Permanent Record

¹⁹ The Tunnel

Imagine you’re entering a tunnel. Imagine the perspective: as you look down the length that stretches ahead of you, notice how the walls seem to narrow to the tiny dot of light at the other end. The light at the end of the tunnel is a symbol of hope, and it’s also what people say they see in near-death experiences. They have to go to it, they say. They’re drawn to it. But then where else is there to go in a tunnel, except through it? Hasn’t everything led up to this point?

My tunnel was the Tunnel: an enormous Pearl Harbor–era airplane factory turned NSA facility located under a pineapple field in Kunia, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The facility was built out of reinforced concrete, its eponymous tunnel a kilometer-long tube in the side of a hill opening up into three cavernous floors of server vaults and offices. At the time the Tunnel was built, the hill was covered over with huge amounts of sand, soil, desiccated pineapple plant leaves, and patches of sun-parched grass to camouflage it from Japanese bombers. Sixty years later it resembled the vast burial mound of a lost civilization, or some gigantic arid pile that a weird god had heaped up in the middle of a god-size sandbox. Its official name was the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center.

I went to work there, still on a Dell contract, but now for the NSA again, early in 2012. One day that summer—actually, it was my birthday—as I passed through the security checks and proceeded down the tunnel, it struck me: this, in front of me, was my future.

I’m not saying that I made any decisions at that instant. The most important decisions in life are never made that way. They’re made subconsciously and only express themselves consciously once fully formed—once you’re finally strong enough to admit to yourself that this is what your conscience has already chosen for you, this is the course that your beliefs have decreed. That was my twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: the awareness that I had entered a tunnel that would narrow my life down toward a single, still-indistinct act.

Just as Hawaii has always been an important waystation—historically, the US military treated the island chain as little more than a mid-Pacific refueling depot for boats and planes—it had also become an important switchpoint for American communications. These include the intelligence that flowed between the contiguous forty-eight states and my former place of employment, Japan, as well as other sites in Asia.

The job I’d taken was a significant step down the career ladder, with duties I could at this point perform in my sleep. It was supposed to mean less stress, a lighter burden. I was the sole employee of the aptly named Office of Information Sharing, where I worked as a SharePoint systems administrator. SharePoint is a Microsoft product, a dopey poky program, or rather a grab-bag of programs, focused on internal document management: who can read what, who can edit what, who can send and receive what, and so on. By making me Hawaii’s SharePoint systems administrator, the NSA had made me the manager of document management. I was, in effect, the reader in chief at one of the agency’s most significant facilities. As was my typical practice in any new technical position, I spent the earliest days automating my tasks—meaning writing scripts to do my work for me—so as to free up my time for something more interesting.

Before I go any further, I want to emphasize this: my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying of documents, but with the reading of them. My initial intention was just to confirm the suspicions that I’d first had back in 2009 in Tokyo. Three years later, I was determined to find out if an American system of mass surveillance existed and, if it did, how it functioned. Though I was uncertain about how to conduct this investigation, I was at least sure of this: I had to understand exactly how the system worked before I could decide what, if anything, to do about it.

THIS, OF COURSE, was not why Lindsay and I had come to Hawaii. We hadn’t hauled all the way out to paradise just so I could throw our lives away for a principle.

We’d come to start over. To start over yet again.

My doctors told me that the climate and more relaxed lifestyle in Hawaii might be beneficial for my epilepsy, since lack of sleep was thought to be the leading trigger of the seizures. Also, the move eliminated the driving problem: the Tunnel was within bicycling distance of a number of communities in Kunia, the quiet heart of the island’s dry, red interior. It was a pleasant, twenty-minute ride to work, through sugarcane fields in brilliant sunshine. With the mountains rising calm and high in the clear blue distance, the gloomy mood of the last few months lifted like the morning fog.

Lindsay and I found a decent-size bungalow-type house on Eleu Street in Waipahu’s Royal Kunia, which we furnished with our stuff from Columbia, Maryland, since Dell paid relocation expenses. The furniture didn’t get much use, though, since the sun and heat would often cause us to walk in the door, strip off our clothes, and lie naked on the carpet beneath the overworked air conditioner. Eventually, Lindsay turned the garage into a fitness studio, filling it with yoga mats and the spinning pole she’d brought from Columbia. I set up a new Tor server. Soon, traffic from around the world was reaching the Internet via the laptop sitting in our entertainment center, which had the ancillary benefit of hiding my own Internet activity in the noise.

One night during the summer I turned twenty-nine, Lindsay finally prevailed on me to go out with her to a luau. She’d been after me to go for a while, because a few of her pole-fitness friends had been involved in some hula-girl capacity, but I’d been resistant. It had seemed like such a cheesy touristy thing to do, and had felt, somehow, disrespectful. Hawaiian culture is ancient, although its traditions are very much alive; the last thing I wanted was to disturb someone’s sacred ritual.

Finally, however, I capitulated. I’m very glad I did. What impressed me the most was not the luau itself—though it was very much a fire-twirling spectacle—but the old man who was holding court nearby in a little amphitheater down by the sea. He was a native Hawaiian, an erudite man with that soft but nasal island voice, who was telling a group of people gathered around a fire the creation stories of the islands’ indigenous peoples.

The one story that stuck with me concerned the twelve sacred islands of the gods. Apparently, there had existed a dozen islands in the Pacific that were so beautiful and pure and blessed with freshwater that they had to be kept secret from humanity, who would spoil them. Three of them were especially revered: Kane-huna-moku, Kahiki, and Pali-uli. The lucky gods who inhabited these islands decided to keep them hidden, because they believed that a glimpse of their bounty would drive people mad. After considering numerous ingenious schemes by which these islands might be concealed, including dyeing them the color of the sea, or sinking them to the bottom of the ocean, they finally decided to make them float in the air.

Once the islands were airborne, they were blown from place to place, staying constantly in motion. At sunrise and sunset, especially, you might think that you’d noticed one, hovering far at the horizon. But the moment you pointed it out to anyone, it would suddenly drift away or assume another form entirely, such as a pumice raft, a hunk of rock ejected by a volcanic eruption—or a cloud.

I thought about that legend a lot while I went about my search. The revelations I was pursuing were exactly like those islands: exotic preserves that a pantheon of self-important, self-appointed rulers were convinced had to be kept secret and hidden from humanity. I wanted to know what the NSA’s surveillance capabilities were exactly; whether and how they extended beyond the agency’s actual surveillance activities; who approved them; who knew about them; and, last but surely not least, how these systems—both technical and institutional—really operated.

The moment I’d think that I spotted one of these “islands”—some capitalized code name I didn’t understand, some program referenced in a note buried at the end of a report—I’d go chasing after further mentions of it in other documents, but find none. It was as if the program I was searching for had floated away from me and was lost. Then, days later, or weeks later, it might surface again under a different designation, in a document from a different department.

Sometimes I’d find a program with a recognizable name, but without an explanation of what it did. Other times I’d just find a nameless explanation, with no indication as to whether the capability it described was an active program or an aspirational desire. I was running up against compartments within compartments, caveats within caveats, suites within suites, programs within programs. This was the nature of the NSA—by design, the left hand rarely knew what the right hand was doing.

In a way, what I was doing reminded me of a documentary I once watched about map-making—specifically, about the way that nautical charts were created in the days before imaging and GPS. Ship captains would keep logs and note their coordinates, which landbound mapmakers would then try to interpret. It was through the gradual accretion of this data, over hundreds of years, that the full extent of the Pacific became known, and all its islands identified.

But I didn’t have hundreds of years or hundreds of ships. I was alone, one man hunched over a blank blue ocean, trying to find where this one speck of dry land, this one data point, belonged in relation to all the others.

²⁰ Heartbeat

Back in 2009 in Japan, when I went to that fateful China conference as a substitute briefer, I guess I’d made some friends, especially at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA) and its parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In the three years since, JCITA had invited me a half-dozen or so times to give seminars and lectures at DIA facilities. Essentially, I was teaching classes in how the American Intelligence Community could protect itself from Chinese hackers and exploit the information gained from analyzing their hacks to hack them in return.

I always enjoyed teaching—certainly more than I ever enjoyed being a student—and in the early days of my disillusionment, toward the end of Japan and through my time at Dell, I had the sense that were I to stay in intelligence work for the rest of my career, the positions in which my principles would be least compromised, and my mind most challenged, would almost certainly be academic. Teaching with JCITA was a way of keeping that door open. It was also a way of keeping up to date—when you’re teaching, you can’t let your students get ahead of you, especially in technology.

This put me in the regular habit of perusing what the NSA called “readboards.” These are digital bulletin boards that function something like news blogs, only the “news” here is the product of classified intelligence activities. Each major NSA site maintains its own, which its local staff updates daily with what they regard as the day’s most important and interesting documents—everything an employee has to read to keep current.

As a holdover from my JCITA lecture preparation, and also, frankly, because I was bored in Hawaii, I got into the habit of checking a number of these boards every day: my own site’s readboard in Hawaii, the readboard of my former posting in Tokyo, and various readboards from Fort Meade. This new low-pressure position gave me as much time to read as I wanted. The scope of my curiosity might have raised a few questions at a prior stage of my career, but now I was the only employee of the Office of Information Sharing—I was the Office of Information Sharing—so my very job was to know what sharable information was out there. Meanwhile, most of my colleagues at the Tunnel spent their breaks streaming Fox News.

In the hopes of organizing all the documents I wanted to read from these various readboards, I put together a personal best-of-the-readboards queue. The files quickly began to pile up, until the nice lady who managed the digital storage quotas complained to me about the folder size. I realized that my personal readboard had become less a daily digest than an archive of sensitive information with relevance far beyond the day’s immediacy. Not wanting to erase it or stop adding to it, which would’ve been a waste, I decided instead to share it with others. This was the best justification for what I was doing that I could think of, especially because it allowed me to more or less legitimately collect material from a wider range of sources. So, with my boss’s approval, I set about creating an automated readboard—one that didn’t rely on anybody posting things to it, but edited itself.

Like EPICSHELTER, my automated readboard platform was designed to perpetually scan for new and unique documents. It did so in a far more comprehensive manner, however, peering beyond NSAnet, the NSA’s network, into the networks of the CIA and the FBI as well as into the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), the Department of Defense’s top-secret intranet. The idea was that its findings would be made available to every NSA officer by comparing their digital identity badges—called PKI certificates—to the classification of the documents, generating a personal readboard customized to their clearances, interests, and office affiliations. Essentially, it would be a readboard of readboards, an individually tailored newsfeed aggregator, bringing each officer all the newest information pertinent to their work, all the documents they had to read to stay current. It would be run from a server that I alone managed, located just down the hall from me. That server would also store a copy of every document it sourced, making it easy for me to perform the kind of deep interagency searches that the heads of most agencies could only dream of.

I called this system Heartbeat, because it took the pulse of the NSA and of the wider IC. The volume of information that crashed through its veins was simply enormous, as it pulled documents from internal sites dedicated to every specialty from updates on the latest cryptographic research projects to minutes of the meetings of the National Security Council. I’d carefully configured it to ingest materials at a slow, constant pace, so as not to monopolize the undersea fiber-optic cable tying Hawaii to Fort Meade, but it still pulled so many more documents than any human ever could that it immediately became the NSAnet’s most comprehensive readboard.

Early on in its operation I got an email that almost stopped Heartbeat forever. A faraway administrator—apparently the only one in the entire IC who actually bothered to look at his access logs—wanted to know why a system in Hawaii was copying, one by one, every record in his database. He had immediately blocked me as a precaution, which effectively locked me out, and was demanding an explanation. I told him what I was doing and showed him how to use the internal website that would let him read Heartbeat for himself. His response reminded me of an unusual characteristic of the technologists’ side of the security state: once I gave him access, his wariness instantly turned into curiosity. He might have doubted a person, but he’d never doubt a machine. He could now see that Heartbeat was just doing what it’d been meant to do, and was doing it perfectly. He was fascinated. He unblocked me from his repository of records, and even offered to help me by circulating information about Heartbeat to his colleagues.

Nearly all of the documents that I later disclosed to journalists came to me through Heartbeat. It showed me not just the aims but the abilities of the IC’s mass surveillance system. This is something I want to emphasize: in mid-2012, I was just trying to get a handle on how mass surveillance actually worked. Almost every journalist who later reported on the disclosures was primarily concerned with the targets of surveillance—the efforts to spy on American citizens, for instance, or on the leaders of America’s allies. That is to say, they were more interested in the topics of the surveillance reports than in the system that produced them. I respect that interest, of course, having shared it myself, but my own primary curiosity was still technical in nature. It’s all well and good to read a document or to click through the slides of a PowerPoint presentation to find out what a program is intended to do, but the better you can understand a program’s mechanics, the better you can understand its potential for abuse.

This meant that I wasn’t much interested in the briefing materials—like, for example, what has become perhaps the best-known file I disclosed, a slide deck from a 2011 PowerPoint presentation that delineated the NSA’s new surveillance posture as a matter of six protocols: “Sniff It All, Know It All, Collect It All, Process It All, Exploit It All, Partner It All.” This was just PR speak, marketing jargon. It was intended to impress America’s allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, the primary countries with which the United States shares intelligence. (Together with the United States, these countries are known as the Five Eyes.) “Sniff It All” meant finding a data source; “Know It All” meant finding out what that data was; “Collect It All” meant capturing that data; “Process It All” meant analyzing that data for usable intelligence; “Exploit It All” meant using that intelligence to further the agency’s aims; and “Partner It All” meant sharing the new data source with allies. While this six-pronged taxonomy was easy to remember, easy to sell, and an accurate measure of the scale of the agency’s ambition and the degree of its collusion with foreign governments, it gave me no insight into how exactly that ambition was realized in technological terms.

Much more revealing was an order I found from the FISA Court, a legal demand for a private company to turn over its customers’ private information to the federal government. Orders such as these were notionally issued on the authority of public legislation; however, their contents, even their existence, were classified Top Secret. According to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, aka the “business records” provision, the government was authorized to obtain orders from the FISA Court that compelled third parties to produce “any tangible thing” that was “relevant” to foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations. But as the court order I found made clear, the NSA had secretly interpreted this authorization as a license to collect all of the “business records,” or metadata, of telephone communications coming through American telecoms, such as Verizon and AT&T, on “an ongoing daily basis.” This included, of course, records of telephone communications between American citizens, the practice of which was unconstitutional.

Additionally, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows the IC to target any foreigner outside the United States deemed likely to communicate “foreign intelligence information”—a broad category of potential targets that includes journalists, corporate employees, academics, aid workers, and countless others innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. This legislation was being used by the NSA to justify its two most prominent Internet surveillance methods: the PRISM program and upstream collection.

PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection, meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private-sector Internet infrastructure—the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean. This collection was managed by the NSA’s Special Sources Operations unit, which built secret wiretapping equipment and embedded it inside the corporate facilities of obliging Internet service providers around the world. Together, PRISM (collection from the servers of service providers) and upstream collection (direct collection from Internet infrastructure) ensured that the world’s information, both stored and in transit, was surveillable.

The next stage of my investigation was to figure out how this collection was actually accomplished—that is to say, to examine the documents that explained which tools supported this program and how they selected from among the vast mass of dragneted communications those that were thought worthy of closer inspection. The difficulty was that this information did not exist in any presentation, no matter the level of classification, but only in engineering diagrams and raw schematics. These were the most important materials for me to find. Unlike the Five Eyes’ pitch-deck cant, they would be concrete proof that the capacities I was reading about weren’t merely the fantasies of an overcaffeinated project manager. As a systems guy who was always being prodded to build faster and deliver more, I was all too aware that the agencies would sometimes announce technologies before they even existed—sometimes because a Cliff-type salesperson had made one too many promises, and sometimes just out of unalloyed ambition.

In this case, the technologies behind upstream collection did exist. As I came to realize, these tools are the most invasive elements of the NSA’s mass surveillance system, if only because they’re the closest to the user—that is, the closest to the person being surveilled. Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.

Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users.

You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.”

If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.

Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.

²¹ Whistleblowing

If any NSA employee who didn’t work with the SharePoint software I managed knew anything at all about SharePoint, they knew the calendars. These were pretty much the same as any normal nongovernment group calendars, just way more expensive, providing the basic when-and-where-do-I-have-to-be-at-a-meeting scheduling interface for NSA personnel in Hawaii. This was about as exciting for me to manage as you might imagine. That’s why I tried to spice it up by making sure the calendar always had reminders of all the holidays, and I mean all of them: not just the federal holidays, but Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali.

Then there was my favorite, the seventeenth of September. Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, which is the holiday’s formal name, commemorates the moment in 1787 when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention officially ratified, or signed, the document. Technically, Constitution Day is not a federal holiday, just a federal observance, meaning that Congress didn’t think our country’s founding document and the oldest national constitution still in use in the world were important enough to justify giving people a paid day off.

