Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition)

ELEVEN ^{The System}

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

However, once I returned from the army and rededicated myself to computing, I gradually came to regret this simple world view. The more I developed my abilities, the more I matured and realized that the technology of communications had a chance of succeeding where the technology of violence had failed in the US’s various wars in the Middle East post-9/11. Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber.

In the early 2000s, the internet was still just barely out of its formative period, and, to my mind at least, it offered a more authentic and complete incarnation of American ideals than even America itself. A place where everyone was equal? Check. A place dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Check, check, check. Here was this wild, open new frontier that belonged to anyone bold enough to settle it, swiftly becoming colonized by governments and corporate interests that were seeking to regulate it for power and profit.

In school, I’d had to memorize the preamble to the US Constitution. Its words lodged in my brain alongside John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”:

This internet revolution wasn’t happening in history textbooks. My generation could be part of it as long as we had the technological knowledge and abilities. But in order to flourish, I had to specialize. I could have become a software developer or, as the job is more commonly called, a programmer, writing the code that makes computers work. Alternatively, I could have become a hardware or network specialist, setting up the servers in their racks and running the wires, weaving the massive fabric that connects every computer, every device, and every file. Computers and computer programs were interesting to me, and so were the networks that linked them together. But I was most intrigued by their total functioning as an overarching system.

A system is just a bunch of parts that function together as a whole, which most people are only reminded of when something breaks. In order to find what caused the system to collapse, you have to start from the point where you spotted the problem and trace the problem’s effects logically through all of the system’s components. Because systems work according to instructions, ultimately when there’s a problem, you’re searching for which rules failed, how, and why.

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

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

But I came into the IC during a different age.

By the time I arrived, the sincerity of public service had given way to the greed of the private sector. The sacred compact of the soldier, officer, and career civil servant was being replaced by a transient worker, or contractor, whose patriotism depended on a better paycheck and for whom the federal government was less the ultimate authority than the ultimate client.

However much the work of Intelligence is privatized, the federal government remains the only authority that can grant an individual clearance to access classified information. And because clearance candidates must be sponsored in order to apply for clearance—meaning they must already have a job offer for a position that requires clearance—most Intelligence contractors begin their careers in a government position.

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

CASL’s ostensible mission was to study how people learned languages and to develop computer-assisted methods to help them do so more quickly and better. The NSA also wanted to develop ways to improve computer comprehension of language. The agency was having a tough time ensuring that its computers could comprehend and analyze the massive amount of foreign-language communications that they were intercepting.

I don’t have a more granular idea of the kinds of things that CASL was supposed to do for the simple reason that when I showed up for work with my bright, shiny clearance, the place wasn’t even open yet. In fact, its building was still under construction. Until it was finished and the tech was installed, my job was essentially that of a night-shift security guard. My responsibilities were limited to showing up every day to patrol the empty halls making sure that nobody burned down the building or broke in and bugged it.

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

It was particularly bizarre to me that most of the systems jobs that were out there were private. These positions came with almost universal access to the employer’s digital existence. The US government had restructured its intelligence agencies so that its most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who didn’t really work for it.

The government agencies were hiring tech companies to hire young adults from my generation, and then they were giving them the keys to the kingdom, because—as Congress and the press were told—the agencies didn’t have a choice. No one else knew how the keys, or the kingdom, worked.

My first major contracting gig was actually a subcontracting gig: the CIA had hired BAE Systems, which had hired COMSO, which hired me.

I never learned what the company’s acronym stood for, or even if it stood for anything. Technically speaking, COMSO would be my employer, but I never worked a single day at a COMSO office, or at a BAE Systems office, and few contractors ever would. I only worked at CIA headquarters.

In fact, I only ever visited the COMSO office, which was in Greenbelt, Maryland, maybe two or three times in my life. One of these was when I went down there to negotiate my salary and sign some paperwork. After the negotiations ended, a man held out his hand and, as I shook it, introduced himself to me as my “manager.” He went on to explain that the title was just a formality, and that I’d be taking my orders directly from the CIA. “If all goes well,” he said, “we’ll never meet again.”

