Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition)

ONE ^{Looking Through the Window}

The first thing I ever hacked was bedtime.

When I was young, it always felt unfair that my parents forced me to go to sleep before they or my sister did. I wasn’t even tired. Life’s first little injustice.

Many nights of the first several years of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining. Until the night I turned six and discovered direct action.

I had just had one of the best days of my life, complete with friends, a party, and gifts, and I wasn’t about to let it end. So I went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours, trying to trick my parents into thinking it was earlier in the evening.

When the authorities—my parents—failed to notice, I was mad with power, galloping laps around the living room. I, the master of time, would never again be sent to bed. I was free.

I fell asleep on the floor, having finally seen the sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But when I awoke, the clocks in the house once again matched my father’s watch.

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

I was born in 1983, at the end of the era in which people set the time for themselves. That was the year that the US Department of Defense created a computer network for the public called the internet. This virtual space gave rise to the Domain Name System that we still use today—the .govs, .mils, .edus, and, of course, .coms. And yet it would be another six years before the World Wide Web was invented, and about nine years before my family got a computer with a modem that could connect to it.

Of course, the internet is not a single entity, although we tend to refer to it as if it were. I’m going to use the term in its broadest sense, to mean the universal network of networks connecting the majority of the world’s computers to one another via a set of shared protocols.

Don’t worry if you think you don’t know a protocol from a hole in the wall. You’ve used them without knowing it. Think of protocols as languages for machines, the common rules they follow to be understood by one another. Every time you check your email, you use a language like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). And the time-setting procedure on your phone that I mentioned uses NTP (Network Time Protocol).

The takeaway is this: These protocols have given us the means to digitize just about everything. The internet has become almost as integral to our lives as the air through which so many of its communications travel. And to digitize something is to record it in a format that will last forever.

Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine internet-less years: I can’t account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. My generation is the last in American, and perhaps even in world, history whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud. They’re mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroid cameras. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of the door frame of the house in which I grew up.

We lived in a grand old redbrick house on a little patch of lawn shaded by dogwoods and magnolias. Their flowers often served as cover for the plastic army men I used to crawl around with. The house had an atypical layout: Its main entrance was on the second floor, accessed by a massive brick staircase. This floor was the primary living space, with the kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms.

Above this main floor was a dusty, cobwebbed, and forbidding attic, haunted by what my mother promised me were squirrels, but what my father insisted were vampire werewolves that would devour any child foolish enough to venture up there. Below the main floor was a more or less finished basement.

My bedroom, which was part of an addition to the house, had a view of the den through a window in what had originally been the exterior wall of the house. This window, which once looked outside, now looked inside.

Though the window had a curtain, it didn’t provide much privacy. From as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was to tug the curtain aside and peek through it into the den. Which is to say, from as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was spying.

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

My father was in the Coast Guard. He sometimes wore a uniform and sometimes didn’t. He left home early and came home late, often with new gadgets, some of which he’d show me and some of which he’d hide. Which would you be more interested in?

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

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

Suddenly, the TV lit up, and with it my father’s face lit up, too. Normally, he spent his evenings sitting on the couch, cracking sodas and watching the people on TV run around a field, but this was different. My father was controlling what was happening on TV.

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

At the time, I had no idea what a computer was, as they were not yet widespread like they are today. I knew only one thing: Whatever he was doing, I wanted to do it, too.

After that, whenever my father came into the den to break out the beige brick, I’d stand up on my bed, tug away the curtain, and spy on his adventures. One night I was truly confused by what he was doing—was it for fun or was it part of his job?—when I peeked through the window and saw him flying.

My father was piloting his own helicopter right there, right in front of me, in our den, on the TV screen. He took off from a little base, complete with a tiny waving American flag, into a black night sky full of twinkling stars, and then immediately crashed to the ground. He gave a little cry that masked my own, but just when I thought the fun was over, he was right back at the little base again with the tiny flag, taking off one more time.

The game was called Choplifter! and it was thrilling. Again and again the helicopter landed and lifted off as my father tried to rescue a flashing crowd of people and ferry them to safety. That was my earliest sense of my father: He was a hero.

The first time he landed that helicopter intact with a full load of miniature people, he cheered just a little too loud. His head snapped to the window to check whether he’d disturbed me, and he caught me dead in the eyes.

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

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

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

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

TWO ^{The Invisible Wall}

Elizabeth City, North Carolina, is a quaint, midsize town built up around the banks of the Pasquotank River. My family has always been connected to the sea, my mother’s side in particular. Her heritage is straight Pilgrim—her first ancestor on these shores was John Alden, the Mayflower’s cooper, or barrel maker. He became the husband of a fellow passenger named Priscilla Mullins, who was the only single woman of marriageable age onboard.

John and Priscilla’s daughter, Elizabeth, was the first Pilgrim girl born in New England. My mother, whose name is also Elizabeth (though she often goes by Wendy), is her direct descendant.

My maternal grandfather, whom I call Pop, is better known as Rear Admiral Edward J. Barrett. At the time of my birth he was deputy chief, aeronautical engineering division, Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. He’d go on to hold various engineering and operational commands. I wasn’t aware of how high up the ranks Pop was rising, but I knew that the welcome-to-command ceremonies became more elaborate as time went on, with longer speeches and larger cakes. I remember the souvenir I was given by the artillery guard at one of them: the shell casing of a 40 mm round, still warm and smelling like powdered hell, which had just been fired in a salute in Pop’s honor.