The Intelligence Community had always had an uncomfortable relationship with Constitution Day, which meant its involvement was typically limited to circulating a bland email drafted by its agencies’ press shops and signed by Director So-and-So, and setting up a sad little table in a forgotten corner of the cafeteria. On the table would be some free copies of the Constitution printed, bound, and donated to the government by the kind and generous rabble-rousers at places like the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation, since the IC was rarely interested in spending some of its own billions on promoting civil liberties through stapled paper.

I suppose the staff got the message, or didn’t: over the seven Constitution Days I spent in the IC, I don’t think I’d ever known anyone but myself to actually take a copy off the table. Because I love irony almost as much as I love freebies, I’d always take a few—one for myself, and the others to salt across my friends’ workstations. I kept my copy propped against the Rubik’s Cube on my desk, and for a time made a habit of reading it over lunch, trying not to drip grease on “We the People” from one of the cafeteria’s grim slices of elementary-school pizza.

I liked reading the Constitution partially because its ideas are great, partially because its prose is good, but really because it freaked out my coworkers. In an office where everything you printed had to be thrown into a shredder after you were done with it, someone would always be intrigued by the presence of hard-copy pages lying on a desk. They’d amble over to ask, “What have you got there?”

“The Constitution.”

Then they’d make a face and back away slowly.

On Constitution Day 2012, I picked up the document in earnest. I hadn’t really read the whole thing in quite a few years, though I was glad to note that I still knew the preamble by heart. Now, however, I read through it in its entirety, from the Articles to the Amendments. I was surprised to be reminded that fully 50 percent of the Bill of Rights, the document’s first ten amendments, were intended to make the job of law enforcement harder. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments were all deliberately, carefully designed to create inefficiencies and hamper the government’s ability to exercise its power and conduct surveillance.

This is especially true of the Fourth, which protects people and their property from government scrutiny: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Translation: If officers of the law want to go rooting through your life, they first have to go before a judge and show probable cause under oath. This means they have to explain to a judge why they have reason to believe that you might have committed a specific crime or that specific evidence of a specific crime might be found on or in a specific part of your property. Then they have to swear that this reason has been given honestly and in good faith. Only if the judge approves a warrant will they be allowed to go searching—and even then, only for a limited time.

The Constitution was written in the eighteenth century, back when the only computers were abacuses, gear calculators, and looms, and it could take weeks or months for a communication to cross the ocean by ship. It stands to reason that computer files, whatever their contents, are our version of the Constitution’s “papers.” We certainly use them like “papers,” particularly our word-processing documents and spreadsheets, our messages and histories of inquiry. Data, meanwhile, is our version of “effects,” a catchall term for all the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online. That includes, by default, metadata, which is the record of all the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online—a perfect ledger of our private lives.

In the centuries since the original Constitution Day, our clouds, computers, and phones have become our homes, just as personal and intimate as our actual houses nowadays. If you don’t agree, then answer me this: Would you rather let your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your unlocked phone?

The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely. The agency was essentially making a claim that the amendment’s protections didn’t apply to modern-day lives. The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure.” Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party”—your telephone service provider—you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you may once have had. And it insisted that “search” and “seizure” occurred only when its analysts, not its algorithms, actively queried what had already been automatically collected.

Had constitutional oversight mechanisms been functioning properly, this extremist interpretation of the Fourth Amendment—effectively holding that the very act of using modern technologies is tantamount to a surrender of your privacy rights—would have been rejected by Congress and the courts. America’s Founders were skilled engineers of political power, particularly attuned to the perils posed by legal subterfuge and the temptations of the presidency toward exercising monarchical authority. To forestall such eventualities, they designed a system, laid out in the Constitution’s first three articles, that established the US government in three coequal branches, each supposed to provide checks and balances to the others. But when it came to protecting the privacy of American citizens in the digital age, each of these branches failed in its own way, causing the entire system to halt and catch fire.

The legislative branch, the two houses of Congress, willingly abandoned its supervisory role: even as the number of IC government employees and private contractors was exploding, the number of congresspeople who were kept informed about the IC’s capabilities and activities kept dwindling, until only a few special committee members were apprised in closed-door hearings. Even then they were only informed of some, but not all, of the IC’s activities. When rare public hearings on the IC were held, the NSA’s position was made strikingly clear: The agency would not cooperate, it would not be honest, and, what was worse, through classification and claims of secrecy it would force America’s federal legislatures to collaborate in its deception. In early 2013, for instance, James Clapper, then the director of National Intelligence, testified under oath to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the NSA did not engage in bulk collection of the communications of American citizens. To the question, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No, sir,” and then added, “There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” That was a witting, bald-faced lie, of course, not just to Congress but to the American people. More than a few of the congresspeople to whom Clapper was testifying knew very well that what he was saying was untrue, yet they refused, or felt legally powerless, to call him out on it.

The failure of the judiciary was, if anything, even more disappointing. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which oversees intelligence surveillance within the United States, is a specialized body that meets in secret and hears only from the government. It was designed to grant individual warrants for foreign intelligence collection, and has always been especially accommodating to the NSA, approving well over 99 percent of the agency’s requests—a rate more suggestive of a ministerial rubber stamp than a deliberative judicial process. After 9/11, the court expanded its role from authorizing the surveillance of specific individuals to ruling on the legality and constitutionality of broad programmatic surveillance, without any adversarial scrutiny. A body that previously had been tasked with approving the surveillance of Foreign Terrorist #1 or Foreign Spy #2 was now being used to legitimize the whole combined infrastructure of PRISM and upstream collection. Judicial review of that infrastructure was reduced, in the words of the ACLU to a secret court upholding secret programs by secretly reinterpreting federal law.

When civil society groups like the ACLU tried to challenge the NSA’s activities in ordinary, open federal courts, a curious thing happened. The government didn’t defend itself on the ground that the surveillance activities were legal or constitutional. It declared, instead, that the ACLU and its clients had no right to be in court at all, because the ACLU could not prove that its clients had in fact been surveilled. Moreover, the ACLU could not use the litigation to seek evidence of surveillance, because the existence (or nonexistence) of that evidence was “a state secret,” and leaks to journalists didn’t count. In other words, the court couldn’t recognize the information that was publicly known from having been published in the media; it could only recognize the information that the government officially confirmed as being publicly known. This invocation of classification meant that neither the ACLU, nor anyone else, could ever establish standing to raise a legal challenge in open court. To my disgust, in February 2013 the US Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 to accept the government’s reasoning and dismissed an ACLU and Amnesty International lawsuit challenging mass surveillance without even considering the legality of the NSA’s activities.

Finally, there was the executive branch, the primary cause of this constitutional breach. The president’s office, through the Justice Department, had committed the original sin of secretly issuing directives that authorized mass surveillance in the wake of 9/11. Executive overreach has only continued in the decades since, with administrations of both parties seeking to act unilaterally and establish policy directives that circumvent law—policy directives that cannot be challenged, since their classification keeps them from being publicly known.

The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity. I realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible—for anything. It was time to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how broken the process was, they were right. The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and they used that knowledge to their advantage.

They’d hacked the Constitution.

AMERICA WAS BORN from an act of treason. The Declaration of Independence was an outrageous violation of the laws of England and yet the fullest expression of what the Founders called the “Laws of Nature,” among which was the right to defy the powers of the day and rebel on point of principle, according to the dictates of one’s conscience. The first Americans to exercise this right, the first “whistleblowers” in American history, appeared one year later—in 1777.

These men, like so many of the men in my family, were sailors, officers of the Continental Navy who, in defense of their new land, had taken to the sea. During the Revolution, they served on the USS Warren, a thirty-two-gun frigate under the command of Commodore Esek Hopkins, the commander in chief of the Continental Navy. Hopkins was a lazy and intractable leader who refused to bring his vessel into combat. His officers also claimed to have witnessed him beating and starving British prisoners of war. Ten of the Warren’s officers—after consulting their consciences, and with barely a thought for their careers—reported all of this up the chain of command, writing to the Marine Committee:

After receiving this letter, the Marine Committee investigated Commodore Hopkins. He reacted by dismissing his officers and crew, and in a fit of rage filed a criminal libel suit against Midshipman Samuel Shaw and Third Lieutenant Richard Marven, the two officers who admitted to having authored the petition. The suit was filed in the courts of Rhode Island, whose last colonial governor had been Stephen Hopkins, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and the commodore’s brother.

The case was assigned to a judge appointed by Governor Hopkins, but before the trial commenced Shaw and Marven were saved by a fellow naval officer, John Grannis, who broke ranks and presented their case directly to the Continental Congress. The Continental Congress was so alarmed by the precedent being set by allowing military complaints regarding dereliction of duty to be subject to the criminal charge of libel that it intervened. On July 30, 1778, it terminated the command of Commodore Hopkins, ordered the Treasury Office to pay Shaw and Marven’s legal fees, and by unanimous consent enacted America’s first whistleblower protection law. This law declared it “the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”

The law gave me hope—and it still does. Even at the darkest hour of the Revolution, with the very existence of the country at stake, Congress didn’t just welcome an act of principled dissent, it enshrined such acts as duties. By the latter half of 2012, I was resolved to perform this duty myself, though I knew I’d be making my disclosures at a very different time—a time both more comfortable and more cynical. Few if any of my IC superiors would have sacrificed their careers for the same American principles for which military personnel regularly sacrifice their lives. And in my case, going up “the chain of command,” which the IC prefers to call “the proper channels,” wasn’t an option as it was for the ten men who crewed on the Warren. My superiors were not only aware of what the agency was doing, they were actively directing it—they were complicit.

In organizations like the NSA—in which malfeasance has become so structural as to be a matter not of any particular initiative, but of an ideology—proper channels can only become a trap, to catch the heretics and disfavorables. I’d already experienced the failure of command back in Warrenton, and then again in Geneva, where in the regular course of my duties I had discovered a security vulnerability in a critical program. I’d reported the vulnerability, and when nothing was done about it I reported that, too. My supervisors weren’t happy that I’d done so, because their supervisors weren’t happy, either. The chain of command is truly a chain that binds, and the lower links can only be lifted by the higher.

Coming from a Coast Guard family, I’ve always been fascinated by how much of the English language vocabulary of disclosure has a nautical undercurrent. Even before the days of the USS Warren, organizations, like ships, sprang leaks. When steam replaced wind for propulsion, whistles were blown at sea to signal intentions and emergencies: one whistle to pass by port, two whistles to pass by starboard, five for a warning.

The same terms in European languages, meanwhile, often have fraught political valences conditioned by historical context. French used dénonciateur throughout much of the twentieth century, until the word’s WWII-era association with being a “denouncer” or “informant” for the Germans led to a preference for lanceur d’alerte (“one who launches a warning”). German, a language that has struggled with its culture’s Nazi and Stasi past, evolved beyond its own Denunziant and Informant to settle on the unsatisfactory Hinweisgeber (a “hint- or tip-giver”), Enthueller (“revealer”), Skandalaufdecker (“scandal-uncoverer”), and even the pointedly political ethische Dissidenten (“ethical dissident”). German uses few of these words online, however; with respect to today’s Internet-based disclosures, it has simply borrowed the noun Whistleblower and the verb leaken. The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an honorable duty.

Ultimately, every language, including English, demonstrates its culture’s relationship to power by how it chooses to define the act of disclosure. Even the nautically derived English words that seem neutral and benign frame the act from the perspective of the institution that perceives itself wronged, not of the public that the institution has failed. When an institution decries “a leak,” it is implying that the “leaker” damaged or sabotaged something.

Today, “leaking” and “whistleblowing” are often treated as interchangeable. But to my mind, the term “leaking” should be used differently than it commonly is. It should be used to describe acts of disclosure done not out of public interest but out of self-interest, or in pursuit of institutional or political aims. To be more precise, I understand a leak as something closer to a “plant,” or an incidence of “propaganda-seeding”: the selective release of protected information in order to sway popular opinion or affect the course of decision making. It is rare for even a day to go by in which some “unnamed” or “anonymous” senior government official does not leak, by way of a hint or tip to a journalist, some classified item that advances their own agenda or the efforts of their agency or party.

This dynamic is perhaps most brazenly exemplified by a 2013 incident in which IC officials, likely seeking to inflate the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, leaked to a few news websites extraordinarily detailed accounts of a conference call between al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and his global affiliates. In this so-called conference call of doom, al-Zawahiri purportedly discussed organizational cooperation with Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, and representatives of the Taliban and Boko Haram. By disclosing the ability to intercept this conference call—that is, if we’re to believe this leak, which consisted of a description of the call, not a recording—the IC irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of apprising itself of the plans and intentions of the highest ranks of terrorist leadership, purely for the sake of a momentary political advantage in the news cycle. Not a single person was prosecuted as a result of this stunt, though it was most certainly illegal, and cost America the ability to keep wiretapping the alleged al-Qaeda hotline.

Time and again, America’s political class has proven itself willing to tolerate, even generate leaks that serve its own ends. The IC often announces its “successes,” regardless of their classification and regardless of the consequences. Nowhere in recent memory has that been more apparent than in the leaks relating to the extrajudicial killing of the American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in Yemen. By breathlessly publicizing its drone attack on al-Aulaqi to the Washington Post and the New York Times, the Obama administration was tacitly admitting the existence of the CIA’s drone program and its “disposition matrix,” or kill list, both of which are officially top secret. Additionally, the government was implicitly confirming that it engaged not just in targeted assassinations, but in targeted assassinations of American citizens. These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion of a media campaign, were shocking demonstrations of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a seal that must be maintained for the government to act with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim credit.

It’s only in this context that the US government’s latitudinal relationship to leaking can be fully understood. It has forgiven “unauthorized” leaks when they’ve resulted in unexpected benefits, and forgotten “authorized” leaks when they’ve caused harm. But if a leak’s harmfulness and lack of authorization, not to mention its essential illegality, make scant difference to the government’s reaction, what does? What makes one disclosure permissible, and another not?

The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the fundamental prerogatives of an institution. If all the disparate components of an organization, from its mailroom to its executive suite, can be assumed to have the same power to discuss internal matters, then its executives have surrendered their information control, and the organization’s continued functioning is put in jeopardy. Seizing this equality of voice, independent of an organization’s managerial or decision-making hierarchy, is what is properly meant by the term “whistleblowing”—an act that’s particularly threatening to the IC, which operates by strict compartmentalization under a legally codified veil of secrecy.

A “whistleblower,” in my definition, is a person who through hard experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed in—and the loyalty owed to—the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable. This person knows that they can’t remain inside the institution, and knows that the institution can’t or won’t be dismantled. Reforming the institution might be possible, however, so they blow the whistle and disclose the information to bring public pressure to bear.

This is an adequate description of my situation, with one crucial addition: all the information I intended to disclose was classified top secret. To blow the whistle on secret programs, I’d also have to blow the whistle on the larger system of secrecy, to expose it not as the absolute prerogative of state that the IC claimed it was but rather as an occasional privilege that the IC abused to subvert democratic oversight. Without bringing to light the full scope of this systemic secrecy, there would be no hope of restoring a balance of power between citizens and their governance. This motive of restoration I take to be essential to whistleblowing: it marks the disclosure not as a radical act of dissent or resistance, but a conventional act of return—signaling the ship to return back to port, where it’ll be stripped, refitted, and patched of its leaks before being given the chance to start over.

A total exposure of the total apparatus of mass surveillance—not by me, but by the media, the de facto fourth branch of the US government, protected by the Bill of Rights: that was the only response appropriate to the scale of the crime. It wouldn’t be enough, after all, to merely reveal a particular abuse or set of abuses, which the agency could stop (or pretend to stop) while preserving the rest of the shadowy apparatus intact. Instead, I was resolved to bring to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry.

Whistleblowers can be elected by circumstance at any working level of an institution. But digital technology has brought us to an age in which, for the first time in recorded history, the most effective will come up from the bottom, from the ranks traditionally least incentivized to maintain the status quo. In the IC, as in virtually every other outsize decentralized institution that relies on computers, these lower ranks are rife with technologists like myself, whose legitimate access to vital infrastructure is grossly out of proportion to their formal authority to influence institutional decisions. In other words, there is usually an imbalance that obtains between what people like me are intended to know and what we are able to know, and between the slight power we have to change the institutional culture and the vast power we have to address our concerns to the culture at large. Though such technological privileges can certainly be abused—after all, most systems-level technologists have access to everything—the highest exercise of that privilege is in cases involving the technology itself. Specialist abilities incur weightier responsibilities. Technologists seeking to report on the systemic misuse of technology must do more than just bring their findings to the public, if the significance of those findings is to be understood. They have a duty to contextualize and explain—to demystify.

A few dozen or so of the people best positioned to do this in the whole entire world were here—they were sitting all around me in the Tunnel. My fellow technologists came in every day and sat at their terminals and furthered the work of the state. They weren’t merely oblivious to its abuses, but incurious about them, and that lack of curiosity made them not evil but tragic. It didn’t matter whether they’d come to the IC out of patriotism or opportunism: once they’d gotten inside the machine, they became machines themselves.

