Time of the Octopus: Based on the True Story of Whistleblower Edward Snowden

02:53 A.M._

“When I read Orwell’s ‘1984’ for the first time,” the Lawyer noted, “Somewhere in the early 90s, I thought that the totalitarian model he described is a far-gone past and in our time, luckily, not relevant, especially in the West. Especially because it was thanks to the West it was defeated. To understand what’s happening in the USA and in the countries of Western Europe, other types of thinker are needed. Maybe we don’t know them yet.”

“I’ve read many philosophers and politicians,” Kold interrupted him. “The problem is that it was Orwell’s artistic interpretation that turned out to be the most effective in my mind. It’s like fuel for an internal combustion engine. It will work very poorly on kerosene. It’ll work a little bit better on poor quality gasoline. But it’ll achieve full power only if you fill the tank with AKI-97. Does that make sense to you?”

“Sort of,” the Lawyer agreed politely.

“Reading various Orwell texts,” Kold went on, “I understood more sharply and clearly what I had to do. In this sense, Orwell has become for me something like a Scripture and instructions at the same time. He very precisely indicated what I had to do:

‘It is the liberals who fear liberty’ It was a bullseye. The octopus has entangled us all with its tentacle. It has latched on to every head. It is pushing the tiny shoots of its prolegs with their greedy suckers through the soft spot in the crowns of our children.

The octopus is everywhere!

Of course, there are people who resist. There are even those who have managed to fight off the tentacles and live inside their own small worlds. But the octopus is so powerful and omnipresent that such exceptions only prove the old rule, formulated by Orwell: ‘Big Brother is watching you’. This thesis has been joined by a new one, given life by the scientific and technological explosion of the new millennium: ‘Big Brother is inside you’.”

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I should really say a few words about how BRISM works. What is the essence of the octopus’ existence?

Boytras and Greyvold have contributed to publications about BRISM, Tembora and other systems, and the world community has a rough idea about these octopus’ organs, but they are still quite far from the nub of it.

Virtual tentacles are sent into all major social nets, communication programs and electronic mail. This is appalling. It’s a complete destruction of concepts such as ‘privacy of correspondence’ and ‘private life’. Hundreds of millions of internet users across the world for years unknowingly provided a nursery, compost in which the octopus grew and matured.

Surveillance programs, especially BRISM, are made in such way that even a child can work with the interface. That’s so that any member of a consulate or embassy – and the data-mining terminals are usually located in places like that – could quickly get all the information he needs. For example, a diplomat, working undercover or a military man from the limited contingent of UN peacekeepers.

The program monitors data for a number of parameters. I don’t want to overload you with specialist terminology, but I’ll just explain what is meant by ‘on fingers’. If you need to track a man’s contacts, let’s call him John Smith, then you need to know the bare minimum.

This minimum can include either his email address or mobile phone number, or name, surname and geographic address (and it doesn’t have to be a full address), or just the number of his driving licence, his passport or his insurance.

BRISM will be able to find the John Smith you need using any of these criteria, sifting out thousands of other John Smiths. Then the operator enters into the program the required level of data gathering – tracking of electronic correspondence, his phone calls, his movements, his visits to internet resources, his contacts in social networks, forums and websites. All of this information is gathered, analysed by various parameters and issued in the form of reports.

BRISM and other similar programs are certainly a miraculous invention, a huge breakthrough in surveillance and espionage. Programs like this allow gathering of information about many people at the same time in all corners of the world with very little effort.

After the acts of terrorism which destroyed the towers of the World Trade Center, the creation of such system has become a necessity. Do you remember what president George Bush Jr. was saying on the evening of September 11^th?

And so the ‘full resources of our intelligence’ created BRISM and other systems like it. It was a good thing because it allowed us to trace, find and destroy many terrorists who were preparing to kill people.

But it turns out that even in the 21^st century, the path to Hell is the same as it was in the Middle Ages – paved with good intentions. To destroy the termites eating away the walls of a house, you don’t burn the whole house down. That’s just pointless.

But in our case that is exactly how it happened. The war on terror has not only turned into bloody wars, in which our brave marines didn’t fight so much against Al-Qaeda as peaceful civilians, but it also resulted in the coming of the octopus, omniscient and omnipotent.

Now the whole world knows that companies like Microsoft (Hotmail), Google (Google Mail), Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple and Paltalk, basically everything computer-related and the whole of the internet community, are working with BRISM.

At the same time, the coming of the octopus has marked a new era, in which the words of Ecclesiastes are not relevant anymore. From now own there’s a lot of power in a lot of knowledge.

I could say a lot more about programs like BRISM, about subchannel information and metadata, which contains not just information about our John Smith but also the opportunity to control him and his actions, his career and his personal life. In other words, everything I was doing to poor Herr Hagen as an agent, BRISM conducts in a moment, simply by analysing the contents of the messages, the essence of correspondence, conversations and even the likes and emoticons of the object of surveillance.

Gathering metadata about a person is not just an invasion of privacy but something much more sinister. I am not a religious man, as unreligious as a true American can be, but when I studied BRISM I realized the deep essence of the program and I must confess, I felt deeply uneasy. I recalled the words from the Revelation of St. John the Evangelist:

BRISM has become that angel which ‘put a seal’ on the foreheads of the ‘pure’ and has begun to count the ‘impure’. Its creators are convinced that they are doing a good thing, but I knew for sure what will happen next:

I won’t quote anymore from St John, although I do know his ‘Revelations’ well. Nobody but God and his prophets can foresee what the future will be like.