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

“Is that all, buddy?”

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

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

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

“What do they do with it?”

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

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

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

“Let’s hope,” my mother said.

When I wasn’t using my math skills in exchange for prizes, I’d often go to my grandmother’s house, which was a few streets over from us, and lie on the carpet beside the long, low bookshelves. My usual company was an edition of Aesop’s Fables and, perhaps my favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology. I was in awe of the hero of Greek mythology named Odysseus and liked Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena well enough, but the deity I admired most had to be Hephaestus: the ugly god of fire, volcanoes, blacksmiths, and carpenters, the god of tinkerers. I was proud of being able to spell his Greek name, and of knowing that his Roman name, Vulcan, was used for the home planet of Spock from Star Trek.

Once, I picked up an illustrated version of the legends of King Arthur and his knights and found myself reading about the fortress of a tyrannical giant named Rhitta Gawr, who refused to accept that the age of his reign had passed and that in the future the world would be ruled by human kings.

The giant lived on a mountain called Snaw Dun, which, a note explained, was Old English for “snow mound.” Today, Snaw Dun is called Mount Snowdon. I remember the feeling of encountering my last name in this context—it was thrilling—and the archaic spelling gave me my first sense that the world was older than I was, even older than my parents were.

Years later, I was obsessed with a new and different type of storytelling. On Christmas 1989, a Nintendo appeared in the house. I took to that two-tone-gray video game console so completely that my alarmed mother imposed a rule: I could only rent a new game when I finished reading a book. Games were expensive, and, having already mastered the ones that had come with the console—a single cartridge combining Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt—I was eager for other challenges. I started coming home from the library with shorter books and books with lots of pictures, including visual encyclopedias of inventions and comic books.

It was the NES—the janky but genius eight-bit Nintendo Entertainment System—that was my real education. From The Legend of Zelda I learned that the world exists to be explored; from Mega Man I learned that my enemies have much to teach; and from Duck Hunt—well, Duck Hunt taught me that even if someone laughs at your failures, it doesn’t mean you get to shoot them in the face.

Ultimately, though, it was Super Mario Bros. that taught me what remains perhaps the most important lesson of my life. Super Mario Bros., the 1.0 edition, is perhaps the all-time masterpiece of side-scrolling games. When the game begins, Mario is standing all the way to the left of the legendary opening screen, and he can only go in one direction: He can only move to the right as new scenery and enemies scroll in from that side. He progresses through eight worlds of four levels each, all of them governed by time constraints, until he reaches the evil Bowser and frees the captive Princess Toadstool.

Throughout all thirty-two levels, Mario exists in front of what in gaming speak is called “an invisible wall,” which doesn’t allow him to go backward. There is no turning back, only going forward—for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown future.

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

The Nintendo was probably just suffering from a faulty pin connection, but given that back then I didn’t even know what a pin connection was, I was frustrated and desperate. Worst of all, my father had just left on a Coast Guard trip and wouldn’t be back to help me fix it for two weeks. So I resolved to fix the thing myself. If I succeeded, I knew my father would be impressed. I went out to the garage to find his gray metal toolbox.

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

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

Once I’d finished my cleaning and repairs, it was time for reassembly. Our dog, Treasure, might have swallowed one of the tiny screws, or maybe it had just gotten lost in the carpet or under the couch. And I must not have put all the components back in the same way I’d found them, because they barely fit into the console’s shell. The shell’s lid kept popping off, so I found myself squeezing the components down, the way you try to shut an overstuffed suitcase. Finally the lid snapped into place, but only on one side.

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

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

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

Like all my father’s lessons, this one had broad applications beyond our immediate task. Ultimately, it was a lesson in the principle of self-reliance, which my father insisted that America had forgotten sometime between his own childhood and mine. Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing a broken machine with a newer model was typically lower than the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was typically lower than the cost of sourcing the parts and figuring out how to fix it yourself. Most people used technology daily and yet failed to understand the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment they depended on. It meant when their equipment worked, they worked, but when their equipment broke down, they broke down, too. Put another way, their possessions possessed them.

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

What I remember most are the screens. The lab itself was dim and empty, the standard-issue beige and white of government construction, but even before my father hit the lights I couldn’t help but be transfixed by the pulsating glow of electric green. Why does this place have so many TVs? was my first thought, quickly followed up by, And why are they all tuned to the same channel? My father explained that these weren’t TVs but computers.

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

My father plopped me down in a chair, and for the first time in my life, I found myself in front of a keyboard. But these computers were not gaming devices, and I didn’t understand how to make them work. There was no controller, no joystick, no gun.

My father told me that every key on the keyboard had a purpose. To demonstrate, he reached over me, typed a command, and pressed the enter key. Something popped up on-screen that I now know is called a text editor. Then he grabbed a Post-it Note and a pen and scribbled out some letters and numbers. He told me to type them up exactly while he went off to repair the broken Nintendo.

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

10 input “what is your name?”; name$

20 print “hello,” + name$+ “!”

After a whole lot of trial, and a whole lot of error, I finally finished. I pressed enter, and, in a flash, the computer was asking me a question: what is your name?

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

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

Almost immediately, I grasped the limitations of gaming systems. They were stifling in comparison to computer systems. They confined you to levels and worlds that you could advance through, even defeat, but never change.

