our lives, even if we don’t realize it, occur not in black and white but in a gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the recycling bin and recyclables in the trash, ride our bicycles in the improper lane, and borrow a stranger’s Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn’t pay for. Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.

I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.”

She was right. And she was right to be worried about me. She thought I was too tense, and under too much stress. I was—not because of my work, but because of my desire to tell her a truth that I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t tell her that my former coworkers at the NSA could target her for surveillance and read the love poems she texted me. I couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took—not just her public photos, but the intimate ones. I couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.

I tried to explain it to her, obliquely, through an analogy. I told her to imagine opening up her laptop one day and finding a spreadsheet on her desktop.

“Why?” she said. “I don’t like spreadsheets.”

I wasn’t prepared for this response, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Nobody does, but this one’s called The End.”

“Ooh, mysterious.”

“You don’t remember having created this spreadsheet, but once you open it up, you recognize its contents. Because inside it is everything, absolutely everything, that could ruin you. Every speck of information that could destroy your life.”

Lindsay smiled. “Can I see the one for you?”

She was joking, but I wasn’t. A spreadsheet containing every scrap of data about you would pose a mortal hazard. Imagine it: all the secrets big and small that could end your marriage, end your career, poison even your closest relationships, and leave you broke, friendless, and in prison. Maybe the spreadsheet would include the joint you smoked last weekend at a friend’s house, or the one line of cocaine you snorted off the screen of your phone in a bar in college. Or the drunken one-night stand you had with your friend’s girlfriend, who’s now your friend’s wife, which you both regret and have agreed never to mention to anyone. Or an abortion you got when you were a teenager, which you kept hidden from your parents and that you’d like to keep hidden from your spouse. Or maybe it’s just information about a petition you signed, or a protest you attended. Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes—if not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this information was being stored by the US government.

Some time after our exchange, Lindsay came up to me and said, “I figured out what would be on my Spreadsheet of Total Destruction—the secret that would ruin me.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

I tried to chill, but I kept having strange physical symptoms. I’d become weirdly clumsy, falling off ladders—more than once—or bumping into door frames. Sometimes I’d trip, or drop spoons I was holding, or fail to gauge distances accurately and miss what I was reaching for. I’d spill water over myself, or choke on it. Lindsay and I would be in the middle of a conversation when I’d miss what she’d said, and she’d ask where I’d gone to—it was like I’d been frozen in another world.

One day when I went to meet Lindsay after her pole-fitness class, I started feeling dizzy. This was the most disturbing of the symptoms I’d had thus far. It scared me, and scared Lindsay, too, especially when it led to a gradual diminishing of my senses. I had too many explanations for these incidents: poor diet, lack of exercise, lack of sleep. I had too many rationalizations: the plate was too close to the edge of the counter, the stairs were slippery. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was worse if what I was experiencing was psychosomatic or genuine. I decided to go to the doctor, but the only appointment wasn’t for weeks.

A day or so later, I was home around noon, trying my best to keep up with work remotely. I was on the phone with a security officer at Dell when the dizziness hit me hard. I immediately excused myself from the call, slurring my words, and as I struggled to hang up the phone, I was sure: I was going to die.

For those who’ve experienced it, this sense of impending doom needs no description, and for those who haven’t, there is no explanation. It strikes so suddenly and primally that it wipes out all other feeling, all thought besides helpless resignation. My life was over. I slumped in my chair, a big black padded Aeron that tilted underneath me as I fell into a void and lost consciousness.

I came to still seated, with the clock on my desk reading just shy of 1:00 p.m. I’d been out less than an hour, but I was exhausted. It was as if I’d been awake since the beginning of time.

I reached for the phone in a panic, but my hand kept missing it and grabbing the air. Once I managed to grab ahold of it and get a dial tone, I found I couldn’t remember Lindsay’s number, or could only remember the digits but not their order.

Somehow I managed to get myself downstairs, taking each step deliberately, palm against the wall. I got some juice out of the fridge and chugged it, keeping both hands on the carton and dribbling a fair amount on my chin. Then I lay down on the floor, pressed my cheek to the cool linoleum, and fell asleep, which was how Lindsay found me.

I’d just had an epileptic seizure.

My mother had epilepsy, and for a time at least was prone to grand mal seizures: the foaming at the mouth, her limbs thrashing, her body rolling around until it stilled into a horrible unconscious rigidity. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t previously associated my symptoms with hers, though that was the very same denial she herself had been in for decades, attributing her frequent falls to “clumsiness” and “lack of coordination.” She hadn’t been diagnosed until her first grand mal in her late thirties, and, after a brief spell on medication, her seizures stopped. She’d always told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary and to this day I’m still not sure if that’s what her doctor had told her or if she was just trying to reassure us that her fate wouldn’t be ours.