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

TWELVE ^Indoc

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

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

“So this is the Deep State,” one guy said, and almost everybody laughed. We were all computer dudes—and yes, almost uniformly dudes. Some were tattooed and pierced, or bore evidence of having removed their piercings for the big day. One still had punky streaks of dye in his hair. Almost all wore contractor badges, as green and crisp as new hundred-dollar bills.

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

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

I wasn’t thinking any of these thoughts at my Indoc session, of course. Instead, I was just trying to keep myself awake. The presenters instructed us on basic operational security practices: Don’t tell anyone who you work for. Don’t leave sensitive materials unattended. Don’t bring your highly insecure cell phone into the highly secure office—or talk on it about work, ever. Don’t wear your Hi, I work for the CIA badge to the mall.

Finally, the room darkened, the PowerPoint presentation was fired up, and faces appeared on a screen. Everyone in the room sat upright. These were the faces, we were told, of former agents and contractors who had failed to follow the rules. The people on the screen, it was implied, were now in basements even worse than this one, and some would be there until they died.

All in all, this was an effective presentation.

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

My team’s task was to manage the vast majority of the CIA servers in the continental United States—the enormous halls of expensive “big iron” computers that comprised the agency’s internal networks and databases, all of its systems that transmitted, received, and stored intelligence. Many of the agency’s most important servers were situated on-site. Half of them were in the NHB, where my team was located; the other half were in the nearby OHB. They were set up on opposite sides of their respective buildings, so that if one side was blown up, we wouldn’t lose too many machines. My team was one of the few at the agency permitted to actually lay hands on the servers that processed and stored the agency’s most important secrets. We were likely the only team with access to log in to nearly all of them.

After a few weeks familiarizing myself with the systems on the day shift, I moved to nights—6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.—when the rest of the agency was pretty much dead.

At night, especially between, say, 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., the CIA was empty and lifeless, a vast and haunted complex with a postapocalyptic feel. All the escalators were stopped, and you had to walk them like stairs. Only half the elevators were working, and the pinging sounds they made, which were barely audible during the bustle of daytime, now sounded alarmingly loud. The agency had recently committed to a new eco-friendly energy-saving policy and installed motion-sensitive overhead lights: The lights would switch on when you approached, so that you felt followed, and your footsteps would echo endlessly.

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

My partner in this task—the only other person responsible for the nocturnal functioning of the CIA’s entire server architecture—was a guy I’m going to call Frank. He was an exceptional personality in every sense. He was a fiftysomething been-there-done-that ex-navy radio operator.

I have to say, when I first met Frank, I thought, Imagine if my entire life were like the nights I spent at CASL. Because, to put it bluntly, Frank did hardly any work at all. At least, that was the impression he liked to project. He enjoyed telling me, and everyone else, that he didn’t really know anything about computing and didn’t understand why they’d put him on such an important team. By his own account, all he’d done at work for the better part of the last decade was sit around and read books, though sometimes he’d also play games of solitaire—with a real deck of cards, not on the computer, of course. Sometimes he’d just pace all night.

When the phone rang to signal that something was broken, he’d just report it to the day shift. Essentially, his philosophy (if you could call it that) was that the night shift had to end sometime and the day shift had more people. Apparently, however, the day shift had gotten tired of coming in to work every morning to find Frank’s feet up in front of the digital equivalent of a dumpster fire, and so I’d been hired.

For some reason, the agency had decided that it was preferable to bring me in than to let this old guy go. After a couple of weeks of working together, I was convinced that his continued employment had to be the result of some personal connection or favor. To test this hypothesis I tried to draw Frank out, but I only provoked a lecture that went on and on, until suddenly a panicked expression came over his face and he jumped up and said, “I gotta change the tape!”

I had no idea what he was talking about. But Frank was already heading to the gray door at the back of our vault, which opened onto a dingy stairwell that gave direct access to the data center itself.

Going down into a server vault—especially the CIA’s—can be a disorienting experience. You descend into darkness blinking with green and red LEDs like an evil Christmas, vibrating with the whir of the industrial fans cooling the precious rack-mounted machinery to prevent it from melting down. Being there was always a bit dizzying.