The repaired Nintendo console went back to the den, where my father and I competed in two-player Mario Kart, Double Dragon, and Street Fighter. By that point, I was significantly better than him, but every so often, I’d let him beat me. I didn’t want him to think that I wasn’t grateful.

I’m not a natural programmer, and I’ve never considered myself any good at it. But I did, over the next decade or so, become good enough to be dangerous. I was fascinated by the thought that one individual programmer could code something universal, something bound by no laws or rules or regulations except cause and effect. There was an utterly logical relationship between my input and the output. If my input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was flawless, the computer’s output was, too. I’d never before experienced anything so consistent and fair, so unequivocally unbiased. A computer would wait forever to receive my command but would process it the very moment I hit enter, no questions asked. Nowhere else had I ever felt so in control.

THREE ^{Beltway Boy}

I was just shy of my ninth birthday when my family moved from North Carolina to Anne Arundel County in Maryland. To my surprise, I found the name Snowden everywhere. I only learned later that in 1686, England’s King Charles II had granted my paternal ancestors nearly two thousand acres of land in the New World, much of which eventually became Anne Arundel County.

Today, the former Snowden fields are bisected by Snowden River Parkway, a busy four-lane commercial stretch. Nearby is Fort George G. Meade, the second-largest army base in the country and the home of the National Security Agency (NSA). Fort Meade, in fact, is built atop land that was once owned by my Snowden cousins.

I knew nothing of this history at the time: My parents joked that the state of Maryland changed the name on the signs every time somebody new moved in. They thought that was funny, but I just found it spooky. We’d only moved about 250 miles, yet it felt like a different planet. I had exchanged the leafy riverside for a concrete sidewalk, and a school where I’d been popular and academically successful for one where I was constantly mocked for my glasses, my disinterest in sports, and especially for my strong Southern drawl.

I was so sensitive about my accent that I stopped speaking in class and started practicing alone at home until I managed to sound “normal.” Meanwhile, my grades plummeted, and some of my teachers decided to have me IQ-tested as a way of diagnosing what they thought was a learning disability. When my score came back, I don’t remember getting any apologies, just a bunch of extra “enrichment assignments.”

We lived in Crofton, Maryland, halfway between Annapolis and Washington, DC. Crofton itself is a planned community; on a map, it resembles the human brain, with the streets coiling and kinking and folding around one another. For my parents, this was an exciting time. Crofton was a step up for them, both economically and socially. Our backyard was basically a golf course, with tennis courts just around the corner, and beyond those an Olympic-size pool. It took my father just forty minutes to get to his new posting as a chief warrant officer in the Office of Aeronautical Engineering at Coast Guard Headquarters, which at the time was located at Buzzard Point in southern Washington, DC, adjacent to Fort Lesley J. McNair. And it took my mother just twenty or so minutes to get to her new job at the NSA, whose boxy futuristic headquarters forms the heart of Fort Meade.

As we lived so close to the headquarters of many government agencies, this type of employment was normal in our area. Neighbors to our left worked for the Defense Department; neighbors to the right worked in the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. For a while, nearly every girl at school on whom I had a crush had a father in the FBI.

For me, Fort Meade was just the place where my mother worked, along with about 125,000 other employees, approximately forty thousand of whom lived on-site, many with their families. The base was home to over 115 government agencies in addition to forces from all five branches of the military. The base has its own post offices, schools, police, and fire departments. Area children, military brats and civilians alike, would flock there daily to take golf, tennis, and swimming lessons. Though we lived off base, my mother still used its commissary as our grocery store to stock up on items in bulk. She also took advantage of the base’s PX, or post exchange, as a one-stop shop for tax-free clothing for my sister and me.

Both my parents had top secret clearances, but my mother also had a higher-level security check that members of the military aren’t subject to. My mother was the furthest thing from a spy. She was a clerk at an independent insurance association that serviced employees of the NSA—she provided spies with retirement plans. But still, she had to be vetted as if she were about to parachute into a jungle to stage a coup.

My father’s career remains fairly murky to me to this day. In the world I grew up in, nobody really talked about their jobs—not just to children, but to each other. Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader purposes of the projects to which they’re assigned. And the work that consumes them tends to require such specialized knowledge that to bring it up at a barbecue would get them disinvited from the next one, because nobody cared.

In retrospect, maybe that secrecy led to the problems we currently face.

FOUR ^{American Online}

It was soon after we moved to Crofton that my father brought home our first desktop computer and set it up—much to my mother’s chagrin—smack in the middle of the dining room table. From the moment it appeared, the computer and I were inseparable. It had what at the time felt like an impossibly fast 25-megahertz Intel 486 CPU and a color monitor that could display up to 256 different colors. (Your current device can probably display in the millions.) It was amazing.

This computer became my constant companion. My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them. They’d call my name to tell me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them. And whenever I was reminded that the computer was a shared computer and not my personal machine, I’d relinquish my seat with such reluctance that as my father or mother or sister took their turn, they’d have to order me out of the room entirely lest I hover moodily over their shoulders and offer advice.

I’d try to rush them through their tasks, so I could get back to mine, which were so much more important—like playing Loom. Loom was about a society of Weavers whose elders create a secret loom that controls the world. When a young boy discovers the loom’s power, he’s forced into exile, and everything spirals into chaos until the world decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea after all.