There is no diagnostic test for epilepsy. The clinical diagnosis is just two or more unexplained seizures—that’s it. Very little is known about the condition. Medicine tends to treat epilepsy phenomenologically. Doctors don’t talk about “epilepsy,” they talk about “seizures.” They tend to divide seizures into two types: localized and generalized, the former being an electrical misfire in a certain section of your brain that doesn’t spread, the latter being an electrical misfire that creates a chain reaction. Basically, a wave of misfiring synapses rolls across your brain, causing you to lose motor function and, ultimately, consciousness.

Epilepsy is such a strange syndrome. Its sufferers feel different things, depending on which part of their brain has the initial electrical cascade failure. Those who have this failure in their auditory center famously hear bells. Those who have it in their visual center either have their vision go dark or see sparkles. If the failure happens in the deeper core areas of the brain—which was where mine occurred—it can cause severe vertigo. In time, I came to know the warning signs, so I could prepare for an oncoming seizure. These signs are called “auras,” in the popular language of epilepsy, though in scientific fact these auras are the seizure itself. They are the proprioceptive experience of the misfire.

I consulted with as many epilepsy specialists as I could find—the best part of working for Dell was the insurance: I had CAT scans, MRIs, the works. Meanwhile, Lindsay, who was my stalwart angel throughout all this, driving me back and forth from appointments, went about researching all the information that was available about the syndrome. She Googled both allopathic and homeopathic treatments so intensely that basically all her Gmail ads were for epilepsy pharmaceuticals.

I felt defeated. The two great institutions of my life had been betrayed and were betraying me: my country and the Internet. And now my body was following suit.

My brain had, quite literally, short-circuited.

¹⁸ On the Couch

It was late at night on May 1, 2011, when I noticed the news alert on my phone: Osama bin Laden had been tracked down to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed by a team of Navy SEALs.

So there it was. The man who’d masterminded the attacks that had propelled me into the army, and from there into the Intelligence Community, was now dead, a dialysis patient shot point-blank in the embrace of his multiple wives in their lavish compound just down the road from Pakistan’s major military academy. Site after site showed maps indicating where the hell Abbottabad was, alternating with street scenes from cities throughout America, where people were fist-pumping, chest-bumping, yelling, getting wasted. Even New York was celebrating, which almost never happens.

I turned off the phone. I just didn’t have it in me to join in. Don’t get me wrong: I was glad the motherfucker was dead. I was just having a pensive moment and felt a circle closing.

Ten years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes flew into the Twin Towers, and what did we have to show for it? What had the last decade actually accomplished? I sat on the couch I’d inherited from my mother’s condo and gazed through the window into the street beyond as a neighbor honked the horn of his parked car. I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d wasted the last decade of my life.

The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red–Severe, Orange–High, Yellow–Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation.

The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened concurrently with the development of digital technology, which made much of the earth American soil—whether we liked it or not. Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force. American politicians weren’t as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East. The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in “counterterror”: the panicked actions of a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unconcerned about upholding the rule of law. After 9/11, the IC’s orders had been “never again,” a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.

After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon less against terror and more against liberty itself. By continuing these programs, by continuing these lies, America was protecting little, winning nothing, and losing much—until there would be few distinctions left between those post-9/11 polarities of “Us” and “Them.”

THE LATTER HALF of 2011 passed in a succession of seizures, and in countless doctors’ offices and hospitals. I was imaged, tested, and prescribed medications that stabilized my body but clouded my mind, turning me depressed, lethargic, and unable to focus.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to live with what Lindsay was now calling my “condition” without losing my job. Being the top technologist for Dell’s CIA account meant I had tremendous flexibility: my office was my phone, and I could work from home. But meetings were an issue. They were always in Virginia, and I lived in Maryland, a state whose laws prevented people diagnosed with epilepsy from driving. If I were caught behind the wheel, I could lose my driver’s license, and with it my ability to attend the meetings that were the single nonnegotiable requirement of my position.

I finally gave in to the inevitable, took a short-term disability leave from Dell, and decamped to my mother’s secondhand couch. It was as blue as my mood, but comfortable. For weeks and weeks it was the center of my existence—the place where I slept and ate and read and slept some more, the place where I just generally wallowed bleakly as time mocked me.

I don’t remember what books I tried to read, but I do remember never managing much more than a page before closing my eyes and sinking back again into the cushions. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except my own weakness, the uncooperative lump that used to be me spread across the upholstery, motionless but for a lone finger atop the screen of the phone that was the only light in the room.

I’d scroll through the news, then nap, then scroll again, then nap—while protesters in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were being imprisoned and tortured or just shot in the streets by the secret state agents of thuggish regimes, many of which America had helped keep in power. The suffering of that season was immense, spiraling out of the regular news cycle. What I was witnessing was desperation, compared with which my own struggles seemed cheap. They seemed small—morally and ethically small—and privileged.