Frank stopped by a shabby corner where an old computer took up almost an entire rickety desk. It was something from the early ’90s or even the late ’80s, a computer so ancient that it shouldn’t even have been called a computer. It was more properly a machine, running a miniature tape format that I didn’t recognize.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was only when Frank repeated this same tape-changing ritual the next night, and the night after that, and on every night we worked together thereafter, that I began to understand why the agency kept him around—and it wasn’t just for his sense of humor. Frank was the only guy willing to stick around between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. who was also old enough to know how to handle that proprietary tape system.

After I found a way to automate most of my own work—writing scripts to automatically update servers and restore lost network connections, mainly—I started having what I came to call a Frank amount of time. Meaning I had all night to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I passed a fair number of hours in long talks with Frank, but I also spent plenty of time online.

Few realize this, but the CIA has its own internet and Web. It has its own kind of Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia, which provides agents with information about agency teams, projects, and missions; and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network. For hours and hours every night, this was my education. For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence.

Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didn’t quite understand at the time, and that no major American employer outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: The computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The higher up this employee is, and the more systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to virtually every byte of his employer’s digital existence. Of course, not everyone is curious enough to take advantage of this education, and not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity. My forays through the CIA’s systems were natural extensions of my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit together into the whole.

With the official title and privileges of a systems administrator, and technical prowess that enabled my clearance to be used to its maximum potential, I was able to satisfy my every informational deficiency and then some. In case you were wondering: Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails are not a thing.

On the CIA’s internal news sites, I read top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still unfolding. These agency accounts of events were often very similar to the accounts that would eventually show up on network news, CNN, or Fox days later. The primary differences were merely in the sourcing and the level of detail.

Working at CIA headquarters was a thrill, but it was still only a few hours away from where I’d grown up, which in many ways was a similar environment. I was in my early twenties, and—apart from stints in North Carolina, childhood trips to visit my grandfather at Coast Guard bases where he’d held commands, and my few weeks in the army at Fort Benning—I’d never really left the Beltway.

The excitement and significance of what I was reading both increased my appreciation of the importance of our work and made me feel like I was missing out by just sitting at a workstation. As I read about events happening in Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, and other foreign cities, I realized that I had to serve my country by doing something truly meaningful abroad. Otherwise, I thought, I’d just become a more successful Frank.

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

My last day at CIA headquarters was just a formality. I’d already done all my paperwork and traded in my green badge for a blue. All that was left to do was to sit through another indoctrination and swear an oath of loyalty—not to the government or agency that now employed me directly, but to the US Constitution. I solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

THIRTEEN ^{The Count of the Hill}

My first orders as a freshly minted officer of the government were to head for the Comfort Inn in Warrenton, Virginia, a sad, dilapidated motel whose primary client was the “State Department,” by which I mean the CIA. It was the worst motel in a town of bad motels, which was probably why the CIA chose it. The Comfort Inn was to be my home for the next six months while I went to the nearby Warrenton Training Center, or, as folks there call it, the Hill.

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

The Hill serves as the heart of the CIA’s field communications network, carefully located just out of nuke range from DC. The salty old techs who worked there liked to say that the CIA could survive losing its headquarters to a catastrophic attack, but it would die if it ever lost Warrenton, and now that the top of the Hill holds two enormous top secret data centers—one of which I later helped construct—I’m inclined to agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one before graduation—which I was told was fairly uncommon. For the first time in my IC career, at age twenty-four, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. Most of the others were just tech-inclined people straight out of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.

We called each other by nicknames more often than by our true names. My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count because, like the vampire puppet of Sesame Street, I had a tendency to interrupt class by raising my forefinger, as if to say, One, two, three, ah, ha, ha, three things you forgot!

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

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

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

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

As was evident from the condition of the Comfort Inn, the school had been cutting some corners. Some of my classmates had begun to suspect that the administration was actually violating federal labor laws by requiring unpaid overtime, denying leave, and refusing to honor family benefits.

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

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

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

I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service Group. Then I copied the email to his boss.

A few days later, we were in class when a frontoffice secretary came in and declared that unpaid overtime would no longer be required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer hotel. I remember the giddy pride with which she announced, “A Hampton Inn!”

I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was at the door, summoning me back to his office. There, waiting in the school head’s office, was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed. He was exceptionally cordial, which unnerved me.

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

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

The CIA was quite different from the other civilian agencies, he said, even if, on paper, the regulations insisted it wasn’t. And in an agency that did such important work, there was nothing more important than the chain of command.