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

Still, it wasn’t lost on me that the machine in the game was a symbol of sorts for the computer on which I was playing it. And then there was the long gray cord that connected the computer to the great wide world beyond. There, for me, was the true magic: I could dial up and connect to something new called the internet.

Nowadays, connectivity is just presumed. Smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always. Connected to what exactly? How? It doesn’t matter. You just tap the icon, and boom, you’ve got it: the news, pizza, streaming music, and streaming video that we used to call TV and movies. Back then, however, we plugged our modems directly into the wall.

I’m not saying that I knew much about what the internet was, or how exactly I was connecting to it, but I did understand the miraculousness of it all. Because in those days, when you told the computer to connect, you were setting off an entire process. It would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of snakes, after which—and it could take whole minutes—you could pick up any other phone in the house on an extension line and actually hear the computers talking. You couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other, of course, since they were speaking in a machine language that transmitted up to fourteen thousand symbols per second.

Internet access, and the emergence of the Web, was my generation’s big bang. It irrevocably altered the course of my life, as it did the lives of everyone. The internet was my sanctuary. If it were possible, I became more sedentary. If it were possible, I became more pale. Gradually, I stopped sleeping at night and instead slept by day in school. My grades went back into free fall.

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

My appetite wasn’t limited to serious tech subjects like how to fix a CD-ROM drive, of course. I also spent plenty of time on gaming sites. But I was generally just so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information immediately available that I’m not sure I was able to say where one subject ended and another began. A crash course on how to build my own computer led to a crash course in processor architecture, with side excursions into information about martial arts, guns, and sports cars.

It was like I was in a race with the technology. I started to resent my parents whenever they would force me off the computer on a school night. I couldn’t bear to have those privileges revoked, disturbed by the thought that every moment that I wasn’t online more and more material was appearing that I’d be missing.

How can I explain it to someone who wasn’t there? Back then, being online was another life, considered by most to be separate and distinct from Real Life. The virtual and the actual had not yet merged. And it was up to each individual user to determine for themselves where one ended and the other began.

It was precisely this that was so inspiring: the freedom to imagine something entirely new, the freedom to start over. As the millennium approached, the online world became increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally peer-to-peer relationship. But for one brief and beautiful stretch of time the internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people. Its purpose was to enlighten, not to make money. I consider the 1990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy I’ve ever experienced.

I was especially involved with the Web-based bulletin-board systems or BBSs. On these, you could pick a username and type out whatever message you wanted to post, either adding to a preexisting group discussion or starting a new one. Imagine the longest email chain you’ve ever been on, but in public. These were also chat applications, which provided an instant message version of the same experience. There you could discuss any topic in real time.

Most of the messaging and chatting I did was in search of answers to questions I had about how to build my own computer, and the responses I received were so considered and thorough, so generous and kind, they’d be unthinkable today. My panicked query about why a certain chipset for which I’d saved up my allowance didn’t seem to be compatible with the motherboard I’d already gotten for Christmas received a two-thousand-word explanation from a professional tenured computer scientist on the other side of the country. I was twelve years old, and my correspondent was an adult stranger far away, yet he treated me like an equal because I’d shown respect for the technology.

I attribute this civility, so far removed from our current social media sniping, to the fact that the only people on these boards were the people who wanted to be there badly enough—who had the proficiency and passion. The internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.

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

I might have told the BBSers my age, but I never told them my name, because one of the greatest joys of these platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. I could take cover under virtually any handle, or “nym,” as they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking my more amateur questions on what seemed to me the more amateur boards under different personas each time. My computer skills were improving so swiftly that I was embarrassed by my previous ignorance and wanted to distance myself from it. I wanted to disassociate my selves.

The internet back then had yet to fall victim to the move by both governments and businesses to link users’ online personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day without having to be held accountable for them the next. That scenario actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides. Mistakes were swiftly punished, but also swiftly rectified, and that allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom. Imagine: You could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to the world, as if the internet button were actually a reset button for your life.

FIVE ^Hacking

All teens are hackers. They have to be, if only because their life circumstances are untenable and they’re willing to do anything to evade parental supervision. Basically, they’re fed up with being on the losing end of an imbalance of power.

To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice.

In school, you were told that in the system of American politics, citizens give consent through the franchise to be governed by their equals. This is democracy. But democracy certainly wasn’t in place in my US history class. If my classmates and I had had the vote, Mr. Martin would have been out of a job. If a teacher didn’t want you to go to the bathroom, you’d better hold it in. If a teacher promised a field trip but then canceled it for an imaginary infraction, they’d offer no explanation beyond citing their broad authority and the maintenance of proper order.

Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be difficult. Getting rules changed would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves at a disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw in every system, in both politics and computing: The people who create the rules have no incentive to act against themselves.

So I started hacking—which remains the sanest, healthiest, and most educational way I know for anyone to assert autonomy and address people on equal terms.

Like most of my classmates, I didn’t like the rules but was afraid of breaking them. I knew how the system worked: You corrected a teacher’s mistake, you got a warning; you confronted the teacher when they didn’t admit the mistake, you got detention; someone cheated off your exam, and though you didn’t expressly let them cheat, you got detention and the cheater got suspended.

This is the origin of all hacking: the awareness of a link between input and output, between cause and effect. Hacking isn’t just native to computing—it exists wherever rules do. To hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and taking advantage of the space between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually works. In making the most of these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules so much as debunking them. Hacking is a reliable method for dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of their system’s righteousness that it never occurred to them to test it.