²² Fourth Estate

Nothing is harder than living with a secret that can’t be spoken. Lying to strangers about a cover identity or concealing the fact that your office is under the world’s most top-secret pineapple field might sound like it qualifies, but at least you’re part of a team: though your work may be secret, it’s a shared secret, and therefore a shared burden. There is misery but also laughter.

When you have a real secret, though, that you can’t share with anyone, even the laughter is a lie. I could talk about my concerns, but never about where they were leading me. To the day I die I’ll remember explaining to my colleagues how our work was being applied to violate the oaths we had sworn to uphold and their verbal shrug in response: “What can you do about it?” I hated that question, its sense of resignation, its sense of defeat, but it still felt valid enough that I had to ask myself, “Well, what?”

When the answer presented itself, I decided to become a whistleblower. Yet to breathe to Lindsay, the love of my life, even a word about that decision would have put our relationship to an even crueler test than saying nothing. Not wishing to cause her any more harm than I was already resigned to causing, I kept silent, and in my silence I was alone.

I thought that solitude and isolation would be easy for me, or at least easier than it had been for my predecessors in the whistleblowing world. Hadn’t each step of my life served as a kind of preparation? Hadn’t I gotten used to being alone, after all those years spent hushed and spellbound in front of a screen? I’d been the solo hacker, the night-shift harbormaster, the keeper of the keys in an empty office. But I was human, too, and the lack of companionship was hard. Each day was haunted by struggle, as I tried and failed to reconcile the moral and the legal, my duties and my desires. I had everything I’d ever wanted—love, family, and success far beyond what I ever deserved—and I lived in Eden amid plentiful trees, only one of which was forbidden to me. The easiest thing should have been to follow the rules.

And even if I was already reconciled to the dangers of my decision, I wasn’t yet adjusted to the role. After all, who was I to put this information in front of the American public? Who’d elected me the president of secrets?

The information I intended to disclose about my country’s secret regime of mass surveillance was so explosive, and yet so technical, that I was as scared of being doubted as I was of being misunderstood. That was why my first decision, after resolving to go public, was to go public with documentation. The way to reveal a secret program might have been merely to describe its existence, but the way to reveal programmatic secrecy was to describe its workings. This required documents, the agency’s actual files—as many as necessary to expose the scope of the abuse though I knew that disclosing even one PDF would be enough to earn me prison.

The threat of government retribution against any entity or platform to which I made the disclosure led me to briefly consider self-publishing. That would’ve been the most convenient and safest method: just collecting the documents that best communicated my concerns and posting them online, as they were, then circulating a link. Ultimately, one of my reasons for not pursuing this course had to do with authentication. Scores of people post “classified secrets” to the Internet every day—many of them about time-travel technologies and aliens. I didn’t want my own revelations, which were fairly incredible already, to get lumped in with the outlandish and lost among the crazy.

It was clear to me then, from the earliest stage of the process, that I required, and that the public deserved, some person or institution to vouch for the veracity of the documents. I also wanted a partner to vet the potential hazards posed by the revelation of classified information, and to help explain that information by putting it in technological and legal context. I trusted myself to present the problems with surveillance, and even to analyze them, but I’d have to trust others to solve them. Regardless of how wary of institutions I might have been by this point, I was far warier of trying to act like one myself. Cooperating with some type of media organization would defend me against the worst accusations of rogue activity, and correct for whatever biases I had, whether they were conscious or unconscious, personal or professional. I didn’t want any political opinion of mine to prejudice anything with regard to the presentation, or reception, of the disclosures. After all, in a country in which everyone was being surveilled, no issue was less partisan than surveillance.

In retrospect, I have to credit at least some of my desire to find ideological filters to Lindsay’s improving influence. Lindsay had spent years patiently instilling in me the lesson that my interests and concerns weren’t always hers, and certainly weren’t always the world’s, and that just because I shared my knowledge didn’t mean that anyone had to share my opinion. Not everybody who was opposed to invasions of privacy might be ready to adopt 256-bit encryption standards or drop off the Internet entirely. An illegal act that disturbed one person as a violation of the Constitution might upset another person as a violation of their privacy, or of that of their spouse or children. Lindsay was my key to unlocking this truth—that diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving common goals. She, without even knowing it, gave me the confidence to conquer my qualms and reach out to other people.

But which people? Who? It might be hard to remember, or even to imagine, but at the time when I first considered coming forward, the whistleblower’s forum of choice was WikiLeaks. Back then, it operated in many respects like a traditional publisher, albeit one that was radically skeptical of state power. WikiLeaks regularly joined up with leading international publications like the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País to publish the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news organizations accomplished over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity.

WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received them: pristine and unredacted. This switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs. Effectually, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I’d already rejected as insufficient. I knew that the story the NSA documents told about a global system of mass surveillance deployed in the deepest secrecy was a difficult one to understand—a story so tangled and technical that I was increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a “document dump,” but only by the patient and careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the best scenario I could conceive of, with the support of multiple independent press institutions.

Though I felt some relief once I’d resolved to disclose directly to journalists, I still had some lingering reservations. Most of them involved my country’s most prestigious publications—particularly America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn’t stop reminding myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the government’s warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen.

Those two journalists, by combining information from Justice Department whistleblowers with their own reporting, had managed to uncover one aspect of STELLARWIND—the NSA’s original-recipe post-9/11 surveillance initiative—and had produced a fully written, edited, and fact-checked article about it, ready to go to press by mid-2004. It was at this point that the paper’s editor in chief, Bill Keller, ran the article past the government, as part of a courtesy process whose typical purpose is for a publication’s editorial staff to have a chance to assess the government’s arguments as to why the publication of certain information might endanger national security. In this case, as in most cases, the government refused to provide a specific reason, but implied that one existed and that it was classified, too. The Bush administration told Keller and the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, without providing any evidence, that the Times would be emboldening America’s enemies and enabling terror if it went public with the information that the government was wiretapping American citizens without a warrant. Unfortunately, the paper allowed itself to be convinced and spiked the article. Lichtblau and Risen’s reporting finally ran, but over a year later, in December 2005, and only after Risen pressured the paper by announcing that the material was included in a book of his that was about to be released. Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have changed the course of the 2004 election.

If the Times, or any paper, did something similar to me—if it took my revelations, reported on them, submitted the reporting for review, and then suppressed its publication—I’d be sunk. Given the likelihood of my identification as the source, it would be tantamount to turning me in before any revelations were brought to the public.

If I couldn’t trust a legacy newspaper, could I trust any institution? Why even bother? I hadn’t signed up for any of this. I had just wanted to screw around with computers and maybe do some good for my country along the way. I had a lease and a lover and my health was improved. Every STOP sign on my commute I took as advice to stop this voluntary madness. My head and heart were in conflict, with the only constant being the desperate hope that somebody else, somewhere else, would figure it out on their own. After all, wasn’t journalism about following the bread crumbs and connecting the dots? What else did reporters do all day, besides tweet?

I knew at least two things about the denizens of the Fourth Estate: they competed for scoops, and they knew very little about technology. It was this lack of expertise or even interest in tech that largely caused journalists to miss two events that stunned me during the course of my fact-gathering about mass surveillance.

The first was the NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah. The agency called it the Massive Data Repository, until somebody with a knack for PR realized the name might be tough to explain if it ever got out, so it was renamed the Mission Data Repository—because as long as you don’t change the acronym, you don’t have to change all the briefing slides. The MDR was projected to contain a total of four twenty-five-thousand-square-foot halls, filled with servers. It could hold an immense amount of data, basically a rolling history of the entire planet’s pattern of life, insofar as life can be understood through the connection of payments to people, people to phones, phones to calls, calls to networks, and the synoptic array of Internet activity moving along those networks’ lines.

The only prominent journalist who seemed to notice the announcement was James Bamford, who wrote about it for Wired in March 2012. There were a few follow-ups in the nontech press, but none of them furthered the reporting. No one asked what, to me at least, were the most basic questions: Why does any government agency, let alone an intelligence agency, need that much space? What data, and how much of it, do they really intend to store there, and for how long? Because there was simply no reason to build something to those specs unless you were planning on storing absolutely everything, forever. Here was, to my mind, the corpus delicti—the plain-as-day corroboration of a crime, in a gigantic concrete bunker surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, sucking up a city’s worth of electricity from its own power grid in the middle of the Utah desert. And no one was paying attention.

The second event happened one year later, in March 2013—one week after Clapper lied to Congress and Congress gave him a pass. A few periodicals had covered that testimony, though they merely regurgitated Clapper’s denial that the NSA collected bulk data on Americans. But no so-called mainstream publication at all covered a rare public appearance by Ira “Gus” Hunt, the chief technology officer of the CIA.

I’d known Gus slightly from my Dell stint with the CIA. He was one of our top customers, and every vendor loved his apparent inability to be discreet: he’d always tell you more than he was supposed to. For sales guys, he was like a bag of money with a mouth. Now he was appearing as a special guest speaker at a civilian tech event in New York called the GigaOM Structure: Data conference. Anyone with $40 could go to it. The major talks, such as Gus’s, were streamed for free live online.

The reason I’d made sure to catch his talk was that I’d just read, through internal NSA channels, that the CIA had finally decided on the disposition of its cloud contract. It had refused my old team at Dell, and turned down HP, too, instead signing a ten-year, $600 million cloud development and management deal with Amazon. I had no negative feelings about this—actually, at this juncture, I was pleased that my work wasn’t going to be used by the agency. I was just curious, from a professional standpoint, whether Gus might obliquely address this announcement and offer any insight into why Amazon had been chosen, since rumors were going around that the proposal process had been rigged in Amazon’s favor.

I got insight, certainly, but of an unexpected kind. I had the opportunity of witnessing the highest-ranking technical officer at the CIA stand onstage in a rumpled suit and brief a crowd of uncleared normies—and, via the Internet, the uncleared world—about the agency’s ambitions and capacities. As his presentation unfolded, and he alternated bad jokes with an even worse command of PowerPoint, I grew more and more incredulous.

“At the CIA,” he said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, he went on: “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human generated information.” The underline was Gus’s own. He was reading from his slide deck, ugly words in an ugly font illustrated with the government’s signature four-color clip art.

There were a few journalists in the crowd, apparently, though it seemed as if almost all of them were from specialty tech-government publications like Federal Computer Week. It was telling that Gus stuck around for a Q & A toward the conclusion of his presentation. Rather, it wasn’t quite a Q & A, but more like an auxiliary presentation, offered directly to the journalists. He must have been trying to get something off his chest, and it wasn’t just his clown tie.

Gus told the journalists that the agency could track their smartphones, even when they were turned off—that the agency could surveil every single one of their communications. Remember: this was a crowd of domestic journalists. American journalists. And the way that Gus said “could” came off as “has,” “does,” and “will.” He perorated in a distinctly disturbed, and disturbing, manner, at least for a CIA high priest: “Technology is moving faster than government or law can keep up. It’s moving faster … than you can keep up: you should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.” I was floored—anybody more junior than Gus who had given a presentation like this would’ve been wearing orange by the end of the day.

Coverage of Gus’s confession ran only in the Huffington Post. But the performance itself lived on at YouTube, where it still remains, at least at the time of this writing six years later. The last time I checked, it had 313 views—a dozen of them mine.

The lesson I took from this was that for my disclosures to be effective, I had to do more than just hand some journalists some documents—more, even, than help them interpret the documents. I had to become their partner, to provide the technological training and tools to help them do their reporting accurately and safely. Taking this course of action would mean giving myself over totally to one of the capital crimes of intelligence work: whereas other spies have committed espionage, sedition, and treason, I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism. The perverse fact is that legally, those crimes are virtually synonymous. American law makes no distinction between providing classified information to the press in the public interest and providing it, even selling it, to the enemy. The only opinion I’ve ever found to contradict this came from my first indoctrination into the IC: there, I was told that it was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.

Given the risks I was taking, I needed to identify people I could trust who were also trusted by the public. I needed reporters who were diligent yet discreet, independent yet reliable. They would need to be strong enough to challenge me on the distinctions between what I suspected and what the evidence proved, and to challenge the government when it falsely accused their work of endangering lives. Above all, I had to be sure that whoever I picked wouldn’t ultimately cave to power when put under pressure that was certain to be like nothing they, or I, had ever experienced before.

I cast my net not so widely as to imperil the mission, but widely enough to avoid a single point of failure—the New York Times problem. One journalist, one publication, even one country of publication wouldn’t be enough, because the US government had already demonstrated its willingness to stifle such reporting. Ideally, I’d give each journalist their own set of documents simultaneously, leaving me with none. This would shift the focus of scrutiny to them, and ensure that even if I were arrested the truth would still get out.

As I narrowed down my list of potential partners, I realized I’d been going about this all wrong, or just wastefully. Instead of trying to select the journalists on my own, I should have been letting the system that I was trying to expose select them for me. My best partners, I decided, would be journalists whom the national security state had already targeted.

Laura Poitras I knew as a documentarian, primarily concerned with America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Her film My Country, My Country depicted the 2005 Iraqi national elections that were conducted under (and frustrated by) the US occupation. She had also made The Program, about the NSA cryptanalyst William Binney—who had raised objections through proper channels about TRAILBLAZER, the predecessor of STELLARWIND, only to be accused of leaking classified information, subjected to repeated harassment, and arrested at gunpoint in his home, though never charged. Laura herself had been frequently harassed by the government because of her work, repeatedly detained and interrogated by border agents whenever she traveled in or out of the country.

Glenn Greenwald I knew as a civil liberties lawyer turned columnist, initially for Salon—where he was one of the few who wrote about the unclassified version of the NSA IG’s Report back in 2009—and later for the US edition of the Guardian. I liked him because he was skeptical and argumentative, the kind of man who’d fight with the devil, and when the devil wasn’t around fight with himself. Though Ewen MacAskill, of the British edition of the Guardian, and Bart Gellman of the Washington Post would later prove stalwart partners (and patient guides to the journalistic wilderness), I found my earliest affinity with Laura and Glenn, perhaps because they weren’t merely interested in reporting on the IC but had personal stakes in understanding the institution.

The only hitch was getting in touch.

Unable to reveal my true name, I contacted the journalists under a variety of identities, disposable masks worn for a time and then discarded. The first of these was “Cincinnatus,” after the legendary farmer who became a Roman consul and then voluntarily relinquished his power. That was followed by “Citizenfour,” a handle that some journalists took to mean that I considered myself the fourth dissident-employee in the NSA’s recent history, after Binney and his fellow TRAILBLAZER whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis—though the triumvirate I actually had in mind consisted of Thomas Drake, who disclosed the existence of TRAILBLAZER to journalists, and Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, whose disclosure of The Pentagon Papers helped expose the deceptions of the Vietnam War and bring it to an end. The final name I chose for my correspondence was “Verax,” Latin for “speaker of truth,” in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called “Mendax” (“speaker of lies”)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.

You can’t really appreciate how hard it is to stay anonymous online until you’ve tried to operate as if your life depended on it. Most of the communications systems set up in the IC have a single basic aim: the observer of a communication must not be able to discern the identities of those involved, or in any way attribute them to an agency. This is why the IC calls these exchanges “non-attributable.” The pre-Internet spycraft of anonymity is famous, mostly from TV and the movies: a safe-house address coded in bathroom-stall graffiti, for instance, or scrambled into the abbreviations of a classified ad. Or think of the Cold War’s “dead drops,” the chalk marks on mailboxes signaling that a secret package was waiting inside a particular hollowed-out tree in a public park. The modern version might be fake profiles trading fake chats on a dating site, or, more commonly, just a superficially innocuous app that leaves superficially innocuous messages on a superficially innocuous Amazon server secretly controlled by the CIA. What I wanted, however, was something even better than that—something that required none of that exposure, and none of that budget.

I decided to use somebody else’s Internet connection. I wish that were simply a matter of going to a McDonald’s or Starbucks and signing on to their Wi-Fi. But those places have CCTV, and receipts, and other people—memories with legs. Moreover, every wireless device, from a phone to a laptop, has a globally unique identifier called a MAC (Machine Address Code), which it leaves on record with every access point it connects to—a forensic marker of its user’s movements.

So I didn’t go to McDonald’s or Starbucks—I went driving. Specifically, I went war-driving, which is when you convert your car into a roving Wi-Fi sensor. For this you need a laptop, a high-powered antenna, and a magnetic GPS sensor, which can be slapped atop the roof. Power is provided by the car or by a portable battery, or else by the laptop itself. Everything you need can fit into a backpack.

I took along a cheap laptop running TAILS, which is a Linux-based “amnesiac” operating system—meaning it forgets everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof,” or disguise, the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way associable with mine. Usefully enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.