I pointed out that I’d tried the chain of command and been failed by it. Which was precisely the last thing I should have been explaining to the chain of command itself, personified just across a desk from me.

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

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

In other words, I wasn’t getting the SRD posting I’d so coveted.

This was their gotcha, their retaliation. No one besides me—and I mean no one—had put down SRD, or any other active combat situation for that matter, as their first or second or even third choice on their dream sheets. Everyone else had prioritized all sweet European vacation-stations with windmills and bicycles, where you rarely hear explosions.

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

FOURTEEN ^Geneva

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is largely set in Geneva, the bustling, neat, clean, clockwork-organized Swiss city where I now made my home. I read it at night during the long, lonely months I spent by myself before Lindsay moved over to join me, stretched out on a bare mattress in the living room of the comically fancy, comically vast, but still almost entirely unfurnished apartment that the embassy was paying for.

In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited: situations in which decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them irreparably. In Geneva, in the same landscape where Mary Shelley’s monster ran amok, America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a life and mission of its own and wreak havoc on the lives of its creators—mine very much included. The CIA station in the American embassy in Geneva was one of the prime European laboratories of this decades-long experiment.

The CIA is the primary American intelligence agency dedicated to HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact—person to person, face-to-face. In other words, when you think of traditional undercover spy missions in movies, you’re thinking of HUMINT (with lots of embellishment, of course). This differs from SIGINT (signals intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of intercepted communications. Though the COs (case officers) who specialized in HUMINT had a general distrust of digital technology, they certainly understood how useful it could be.

To serve as a technical field officer among these people was to be as much a cultural ambassador as an expert adviser. On Monday, a CO might ask my advice on how to set up a covert online communications channel with a potential turncoat they were afraid to spook. On Tuesday, another CO might introduce me to someone they’d say was a “specialist” in from Washington—though this was in fact the same CO from the day before, now testing out a disguise that I’m still embarrassed to say I didn’t suspect in the least, though I suppose that was the point. On Wednesday, I might be asked how best to destroy after transmitting (the technological version of burn after reading) a disc of customer records that a CO had managed to purchase from a crooked Swisscom employee. On Thursday, I might have to write up and transmit security violation reports on COs, documenting minor infractions like forgetting to lock the door to a vault when they’d gone to the bathroom. (I once had to write up myself for exactly the same mistake.) Come Friday, the chief of operations might call me into his office and ask me if, “hypothetically speaking,” headquarters could send over an infected thumb drive that could be used by “someone” to hack the computers used by delegates to the United Nations, whose main building was just up the street. Did I think there was much of a chance of this “someone” being caught?

I didn’t, and they weren’t.

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

The notoriously slow and meticulous methods of traditional spycraft certainly had their successes. But with the world’s deepest secrets now stored on computers, which were more often than not connected to the open internet, it was only logical that America’s intelligence agencies would want to use those very same connections to steal them.

Before the advent of the internet, if an agency wanted to gain access to a target’s computer, it had to recruit a person, or what spies call an “asset,” who had physical access to it. But this new world of “digital network intelligence” meant that physical access was almost never required. An agent now could just send the target a message, such as an email, with attachments or links that unleashed malware (an evil program) that would allow the agency to surveil not just the target’s computer but its entire network. Given this innovation, the CIA’s HUMINT would be dedicated to the identification of targets of interest, and SIGINT would take care of the rest.

That, at least, was the hope. But as intelligence increasingly became “cyberintelligence,” old concerns also had to be updated to the new medium of the internet. For example: how to research a target while remaining anonymous online.

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

It may be hard to believe, but the agency at the time had no good answer for what a case officer should do to remain anonymous online. Formally, the way this ridiculous procedure was supposed to work was that someone back in McLean would go online from a specific computer terminal and set up a fake origin for a query before sending it to Google. If anyone tried to look into who had run that particular search, all they would find would be a fake business located somewhere in America that the CIA used as cover. I can say with absolute certainty that the process was ineffective, onerous, and expensive.

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

Tor is free and open-source software that, if used carefully, allows its users to browse online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity. Its protocols were developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory throughout the mid-1990s, and in 2003 it was released to the public. Tor operates on a cooperative community model, relying on tech-savvy volunteers all over the globe who run their own Tor servers out of their basements, attics, and garages.