But the octopus has another hypostasis, the most vile and disgusting. He grants to a few the power over many, quite often raising most ordinary nobodies over the crowd.

Even at the testing stage in Fort Meade a few programmers used BRISM to track their husbands, wives and lovers.

It’s not hard to guess that the octopus’ tentacles are now present almost in all bedrooms in the world. Maybe only African natives, the inhabitants of New Guinea, the Indians in the Amazon jungle and the nomads of north Russia are still truly free people. Everyone else is carefully watched by the octopus, whose ethic is dictated by the ethics of the people sitting at the computer monitors as they control the program.

I remember back when I started working for the agency, the Baseball player and I had a very long conversation on this subject, at the end of which he brought up one of the well-known parables of King Solomon:

At the time, I was satisfied with this answer. Indeed, to find a cure for a horrid illness, one has to dissect the bodies of the deceased and study their innards. To catch a criminal one has to communicate with the lowest type of people, the dregs of society. In other words, you can’t fry an egg without breaking it first and you can’t mould a clay pot without getting your hands dirty.

Gradually I began to be convinced that systems like BRISM are far too dangerous weapons for dirty hands.

And when I got a proof of it – the situation with the helicopters in South Africa wasn’t the only one. When I realized the agency was conducting wiretapping and data gathering in Europe, Brazil, the countries of the Maghreb and the Levant, China and Russia, not to mention the United States itself – I was horrified. Because behind a virtual curtain and classifications such as ‘Top Secret’ I could see a real Overworld government, able to intervene in the internal affairs of any country, able to change not just the course of commercial deals but the course of history.

And that Overworld government was not the leadership of the Federal Reserve System, as some cryptologists like to portray it, nor the clans of Rothschilds and Rockefellers, nor a secret bunch of Zionists, nor hawk generals sitting in a secret bunker, no!

The octopus was ruling the world. The programs IT workers were ruling, without even being aware of it, through a few hundred eggheaded half-autists spending whole days behind computers. They were deciding the course of history and for now they were just carrying out the orders of their bosses, although now I’m not even sure that it’s not the other way around.

If you really know everything about a man – what will stop you from pressing a right ‘sore spot’ or activating a ‘pleasure center’ to make him to do what you want?

Who knows, maybe the whole administration of the National Security Agency and maybe even the administration in Washington has long been controlled by the operators of BRISM and other programs?

Moreover, I do not rule out that what I have done might also have been initiated from outside. But one thing comforts me: if it is indeed the truth then the octopus has taken us over and we really do live inside the Matrix like in the movies of the Wachowski brothers.

Of course at the beginning I didn’t think about fighting the octopus at all. I just wanted to get out, to go into the shadows, to step aside. I had no plan – I just tendered my resignation due to poor health. Why did I do that instead of just resigning? You need to know that you can’t just leave the agency or any intelligence structure in any country of the world really. You need a valid reason for them to leave you alone and in this situation my unsuitability for work due to poor health seemed to me the best argument.

In the depths of the internet, I found an instruction for prisoners about how to simulate an epileptic fit and during the medical check, which I started myself by complaining on constant headaches, I fainted and imitated a tonic-clonic seizure.

Epilepsy is one of the most mysterious illnesses. Nobody really knows what causes it, how to treat it or why for some it lasts for tens of years, coming back regularly, while others just have one seizure in their whole life.

Apart from everything else, it is thought that a seizure can be provoked by a combination of sounds and light flashes on TV or a computer screen. In any case, epileptics shouldn’t use these gadgets or tablets and smartphones.

It’s not hard to simulate epilepsy. You just need to approach it seriously and not to spare yourself. If you fall down, then you fall properly. And if you have convulsions go for it hog wild.

Before your ‘fit’ you drip atropine into your eyes so that the pupils don’t react to light and you have to tense the muscles around the eyes. It is also an important sign of ‘true’ epilepsy.

The hardest part was foam in the mouth. There were a few recipes given on a site for prison-malingerers but all of them were awful – soap foam, cocaine, dried belladonna… I had a much better recipe: a pinch of soda and a few crystals of citric acid. Putting this mixture in my mouth a few seconds before falling off the chair, I achieved quite natural authentic foam…

Basically, I really scared the doctors. I beat the back of my head on the floor. I smashed my knee on the chair leg. I arched, howled and wheezed, and bit through my tongue so that eerily bloody foam was oozing through my clenched teeth.

In the end, I was sent for many checks, which, of course, found all sorts of issues in various organs. That is why medics always joke that there are no healthy people, only ‘underexamined’ ones.

And that is what my tactic aimed at – not a single boss in his right mind would want to keep a man with such bouquet of illnesses in a job like mine.

So having resigned, I experienced a true euphoria for a time, maybe a month or two, I can’t remember now. I was paid quite a good bonus for the work I’d done. I visited Japan, the Philippines, Australia and Ecuador, then I visited my father, mother and Judith. In short, I had the life of a typical holidaymaker, not thinking about the future.

But in reality I wasn’t a holidaymaker and I had no idea what was waiting for me, but I didn’t want to think about it, especially because everything around me was moving towards change: America was shaken by the presidential campaign of Barrack Hussein Obama.”