At nights and on weekends, I drove around what seemed like the entire island of Oahu, letting my antenna pick up the pulses of each Wi-Fi network. My GPS sensor tagged each access point with the location at which it was noticed, thanks to a mapping program I used called Kismet. What resulted was a map of the invisible networks we pass by every day without even noticing, a scandalously high percentage of which had either no security at all or security I could trivially bypass. Some of the networks required more sophisticated hacking. I’d briefly jam a network, causing its legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their “authentication packets,” which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on just like any other “authorized” user.

With this network map in hand, I’d drive around Oahu like a madman, trying to check my email to see which of the journalists had replied to me. Having made contact with Laura Poitras, I’d spend much of the evening writing to her—sitting behind the wheel of my car at the beach, filching the Wi-Fi from a nearby resort. Some of the journalists I’d chosen needed convincing to use encrypted email, which back in 2012 was a pain. In some cases, I had to show them how, so I’d upload tutorials—sitting in my idling car in a parking lot, availing myself of the network of a library. Or of a school. Or of a gas station. Or of a bank—which had horrifyingly poor protections. The point was to not create any patterns.

Atop the parking garage of a mall, secure in the knowledge that the moment I closed the lid of my laptop, my secret was safe, I’d draft manifestos explaining why I’d gone public, but then delete them. And then I’d try writing emails to Lindsay, only to delete them, too. I just couldn’t find the words.

²³ Read, Write, Execute

Read, Write, Execute: in computing, these are called permissions. Functionally speaking, they determine the extent of your authority within a computer or computer network, defining what exactly you can and cannot do. The right to read a file allows you to access its contents, while the right to write a file allows you to modify it. Execution, meanwhile, means that you have the ability to run a file or program, to carry out the actions it was designed to do.

Read, Write, Execute: this was my simple three-step plan. I wanted to burrow into the heart of the world’s most secure network to find the truth, make a copy of it, and get it out into the world. And I had to do all this without getting caught—without being read, written, and executed myself.

Almost everything you do on a computer, on any device, leaves a record. Nowhere is this more true than at the NSA. Each log-in and log-out creates a log entry. Each permission I used left its own forensic trace. Every time I opened a file, every time I copied a file, that action was recorded. Every time I downloaded, moved, or deleted a file, that was recorded, too, and security logs were updated to reflect the event. There were network flow records, public key infrastructure records—people even joked about cameras hidden in the bathrooms, in the bathroom stalls. The agency had a not inconsiderable number of counterintelligence programs spying on the people who were spying on people, and if even one caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, it wouldn’t be a file that was getting deleted.

Luckily, the strength of these systems was also their weakness: their complexity meant that not even the people running them necessarily knew how they worked. Nobody actually understood where they overlapped and where their gaps were. Nobody, that is, except the systems administrators. After all, those sophisticated monitoring systems you’re imagining, the ones with scary names like MIDNIGHTRIDER—somebody’s got to install them in the first place. The NSA may have paid for the network, but sysadmins like myself were the ones who really owned it.

The Read phase would involve dancing through the digital grid of tripwires laid across the routes connecting the NSA to every other intelligence agency, domestic and foreign. (Among these was the NSA’s UK partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which was setting up dragnets like OPTICNERVE, a program that saved a snapshot every five minutes from the cameras of people video-chatting on platforms like Yahoo Messenger, and PHOTONTORPEDO, which grabbed the IP addresses of MSN Messenger users.) By using Heartbeat to bring in the documents I wanted, I could turn “bulk collection” against those who’d turned it against the public, effectively Frankensteining the IC. The agency’s security tools kept track of who read what, but it didn’t matter: anyone who bothered to check their logs was used to seeing Heartbeat by now. It would sound no alarms. It was the perfect cover.

But while Heartbeat would work as a way of collecting the files—far too many files—it only brought them to the server in Hawaii, a server that kept logs even I couldn’t get around. I needed a way to work with the files, search them, and discard the irrelevant and uninteresting, along with those containing legitimate secrets that I wouldn’t be giving to journalists. At this point, still in my Read phase, the hazards were manifold, due mainly to the fact that the protocols I was up against were no longer geared to monitoring but to prevention. If I ran my searches on the Heartbeat server, it would light a massive electronic sign blinking ARREST ME.

I thought about this for a while. I couldn’t just copy the files directly from the Heartbeat server onto a personal storage device and waltz out of the Tunnel without being caught. What I could do, though, was bring the files closer, directing them to an intermediate way station.

I couldn’t send them to one of our regular computers, because by 2012 all of the Tunnel had been upgraded to new “thin client” machines: small helpless computers with crippled drives and CPUs that couldn’t store or process data on their own, but did all of their storage and processing on the cloud. In a forgotten corner of the office, however, there was a pyramid of disused desktop computers—old, moldering legacy machines the agency had wiped clean and discarded. When I say old here, I mean young by the standards of anyone who doesn’t live on a budget the size of the NSA’s. They were Dell PCs from as recently as 2009 or 2010, large gray rectangles of comforting weight, which could store and process data on their own without being connected to the cloud. What I liked about them was that though they were still in the NSA system, they couldn’t really be closely tracked as long as I kept them off the central networks.

I could easily justify needing to use these stolid, reliable boxes by claiming that I was trying to make sure Heartbeat worked with older operating systems. After all, not everybody at every NSA site had one of the new “thin clients” just yet. And what if Dell wanted to implement a civilian version of Heartbeat? Or what if the CIA, or FBI, or some similarly backward organization wanted to use it? Under the guise of compatibility testing, I could transfer the files to these old computers, where I could search, filter, and organize them as much as I wanted, as long as I was careful. I was carrying one of the big old hulks back to my desk when I passed one of the IT directors, who stopped me and asked me what I needed it for—he’d been a major proponent of getting rid of them. “Stealing secrets,” I answered, and we laughed.

The Read phase ended with the files I wanted all neatly organized into folders. But they were still on a computer that wasn’t mine, which was still in the Tunnel underground. Enter, then, the Write phase, which for my purposes meant the agonizingly slow, boring-but-also-cripplingly-scary process of copying the files from the legacy Dells something that I could spirit out of the building.

The easiest and safest way to copy a file off any IC workstation is also the oldest: a camera. Smartphones, of course, are banned in NSA buildings, but workers accidentally bring them in all the time without anyone noticing. They leave them in their gym bags or in the pockets of their windbreakers. If they’re caught with one in a random search and they act goofily abashed instead of screaming panicked Mandarin into their wristwatch, they’re often merely warned, especially if it’s their first offense. But getting a smartphone loaded with NSA secrets out of the Tunnel is a riskier gambit. Odds are that nobody would’ve noticed—or cared—if I walked out with a smartphone, and it might have been an adequate tool for a staffer trying to copy a single torture report, but I wasn’t wild about the idea of taking thousands of pictures of my computer screen in the middle of a top secret facility. Also, the phone would have had to be configured in such a way that even the world’s foremost forensic experts could seize and search it without finding anything on it that they shouldn’t.

I’m going to refrain from publishing how exactly I went about my own writing—my own copying and encryption—so that the NSA will still be standing tomorrow. I will mention, however, what storage technology I used for the copied files. Forget thumbdrives; they’re too bulky for the relatively small amount they store. I went, instead, for SD cards—the acronym stands for Secure Digital. Actually, I went for the mini- and micro-SD cards.

You’ll recognize SD cards if you’ve ever used a digital camera or video camera, or needed more storage on a tablet. They’re tiny little buggers, miracles of nonvolatile flash storage, and—at 20 x 21.5 mm for the mini, 15 x 11 mm for the micro, basically the size of your pinkie fingernail—eminently concealable. You can fit one inside the pried-off square of a Rubik’s Cube, then stick the square back on, and nobody will notice. In other attempts I carried a card in my sock, or, at my most paranoid, in my cheek, so I could swallow it if I had to. Eventually, as I gained confidence, and certainty in my methods of encryption, I’d just keep a card at the bottom of my pocket. They hardly ever triggered metal detectors, and who wouldn’t believe I’d simply forgotten something so small?

The size of SD cards, however, has one downside: they’re extremely slow to write. Copying times for massive volumes of data are always long—at least always longer than you want—but the duration tends to stretch even more when you’re copying not to a speedy hard drive but to a minuscule silicon wafer embedded in plastic. Also, I wasn’t just copying. I was deduplicating, compressing, encrypting, none of which processes could be accomplished simultaneously with any other. I was using all the skills I’d ever acquired in my storage work, because that’s what I was doing, essentially. I was storing the NSA’s storage, making an off-site backup of evidence of the IC’s abuses.

It could take eight hours or more—entire shifts—to fill a card. And though I switched to working nights again, those hours were terrifying. There was the old computer chugging, monitor off, with all but one fluorescent ceiling panel dimmed to save energy in the after-hours. And there I was, turning the monitor back on every once in a while to check the rate of progress and cringing. You know the feeling—the sheer hell of following the completion bar as it indicates 84 percent completed, 85 percent completed … 1:58:53 left … As it filled toward the sweet relief of 100 percent, all files copied, I’d be sweating, seeing shadows and hearing footsteps around every corner.

EXECUTE: THAT WAS the final step. As each card filled, I had to run my getaway routine. I had to get that vital archive out of the building, past the bosses and military uniforms, down the stairs and out the empty hall, past the badge scans and armed guards and mantraps—those two-doored security zones in which the next door doesn’t open until the previous door shuts and your badge scan is approved, and if it isn’t, or if anything else goes awry, the guards draw their weapons and the doors lock you in and you say, “Well, isn’t this embarrassing?” This—per all the reports I’d been studying, and all the nightmares I’d been having—was where they’d catch me, I was sure of it. Each time I left, I was petrified. I’d have to force myself not to think about the SD card. When you think about it, you act differently, suspiciously.

One unexpected upshot of gaining a better understanding of NSA surveillance was that I’d also gained a better understanding of the dangers I faced. In other words, learning about the agency’s systems had taught me how not to get caught by them. My guides in this regard were the indictments that the government had brought against former agents—mostly real bastards who, in IC jargon, had “exfiltrated” classified information for profit. I compiled, and studied, as many of these indictments as I could. The FBI—the agency that investigates all crime within the IC—took great pride in explaining exactly how they caught their suspects, and believe me, I didn’t mind benefiting from their experience. It seemed that in almost every case, the FBI would wait to make its arrest until the suspect had finished their work and was about to go home. Sometimes they would let the suspect take the material out of a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is a type of building or room shielded against surveillance—and out into the public, where its very presence was a federal crime. I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me—there, out in the public light, just at the far end of the Tunnel.

I’d usually try to banter with the guards, and this was where my Rubik’s Cube came in most handy. I was known to the guards and to everybody else at the Tunnel as the Rubik’s Cube guy, because I was always working the cube as I walked down the halls. I got so adept I could even solve it one-handed. It became my totem, my spirit toy, and a distraction device as much for myself as for my coworkers. Most of them thought it was an affectation, or a nerdy conversation starter. And it was, but primarily it relieved my anxiety. It calmed me.

I bought a few cubes and handed them out. Anyone who took to it, I’d give them pointers. The more that people got used to them, the less they’d ever want a closer look at mine.

I got along with the guards, or I told myself I did, mostly because I knew where their minds were: elsewhere. I’d done something like their job before, back at CASL. I knew how mind-numbing it was to spend all night standing, feigning vigilance. Your feet hurt. After a while, all the rest of you hurts. And you can get so lonely that you’ll talk to a wall.

I aimed to be more entertaining than the wall, developing my own patter for each human obstacle. There was the one guard I talked to about insomnia and the difficulties of day-sleeping (remember, I was on nights, so this would’ve been around two in the morning). Another guy, we discussed politics. He called Democrats “Demon Rats,” so I’d read Breitbart News in preparation for the conversation. What they all had in common was a reaction to my cube: it made them smile. Over the course of my employment at the Tunnel, pretty much all the guards said some variation of, “Oh man, I used to play with that when I was a kid,” and then, invariably, “I tried to take the stickers off to solve it.” Me too, buddy. Me too.

It was only once I got home that I was able to relax, even just slightly. I was still worried about the house being wired—that was another one of those charming methods the FBI used against those it suspected of inadequate loyalty. I’d rebuff Lindsay’s concerns about my insomniac ways until she hated me and I hated myself. She’d go to bed and I’d go to the couch, hiding with my laptop under a blanket like a child because cotton beats cameras. With the threat of immediate arrest out of the way, I could focus on transferring the files to a larger external storage device via my laptop—only somebody who didn’t understand technology very well would think I’d keep them on the laptop forever—and locking them down under multiple layers of encryption algorithms using differing implementations, so that even if one failed the others would keep them safe.

I’d been careful not to leave any traces at my work, and I took care that my encryption left no traces of the documents at home. Still, I knew the documents could lead back to me once I’d sent them to the journalists and they’d been decrypted. Any investigator looking at which agency employees had accessed, or could access, all these materials would come up with a list with probably only a single name on it: mine. I could provide the journalists with fewer materials, of course, but then they wouldn’t be able to most effectively do their work. Ultimately, I had to contend with the fact that even one briefing slide or PDF left me vulnerable, because all digital files contain metadata, invisible tags that can be used to identify their origins.

I struggled with how to handle this metadata situation. I worried that if I didn’t strip the identifying information from the documents, they might incriminate me the moment the journalists decrypted and opened them. But I also worried that by thoroughly stripping the metadata, I risked altering the files—if they were changed in any way, that could cast doubt on their authenticity. Which was more important: personal safety, or the public good? It might sound like an easy choice, but it took me quite a while to bite the bullet. I owned the risk, and left the metadata intact.

Part of what convinced me was my fear that even if I had stripped away the metadata I knew about, there could be other digital watermarks I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t scan for. Another part had to do with the difficulty of scrubbing single-user documents. A single-user document is a document marked with a user-specific code, so that if any publication’s editorial staff decided to run it by the government, the government would know its source. Sometimes the unique identifier was hidden in the date and time-stamp coding, sometimes it involved the pattern of microdots in a graphic or logo. But it might also be embedded in something, in some way, I hadn’t even thought of. This phenomenon should have discouraged me, but instead it emboldened me. The technological difficulty forced me, for the first time, to confront the prospect of discarding my lifetime practice of anonymity and coming forward to identify myself as the source. I would embrace my principles by signing my name to them and let myself be condemned.

Altogether, the documents I selected fit on a single drive, which I left out in the open on my desk at home. I knew that the materials were just as secure now as they had ever been at the office. Actually, they were more secure, thanks to multiple levels and methods of encryption. That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.

²⁴ Encrypt

Most people who use computers, and that includes members of the Fourth Estate, think there’s a fourth basic permission besides Read, Write, and Execute, called “Delete.”

Delete is everywhere on the user side of computing. It’s in the hardware as a key on the keyboard, and it’s in the software as an option that can be chosen from a drop-down menu. There’s a certain finality that comes with choosing Delete, and a certain sense of responsibility. Sometimes a box even pops up to double-check: “Are you sure?” If the computer is second-guessing you by requiring confirmation—click “Yes”—it makes sense that Delete would be a consequential, perhaps even the ultimate decision.

Undoubtedly, that’s true in the world outside of computing, where the powers of deletion have historically been vast. Even so, as countless despots have been reminded, to truly get rid of a document you can’t just destroy every copy of it. You also have to destroy every memory of it, which is to say you have to destroy all the people who remember it, along with every copy of all the other documents that mention it and all the people who remember all those other documents. And then, maybe, just maybe, it’s gone.

Delete functions appeared from the very start of digital computing. Engineers understood that in a world of effectively unlimited options, some choices would inevitably turn out to be mistakes. Users, regardless of whether or not they were really in control at the technical level, had to feel in control, especially with regard to anything that they themselves had created. If they made a file, they should be able to unmake it at will. The ability to destroy what they created and start over afresh was a primary function that imparted a sense of agency to the user, despite the fact that they might be dependent on proprietary hardware they couldn’t repair and software they couldn’t modify, and bound by the rules of third-party platforms.

Think about the reasons that you yourself press Delete. On your personal computer, you might want to get rid of some document you screwed up, or some file you downloaded but no longer need—or some file you don’t want anyone to know you ever needed. On your email, you might delete an email from a former lover that you don’t want to remember or don’t want your spouse to find, or an RSVP for that protest you went to. On your phone, you might delete the history of everywhere that phone has traveled, or some of the pictures, videos, and private records it automatically uploaded to the cloud. In every instance, you delete, and the thing—the file—appears to be gone.

The truth, though, is that deletion has never existed technologically in the way that we conceive of it. Deletion is just a ruse, a figment, a public fiction, a not-quite-noble lie that computing tells you to reassure you and give you comfort. Although the deleted file disappears from view, it is rarely gone. In technical terms, deletion is really just a form of the middle permission, a kind of Write. Normally, when you press Delete for one of your files, its data—which has been stashed deep down on a disk somewhere—is not actually touched. Efficient modern operating systems are not designed to go all the way into the bowels of a disk purely for the purposes of erasure. Instead, only the computer’s map of where each file is stored—a map called the “file table”—is rewritten to say “I’m no longer using this space for anything important.” What this means is that, like a neglected book in a vast library, the supposedly erased file can still be read by anyone who looks hard enough for it. If you only erase the reference to it, the book itself still remains.