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

The summer I turned thirteen, I resolved to seriously reduce my classroom commitments. I wasn’t quite sure how I’d swing that, though. All the plans I came up with were likely to backfire. If I was caught skipping class, my parents would revoke my computer privileges; if I decided to drop out, they’d bury my body deep in the woods and tell the neighbors I’d run away. I had to come up with a hack—and then, on the first day of the new school year, I found one. Indeed, it was basically handed to me.

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

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

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

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

The moment I figured that out, I stopped doing homework completely. Every day was bliss. Until Mr. Stockton asked me in front of the entire class why I hadn’t handed in the past half dozen or so homework assignments. I cheerfully offered my equation to the math teacher.

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

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

Pretty clever, Mr. Stockton.

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

I also did some more conventional—computer-based—hacking. As I did, my abilities improved. At the bookstore, I’d page through tiny, blurrily photocopied, stapled-together hacker zines, absorbing their techniques, and in the process absorbing their antiauthoritarian politics.

People still ask me why, when I finally did gain some hacking proficiency, I didn’t race out to empty bank accounts or steal credit card numbers. The honest answer is that I was too young and dumb to even know that this was an option, let alone to know what I’d do with the stolen loot. All I wanted, all I needed, I already had for free. Instead, I figured out simple ways to hack some games, giving myself extra lives and letting me do things like see through walls. Also, there wasn’t a lot of money on the internet back then, at least not by today’s standards.

If you asked some of the big-shot hackers of the day why, for example, they’d hacked into a major news site only to do nothing more meaningful than replace the headlines with a goofy GIF that would be taken down in half an hour, the reply would’ve been a version of the answer given by the mountaineer who was asked his reason for climbing Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.” Most hackers, particularly young ones, set out to search for the limits of their talent and any opportunity to prove the impossible possible.

I was young, and while my curiosity was pure, it was also pretty revealing. The more I came to know about the fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of trusting the wrong machine. My first hack that ever courted trouble dealt with the fear of a full-on, scorched-earth nuclear holocaust.

I’d been reading some article about the history of the American nuclear program, and before I knew it, with just a couple of clicks, I was at the website of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the country’s nuclear research facility. That’s just the way the internet works: You get curious, and your fingers do the thinking for you. But suddenly I was legitimately freaked out: The website of America’s largest and most significant scientific research and weapons development institution, I noticed, had a glaring security hole. Its vulnerability was basically the virtual version of an unlocked door. Within a half hour of reading an article about the threat of nuclear weapons, I’d stumbled upon a trove of files meant only for the lab’s security-cleared workers.

To be sure, the documents I accessed weren’t exactly the classified plans for building a nuclear device in my garage. (And, anyway, it’s not as if those plans weren’t already available on about a dozen DIY websites.) Still, as someone suddenly worried about nuclear war, and also as the child of military parents, I did what I figured I was supposed to: I told an adult. I sent an explanatory email to the laboratory’s webmaster about the vulnerable files and waited for a response that never came.

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

An operator picked up, and the moment she did, I started stammering. She interrupted with a curt “Please hold for IT,” and before I could thank her, she’d transferred me to a voice mail.

By the time the beep came, I’d regained some confidence, and I left a message. I think I even spelled out my name, like my father sometimes did, using the military phonetic alphabet: “Sierra November Oscar Whiskey Delta Echo November.” Then I hung up and went on with my life, which for a week consisted pretty much exclusively of checking the Los Alamos website.

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

Weeks passed until one evening, just before dinner, the phone rang. My mother, who was in the kitchen making dinner, picked up.

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

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

Her whisper terrified me. “What did you do?”

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

“Los Alamos, the nuclear laboratory.”

“Oh, thank God.”

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

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

My mother hadn’t taken her eyes off me. I gave her a thumbs-up, and then, to further reassure her, I explained to the IT rep what he already knew: how I’d found the problem, how I’d reported it, how I hadn’t received any response until now. I finished up with, “I really appreciate you telling me. I hope I didn’t cause any problems.”

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

“Nothing really,” I said.

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

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

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

SIX ^Incomplete

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

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

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

At the time, I believed that life’s most important questions were binary, meaning that one answer was always Right, and all the rest were Wrong. I think I was enchanted by the model of computer programming, whose questions can only be answered in one of two ways: 1 or 0, the machine-code version of yes or no, true or false. Even the multiple-choice questions of my quizzes and tests could be approached through binary logic. If I didn’t immediately recognize one of the possible answers as correct, I could always try to reduce my choices by a process of elimination.

Toward the end of my freshman year, however, I was faced with a very different kind of assignment—a question that couldn’t be answered by filling in bubbles with a number-two pencil. It was an English class assignment, a writing prompt: “Please produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1,000 words.” I was being ordered to divulge my thoughts on perhaps the only subject on which I didn’t have any thoughts: the subject of me. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t turn anything in and received an incomplete.

My problem, like the prompt itself, was personal—my family was falling apart. My parents were getting a divorce. It all happened so fast. My father moved out, and my mother moved us into a condominium in a development in nearby Ellicott City. As the custody and visitation rights were being sorted, my sister threw herself into college applications.