Throughout the Middle East, innocent civilians were living under the constant threat of violence, with work and school suspended, no electricity, no sewage. In many regions, they didn’t have access to even the most rudimentary medical care. But if at any moment I doubted that my anxieties about surveillance and privacy were relevant, or even appropriate, in the face of such immediate danger and privation, I only had to pay a bit more attention to the crowds on the street and the proclamations they were making—in Cairo and Sanaa, in Beirut and Damascus, in Ahvaz, Khuzestan, and in every other city of the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement. The crowds were calling for an end to oppression, censorship, and precarity. They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people. Although each crowd in each city, even on each day, seemed to have its own specific motivation and its own specific goals, they all had one thing in common: a rejection of authoritarianism, a recommitment to the humanitarian principle that an individual’s rights are inborn and inalienable.

In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state. In the former, people are subjects, who are only allowed to own property, pursue an education, work, pray, and speak because their government permits them to. In the latter, people are citizens, who agree to be governed in a covenant of consent that must be periodically renewed and is constitutionally revocable. It’s this clash, between the authoritarian and the liberal democratic, that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time—not some concocted, prejudiced notion of an East-West divide, or of a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam.

Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but governments of leaders, who demand loyalty from their subjects and are hostile to dissent. Liberal-democratic states, by contrast, make no or few such demands, but depend almost solely on each citizen voluntarily assuming the responsibility of protecting the freedoms of everyone else around them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality, or gender. Any collective guarantee, predicated not on blood but on assent, will wind up favoring egalitarianism—and though democracy has often fallen far short of its ideal, I still believe it to be the one form of governance that most fully enables people of different backgrounds to live together, equal before the law.

This equality consists not only of rights but also of freedoms. In fact, many of the rights most cherished by citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication. They exist in that open-ended empty space created through the restriction of government power. For example, Americans only have a “right” to free speech because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a “right” to a free press because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it. They only have a “right” to worship freely because the government is forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, and a “right” to peaceably assemble and protest because the government is forbidden from making any law that says they can’t.

In contemporary life, we have a single concept that encompasses all this negative or potential space that’s off-limits to the government. That concept is “privacy.” It is an empty zone that lies beyond the reach of the state, a void into which the law is only permitted to venture with a warrant—and not a warrant “for everybody,” such as the one the US government has arrogated to itself in pursuit of mass surveillance, but a warrant for a specific person or purpose supported by a specific probable cause.

The word “privacy” itself is somewhat empty, because it is essentially indefinable, or over-definable. Each of us has our own idea of what it is. “Privacy” means something to everyone. There is no one to whom it means nothing.

It’s because of this lack of common definition that citizens of pluralistic, technologically sophisticated democracies feel that they have to justify their desire for privacy and frame it as a right. But citizens of democracies don’t have to justify that desire—the state, instead, must justify its violation. To refuse to claim your privacy is actually to cede it, either to a state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a “private” business.

There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. You’re assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music tastes and reading preferences.

Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily dismantling.

I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how. I’d had enough of feeling helpless, of being just an asshole in flannel lying around on a shabby couch eating Cool Ranch Doritos and drinking Diet Coke while the world went up in flames.

The young people of the Middle East were agitating for higher wages, lower prices, and better pensions, but I couldn’t give them any of that, and no one could give them a better shot at self-governance than the one they were taking themselves. They were, however, also agitating for a freer Internet. They were decrying Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, who had been increasingly censoring and blocking threatening Web content, tracking and hacking traffic to offending platforms and services, and shutting down certain foreign ISPs entirely. They were protesting Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, who’d cut off Internet access for his whole country—which had merely succeeded in making every young person in the country even more furious and bored, luring them out into the streets.

Ever since I’d been introduced to the Tor Project in Geneva, I’d used its browser and run my own Tor server, wanting to do my professional work from home and my personal Web browsing unmonitored. Now, I shook off my despair, propelled myself off the couch, and staggered over to my home office to set up a bridge relay that would bypass the Iranian Internet blockades. I then distributed its encrypted configuration identity to the Tor core developers.

This was the least I could do. If there was just the slightest chance that even one young kid from Iran who hadn’t been able to get online could now bypass the imposed filters and restrictions and connect to me—connect through me—protected by the Tor system and my server’s anonymity, then it was certainly worth my minimal effort.

I imagined this person reading their email, or checking their social media accounts to make sure that their friends and family had not been arrested. I had no way of knowing whether this was what they did, or whether anyone at all linked to my server from Iran. And that was the point: the aid I offered was private.

The guy who started the Arab Spring was almost exactly my age. He was a produce peddler in Tunisia, selling fruits and vegetables out of a cart. In protest against repeated harassment and extortion by the authorities, he stood in the square and set fire to his life, dying a martyr. If burning himself to death was the last free act he could manage in defiance of an illegitimate regime, I could certainly get up off the couch and press a few buttons.