This can be confirmed through experience, actually. Next time you copy a file, ask yourself why it takes so long when compared with the instantaneous act of deletion. The answer is that deletion doesn’t really do anything to a file besides conceal it. Put simply, computers were not designed to correct mistakes, but to hide them—and to hide them only from those parties who don’t know where to look.

THE WANING DAYS of 2012 brought grim news: the few remaining legal protections that prohibited mass surveillance by some of the most prominent members of the Five Eyes network were being dismantled. The governments of both Australia and the UK were proposing legislation for the mandatory recording of telephony and Internet metadata. This was the first time that notionally democratic governments publicly avowed the ambition to establish a sort of surveillance time machine, which would enable them to technologically rewind the events of any person’s life for a period going back months and even years. These attempts definitively marked, to my mind at least, the so-called Western world’s transformation from the creator and defender of the free Internet to its opponent and prospective destroyer. Though these laws were justified as public safety measures, they represented such a breathtaking intrusion into the daily lives of the innocent that they terrified—quite rightly—even the citizens of other countries who didn’t think themselves affected (perhaps because their own governments chose to surveil them in secret).

These public initiatives of mass surveillance proved, once and for all, that there could be no natural alliance between technology and government. The rift between my two strangely interrelated communities, the American IC and the global online tribe of technologists, became pretty much definitive. In my earliest years in the IC, I could still reconcile the two cultures, transitioning smoothly between my spy work and my relationships with civilian Internet privacy folks—everyone from the anarchist hackers to the more sober academic Tor types who kept me current about computing research and inspired me politically. For years, I was able to fool myself that we were all, ultimately, on the same side of history: we were all trying to protect the Internet, to keep it free for speech and free of fear. But my ability to sustain that delusion was gone. Now the government, my employer, was definitively the adversary. What my technologist peers had always suspected, I’d only recently confirmed, and I couldn’t tell them. Or I couldn’t tell them yet.

What I could do, however, was help them out, so long as that didn’t imperil my plans. This was how I found myself in Honolulu, a beautiful city in which I’d never had much interest, as one of the hosts and teachers of a CryptoParty. This was a new type of gathering invented by an international grassroots cryptological movement, at which technologists volunteered their time to teach free classes to the public on the topic of digital self-defense—essentially, showing anyone who was interested how to protect the security of their communications. In many ways, this was the same topic I taught for JCITA, so I jumped at the chance to participate.

Though this might strike you as a dangerous thing for me to have done, given the other activities I was involved with at the time, it should instead just reaffirm how much faith I had in the encryption methods I taught—the very methods that protected that drive full of IC abuses sitting back at my house, with locks that couldn’t be cracked even by the NSA. I knew that no number of documents, and no amount of journalism, would ever be enough to address the threat the world was facing. People needed tools to protect themselves, and they needed to know how to use them. Given that I was also trying to provide these tools to journalists, I was worried that my approach had become too technical. After so many sessions spent lecturing colleagues, this opportunity to simplify my treatment of the subject for a general audience would benefit me as much as anyone. Also, I honestly missed teaching: it had been a year since I’d stood at the front of a class, and the moment I was back in that position I realized I’d been teaching the right things to the wrong people all along.

When I say class, I don’t mean anything like the IC’s schools or briefing rooms. The CryptoParty was held in a one-room art gallery behind a furniture store and coworking space. While I was setting up the projector so I could share slides showing how easy it was to run a Tor server to help, for example, the citizens of Iran—but also the citizens of Australia, the UK, and the States—my students drifted in, a diverse crew of strangers and a few new friends I’d only met online. All in all, I’d say about twenty people showed up that December night to learn from me and my co-lecturer, Runa Sandvik, a bright young Norwegian woman from the Tor Project. (Runa would go on to work as the senior director of information security for the New York Times, which would sponsor her later CryptoParties.) What united our audience wasn’t an interest in Tor, or even a fear of being spied on as much as a desire to re-establish a sense of control over the private spaces in their lives. There were some grandparent types who’d wandered in off the street, a local journalist covering the Hawaiian “Occupy!” movement, and a woman who’d been victimized by revenge porn. I’d also invited some of my NSA colleagues, hoping to interest them in the movement and wanting to show that I wasn’t concealing my involvement from the agency. Only one of them showed up, though, and sat in the back, legs spread, arms crossed, smirking throughout.

I began my presentation by discussing the illusory nature of deletion, whose objective of total erasure could never be accomplished. The crowd understood this instantly. I went on to explain that, at best, the data they wanted no one to see couldn’t be unwritten so much as overwritten: scribbled over, in a sense, with random or pseudo-random data until the original was rendered unreadable. But, I cautioned, even this approach had its drawbacks. There was always a chance that their operating system had silently hidden away a copy of the file they were hoping to delete in some temporary storage nook they weren’t privy to.

That’s when I pivoted to encryption.

Deletion is a dream for the surveillant and a nightmare for the surveilled, but encryption is, or should be, a reality for all. It is the only true protection against surveillance. If the whole of your storage drive is encrypted to begin with, your adversaries can’t rummage through it for deleted files, or for anything else—unless they have the encryption key. If all the emails in your inbox are encrypted, Google can’t read them to profile you—unless they have the encryption key. If all your communications that pass through hostile Australian or British or American or Chinese or Russian networks are encrypted, spies can’t read them—unless they have the encryption key. This is the ordering principle of encryption: all power to the key holder.

Encryption works, I explained, by way of algorithms. An encryption algorithm sounds intimidating, and certainly looks intimidating when written out, but its concept is quite elementary. It’s a mathematical method of reversibly transforming information—such as your emails, phone calls, photos, videos, and files—in such a way that it becomes incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a copy of the encryption key. You can think of a modern encryption algorithm as a magic wand that you can wave over a document to change each letter into a language that only you and those you trust can read, and the encryption key as the unique magic words that complete the incantation and put the wand to work. It doesn’t matter how many people know that you used the wand, so long as you can keep your personal magic words from the people you don’t trust.

Encryption algorithms are basically just sets of math problems designed to be incredibly difficult even for computers to solve. The encryption key is the one clue that allows a computer to solve the particular set of math problems being used. You push your readable data, called plaintext, into one end of an encryption algorithm, and incomprehensible gibberish, called ciphertext, comes out the other end. When somebody wants to read the ciphertext, they feed it back into the algorithm along with—crucially—the correct key, and out comes the plaintext again. While different algorithms provide different degrees of protection, the security of an encryption key is often based on its length, which indicates the level of difficulty involved in solving a specific algorithm’s underlying math problem. In algorithms that correlate longer keys with better security, the improvement is exponential. If we presume that an attacker takes one day to crack a 64-bit key—which scrambles your data in one of 2⁶⁴ possible ways (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique permutations)—then it would take double that amount of time, two days, to break a 65-bit key, and four days to break a 66-bit key. Breaking a 128-bit key would take 2⁶⁴ times longer than a day, or fifty million billion years. By that time, I might even be pardoned.

In my communications with journalists, I used 4096- and 8192-bit keys. This meant that absent major innovations in computing technology or a fundamental redefining of the principles by which numbers are factored, not even all of the NSA’s cryptanalysts using all of the world’s computing power put together would be able to get into my drive. For this reason, encryption is the single best hope for fighting surveillance of any kind. If all of our data, including our communications, were enciphered in this fashion, from end to end (from the sender end to the recipient end), then no government—no entity conceivable under our current knowledge of physics, for that matter—would be able to understand them. A government could still intercept and collect the signals, but it would be intercepting and collecting pure noise. Encrypting our communications would essentially delete them from the memories of every entity we deal with. It would effectively withdraw permission from those to whom it was never granted to begin with.

Any government hoping to access encrypted communications has only two options: it can either go after the keymasters or go after the keys. For the former, they can pressure device manufacturers into intentionally selling products that perform faulty encryption, or mislead international standards organizations into accepting flawed encryption algorithms that contain secret access points known as “back doors.” For the latter, they can launch targeted attacks against the endpoints of the communications, the hardware and software that perform the process of encryption. Often, that means exploiting a vulnerability that they weren’t responsible for creating but merely found, and using it to hack you and steal your keys—a technique pioneered by criminals but today embraced by major state powers, even though it means knowingly preserving devastating holes in the cybersecurity of critical international infrastructure.

The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called “zero knowledge,” a method that ensures that any data you try to store externally—say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform—is encrypted by an algorithm running on your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the users’ hands—and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.

My key to the NSA’s secrets went beyond zero knowledge: it was a zero-knowledge key consisting of multiple zero-knowledge keys.

Imagine it like this: Let’s say that at the conclusion of my CryptoParty lecture, I stood by the exit as each of the twenty audience members shuffled out. Now, imagine that as each of them passed through the door and into the Honolulu night, I whispered a word into their ear—a single word that no one else could hear, and that they were only allowed to repeat if they were all together, once again, in the same room. Only by bringing back all twenty of these folks and having them repeat their words in the same order in which I’d originally distributed them could anyone reassemble the complete twenty-word incantation. If just one person forgot their word, or if the order of recitation was in any way different from the order of distribution, no spell would be cast, no magic would happen.

My keys to the drive containing the disclosures resembled this arrangement, with a twist: while I distributed most of the pieces of the incantation, I retained one for myself. Pieces of my magic spell were hidden everywhere, but if I destroyed just the single lone piece that I kept on my person, I would destroy all access to the NSA’s secrets forever.

²⁵ The Boy

It’s only in hindsight that I’m able to appreciate just how high my star had risen. I’d gone from being the student who couldn’t speak in class to being the teacher of the language of a new age, from the child of modest, middle-class Beltway parents to the man living the island life and making so much money that it had lost its meaning. In just the seven short years of my career, I’d climbed from maintaining local servers to crafting and implementing globally deployed systems—from graveyard-shift security guard to key master of the puzzle palace.

But there’s always a danger in letting even the most qualified person rise too far, too fast, before they’ve had enough time to get cynical and abandon their idealism. I occupied one of the most unexpectedly omniscient positions in the Intelligence Community—toward the bottom rung of the managerial ladder, but high atop heaven in terms of access. And while this gave me the phenomenal, and frankly undeserved, ability to observe the IC in its grim fullness, it also left me more curious than ever about the one fact I was still finding elusive: the absolute limit of who the agency could turn its gaze against. It was a limit set less in policy or law than in the ruthless, unyielding capabilities of what I now knew to be a world-spanning machine. Was there anyone this machine could not surveil? Was there anywhere this machine could not go?

The only way to discover the answer was to descend, abandoning my panoptic perch for the narrow vision of an operational role. The NSA employees with the freest access to the rawest forms of intelligence were those who sat in the operator’s chair and typed into their computers the names of the individuals who’d fallen under suspicion, foreigners and US citizens alike. For one reason or another, or for no reason at all, these individuals had become targets of the agency’s closest scrutiny, with the NSA interested in finding out everything about them and their communications. My ultimate destination, I knew, was the exact point of this interface—the exact point where the state cast its eye on the human and the human remained unaware.

The program that enabled this access was called XKEYSCORE, which is perhaps best understood as a search engine that lets an analyst search through all the records of your life. Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages from the public Internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything. Though I’d read enough about the program to understand how it worked, I hadn’t yet used it, and I realized I ought to know more about it. By pursuing XKEYSCORE, I was looking for a personal confirmation of the depths of the NSA’s surveillance intrusions—the kind of confirmation you don’t get from documents but only from direct experience.

One of the few offices in Hawaii with truly unfettered access to XKEYSCORE was the National Threat Operations Center. NTOC worked out of the sparkling but soulless new open-plan office the NSA had formally named the Rochefort Building, after Joseph Rochefort, a legendary World War II–era Naval cryptanalyst who broke Japanese codes. Most employees had taken to calling it the Roach Fort, or simply “the Roach.” At the time I applied for a job there, parts of the Roach were still under construction, and I was immediately reminded of my first cleared job, with CASL: it was my fate to begin and end my IC career in unfinished buildings.

In addition to housing almost all of the agency’s Hawaii-based translators and analysts, the Roach also accommodated the local branch of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division. This was the NSA unit responsible for remotely hacking into the computers of people whom analysts had selected as targets—the agency’s equivalent of the old burglary teams that once snuck into enemies’ homes to plant bugs and find compromising material. NTOC’s main job, by contrast, was to monitor and frustrate the activity of the TAO’s foreign equivalents. As luck would have it, NTOC had a position open through a contractor job at Booz Allen Hamilton, a job they euphemistically described as “infrastructure analyst.” The role involved using the complete spectrum of the NSA’s mass surveillance tools, including XKEYSCORE, to monitor activity on the “infrastructure” of interest, the Internet.

Though I’d be making slightly more money at Booz, around $120,000 a year, I considered it a demotion—the first of many as I began my final descent, jettisoning my accesses, my clearances, and my agency privileges. I was an engineer who was becoming an analyst who would ultimately become an exile, a target of the very technologies I’d once controlled. From that perspective, this particular fall in prestige seemed pretty minor. From that perspective, everything seemed pretty minor, as the arc of my life bent back toward earth, accelerating toward the point of impact that would end my career, my relationship, my freedom, and possibly my life.

I’D DECIDED TO bring my archives out of the country and pass them to the journalists I’d contacted, but before I could even begin to contemplate the logistics of that act I had to go shake some hands. I had to fly east to DC and spend a few weeks meeting and greeting my new bosses and colleagues, who had high hopes for how they might apply my keen understanding of online anonymization to unmask their more clever targets. This was what brought me back home to the Beltway for the very last time, and back to the site of my first encounter with an institution that had lost control: Fort Meade. This time I was arriving as an insider.

The day that marked my coming of age, just over ten tumultuous years earlier, had profoundly changed not just the people who worked at NSA headquarters but the place itself. I first noticed this fact when I got stopped in my rental car trying to turn off Canine Road into one of the agency’s parking lots, which in my memory still howled with panic, ringtones, car horns, and sirens. Since 9/11, all the roads that led to NSA headquarters had been permanently closed to anyone who didn’t possess one of the special IC badges now hanging around my neck.

Whenever I wasn’t glad-handing NTOC leadership at headquarters, I spent my time learning everything I could—“hot-desking” with analysts who worked different programs and different types of targets, so as to be able to teach my fellow team members back in Hawaii the newest ways the agency’s tools might be used. That, at least, was the official explanation of my curiosity, which as always exceeded the requirements and earned the gratitude of the technologically inclined. They, in turn, were as eager as ever to demonstrate the power of the machinery they’d developed, without expressing a single qualm about how that power was applied. While at headquarters, I was also put through a series of tests on the proper use of the system, which were more like regulatory compliance exercises or procedural shields than meaningful instruction. The other analysts told me that since I could take these tests as many times as I had to, I shouldn’t bother learning the rules: “Just click the boxes until you pass.”

The NSA described XKEYSCORE, in the documents I’d later pass on to journalists, as its “widest-ranging” tool, used to search “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.” The technical specs I studied went into more detail as to how exactly this was accomplished—by “packetizing” and “sessionizing,” or cutting up the data of a user’s online sessions into manageable packets for analysis—but nothing could prepare me for seeing it in action.

It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.

My weeks at Fort Meade, and the short stint I put in at Booz back in Hawaii, were the only times I saw, firsthand, the abuses actually being committed that I’d previously read about in internal documentation. Seeing them made me realize how insulated my position at the systems level had been from the ground zero of immediate damage. I could only imagine the level of insulation of the agency’s directorship or, for that matter, of the US president.

I didn’t type the names of the agency director or the president into XKEYSCORE, but after enough time with the system I realized I could have. Everyone’s communications were in the system—everyone’s. I was initially fearful that if I searched those in the uppermost echelons of state, I’d be caught and fired, or worse. But it was surpassingly simple to disguise a query regarding even the most prominent figure by encoding my search terms in a machine format that looked like gibberish to humans but would be perfectly understandable to XKEYSCORE. If any of the auditors who were responsible for reviewing the searches ever bothered to look more closely, they would see only a snippet of obfuscated code, while I would be able to scroll through the most personal activities of a Supreme Court justice or a congressperson.

As far as I could tell, none of my new colleagues intended to abuse their powers so grandly, although if they had it’s not like they’d ever mention it. Anyway, when analysts thought about abusing the system, they were far less interested in what it could do for them professionally than in what it could do for them personally. This led to the practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection—reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, no one in the agency’s history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself. The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.

One thing you come to understand very quickly while using XKEYSCORE is that nearly everyone in the world who’s online has at least two things in common: they have all watched porn at one time or another, and they all store photos and videos of their family. This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race, and age—from the meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or cousin.

