The Switch

50

The senator was eating a salad at her desk. She’d just come back from two fund-raising lunches, but she didn’t like eating in front of other people. Except Will, which was something he was secretly proud of. She waved hello with her plastic fork and finished chewing her mouthful. Will closed the office door.

“I don’t have any news,” Will said, sitting in her visitor chair. “Any good news, anyway. But we’ve got to talk about the possibility that this thing might get out. That the cat might get out of the bag. Because this is a very, very big cat.”

She looked at him for a long time before she said, “CHRYSALIS.”

He hesitated. “And the fact that you signed off on it.”

“Reluctantly. Along with a majority of the committee.”

“I’ve given this a lot of thought. You know, they’ll call you an ‘NSA stooge.’” She was known to be a supporter of the intelligence community but of the “tough love” variety. Agency budget requests always got a haircut. She’d been quoted as saying, “We all need to do more with less, including our vital intelligence community.” But in public she was rarely critical of the intelligence agencies.

“Oh, it’ll be a shit storm, all right.”

“A shit storm? Boss, it’ll be more like a vast asteroid of shit slamming into the continent. I mean, politically speaking, this is an extinction-level event, okay?”

She looked surprised at his intensity. Tonelessly, she said, “Go on.”

He thought about CHRYSALIS. Goddamned CHRYSALIS. The product of the NSA’s finest minds. The most advanced example of its technical wizardry. CHRYSALIS would enable the agency to invisibly access any of the cameras in every phone, every laptop, every desktop, every personal digital assistant. Without the user being aware of it. Turning hundreds of millions of cameras into always-on nanny cams. Naturally, there were assurances made that the teraflops of data would be algorithmically gathered and stored away, never to be seen by any human observer, blah blah blah — unless a secret court deemed it relevant in the course of an investigation.

He stood up and came around to her side of the desk, his voice quiet, urgent. “You know how this is going to play out, right? Once it goes public? This is what they’ll say about it. This is the portrait they’ll paint. Millions of people, American citizens, recorded against their will in their most intimate, most private moments. Farting, picking their nose, getting off to porn, taking a dump. Every goddamned laptop and cell phone and anything with a camera turned into a staring, always-open eye.”

She closed her eyes, shook her head. “That’s not how it sounded when they presented it, with all that hoo-ha about optical signal feeds and getting full feeds on the bad guys. And how it’s only inspected by machines, not human beings. It sounded safe — and necessary.”

“It’s mass surveillance, and the American public’s going to freak out.”

The senator stared at him for a long while. “Will, do you think we made a mistake?”

We? he thought. He’d argued against it! But no, there was ISIS and al-Qaeda, and the tragic terrorist attacks last year, and her constituents wanted scalps. “I think that’s irrelevant at this point,” he said. “There’s already rumors about how the government has ways of turning on the camera on your computer. People are going to feel humiliated — they’ll feel violated — and they will come for us with pitchforks and torches and there will be no forgiveness and no bargaining.”

“Will, the data won’t actually be accessed unless there was—”

“Unless some secret court makes a secret authorization with no real oversight? That’s how they’re going to play it. We are turning the sanctity of the home into a... a movie set. Every house a glass house. Big Brother stuff. I’m not arguing the rights and wrongs of this. I’m talking about the optics. That’s how it’s gonna play. On CNN, the volume dialed up to eleven. These US senators just abolished privacy.”

“With the proper explanation—”

“Susan, it’s that rule of politics you taught me on day one: when you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

He wondered if he’d gone too far with her, been too candid, too blunt. He expected her exasperated gaze, but to his surprise she looked pained.

“Then there’s the question of what happens if the NSA gets it before we do.”

“That can’t happen. They’d hold it over me, use it as blackmail — use it to control me. They’d turn me into a marionette, with its strings in their slimy hands. You realize that cannot happen. You cannot let that happen.”

“I won’t,” he said. “I have a plan. I may need to be out of the office for a couple of days, but Jodie can take over.”

“Fine.”

“I’m on it,” he said.