I reacted by turning inward. Among family, I was dependable and sincere. Among friends, cheery and unconcerned. But when I was alone, I was constantly worried about being a burden. Every fuss I’d ever made flickered in my mind, evidence that I was responsible for what had happened between my parents.

I started faking self-sufficiency, projecting a sort of premature adulthood. I stopped saying that I was “playing” with the computer and started saying that I was “working” on it. Just changing those words, without remotely changing what I was doing, made a difference in how I was perceived, by others and even by myself.

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

I was surprised to find that as I put more and more distance between myself and my parents, I became closer to others, who treated me like a peer. Mentors who taught me to sail, trained me to fight, coached me in public speaking, and gave me the confidence to stand onstage—all of them helped to raise me.

At the beginning of my sophomore year, though, I started getting tired a lot and falling asleep more than usual—not just at school anymore, but now even at the computer. Soon enough my joints were aching, my nodes were swollen, the whites of my eyes turned yellow, and I was too exhausted to get out of bed, even after sleeping for twelve hours or more at a stretch.

I was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. It was both a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not least because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,” and at age fifteen the only hooking up I’d ever done involved a modem. School was totally forgotten, my absences piled up. I barely had the energy to do anything but play the games my parents gave me. When I no longer had it in me to even work a joystick, I wondered why I was alive.

It was a haze. While I was resigned to all the fever dreams sleep brought me, the thought of having to catch up on my schoolwork was the true nightmare. After I’d missed approximately four months of class, I got a letter in the mail informing me that I’d have to repeat my sophomore year. The prospect of returning to school, let alone of repeating two semesters, was unimaginable to me, and I was ready to do whatever it took to avoid it.

Suddenly I was upright and getting dressed in something other than pajamas. I was online and on the phone, searching for the system’s edges, searching for a hack. After a bit of research, and a lot of form filling, my solution landed in the mailbox: I’d gotten myself accepted to college. Apparently, you don’t need a high school diploma to apply.

Anne Arundel Community College wasn’t a fancy university, but it would do the trick. All that mattered was that it was accredited. I took the offer of admission to my high school administrators, who agreed to let me enroll. I’d attend college classes two days a week, which was just about the most that I could manage to stay upright and functional. By taking classes above my grade level, I wouldn’t have to suffer through the year I’d missed. I’d just skip it.

I was the youngest person in all my classes, and might even have been the youngest person at the school. This, along with the fact that I was still recovering, meant that I didn’t hang out much. Also, because AACC was a commuter school, it had no active campus life. The anonymity of the school suited me fine, though, as did my classes, most of which were distinctly more interesting than anything I’d napped through at Arundel High.

Before I go any further, I should note that I still owe that English class autobiographical statement. The older I get, the heavier it weighs on me, and yet writing it hasn’t gotten any easier.

It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures” in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to instill in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house; you drive the most ordinary car; you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover.

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

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

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

SEVEN ^9/11

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

I had a white Honda Civic and drove it all over. My life became a circuit, tracing a route between home, college, and my friends, particularly a new group that I’d met in Japanese class. Most of these friends were aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed with anime. As our friendships deepened, so, too, did my familiarity with anime genres.

One of my new friends—I’ll call her Mae—was much older, at a comfortably adult twenty-five. She was something of an idol to the rest of us, as a published artist and avid cosplayer. She was my Japanese conversation partner and, I was impressed to find out, also ran a successful Web-design business.

That’s how I became a freelancer: I started working as a Web designer for a girl I met in class. I was a quick learner, and in a company of two, you’ve got to be able to do everything. We worked out of her house, a two-story town house that she shared with her husband, a neat and clever man whom I’ll call Norm.

The town house was located on base at Fort Meade, where Norm worked as an air force linguist assigned to the NSA. It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time, Fort Meade was almost entirely accessible to anyone. It wasn’t all barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire like it is today. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate and show ID.

Mae was strikingly canny, working twice as hard as her peers to make her business a success. She parlayed her illustration skills into logo design and offered basic branding services. As for my work, the methods and coding were simple enough for me to pick up on the fly, and although they could be brutally repetitive, I wasn’t complaining.

Still, about a year into my job, I realized I had to plan for my future. Most job listings and contracts for advanced work were beginning to require that applicants be officially accredited by major tech companies like IBM and Cisco in the use and service of their products. The certification credentials were being adopted as industry standard almost as quickly as the industry could invent them. An A+ certification meant that you were able to service and repair computers. A Net+ certification meant that you were able to handle some basic networking. But these were just ways to become the guy who worked the help desk. The best pieces of paper were grouped under the Microsoft Certified Professional series. The most advanced certification, the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, or MCSE, was the brass ring, the guaranteed meal ticket.

In terms of technical know-how, the MCSE wasn’t the easiest to get, but it also didn’t require what most self-respecting hackers would consider unicorn genius, either. In terms of time and money, the commitment was considerable. I had to take seven separate tests, which cost 150 dollars each, and pay something like eighteen thousand dollars in tuition to Johns Hopkins University for the full battery of prep classes. True to form, I didn’t finish the classes, opting instead to go straight to the testing after I felt I’d had enough. Unfortunately, Hopkins didn’t give refunds. With payments looming on my tuition loan, I asked Mae to give me more hours. She agreed and told me to start coming in at 9:00 a.m. It was an early start time, especially for a freelancer, which was why I was running late on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001.