It’s the family stuff that got to me the most. I remember this one child in particular, a little boy in Indonesia. Technically, I shouldn’t have been interested in this little boy, but I was, because my employers were interested in his father. I had been reading through the shared targeting folders of a “persona” analyst, meaning someone who typically spent most of their day sifting through artifacts like chat logs and Gmail inboxes and Facebook messages, rather than the more obscure and difficult, typically hacker-generated traffic of the infrastructure analysts.

The boy’s father, like my own father, was an engineer—but unlike my father, this guy wasn’t government- or military-affiliated. He was just a regular academic who’d been caught up in a surveillance dragnet. I can’t even remember how or why he’d come to the agency’s attention, beyond sending a job application to a research university in Iran. The grounds for suspicion were often poorly documented, if they were documented at all, and the connections could be incredibly tenuous—“believed to be potentially associated with” and then the name of some international organization that could be anything from a telecommunications standards body to UNICEF to something you might actually agree is menacing.

Selections from the man’s communications had been sieved out of the stream of Internet traffic and assembled into folders—here was the fatal copy of the résumé sent to the suspect university; here were his texts; here was his Web browser history; here was the last week or so of his correspondence both sent and received, tagged to IP addresses. Here were the coordinates of a “geo-fence” the analyst had placed around him to track whether he strayed too far from home, or perhaps traveled to the university for his interview.

Then there were his pictures, and a video. He was sitting in front of his computer, as I was sitting in front of mine. Except that in his lap he had a toddler, a boy in a diaper.

The father was trying to read something, but the kid kept shifting around, smacking the keys and giggling. The computer’s internal mic picked up his giggling and there I was, listening to it on my headphones. The father held the boy tighter, and the boy straightened up, and, with his dark crescent eyes, looked directly into the computer’s camera—I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was looking directly at me. Suddenly I realized that I’d been holding my breath. I shut the session, got up from the computer, and left the office for the bathroom in the hall, head down, headphones still on with the cord trailing.

Everything about that kid, everything about his father, reminded me of my own father, whom I met for dinner one evening during my stint at Fort Meade. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but there in the midst of dinner, over bites of Caesar salad and a pink lemonade, I had the thought: I’ll never see my family again. My eyes were dry—I was exerting as much control as I could—but inside, I was devastated. I knew that if I told him what I was about to do, he would’ve called the cops. Or else he would’ve called me crazy and had me committed to a mental hospital. He would’ve done anything he thought he had to do to prevent me from making the gravest of mistakes.

I could only hope that his hurt would in time be healed by pride.

Back in Hawaii between March and May 2013, a sense of finality suffused nearly every experience for me, and though the experiences themselves might seem trivial, they eased my path. It was far less painful to think that this was the last time I’d ever stop at the curry place in Mililani or drop by the art-gallery hacker space in Honolulu or just sit on the roof of my car and scan the nighttime sky for falling stars than to think that I only had another month left with Lindsay, or another week left of sleeping next to her and waking up next to her and yet trying to keep my distance from her, for fear of breaking down.

The preparations I was making were those of a man about to die. I emptied my bank accounts, putting cash into an old steel ammo box for Lindsay to find so that the government couldn’t seize it. I went around the house doing oft-procrastinated chores, like fixing windows and changing lightbulbs. I erased and encrypted my old computers, reducing them to the silent husks of better times. In sum, I was putting my affairs in order to try to make everything easier for Lindsay, or just for my conscience, which periodically would switch allegiance from a world that hadn’t earned it to the woman who had and the family I loved.

Everything was imbued with this sense of an ending, and yet there were moments when it seemed that no end was in sight and that the plan I’d developed was collapsing. It was difficult to get the journalists to commit to a meeting, mostly because I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with, or even, for a while at least, where and when it was happening. I had to reckon with the prospect of them never showing up, or of them showing up but then dropping out. Ultimately I decided that if either of those happened, I’d just abandon the plan and return to work and to Lindsay as if everything was normal, to wait for my next chance.

In my wardrives back and forth from Kunia—a twenty-minute ride that could become a two-hour Wi-Fi scavenger hunt—I’d been researching various countries, trying to find a location for my meeting with the journalists. It felt like I was picking out my prison, or rather my grave. All of the Five Eyes countries were obviously off-limits. In fact, all of Europe was out, because its countries couldn’t be counted upon to uphold international law against the extradition of those charged with political crimes in the face of what was sure to be significant American pressure. Africa and Latin America were no-go zones too—the United States had a history of acting there with impunity. Russia was out because it was Russia, and China was China: both were totally out of bounds. The US government wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at the map. The optics would only be worse in the Middle East. It sometimes seemed as if the most challenging hack of my life wasn’t going to be plundering the NSA but rather trying to find a meeting venue independent enough to hold off the White House and free enough not to interfere with my activities.

The process of elimination left me with Hong Kong. In geopolitical terms, it was the closest I could get to no-man’s-land, but with a vibrant media and protest culture, not to mention largely unfiltered Internet. It was an oddity, a reasonably liberal world city whose nominal autonomy would distance me from China and restrain Beijing’s ability to take public action against me or the journalists—at least immediately—but whose de facto existence in Beijing’s sphere of influence would reduce the possibility of unilateral US intervention. In a situation with no promise of safety, it was enough to have the guarantee of time. Chances were that things weren’t going to end well for me, anyway: the best I could hope for was getting the disclosures out before I was caught.

The last morning I woke up with Lindsay, she was leaving on a camping trip to Kauai—a brief getaway with friends that I’d encouraged. We lay in bed and I held her too tightly, and when she asked with sleepy bewilderment why I was suddenly being so affectionate, I apologized. I told her how sorry I was for how busy I’d been, and that I was going to miss her—she was the best person I’d ever met in my life. She smiled, pecked me on the cheek, and then got up to pack.

The moment she was out the door, I started crying, for the first time in years. I felt guilty about everything except what my government would accuse me of, and especially guilty about my tears, because I knew that my pain would be nothing compared to the pain I’d cause to the woman I loved, or to the hurt and confusion I’d cause my family.

At least I had the benefit of knowing what was coming. Lindsay would return from her camping trip to find me gone, ostensibly on a work assignment, and my mother basically waiting on our doorstep. I’d invited my mother to visit, in a move so uncharacteristic that she must have expected another type of surprise—like an announcement that Lindsay and I were engaged. I felt horrible about the false pretenses and winced at the thought of her disappointment, but I kept telling myself I was justified. My mother would take care of Lindsay and Lindsay would take care of her. Each would need the other’s strength to weather the coming storm.

The day after Lindsay left, I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops: secure communications, normal communications, a decoy, and an “airgap” (a computer that had never gone and would never go online). I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I scribbled in pen: Got called away for work. I love you. I signed it with my call-letter nickname, Echo. Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20 arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me.

²⁶ Hong Kong

The deep psychological appeal of games, which are really just a series of increasingly difficult challenges, is the belief that they can be won. Nowhere is this more clear to me than in the case of the Rubik’s Cube, which satisfies a universal fantasy: that if you just work hard enough and twist yourself through all of the possibilities, everything in the world that appears scrambled and incoherent will finally click into position and become perfectly aligned; that human ingenuity is enough to transform the most broken and chaotic system into something logical and orderly where every face of three-dimensional space shines with perfect uniformity.

I’d had a plan—I’d had multiple plans—in which a single mistake would have meant getting caught, and yet I hadn’t been: I’d made it out of the NSA, I’d made it out of the country. I had beaten the game. By every standard I could imagine, the hard part was over. But my imagination hadn’t been good enough, because the journalists I’d asked to come meet me weren’t showing up. They kept postponing, giving excuses, apologizing.

I knew that Laura Poitras—to whom I’d already sent a few documents and the promise of many more—was ready to fly anywhere from New York City at a moment’s notice, but she wasn’t going to come alone. She was busy trying to get Glenn Greenwald to commit, trying to get him to buy a new laptop that he wouldn’t put online. Trying to get him to install encryption programs so we could better communicate. And there I was, in Hong Kong, watching the clock tick away the hours, watching the calendar tick off the days, beseeching, begging: please come before the NSA realizes I’ve been gone from work too long. It was tough to think about all the lengths I’d gone to only to face the prospect of being left in Hong Kong high and dry. I tried to work up some sympathy for these journalists who seemed too busy or too nervous to lock down their travel plans, but then I’d recall just how little of the material for which I was risking everything would actually make it to the public if the police arrived first. I thought about my family and Lindsay and how foolish it was to have put my life in the hands of people who didn’t even know my name.

I barricaded myself in my room at the Mira Hotel, which I chose because of its central location in a crowded shopping and business district. I put the “Privacy Please—Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle to keep housekeeping out. For ten days, I didn’t leave the room for fear of giving a foreign spy the chance to sneak in and bug the place. With the stakes so high, the only move I had was to wait. I converted the room into a poor man’s operations center, the invisible heart of the network of encrypted Internet tunnels from which I’d send increasingly shrill pleas to the absent emissaries of our free press. Then I’d stand at the window hoping for a reply, looking out onto the beautiful park I’d never visit. By the time Laura and Glenn finally arrived, I’d eaten every item on the room service menu.

That isn’t to say that I just sat around during that week and a half writing wheedling messages. I also tried to organize the last briefing I’d ever give—going through the archive, figuring out how best to explain its contents to the journalists in the surely limited time we’d have together. It was an interesting problem: how to most cogently express to nontechnical people who were almost certainly inclined to be skeptical of me the fact that the US government was surveilling the world and the methods by which it was doing so. I put together dictionaries of terms of art like “metadata” and “communications bearer.” I put together glossaries of acronyms and abbreviations: CCE, CSS, DNI, NOFORN. I made the decision to explain not through technologies, or systems, but through surveillance programs—in essence, through stories—in an attempt to speak their language. But I couldn’t decide which stories to give them first, and I kept shuffling them around, trying to put the worst crimes in the best order.

I had to find a way to help at least Laura and Glenn understand something in the span of a few days that it had taken me years to puzzle out. Then there was another thing: I had to help them understand who I was and why I’d decided to do this.

AT LONG LAST, Glenn and Laura showed up in Hong Kong on June 2. When they came to meet me at the Mira, I think I disappointed them, at least initially. They even told me as much, or Glenn did: He’d been expecting someone older, some chain-smoking, tipsy depressive with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience. He didn’t understand how a person as young as I was—he kept asking me my age—not only had access to such sensitive documents, but was also so willing to throw his life away. For my part, I didn’t know how they could have expected some graybeard, given my instructions to them about how to meet: Go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s Cube. The funny thing was that I’d originally been wary of using that bit of tradecraft, but the cube was the only thing I’d brought with me that was likely to be unique and identifiable from a distance. It also helped me hide the stress of waiting for what I feared might be the surprise of handcuffs.

That stress would reach its visible peak just ten or so minutes later, when I’d brought Laura and Glenn up to my room—#1014, on the tenth floor. Glenn had barely had the chance to stow his smartphone in my minibar fridge at my request when Laura started rearranging and adjusting the lights in the room. Then she unpacked her digital video camera. Though we’d agreed, over encrypted email, that she could film our encounter, I wasn’t ready for the reality.

Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when she pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a cramped, messy room that I hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all of my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.

In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight, kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I wasn’t having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look when it was played back in court. I realized there were so many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers, piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor.

It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I had never met any journalists before serving as their source. The first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US government’s system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. In the end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never could. The footage she shot over the course of our days together in Hong Kong can’t be distorted. Its existence is a tribute not just to her professionalism as a documentarian but to her foresight.

I spent the week between June 3 and June 9 cloistered in that room with Glenn and his colleague from the Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, who joined us a bit later that first day. We talked and talked, going through the NSA’s programs, while Laura hovered and filmed. In contrast to the frenetic days, the nights were empty and desolate. Glenn and Ewen would retreat to their own hotel, the nearby W, to write up their findings into articles. Laura would disappear to edit her footage and do her own reporting with Bart Gellman of the Washington Post, who never made it to Hong Kong but worked remotely with the documents he received from her.

I’d sleep, or try to—or else I’d put on the TV, find an English-language channel like the BBC or CNN, and watch the international reaction. On June 5, the Guardian broke Glenn’s first story, the FISA court order that authorized the NSA to collect information from the American telecom Verizon about every phone call it handled. On June 6, it ran Glenn’s PRISM story, pretty much simultaneously with a similar account in the Washington Post by Laura and Bart. I knew, and I think we all knew, that the more pieces came out the more likely it was that I’d be identified, particularly because my office had begun emailing me asking for status updates and I wasn’t answering. But though Glenn and Ewen and Laura were unfailingly sympathetic to my ticking time-bomb situation, they never let their desire to serve the truth be tempered by that knowledge. And following their example, neither did I.

Journalism, like documentary film, can only reveal so much. It’s interesting to think about what a medium is forced to omit, both by convention and technology. In Glenn’s prose, especially in the Guardian, you got a laser-focused statement of fact, stripped of the dogged passion that defines his personality. Ewen’s prose more fully reflected his character: sincere, gracious, patient, and fair. Meanwhile, Laura, who saw all but was rarely seen, had an omniscient reserve and a sardonic wit—half master spy, half master artist.

As the revelations ran wall to wall on every TV channel and website, it became clear that the US government had thrown the whole of its machinery into identifying the source. It was also clear that when they did, they would use the face they found—my face—to evade accountability: instead of addressing the revelations, they’d impugn the credibility and motives of “the leaker.” Given the stakes, I had to seize the initiative before it was too late. If I didn’t explain my actions and intentions, the government would, in a way that would swing the focus away from its misdeeds.

The only hope I had of fighting back was to come forward first and identify myself. I’d give the media just enough personal detail to satisfy their mounting curiosity, with a clear statement that what mattered wasn’t me, but rather the subversion of American democracy. Then I’d vanish just as quickly as I’d appeared. That, at least, was the plan.

Ewen and I decided that he’d write a story about my IC career and Laura suggested filming a video statement to appear alongside it in the Guardian. In it, I’d claim direct and sole responsibility as the source behind the reporting on global mass surveillance. But even though Laura had been filming all week (a lot of that footage would make it into her feature documentary, Citizenfour), we just didn’t have the time for her to go through everything she’d shot in search of snippets of me speaking coherently and making eye contact. What she proposed, instead, was my first recorded statement, which she started filming right there and then—the one that begins, “Uh, my name is Ed Snowden. I’m, ah, twenty-nine years old.”

Hello, world.

WHILE I’VE NEVER once regretted tugging aside the curtain and revealing my identity, I do wish I had done it with better diction and a better plan in mind for what was next. In truth, I had no plan at all. I hadn’t given much thought to answering the question of what to do once the game was over, mainly because a winning conclusion was always so unlikely. All I’d cared about was getting the facts out into the world: I figured that by putting the documents into the public record, I was essentially putting myself at the public’s mercy. No exit strategy could be the only exit strategy, because any next step I might have premeditated taking would have run the risk of undermining the disclosures.

If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek asylum, for example, I would’ve been called a foreign agent of that country. Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to be arrested upon landing and charged under the Espionage Act. That would’ve entitled me to a show trial deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.

The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in my position would not even be allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to argue that the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain laws regarding surveillance, or convinced the courts to strike down a certain mass surveillance program as illegal, or influenced the attorney general and the president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance was a crucial one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the country. All these claims would be deemed not just irrelevant but inadmissible in the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing my government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified information to journalists, a fact that is not in dispute. This is why anyone who says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then, surely be a cruel one. The penalty for disclosing top secret documents, whether to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per document.

From the moment that Laura’s video of me was posted on the Guardian website on June 9, I was marked. There was a target on my back. I knew that the institutions I’d shamed would not relent until my head was bagged and my limbs were shackled. And until then—and perhaps even after then—they would harass my loved ones and disparage my character, prying into every aspect of my life and career, seeking information (or opportunities for disinformation) with which to smear me. I was familiar enough with how this process went, both from having read classified examples of it within the IC and from having studied the cases of other whistleblowers and leakers. I knew the stories of heroes like Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, and more recent opponents of government secrecy like Thomas Tamm, an attorney with the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review who served as a source for much of the warrantless wiretapping reporting of the mid-2000s. There were also Drake, Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis, the digital-age successors to Perry Fellwock, who back in 1971 had revealed the existence of the then-unacknowledged NSA in the press, which caused the Senate’s Church Committee (the forerunner of today’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) to try to ensure that the agency’s brief was limited to the gathering of foreign rather than domestic signals intelligence. And then there was US Army Private Chelsea Manning, who for the crime of exposing America’s war crimes was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, of which she served seven, her sentence commuted only after an international outcry arose over the treatment she received during solitary confinement.

All of these people, whether they faced prison or not, encountered some sort of backlash, most often severe and derived from the very abuse that I’d just helped expose: surveillance. If ever they’d expressed anger in a private communication, they were “disgruntled.” If they’d ever visited a psychiatrist or a psychologist, or just checked out books on related subjects from a library, they were “mentally unsound.” If they’d been drunk even once, they were said to be alcoholics. If they’d had even one extramarital affair, they were said to be sexual deviants. Not a few lost their homes and were bankrupted. It’s easier for an institution to tarnish a reputation than to substantively engage with principled dissent—for the IC, it’s just a matter of consulting the files, amplifying the available evidence, and, where no evidence exists, simply fabricating it.