For me, Tor was a life changer, bringing me back to the internet of my childhood by giving me just the slightest taste of freedom from being observed.

None of this is meant to imply that the agency wasn’t still doing some significant HUMINT, in the same manner in which it had always done so. Even I got involved, though my most memorable operation was a failure. Geneva was the first and only time in my intelligence career in which I made the personal acquaintance of a “target.”

I met the man at an embassy party. The embassy had lots of those. The COs always went, and sometimes they would bring me along. As a technologist, I found it incredibly easy to defend my cover. The moment someone asked me what I did, and I responded with the four words “I work in IT,” their interest in me was over.

The party I’m recalling took place on a warm night on the outside terrace of an upscale café. I took my plate and sat down at a table next to a well-dressed Middle Eastern man. He seemed lonely and totally exasperated that no one seemed interested in him, so I asked him about himself. That’s the usual technique: just be curious and let them talk. In this case, the man did so much talking that it was like I wasn’t even there. He was Saudi and told me about how much he loved Geneva. With a touch of a conspiratorial tone, he then said that he worked in private wealth management and mentioned his clients.

“Your clients?” I asked.

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

After a few minutes, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and on the way there I leaned over to tell the CO what I’d learned. I passed along this information because Saudi Arabia was suspected of financing terrorism. After an intentionally long interval “fixing my hair,” or texting Lindsay in front of the bathroom mirror, I returned to find the CO sitting in my chair. I waved to my new Saudi friend before sitting down at a different table. My job identifying an asset was done.

The next day, the CO, whom I’ll call Cal, heaped me with praise and thanked me effusively. COs are promoted or passed over based primarily on how effective they are at recruiting assets with access to information on matters substantial enough to be formally reported back to headquarters.

Despite Cal’s regular meetings with the banker, the banker wasn’t warming up to him—and Cal was getting impatient. After a month of failures, Cal was so frustrated that he took the banker out and intentionally got him drunk. Then he pressured the guy to drive home drunk instead of taking a cab. Before the guy had even left the last bar of the night, Cal called the Geneva police, who not fifteen minutes later arrested the banker for driving under the influence. The banker faced an enormous fine. When the fine was levied, and his “friend” couldn’t afford to pay, Cal was ready with a loan. Suddenly the banker had become dependent on him, the dream of every CO.

In the end, though, when the CO finally made the pitch to the banker to become an asset, the man turned him down. He cut off all contact and returned to Saudi Arabia. The CO was rotated back to the States. It was a waste, which I myself had put in motion and then was powerless to stop. After that experience, the prioritizing of SIGINT over HUMINT made all the more sense to me.

In the summer of 2008, the city had its annual giant carnival that culminates in fireworks. I remember sitting with the local personnel of the Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating surveillance equipment that allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. The work these guys did was way beyond my abilities, and they had access to NSA tools that I didn’t even know existed. Still, we were friendly: I looked up to them, and they looked out for me.

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

FIFTEEN ^Tokyo

The internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. Over 90 percent of the world’s internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses.

Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. They’re also subject to classified American policies that permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.

It should have been obvious that the US government would engage in this type of mass surveillance. It should have been especially obvious to me. Yet it wasn’t—mostly because the government kept insisting that it did nothing of the sort. All of us were too trusting. But I didn’t know that until some time after I moved to Japan in 2009 to work for the NSA.

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

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

My official job title was systems analyst, with responsibility for maintaining the local NSA systems. Much of my initial work was that of a systems administrator, though, helping to connect the NSA’s systems with the CIA’s.

Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security.

It was rather disconcerting to find out that the NSA was so far ahead of the game in terms of cyberintelligence, yet so far behind it in terms of cybersecurity. My chiefs at the PTC understood the risks, so they tasked me with engineering a solution. The result was a backup and storage system: a complete, automated, and constantly updating copy of all of the agency’s most important material. It allowed the agency to store intelligence data for progressively longer periods of time. The goal quickly went from being able to store intelligence for days, to weeks, to months, to five years or more. The agency’s ultimate dream is permanency—to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced forever, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.