I was speeding down Route 32 under a beautiful Microsoft-blue sky, trying not to get caught by any speed traps. My window was down, and my hand was riding the wind—it felt like a lucky day. I had the talk radio cranked and was waiting for the news to switch to the traffic.

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

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

Mae picked up. “What? Really?”

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

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

She turned to me. “A second plane just hit the other tower.” Until that moment, I’d thought it had been an accident.

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

“Like, the gates?” I said. “Seriously?”

The scale of what had happened had yet to hit me. I was thinking about my commute.

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

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

“You’re not going to believe this.”

The Pentagon, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, had been attacked.

Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. For as long as I live, I’ll remember retracing my way up the road past the NSA’s headquarters. At the moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the National Security Agency was abandoning its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.

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

I wasn’t thinking about the next likeliest targets as my car crawled through the gridlock caused by everyone trying to get out of the same parking lot simultaneously. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. What I was doing was obediently following along, in what today I recall as a clamor of horns (I don’t think I’d ever heard a car horn at an American military installation before) and radios shrieking the news of the South Tower’s collapse while drivers steered with their knees and feverishly pressed redial on their phones. (Calls were just about impossible to make due to an overloaded cell network.) Gradually, I realized that I was cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper. Even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.

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

EIGHT ^9/12

Try to remember the biggest family event you’ve ever been to—maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? Around thirty, fifty? Though all of them together make up your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know each and every individual member. Now think about how many people are in your school. How many of them are your friends, and how many others do you just know as acquaintances, and how many others do you simply recognize? It certainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all “your people,” but you may still feel a bond with them.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. The events of that day left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.

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

The two decades since 9/11 have seen America self-destruct by way of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. Having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how intelligence can be used for disinformation and propaganda against America’s enemies, but also against its allies and sometimes its own citizens. Whenever I try to understand how the last two decades happened, I return to that September—to that ground-zero day and its immediate aftermath.

I remember escaping the panicked crush of the spies fleeing Fort Meade just as the North Tower of the World Trade Center came down. Once on the highway, I tried to steer with one hand while pressing buttons with the other, calling family indiscriminately and never getting through. Finally, I managed to get in touch with my mother, who was working as a clerk for the federal courts in Baltimore.

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

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

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

“Is Pop in Washington?”

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

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

Before I could say anything, my mother spoke again. “There’s someone on the other line. It might be Gran. I’ve got to go.”

She didn’t call me back. I tried her number endlessly but couldn’t get through, so I went home to wait, sitting in front of the blaring TV while I kept reloading news sites.

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

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

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

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

After 9/11, America immediately divided the world into “us” and “them,” and everyone was either with us or against us, as President George W. Bush remarked while the rubble was still smoldering. People in my neighborhood put up new American flags, as if to show which side they’d chosen. Others stuffed red, white, and blue Dixie cups through every chain-link fence on every overpass of every highway between my mother’s home and my father’s to spell out phrases like UNITED WE STAND and STAND TOGETHER NEVER FORGET.

Nearly a hundred thousand spies returned to work with the knowledge that they’d failed at their primary job, which was protecting America. They had the same anger as everybody else, but they also felt guilt. September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world. In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values in the now-connected global public.

Instead, it went to war.

The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision. I accepted all the claims reported by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid to. I wanted to be a liberator. I wanted to free the oppressed. I wanted vengeance. It’s humiliating to acknowledge how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.

I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, serving in the military had seemed pointless, or just boring. Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991 and the attacks of 2001, America lacked for enemies. It was the sole global superpower. There were seemingly no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.

My options dismayed me, however. I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes. Unfortunately for me, the primary agencies that did that—the NSA, the CIA—often required a traditional college degree. The more I read online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirement for military veterans. It was then that I decided to join up.

After talking to recruiters from every branch, I decided to join the army, whose leadership some in my Coast Guard family had always considered the crazy uncles of the US military.

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

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

NINE ^X-rays

I joined the army because it wasn’t the Coast Guard. It didn’t hurt that I’d scored high enough on its entrance exams to qualify for a chance to come out of training as a Special Forces sergeant, on a track the recruiters called 18 X-ray, which was designed to boost the ranks of the small flexible units that were doing the hardest fighting in America’s increasingly shadowy and disparate wars.

The 18 X-ray program was a considerable incentive; traditionally, before 9/11, I would’ve had to already be in the army before being given a shot at attending the Special Forces’ qualification courses. The new system worked by screening prospective soldiers up front, identifying those with the highest levels of fitness, intelligence, and language-learning ability—the ones who might make the cut—and using the appeal of special training and a rapid advance in rank to enlist promising candidates.

I’d put in a couple of months of grueling runs to prepare—I was in great shape, but I always hated running—before my recruiter called to say that my paperwork had been approved: I was in; I’d made it. I was the first candidate he’d ever signed up for the program, and I could hear the pride and cheer in his voice when he told me that after training, I’d probably be made a Special Forces Communications, Engineering, or Intelligence sergeant.

Probably.

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

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

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

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

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

Everywhere we went, we marched—or ran. We ran constantly. Miles before mess, miles after mess, down roads and fields and around the track while the drill sergeant called the cadence. When you’re running in unit formation, the cadence lulls you, filling your ears with the din of dozens of men echoing your own shouting voice and forcing your eyes to fix on the footfalls of the runner in front of you. After a while you don’t think anymore—you merely count, mile after mile. I would say it was serene if it hadn’t been so deadening. I would say I was at peace if I hadn’t been so tired. This was precisely as the army intended. The army makes its fighters by first training the fight out of them until they’re too weak to care, or to do anything besides obey.