As sure as I was of my government’s indignation, I was just as sure of the support of my family, and of Lindsay, who I was certain would understand—perhaps not forgive, but understand—the context of my recent behavior. I took comfort from recalling their love: it helped me cope with the fact that there was nothing left for me to do, no further plans in play. I could only extend the belief I had in my family and Lindsay into a perhaps idealistic belief in my fellow citizens, a hope that once they’d been made aware of the full scope of American mass surveillance they’d mobilize and call for justice. They’d be empowered to seek that justice for themselves, and, in the process, my own destiny would be decided. This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.

WITHIN HOURS AFTER my Guardian video ran, one of Glenn’s regular readers in Hong Kong contacted him and offered to put me in touch with Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Man, two local attorneys who then volunteered to take on my case. These were the men who helped get me out of the Mira when the press finally located me and besieged the hotel. As a diversion, Glenn went out the front lobby door, where he was immediately thronged by the cameras and mics. Meanwhile, I was bundled out of one of the Mira’s myriad other exits, which connected via a skybridge to a mall.

I like Robert—to have been his client is to be his friend for life. He’s an idealist and a crusader, a tireless champion of lost causes. Even more impressive than his lawyering, however, was his creativity in finding safe houses. While journalists were scouring every five-star hotel in Hong Kong, he took me to one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city and introduced me to some of his other clients, a few of the nearly twelve thousand forgotten refugees in Hong Kong—under Chinese pressure, the city has maintained a dismal 1 percent approval rate for permanent residency status. I wouldn’t usually name them, but since they have bravely identified themselves to the press, I will: Vanessa Mae Bondalian Rodel from the Philippines, and Ajith Pushpakumara, Supun Thilina Kellapatha, and Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, all from Sri Lanka.

These unfailingly kind and generous people came through with charitable grace. The solidarity they showed me was not political. It was human, and I will be forever in their debt. They didn’t care who I was, or what dangers they might face by helping me, only that there was a person in need. They knew all too well what it meant to be forced into a mad escape from mortal threat, having survived ordeals far in excess of anything I’d dealt with and hopefully ever will: torture by the military, rape, and sexual abuse. They let an exhausted stranger into their homes—and when they saw my face on TV, they didn’t falter. Instead, they smiled, and took the opportunity to reassure me of their hospitality.

Though their resources were limited—Supun, Nadeeka, Vanessa, and two little girls lived in a crumbling, cramped apartment smaller than my room at the Mira—they shared everything they had with me, and they shared it unstintingly, refusing my offers to reimburse them for the cost of taking me in so vociferously that I had to hide money in the room to get them to accept it. They fed me, they let me bathe, they let me sleep, and they protected me. I will never be able to explain what it meant to be given so much by those with so little, to be accepted by them without judgment as I perched in corners like a stray street cat, skimming the Wi-Fi of distant hotels with a special antenna that delighted the children.

Their welcome and friendship was a gift, for the world to even have such people is a gift, and so it pains me that, all these years later, the cases of Ajith, Supun, Nadeeka, and Nadeeka’s daughter are still pending. The admiration I feel for these folks is matched only by the resentment I feel toward the bureaucrats in Hong Kong, who continue to deny them the basic dignity of asylum. If folks as fundamentally decent and selfless as these aren’t deemed worthy of the protection of the state, it’s because the state itself is unworthy. What gives me hope, however, is that just as this book was going to press, Vanessa and her daughter received asylum in Canada. I look forward to the day when I can visit all of my old Hong Kong friends in their new homes, wherever those may be, and we can make happier memories together in freedom.

On June 14, the US government charged me under the Espionage Act in a sealed complaint, and on June 21 they formally requested my extradition. I knew it was time to go. It was also my thirtieth birthday.

Just as the US State Department sent its request, my lawyers received a reply to my appeal for assistance from the UN High Commissioner on Refugees: there was nothing that could be done for me. The Hong Kong government, under Chinese pressure or not, resisted any UN effort at affording me international protection on its territory, and furthermore asserted that it would first have to consider the claims of my country of citizenship. In other words, Hong Kong was telling me to go home and deal with the UN from prison. I wasn’t just on my own—I was unwelcome. If I was going to leave freely, I had to leave now. I wiped my four laptops completely clean and destroyed the cryptographic key, which meant that I could no longer access any of the documents even if compelled. Then I packed the few clothes I had and headed out. There was no safety to be found in the “fragrant harbor.”

²⁷ Moscow

For a coastal country at the northwestern edge of South America, half a globe away from Hong Kong, Ecuador is in the middle of everything: not for nothing does its name translate to “The Republic of the Equator.” Most of my fellow North Americans would correctly say that it’s a small country, and some might even know enough to call it historically oppressed. But they are ignorant if they think it’s a backwater. When Rafael Correa became president in 2007, as part of a tide of so-called democratic socialist leaders who swept elections in the late 1990s and early 2000s in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela, he initiated a spate of policies intended to oppose and reverse the effects of US imperialism in the region. One of these measures, reflecting President Correa’s previous career as an economist, was an announcement that Ecuador would consider its national debt illegitimate—technically, it would be classified as “odious debt,” which is national debt incurred by a despotic regime or through despotic imperialist trade policies. Repayment of odious debt is not enforceable. With this announcement, Correa freed his people from decades of economic serfdom, though he made not a few enemies among the class of financiers who direct much of US foreign policy.

Ecuador, at least in 2013, had a hard-earned belief in the institution of political asylum. Most famously, the Ecuadorean embassy in London had become, under Correa, the safe haven and redoubt of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. I had no desire to live in an embassy, perhaps because I’d already worked in one. Still, my Hong Kong lawyers agreed that, given the circumstances, Ecuador seemed to be the most likely country to defend my right to political asylum and the least likely to be cowed by the ire of the hegemon that ruled its hemisphere. My growing but ad hoc team of lawyers, journalists, technologists, and activists concurred. My hope was to make it to Ecuador proper.

With my government having decided to charge me under the Espionage Act, I stood accused of a political crime, meaning a crime whose victim is the state itself rather than a person. Under international humanitarian law, those accused in this way are generally exempt from extradition, because the charge of political criminality is more often than not an authoritarian attempt at quashing legitimate dissent. In theory, this means that government whistleblowers should be protected against extradition almost everywhere. In practice, of course, this is rarely the case, especially when the government that perceives itself wronged is America’s—which claims to foster democracy abroad yet secretly maintains fleets of privately contracted aircraft dedicated to that form of unlawful extradition known as rendition, or, as everyone else calls it, kidnapping.

The team supporting me had reached out to officials everywhere from Iceland to India, asking if they would respect the prohibition against extradition of those accused of political crimes and commit to noninterference in my potential travel. It soon became evident that even the most advanced democracies were afraid of incurring the wrath of the US government. They were happy to privately express their sympathies, but reluctant to offer even unofficial guarantees. The common denominator of the advice that filtered back to me was to land only in non-extradition countries, and avoid any route that crossed the airspace of any countries with a record of cooperation with or deference to the US military. One official, I think from France, suggested that the odds of my successful transit might be significantly increased if I were issued a laissez-passer, a UN-recognized one-way travel document typically issued to grant safe passage to refugees crossing borders—but obtaining one of those was easier said than done.

Enter Sarah Harrison, a journalist and an editor for WikiLeaks. The moment the news broke that an American had unmasked a global system of mass surveillance, she had immediately flown to Hong Kong. Through her experience with the website and particularly with the fate of Assange, she was poised to offer me the world’s best asylum advice. It didn’t hurt that she also had family connections with the legal community in Hong Kong.

People have long ascribed selfish motives to Assange’s desire to give me aid, but I believe he was genuinely invested in one thing above all—helping me evade capture. That doing so involved tweaking the US government was just a bonus for him, an ancillary benefit, not the goal. It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to know, a battle he will do anything to win. It’s for this reason that I regard it as too reductive to interpret his assistance as merely an instance of scheming or self-promotion. More important to him, I believe, was the opportunity to establish a counterexample to the case of the organization’s most famous source, US Army Private Chelsea Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to whistleblowers everywhere. Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation gave him a chance to right a wrong. There was nothing he could have done to save Manning, but he seemed, through Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me.

That said, I was initially wary of Sarah’s involvement. But Laura told me that she was serious, competent, and, most important, independent: one of the few at WikiLeaks who dared to openly disagree with Assange. Despite my caution, I was in a difficult position, and as Hemingway once wrote, the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.

Laura informed me of Sarah’s presence in Hong Kong only a day or so before she communicated with me on an encrypted channel, which itself was only a day or two before I actually met her in person—and if I’m somewhat loose on my dates here, you’ll have to forgive me: one frenetic day bled into the next. Sarah had been a whirlwind, apparently, since the moment of her landing in Hong Kong. Though she wasn’t a lawyer, she had deep expertise when it came to what I’ll call the interpersonal or subofficial nuances of avoiding extradition. She met with local Hong Kong human rights attorneys to seek independent opinions, and I was deeply impressed by both her pace and her circumspection. Her connections through WikiLeaks and the extraordinary courage of the Ecuadorean consul in London, Fidel Narváez, together produced a laissez-passer in my name. This laissez-passer, which was meant to get me to Ecuador, had been issued by the consul on an emergency basis, since we didn’t have time for his home government to formally approve it. The moment it was in hand, Sarah hired a van to take us to the airport.

That’s how I met her—in motion. I’d like to say that I started off our acquaintance by offering my thanks, but instead the first thing I said was: “When was the last time you slept?” Sarah looked just as ragged and disheveled as I did. She stared out the window, as if trying to recall the answer, but then just shook her head: “I don’t know.”

We were both developing colds and our careful conversation was punctuated by sneezes and coughs. By her own account, she was motivated to support me out of loyalty to her conscience more than to the ideological demands of her employer. Certainly her politics seemed shaped less by Assange’s feral opposition to central power than by her own conviction that too much of what passed for contemporary journalism served government interests rather than challenged them. As we hurtled to the airport, as we checked in, as we cleared passport control for the first of what should have been three flights, I kept waiting for her to ask me for something—anything, even just for me to make a statement on Assange’s, or the organization’s, behalf. But she never did, although she did cheerfully share her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the public and the truth. For that instance of straight talk, and for many others, I’ll always admire Sarah’s honesty.

We were traveling to Quito, Ecuador, via Moscow via Havana via Caracas for a simple reason: it was the only safe route available. There were no direct flights to Quito from Hong Kong, and all of the other connecting flights traveled through US airspace. While I was concerned about the massive layover in Russia—we’d have almost twenty hours before the Havana flight departed—my primary fear was actually the next leg of the journey, because traveling from Russia to Cuba meant passing through NATO airspace. I didn’t particularly relish flying over a country like Poland, which during my lifetime has done everything to please the US government, including hosting CIA black sites where my former IC colleagues subjected prisoners to “enhanced interrogations,” another Bush-era euphemism for “torture.”

I wore my hat down over my eyes to avoid being recognized, and Sarah did the seeing for me. She took my arm and led me to the gate, where we waited until boarding. This was the last moment for her to back out, and I told her so. “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Protect me like this.”

Sarah stiffened. “Let’s get one thing clear,” she said as we boarded, “I’m not protecting you. No one can protect you. What I’m here for is to make it harder for anyone to interfere. To make sure everyone’s on their best behavior.”

“So you’re my witness,” I said.

She gave a slight wry smile. “Someone has to be the last person to ever see you alive. It might as well be me.”

Though the three points where I’d thought we were most likely to get stopped were now behind us (check-in, passport control, and the gate), I didn’t feel safe on the plane. I didn’t want to get complacent. I took the window seat and Sarah sat next to me, to screen me from the other passengers across the row. After what felt like an eternity, the cabin doors were shut, the skybridge pulled away, and finally, we were moving. But just before the plane rolled from the tarmac onto the runway, it halted sharply. I was nervous. Pressing the brim of my hat up against the glass, I strained to catch the sound of sirens or the flashing of blue lights. It felt like I was playing the waiting game all over again—it was a wait that wouldn’t end. Until, suddenly, the plane rolled into motion again and took a turn, and I realized that we were just far back in the line for takeoff.

My spirits rose with the wheels, but it was hard to believe I was out of the fire. Once we were airborne, I loosened my grip from my thighs and felt an urge to take my lucky Rubik’s Cube out of my bag. But I knew I couldn’t, because nothing would make me more conspicuous. Instead, I sat back, pulled my hat down again, and kept my half-open eyes on the map on the seatback screen just in front of me, tracking the pixelated route across China, Mongolia, and Russia—none of which would be especially amenable to doing any favors for the US State Department. However, there was no predicting what the Russian government would do once we landed, beyond hauling us into an inspection so they could search through my blank laptops and empty bag. What I hoped might spare us any more invasive treatment was that the world was watching and my lawyers and WikiLeaks’ lawyers were aware of our itinerary.

It was only once we’d entered Chinese airspace that I realized I wouldn’t be able to get any rest until I asked Sarah this question explicitly: “Why are you helping me?”

She flattened out her voice, as if trying to tamp down her passions, and told me that she wanted me to have a better outcome. She never said better than what outcome or whose, and I could only take that answer as a sign of her discretion and respect.

I was reassured, enough at least to finally get some sleep.

WE LANDED AT Sheremetyevo on June 23 for what we assumed would be a twenty-hour layover. It has now dragged on for over six years. Exile is an endless layover.

In the IC, and in the CIA in particular, you get a lot of training on how not to get into trouble at customs. You have to think about how you dress, how you act. You have to think about the things in your bag and the things in your pockets and the tales they tell about you. Your goal is to be the most boring person in line, with the most perfectly forgettable face. But none of that really matters when the name on your passport is all over the news.

I handed my little blue book to the bearish guy in the passport control booth, who scanned it and rifled through its pages. Sarah stood stalwart behind me. I’d made sure to take note of the time it took for the people ahead of us in line to clear the booth, and our turn was taking too long. Then the guy picked up his phone, grumbled some words in Russian, and almost immediately—far too quickly—two security officers in suits approached. They must have been waiting. The officer in front took my little blue book from the guy in the booth and leaned in close to me. “There is problem with passport,” he said. “Please, come with.”

Sarah immediately stepped to my side and unleashed a fast flurry of English: “I’m his legal adviser. Wherever he goes, I go. I’m coming with you. According to the—”

But before she could cite the relevant UN covenants and Genevan codicils, the officer held up his hand and glanced at the line. He said, “Okay, sure, okay. You come.”

I don’t know whether the officer had even understood what she said. He just clearly didn’t want to make a scene.

The two security officers marched us briskly toward what I assumed was going to be a special room for secondary inspection, but instead turned out to be one of Sheremetyevo’s plush business lounges—like a business-class or first-class area, with just a few passengers basking obliviously in their luxury seats. Sarah and I were directed past them and down a hall into a conference room of sorts, filled with men in gray sitting around a table. There were a half-dozen of them or so, with military haircuts. One guy sat separately, holding a pen. He was a notetaker, a kind of secretary, I guessed. He had a folder in front of him containing a pad of paper. On the cover of the folder was a monocolor insignia that I didn’t need Russian in order to understand: it was a sword and shield, the symbol of Russia’s foremost intelligence service, the Federal Security Service (FSB). Like the FBI in the United States, the FSB exists not only to spy and investigate but also to make arrests.

At the center of the table sat an older man in a finer suit than the others, the white of his hair shining like a halo of authority. He gestured for Sarah and me to sit opposite him, with an authoritative sweep of the hand and a smile that marked him as a seasoned case officer, or whatever the term is for a CO’s Russian equivalent. Intelligence services the world over are full of such figures—dedicated actors who will try on different emotions until they get the response they want.

He cleared his throat and gave me, in decent English, what the CIA calls a cold pitch, which is basically an offer by a foreign intelligence service that can be summarized as “come and work for us.” In return for cooperation, the foreigners dangle favors, which can be anything from stacks of cash to a get-out-of-jail-free card for pretty much anything from fraud to murder. The catch, of course, is that the foreigners always expect something of equal or better value in exchange. That clear and unambiguous transaction, however, is never how it starts. Come to think of it, it’s funny that it’s called a cold pitch, because the person making it always starts warm, with grins, levity, and words of sympathy.

I knew I had to cut him off. If you don’t cut off a foreign intelligence officer right away, it might not matter whether you ultimately reject their offer, because they can destroy your reputation simply by leaking a recording of you considering it. So as the man apologized for inconveniencing us, I imagined the hidden devices recording us, and tried to choose my words carefully.