The NSA has a whole protocol you’re supposed to follow when you give a program a code name. An internal website throws imaginary dice to pick one name from column A, and throws again to pick one name from column B. This is how you end up with names that don’t mean anything, like FOXACID and EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE. But agents at the NSA would often cheat and redo their dice throws until they got the name combination they wanted, whatever they thought was cool: TRAFFICTHIEF, the VPN Attack Orchestrator.

I swear I never did that when I went about finding a name for my backup system. I swear that I just rolled the bones and came up with EPICSHELTER. Later, once the agency adopted the system, they renamed it something like the Storage Modernization Plan or Storage Modernization Program.

In the midst of my EPICSHELTER work, the PTC hosted a conference on China, and I was asked to make a presentation. To prepare, I started pulling everything off the NSA network (and off the CIA network, to which I still had access), trying to read every top secret report I could find about what the Chinese were doing online.

What I read were the technical details of China’s surveillance of private communications—an accounting of the mechanisms and machinery required for the constant collection, storage, and analysis of the billions of daily telephone and internet communications of over a billion people. Essentially, China was spying on the private lives of its own citizens. At first I was so impressed by the system’s achievement that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian controls.

But there were certain aspects of what I was reading that disturbed me. I was reminded that if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly already has been. There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself. What China was doing publicly to its own citizens, America might be—could be—doing secretly to the world.

And although you should hate me for it, I have to say that at the time I did my best to ignore my concerns. The distinctions were still fairly clear to me. China’s system was intended to keep its citizens in and America out. The American systems were invisible and purely defensive. Understood this way, the US surveillance model was perfectly okay with me.

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

At the start of my employment with the NSA, in 2009, I was only slightly more knowledgeable about its practices than the rest of the world. I was aware of the agency’s surveillance initiatives authorized by President George W. Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, especially the warrantless wiretapping of the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP).

The PSP empowered the NSA to collect telephone and internet communications between the United States and abroad without having to obtain a special warrant—in other words, there was no need for the NSA to prove that someone was suspected of wrongdoing in order to spy on them. That was a drastic, potentially unconstitutional change from how wiretapping had worked in the past.

The Bush administration claimed to have let the program expire in 2007. But the expiration turned out to be a farce. When Congress passed the Protect America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, it gave the NSA approval for the warrantless collection of outbound telephone and internet communications originating within American borders.

That, at least, was the picture I got after reading the government’s own summary of the situation in an unclassified report compiled by the inspectors general from five government agencies. I couldn’t help but notice the fact that hardly any of the executive branch officials who had authorized these programs had agreed to be interviewed by the inspectors general. I interpreted their absence from the record as an admission of malfeasance, or wrongdoing by a public official.

My suspicions sent me searching for the classified version of the report, but such a version appeared not to exist. I didn’t understand. I wondered whether I was looking in the wrong places. After a while of finding nothing, I decided to drop the issue. Life took over, and I had work to do.

It was only later, long after I’d forgotten about it, that the classified version came skimming across my desktop. Once it turned up, I realized why I hadn’t had any luck finding it previously: It couldn’t be seen, not even by the heads of agencies. It was filed in an Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment, an extremely rare classification used only to make sure that something would remain hidden even from those holding top secret clearance. Because of my position, I was familiar with most of the ECIs at the NSA, but not this one.

The report came to my attention by mistake: Someone in the NSA IG’s office had left a draft copy on a system that I had access to. Here was everything that was missing from the unclassified version. And the activities it outlined were so deeply criminal that no government would ever allow it to be released unredacted, or uncensored.

The classified version immediately exposed the unclassified document as an outright and carefully concocted lie. The only thing these two particular reports had in common was their title.

The classified report outlined what it called “a collection gap,” and pointed to the necessity of the bulk collection of internet communications. The code name for this bulk collection initiative was STELLARWIND; it was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret. The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it.

At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.

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

But even once a common ground of terminology is established, misperceptions can still abound.

Most people, even today, tend to think of mass surveillance in terms of content—the actual words they use when they make a phone call or write an email. When they find out that the government actually cares comparatively little about that content, they tend to care comparatively little about government surveillance. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is rarely as revealing as the unwritten, unspoken information that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.