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

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

Toward the middle of the movement, I was in the lead and scrambled atop a storm-felled tree to check our bearings. After confirming that we were on track, I went to hop down, but with one foot extended I noticed the coil of a snake directly below me. Kids in North Carolina grow up being told that all snakes are deadly, and I wasn’t about to start doubting it now.

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

I managed to tough it out and finish, but the only reason was that I didn’t have a choice. By the time I got back to the barracks, my legs were numb.

The next morning, I was torn from a fitful sleep by the clanking of a metal trash can being thrown down the squad bay, a wake-up call that meant someone hadn’t done their job to the drill sergeant’s satisfaction. I shot up automatically, swinging myself over the edge of my bunk and springing to the floor. When I landed, my legs gave way and I fell.

Meanwhile, a crowd gathered around me with laughter that turned to concern and then to silence as the drill sergeant approached. “Daisy! Get Snowflake here down to the bench.”

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

After he carried me down to the bench, Daisy had to go. He wasn’t hurt, and those of us who were had to be kept separated. I got partnered up with a smart, handsome, former-catalog-model Captain America type who’d injured his hip about a week earlier. Neither of us felt up to talking, so we crutched along in grim silence. At the hospital I was x-rayed and told that I had bilateral tibial fractures. These are stress fractures, which can deepen with time and pressure until they crack the bones down to the marrow. The only thing I could do to help my legs heal was to get off my feet and stay off them. It was with those orders that I was dismissed from the examination room to get a ride back to the battalion.

Except I couldn’t leave without my partner. He’d gone in to be x-rayed after me and hadn’t returned. I assumed he was still being examined, so I waited. And waited. Hours passed. It turned out he was in surgery.

I was sent back to Fort Benning alone. If I stayed on the bench for more than three or four days, I’d be at serious risk of being “recycled”—forced to start basic training over from scratch—or, worse, of being transferred to the medical unit and sent home.

My next doctor’s appointment confirmed I wasn’t long for the army. After examining me and a new set of X-rays, the doctor said that I was in no condition to continue with my company. The next phase of training was airborne, and he told me, “Son, if you jump on those legs, they’re going to turn into powder.”

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

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

I accepted his offer.

Shortly thereafter, I was transferred to the medical unit. I signed some forms formalizing my administrative discharge and left on crutches that the army let me keep.

TEN ^{Cleared and In Love}

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

I was ready to face the facts: If I still had the urge to serve my country, and I most certainly did, then I’d have to serve it through my head and hands—through computing. Which meant I would need a security clearance.

There are, generally speaking, three levels of security clearance. From low to high they are confidential, secret, and top secret. A top secret clearance can also be extended with a Sensitive Compartmented Information qualifier, creating the coveted TS/SCI access required by top-tier agencies like the CIA and NSA. The TS/SCI is by far the hardest access to get, but also opens the most doors. The approval process for a TS/SCI can take a year or more. All it involves is filling out some paperwork, then sitting around with your feet up and trying not to commit too many crimes while the federal government renders its verdict. The rest, after all, is out of your hands.

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

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

The goal of all this background checking was not only to find out what I’d done wrong, but also to find out how I might be compromised or blackmailed. The most important thing to the Intelligence Community (IC) is not that you’re 100 percent perfectly clean, because if that were the case they wouldn’t hire anybody. Instead, it’s that there’s no dirty secret out there that you’re hiding that could be used against you, and thus against the agency, by an enemy power.

This, of course, set me thinking. Nothing I could come up with would have raised even an iota of eyebrow from investigators. Still, I was worried about my chat logs and forum posts, all the supremely moronic commentary that I’d sprayed across gaming and hacker sites when I was younger. When I went back and reread the posts, I cringed. Half the things I’d said I hadn’t even meant at the time, and the other half, the things I think I had meant at the time, were even worse. I’d grown up.

This might be a familiar problem for any generation that grows up online. My generation was the first to be able to discover and explore our identities almost totally unsupervised. But we gave hardly any thought to the fact that it was all being preserved forever, and that one day we might be expected to account for it.

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

But ultimately, I couldn’t. Something kept preventing me. It just felt wrong. To blank my posts from the face of the earth wasn’t illegal, and it wouldn’t even have made me ineligible for a security clearance had anyone found out. But the prospect of doing so bothered me nonetheless. What mattered to me wasn’t so much the integrity of the written record but that of my soul. I didn’t want to live in a world where everyone had to pretend that they were perfect, because that was a world that had no place for me or my friends. To erase those comments would have been to erase who I was, where I was from, and how far I’d come.

I decided to leave the comments up and figure out how to live with them. We can’t erase the things that shame us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. All we can do is control our reactions—whether we let the past oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.

In the midst of waiting for the clearance process to take its course, I met Lindsay Mills on an online dating site. She would go on to become my partner and the love of my life. Our first date was a continuation of our first contact online and the start of a conversation that will last as long as we will.

I told her I was worried about the upcoming polygraph, or lie detector, test required for my clearance, and she offered to practice with me. The philosophy she lived by was the perfect training: Say what you want; say who you are; never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem.

I passed the test with flying colors.

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

I was twenty-two years old, had a girlfriend I loved, and I was on top of the world.