“Listen, I understand who you are, and what this is,” I said. “Please let me be clear that I have no intention to cooperate with you. I’m not going to cooperate with any intelligence service. I mean no disrespect, but this isn’t going to be that kind of meeting. If you want to search my bag, it’s right here,” and I pointed to it under my chair. “But I promise you, there’s nothing in it that can help you.”

As I was speaking, the man’s face changed. He started to act wounded. “No, we would never do that,” he said. “Please believe me, we only want to help you.”

Sarah cleared her throat and jumped in. “That’s quite kind of you, but I hope you can understand that all we’d like is to make our connecting flight.”

For the briefest instant, the man’s feigned sorrow became irritation. “You are his lawyer?”

“I’m his legal adviser,” Sarah answered.

The man asked me, “So you are not coming to Russia to be in Russia?”

“No.”

“And so may I ask where you are trying to go? What is your final destination?”

I said, “Quito, Ecuador, via Caracas, via Havana,” even though I knew that he already knew the answer. He certainly had a copy of our itinerary, since Sarah and I had traveled from Hong Kong on Aeroflot, the Russian flagship airline.

Up until this point, he and I had been reading from the same intelligence script, but now the conversation swerved. “You haven’t heard?” he said. He stood and looked at me like he was delivering the news of a death in the family. “I am afraid to inform you that your passport is invalid.”

I was so surprised, I just stuttered. “I’m sorry, but I—I don’t believe that.”

The man leaned over the table and said, “No, it is true. Believe me. It is the decision of your minister, John Kerry. Your passport has been canceled by your government, and the air services have been instructed not to allow you to travel.”

I was sure it was a trick, but I wasn’t quite sure to what purpose. “Give us a minute,” I said, but even before I could ask, Sarah had snatched her laptop out of her bag and was getting onto the airport Wi-Fi.

“Of course, you will check,” the man said, and he turned to his colleagues and chatted amiably to them in Russian, as if he had all the time in the world.

It was reported on every site Sarah looked at. After the news had broken that I’d left Hong Kong, the US State Department announced that it had canceled my passport. It had revoked my travel document while I was still in midair.

I was incredulous: my own government had trapped me in Russia. The State Department’s move might merely have been the result of bureaucratic proceduralism—when you’re trying to catch a fugitive, putting out an Interpol alert and canceling their passport is just standard operating procedure. But in the final accounting it was self-defeating, as it handed Russia a massive propaganda victory.

“It’s true,” said Sarah, with a shake of her head.

“So what will you do?” the man asked, and he walked around to our side of the table.

Before I could take the Ecuadorean safe conduct pass out of my pocket, Sarah said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to advise Mr. Snowden not to answer any more questions.”

The man pointed at me, and said, “You will come.”

He gestured me to follow him to the far end of the conference room, where there was a window. I went and stood next to him and looked. About three or four floors below was street level and the largest media scrum I’ve ever seen, scads of reporters wielding cameras and mics.

It was an impressive show, perhaps choreographed by the FSB, perhaps not, most likely half and half. Almost everything in Russia is half and half. But at least now I knew why Sarah and I had been brought to this conference room in this lounge.

I went back to my chair but didn’t sit down again.

The man turned from the window to face me and said, “Life for a person in your situation can be very difficult without friends who can help.” He let the words linger.

Here it comes, I thought—the direct solicitation.

He said, “If there is some information, perhaps, some small thing you could share with us?”

“We’ll be okay on our own,” I said. Sarah stood up next to me.

The man sighed. He turned to mumble in Russian, and his comrades rose and filed out. “I hope you will not regret your decision,” he said to me. Then he gave a slight bow and made his own exit, just as a pair of officials from the airport administration entered.

I demanded to be allowed to go to the gate for the flight to Havana, but they ignored me. I finally reached into my pocket and brandished the Ecuadorean safe conduct pass, but they ignored that, too.

All told, we were trapped in the airport for a biblical forty days and forty nights. Over the course of those days, I applied to a total of twenty-seven countries for political asylum. Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure, with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring that they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory—a feat that was impossible. Ultimately, the only head of state that proved sympathetic to my cause was Burger King, who never denied me a Whopper (hold the tomato and onion).

Soon, my presence in the airport became a global spectacle. Eventually the Russians found it a nuisance. On July 1, the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, left another airport in Moscow, Vnukovo, in his Bolivian state plane after attending the annual GECF, or Gas Exporting Countries Forum. The US government, suspecting that I was onboard due to President Morales’s expressions of solidarity, pressured the governments of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal to deny the plane access to their airspace, and succeeded in diverting it to Vienna, Austria. There it was grounded, searched, and only allowed to continue on its journey once no traces of me were found. This was a startling violation of sovereignty, which occasioned UN censure. The incident was an affront to Russia, which couldn’t guarantee a visiting head of state safe passage home. And it confirmed to Russia and to me that any flight that America suspected me of stowing away on ran the same risk of being diverted and grounded.

The Russian government must have decided that it would be better off without me and the media swarm clogging up the country’s major airport. On August 1 it granted me temporary asylum. Sarah and I were allowed to leave Sheremetyevo, but eventually only one of us would be heading home. Our time together served to bind us as friends for life. I will always be grateful for the weeks she spent by my side, for her integrity and her fortitude.

²⁸ From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills

As far away from home as I was, my thoughts were consumed with Lindsay. I’ve been wary of telling her story—the story of what happened to her once I was gone: the FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the press attention, the online harassment, the confusion and pain, the anger and sadness. Finally, I realized that only Lindsay herself should be the person to recount that period. No one else has the experience, but more than that: no one else has the right. Luckily, Lindsay has kept a diary since adolescence, using it to record her life and draft her art. She has graciously agreed to let me include a few pages here. In the entries that follow, all names have been changed (except those of family), some typos fixed, and a few redactions made. Otherwise, this is how it was, from the moment that I left Hawaii.

²⁹ Love and Exile

If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.

But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.

All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store for perpetuity the data of your life.

And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or “exploits,” they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets them positively identify you.

This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation—the final product of a political and professional class that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.

IF MASS SURVEILLANCE was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life, then I wanted the dangers it posed, and the damage it had already done, to be a constant presence too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to make this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world, could not ignore.In the years since 2013, awareness has grown, both in scope and subtlety. But in this social media age, we have always to remind ourselves: awareness alone is not enough.

In America, the initial press reports on the disclosures started a “national conversation,” as President Obama himself conceded. While I appreciated the sentiment, I remember wishing that he had noted that what made it “national,” what made it a “conversation,” was that for the first time the American public was informed enough to have a voice.

The revelations of 2013 particularly roused Congress, both houses of which launched multiple investigations into NSA abuses. Those investigations concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the nature and efficacy of its mass surveillance programs, even to the most highly cleared Intelligence Committee legislators.

In 2015, a federal court of appeals ruled in the matter of ACLU v. Clapper, a suit challenging the legality of the NSA’s phone records collection program. The court ruled that the NSA’s program had violated even the loose standards of the Patriot Act and, moreover, was most probably unconstitutional. The ruling focused on the NSA’s interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government to demand from third parties “any tangible thing” that it deemed “relevant” to foreign intelligence and terror investigations. In the court’s opinion, the government’s definition of “relevant” was so expansive as to be virtually meaningless. To call some collected data “relevant” merely because it might become relevant at some amorphous point in the future was “unprecedented and unwarranted.” The court’s refusal to accept the government’s definition caused not a few legal scholars to interpret the ruling as casting doubt on the legitimacy of all government bulk-collection programs predicated on this doctrine of future relevance. In the wake of this opinion, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which amended Section 215 to explicitly prohibit the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Going forward, those records would remain where they originally had been, in the private control of the telecoms, and the government would have to formally request specific ones with a FISC warrant in hand if it wanted to access them.

ACLU v. Clapper was a notable victory, to be sure. A crucial precedent was set. The court declared that the American public had standing: American citizens had the right to stand in a court of law and challenge the government’s officially secret system of mass surveillance. But as the numerous other cases that resulted from the disclosures continue to wend their slow and deliberate ways through the courts, it becomes ever clearer to me that the American legal resistance to mass surveillance was just the beta phase of what has to be an international opposition movement, fully implemented across both governments and private sector.

The reaction of technocapitalists to the disclosures was immediate and forceful, proving once again that with extreme hazards come unlikely allies. The documents revealed an NSA so determined to pursue any and all information it perceived as being deliberately kept from it that it had undermined the basic encryption protocols of the Internet—making citizens’ financial and medical records, for example, more vulnerable, and in the process harming businesses that relied on their customers entrusting them with such sensitive data. In response, Apple adopted strong default encryption for its iPhones and iPads, and Google followed suit for its Android products and Chromebooks. But perhaps the most important private-sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set about switching their website platforms, replacing http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) with the encrypted https (the S signifies security), which helps prevent third-party interception of Web traffic. The year 2016 was a landmark in tech history, the first year since the invention of the Internet that more Web traffic was encrypted than unencrypted.

The Internet is certainly more secure now than it was in 2013, especially given the sudden global recognition of the need for encrypted tools and apps. I’ve been involved with the design and creation of a few of these myself, through my work heading the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering public-interest journalism in the new millennium. A major part of the organization’s brief is to preserve and strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights through the development of encryption technologies. To that end, the FPF financially supports Signal, an encrypted texting and calling platform created by Open Whisper Systems, and develops SecureDrop (originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz), an open-source submission system that allows media organizations to securely accept documents from anonymous whistleblowers and other sources. Today, SecureDrop is available in ten languages and used by more than seventy media organizations around the world, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New Yorker.

In a perfect world, which is to say in a world that doesn’t exist, just laws would make these tools obsolete. But in the only world we have, they have never been more necessary. A change in the law is infinitely more difficult to achieve than a change in a technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation institutions will seek to abuse that disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to independent, open-source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.

In my current situation, I’m constantly reminded of the fact that the law is country-specific, whereas technology is not. Every nation has its own legal code but the same computer code. Technology crosses borders and carries almost every passport. As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming the surveillance regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of my exile, but an encrypted smartphone might.

INTERNATIONALLY, THE DISCLOSURES helped to revive debates about surveillance in places with long histories of abuses. The countries whose citizenries were most opposed to American mass surveillance were those whose governments had most cooperated with it, from the Five Eyes nations (especially the UK, whose GCHQ remains the NSA’s primary partner) to nations of the European Union. Germany, which has done much to reckon with its Nazi and Communist past, provides the primary example of this disjunction. Its citizens and legislators were appalled to learn that the NSA was surveilling German communications and had even targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s smartphone. At the same time, the BND, Germany’s premier intelligence agency, had collaborated with the NSA in numerous operations, even carrying out certain proxy surveillance initiatives that the NSA was unable or unwilling to undertake on its own.

Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy. Such cognitive dissonance on a geopolitical scale has helped to bring individual privacy concerns back into the international dialogue within the context of human rights.

For the first time since the end of World War II, liberal democratic governments throughout the world were discussing privacy as the natural, inborn right of every man, woman, and child. In doing so they were harking back to the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article 12 states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” Like all UN declarations, this aspirational document was never enforceable, but it had been intended to inculcate a new basis for transnational civil liberties in a world that had just survived nuclear atrocities and attempted genocides and was facing an unprecedented surfeit of refugees and the stateless.

The EU, still under the sway of this postwar universalist idealism, now became the first transnational body to put these principles into practice, establishing a new directive that seeks to standardize whistleblower protections across its member states, along with a standardized legal framework for privacy protection. In 2016, the EU Parliament passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the most significant effort yet made to forestall the incursions of technological hegemony—which the EU tends to regard, not unfairly, as an extension of American hegemony.

The GDPR treats the citizens of the European Union, whom it calls “natural persons,” as also being “data subjects”—that is, people who generate personally identifiable data. In the US, data is usually regarded as the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of the person it represents, which allows it to treat our data subjecthood as deserving of civil liberties protections.

The GDPR is undoubtedly a major legal advance, but even its transnationalism is too parochial: the Internet is global. Our natural personhood will never be legally synonymous with our data subjecthood, not least because the former lives in one place at a time while the latter lives in many places simultaneously.

Today, no matter who you are, or where you are, bodily, physically, you are also elsewhere, abroad—multiple selves wandering along the signal paths, with no country to call your own, and yet beholden to the laws of every country through which you pass. The records of a life lived in Geneva dwell in the Beltway. The photos of a wedding in Tokyo are on a honeymoon in Sydney. The videos of a funeral in Varanasi are up on Apple’s iCloud, which is partially located in my home state of North Carolina and partially scattered across the partner servers of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, throughout the EU, UK, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China.

Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.

We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies detect us in utero, and our data will continue to proliferate even after we die. Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep, comprise just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives—most of it unconsciously, or without our consent—by business and government surveillance. We are the first people in the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.

Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new generation. Not yet born on 9/11, they have spent their entire lives under the omnipresent specter of this surveillance. These young people who have known no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s their political creativity and technological ingenuity that give me hope.

Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able to do so. Then they, and their children, will be trapped too—each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.

Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.

We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control.

Of course, all of the above has already happened.

EXILE: NOT A day has passed since August 1, 2013, in which I don’t recall that “exile” was what my teenage self used to call getting booted off-line. The Wi-Fi died? Exile. I’m out of signal range? Exile. The self who used to say that now seems so young to me. He seems so distant.

When people ask me what my life is like now, I tend to answer that it’s a lot like theirs in that I spend a lot of time in front of the computer—reading, writing, interacting. From what the press likes to describe as an “undisclosed location”—which is really just whatever two-bedroom apartment in Moscow I happen to be renting—I beam myself onto stages around the world, speaking about the protection of civil liberties in the digital age to audiences of students, scholars, lawmakers, and technologists.

Some days I take virtual meetings with my fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, or talk with my European legal team, led by Wolfgang Kaleck, at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Other days, I just pick up some Burger King—I know where my loyalties lie—and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use credit cards. One fixture of my existence is my daily check-in with my American lawyer, confidant, and all-around consigliere Ben Wizner at the ACLU, who has been my guide to the world as it is and puts up with my musings about the world as it should be.

That’s my life. It got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of 2014, when Lindsay came to visit—the first time I’d seen her since Hawaii. I tried not to expect too much, because I knew I didn’t deserve the chance; the only thing I deserved was a slap in the face. But when I opened the door, she placed her hand on my cheek and I told her I loved her.

“Hush,” she said, “I know.”

We held each other in silence, each breath like a pledge to make up for lost time.

From that moment, my world was hers. Previously, I’d been content to hang around indoors—indeed, that was my preference before I was in Russia—but Lindsay was insistent: she’d never been to Russia and now we were going to be tourists together.

My Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who helped me get asylum in the country—he was the only lawyer who had the foresight to show up at the airport with a translator—is a cultured and resourceful man, and he proved as adept at obtaining last-minute tickets to the opera as he is at navigating my legal issues. He helped arrange two box seats at the Bolshoi Theater, so Lindsay and I got dressed and went, though I have to admit I was wary. There were so many people, all packed so tightly into a hall. Lindsay could sense my growing unease. As the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, she leaned over, nudged me in the ribs, and whispered, “None of these people are here for you. They’re here for this.”

Lindsay and I also spent time at some of Moscow’s museums. The Tretyakov Gallery contains one of the world’s richest collection of Russian Orthodox icon paintings. The artists who made these paintings for the Church were essentially contractors, I thought, and so were typically not allowed to sign their names to their handiwork, or preferred not to. The time and tradition that fostered these works was not given much to recognizing individual achievement. As Lindsay and I stood in front of one of the icons, a young tourist, a teenage girl, suddenly stepped between us. This wasn’t the first time I was recognized in public, but given Lindsay’s presence, it certainly threatened to be the most headline-worthy. In German-accented English, the girl asked whether she could take a selfie with us. I’m not sure what explains my reaction—maybe it was this German girl’s shy and polite way of asking, or maybe it was Lindsay’s always mood-improving, live-and-let-live presence—but without hesitation, for once, I agreed. Lindsay smiled as the girl posed between us and took a photo. Then, after a few sweet words of support, she departed.

I dragged Lindsay out of the museum a moment later. I was afraid that if the girl posted the photo to social media we could be just minutes away from unwanted attention. I feel foolish now for thinking that. I kept nervously checking online, but the photo didn’t appear. Not that day, and not the day after. As far as I can tell, it was never shared—just kept as a private memory of a personal moment.

WHENEVER I GO outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get rid of my beard, maybe I wear different glasses. I never liked the cold until I realized that a hat and scarf provide the world’s most convenient and inconspicuous anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk, and, contrary to the sage advice of my mother, I look away from traffic when crossing the street, which is why I’ve never been caught on any of the car dashcams that are ubiquitous here. Passing buildings equipped with CCTV I keep my head down, so that no one will see me as I’m usually seen online—head-on. I used to worry about the bus and metro, but nowadays everybody’s too busy staring at their phones to give me a second glance. If I take a cab, I’ll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a few blocks away from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks away from where I’m going.

Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.

Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is more patient and generous and kind.

Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here three years ago, and two years ago today, we married.