The NSA calls this “metadata.” Metadata is data about data. It is, more accurately, data that is made by data—all the records of all the things you do on your devices and all the things your devices do on their own. Take a phone call, for example: Its metadata might include the date and time of the call, the call’s duration, the number from which the call was made, the number being called, and their locations. An email’s metadata might include information about what type of computer it was generated on, who the computer belonged to, who sent the email, who received it, where and when it was sent and received, and who if anyone besides the sender and recipient accessed it, and where and when.

Metadata can tell the address you slept at last night and what time you got up this morning. It reveals every place you visited during your day and how long you spent there. It shows who you were in touch with and who was in touch with you.

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

There’s another thing, too: Content is usually defined as something that you knowingly produce. You know what you’re saying during a phone call or what you’re writing in an email. But you have hardly any control over the metadata you produce, because it is generated automatically. Your devices are constantly communicating for you whether you want them to or not.

After reading this classified report, I spent the next weeks, even months, in a daze. I was sad and low, trying to deny everything I was thinking and feeling—that’s what was going on in my head toward the end of my stint in Japan. I felt like a fool, as someone of supposedly serious technical skills who’d somehow helped to build an essential component of this system without realizing its purpose. I felt used, as an employee of the IC who only now was realizing that all along I’d been protecting not my country but the state. I felt, above all, violated.

I realized that if my generation didn’t intervene, the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance was a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.

SIXTEEN ^{Home on the Cloud}

In 2011, I was back in the States, working for Dell, but now attached to my old agency, the CIA. I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved.

Counting Geneva, and not counting periodic trips home, I’d been away for nearly four years. The America I returned to felt like a changed country. Every other conversation was about some TV show or movie I didn’t know, or a celebrity scandal I didn’t care about, and I couldn’t respond—I had nothing to respond with. A normal life was what Lindsay and I were hoping for. We were ready for the next stage and had decided to settle down. Lindsay was getting certified as a yoga instructor. I, meanwhile, was getting used to my new position—in sales.

My main project was to help the CIA by building it a “private cloud.” It felt as if every major tech company, including Dell, was rolling out new civilian versions of what I was working on. I was amazed at how willingly people were signing up, so excited at the prospect of their photos and videos and music and e-books being universally backed up and available that they never gave much thought as to why such an über-sophisticated and convenient storage solution was being offered to them for “free” or for “cheap” in the first place.

I don’t think I’d ever seen such a concept be so uniformly bought into. I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes. It would still be another half decade before virtual assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home were placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all activity within range, to log all habits and preferences, which would then be developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash.

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

When we choose to store our data online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can delete any data they object to. Unless we’ve kept a separate copy on our own machines or drives, this data will be lost to us forever. If any of our data is found to be in violation of the terms of service, the companies can delete our accounts, deny us our own data, and yet retain a copy for their own records, which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately, the privacy of our data depends on the ownership of our data. There is no property less protected, and yet no property more private.

The internet I’d grown up with was disappearing. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught ordeal. Every transaction was a potential danger.

The majority of American internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The American IC was seeking to take advantage of that fact by obtaining access to their networks—both through direct orders that were kept secret from the public, and clandestine efforts that were kept secret from the companies themselves. Our user data was turning vast profits for the companies, and the government pilfered it for free. I don’t think I’d ever felt so powerless.

Every morning when I left our town house, I found myself nodding at the security cameras dotted throughout our development. Previously I’d never paid them any attention, but now, when a light turned red on my commute, I couldn’t help but think of its leering sensor, keeping tabs on me. License-plate readers were recording my comings and goings, even if I maintained a speed of thirty-five miles per hour.

In the American system of democracy, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another. In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused. Law enforcement is prohibited from surveilling private citizens on their property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant. There are few laws, however, that restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes the vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks.

Law enforcement’s use of surveillance cameras on public property was originally conceived of as a crime deterrent and an aid to investigators after a crime had occurred. But as the cost of these devices continued to fall, law enforcement began using them to track people who had not committed, or were not even suspected of, any crime. And the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence capabilities such as facial and pattern recognition. An AI-equipped surveillance camera could be made into a sort of automated police officer—a true robocop. Even in 2011, it was clear to me that this was where technology was leading us.

I began to picture a world in which all people were totally surveilled, and all laws were totally enforced, automatically, by computers. Such a world of total automated law enforcement would be intolerable. Most of our lives, even if we don’t realize it, occur not in black and white but in a gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the recycling bin and recyclables in the trash, ride our bicycles in the improper lane, or borrow a stranger’s Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn’t pay for. Put simply, a world in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone is a criminal.

I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic, she wasn’t ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. She thought I was too tense, and under too much stress. I was—not because of my work, but because of my desire to tell her a truth that I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t tell her that my former coworkers at the NSA could target her for surveillance or access all the photos she took. I couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected.

I began having strange physical symptoms. I’d become weirdly clumsy, falling off ladders—more than once—or bumping into door frames. Sometimes I’d trip or drop spoons I was holding. I’d spill water over myself or choke on it.

One day when I went to meet Lindsay, I started feeling dizzy. It scared me and scared Lindsay, too. I decided to go to the doctor, but the only appointment wasn’t for weeks.

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

I passed out.

I came to still seated, with the clock on my desk reading just shy of 1:00 p.m. I’d been out less than an hour, but I was exhausted. I reached for the phone in a panic, but my hand kept missing it and grabbing the air. Once I managed to grab ahold of it and get a dial tone, I found I couldn’t remember Lindsay’s number, or could only remember the digits but not their order.

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

I’d just had an epileptic seizure.

My mother had epilepsy, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t associated my symptoms with hers. She’d always told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary, meaning passed down from your parents or grandparents, and to this day I’m still not sure if that’s what her doctor had told her or if she was just trying to reassure us that her fate wouldn’t be ours.

Very little is known about epilepsy. I consulted as many specialists as I could find. I had CAT scans, MRIs, the works. Meanwhile, Lindsay went about researching all the information that was available about the syndrome. She googled treatments so intensely that basically all her Gmail ads were for epilepsy pharmaceuticals.

I felt defeated. First my country and the internet had betrayed me. And now my body was following suit.

My brain had, quite literally, short-circuited.

SEVENTEEN ^{On the Couch}

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

So there it was. The man who’d masterminded the attacks of September 11, 2001, who had propelled me into the army and from there into the Intelligence Community, was now dead.

Ten years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes had flown into the Twin Towers, and what did we have to show for it? What had the last decade actually accomplished? The previous ten years had been a parade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions of foreign prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, torture, and targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. In America, through laws like the Patriot Act, we witnessed the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage was staggering and felt entirely irreversible.

I couldn’t shake the idea that I’d wasted the last decade of my life.

The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened at the same time as the development of digital technology. Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented. The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself.

After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon against liberty. By continuing these programs, by continuing these lies, which were revealed to be largely ineffective tools to stop terrorism, America was protecting little, winning nothing, and losing much.

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

I finally took a short-term disability leave from Dell and decamped to my mother’s secondhand couch. I don’t remember what books I tried to read, but I do remember never managing much more than a page before closing my eyes and sinking back again into the cushions. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except my own weakness. Often, I was motionless but for a lone finger atop the screen of the phone that was the only light in the room.

I’d scroll through the news, then nap, then scroll again, then nap. I primarily followed protesters across the Middle East during what came to be known as the Arab Spring. Across the region, people were living under the constant threat of violence, with work and school suspended, and had no electricity, no sewage. In many regions, they didn’t have access to even the most rudimentary medical care.

The crowds were calling for an end to oppression and censorship. They were declaring that in a truly just society, the people were not answerable to the government—the government was answerable to the people. They were rejecting authoritarianism.

In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive from the people and are granted to the state. Though democracy has fallen far short of its ideal, I still believe it to be the one form of governance that most fully enables people of different backgrounds to live together, equal before the law.

This equality consists not only of rights but also of freedoms, including privacy. Saying that you don’t need or want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—including their immigration status, unemployment history, financial history, and health records. Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Just because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor.

The young people of the Middle East were agitating for higher wages, lower prices, and better pensions. I couldn’t give them any of that. They were, however, also agitating for a freer internet.

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

This was the least I could do. If there was just the slightest chance that even one young kid from Iran could now bypass the imposed filters and restrictions and connect through me online, protected by the Tor system and my server’s anonymity, then it was certainly worth my minimal effort.

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