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- PART TWO
- In sum, 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.
- Geneva was regarded as ground zero for this transition because it contained the world’s richest environment of
- sophisticated targets, from the global headquarters of the United Nations to the home offices of numerous specialized
- UN agencies and international nongovernmental organizations. There was the International Atomic Energy Agency, which
- promotes nuclear technology and safety standards worldwide, including those that relate to nuclear weaponry; the
- International Telecommunication Union, which— through its influence over technical standards for everything from the
- radio spectrum to satellite orbits—determines what can be communicated and how; and the World Trade Organization,
- which—through its regulation of the trade of goods, services, and intellectual property among participating nations—
- determines what can be sold and how. Finally, there was Geneva’s role as the capital of private finance, which
- allowed great fortunes to be stashed and spent without much public scrutiny regardless of whether those fortunes were
- ill-gotten or well earned.
- The notoriously slow and meticulous methods of traditional spycraft certainly had their successes in manipulating
- these systems for America’s benefit, but ultimately too few to satisfy the ever-increasing appetite of the American
- policy makers who read the IC’s reports, especially as the Swiss banking sector—along with the rest of the world—went
- digital. 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 an
- asset who had physical access to it. This was obviously a dangerous proposition: the asset might be caught in the act
- of downloading the secrets, or of implanting the exploitative hardware and
- software that would radio the secrets to their handlers. The global spread of digital technology simplified this
- process enormously. This new world of “digital network intelligence” or “computer network operations” meant that
- physical access was almost never required, which reduced the level of human risk and permanently realigned the
- HUMINT/SIGINT balance. An agent now could just send the target a message, such as an email, with attachments or links
- that unleashed malware 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. Instead of a CO cultivating a target into an asset—through cash-on-the-barrel bribery,
- or coercion and blackmail if the bribery failed—a few clever computer hacks would provide a similar benefit. What’s
- more, with this method the target would remain unwitting, in what would inevitably be a cleaner process.
- That, at least, was the hope. But as intelligence increasingly became “cyberintelligence” (a term used to
- distinguish it from the old phone-and-fax forms of off-line SIGINT), 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.
- This issue would typically emerge when a CO would search the name of a person from a country like Iran or China in
- the agency’s databases and come up empty-handed. For casual searches of prospective targets like these, No Results
- was actually a fairly common outcome: the CIA’s databases were mostly filled with people already of interest to the
- agency, or citizens of friendly countries whose records were more easily available. When faced with No Results, a CO
- would have to do the same thing you do when you want to look someone up: they’d turn to the public Internet. This was
- risky.
- 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 in
- this situation, beyond weakly
- recommending that they ask CIA headquarters to take over the search on their behalf. 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 use what was called a “nonattributable research system.” This was set up to proxy—that is, fake the
- origin of—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 an anodyne business located somewhere in America—one of the myriad fake executive-headhunter
- or personnel-services companies the CIA used as cover.
- I can’t say that anyone ever definitively explained to me why the agency liked to use “job search” businesses as a
- front; presumably they were the only companies that might plausibly look up a nuclear engineer in Pakistan one day
- and a retired Polish general the next. I can say with absolute certainty, however, that the process was ineffective,
- onerous, and expensive. To create just one of these covers, the agency had to invent the purpose and name of a
- company, secure a credible physical address somewhere in America, register a credible URL, put up a credible website,
- and then rent servers in the company’s name. Furthermore, the agency had to create an encrypted connection from those
- servers that allowed it to communicate with the CIA network without anyone noticing the connection. Here’s the
- kicker: After all of that effort and money was expended just to let us anonymously Google a name, whatever front
- business was being used as a proxy would immediately be burned—by which I mean its connection to the CIA would be
- revealed to our adversaries—the moment some analyst decided to take a break from their research to log in to their
- personal Facebook account on that same computer. Since few of the people at headquarters were undercover, that
- Facebook account would often openly declare, “I work at the CIA,” or just as tellingly, “I work at the State
- Department, but in McLean.”
- Go ahead and laugh. Back then, it happened all the time.
- 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.
- The Tor Project was a creation of the state that ended up becoming one of the few effective shields against the
- state’s surveillance. Tor is free and open- source software that, if used carefully, allows its users to browse
- online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity that can be practically achieved at scale. Its protocols were
- developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory throughout the mid-1990s, and in 2003 it was released to the public—to
- the
- worldwide civilian population on whom its functionality depends. This is because 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. By routing its users’ Internet traffic through these servers, Tor does the same job
- of protecting the origin of that traffic as the CIA’s “non-attributable research” system, with the primary difference
- being that Tor does it better, or at least more efficiently. I was already convinced of this, but
- convincing the gruff COs was another matter altogether.
- With the Tor protocol, your traffic is distributed and bounced around through randomly generated pathways from Tor
- server to Tor server, with the purpose being to replace your identity as the source of a communication with that of
- the last Tor server in the constantly shifting chain. Virtually none of the Tor servers, which are called “layers,”
- know the identity of, or any identifying information about, the origin of the traffic. And in a true stroke of
- genius, the one Tor server that does know the origin—the very first server in the chain—does not know where that
- traffic is headed. Put more simply: the first Tor server that connects you to the Tor network, called a gateway,
- knows you’re the one sending a request, but because it isn’t allowed to read that request, it has no idea whether
- you’re looking for pet memes or information about a protest, and the final Tor server that your request passes
- through, called an exit, knows exactly what’s being asked for, but has no idea who’s asking for it.
- This layering method is called onion routing, which gives Tor its name: it’s The Onion Router. The classified joke
- was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry. Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US
- military–developed technology that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know-how
- to protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to
- average users across the globe. In this sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland. For me personally, 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 account of the CIA’s pivot to cyberintelligence, or SIGINT on the Internet, 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, at
- least since the advent of the modern IC in the aftermath of World War II.
- 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—the first and only time that I looked
- directly into the eyes of a human being rather than just recording their life from afar. I have to say, I found the
- whole experience unforgettably visceral and sad.
- Sitting around discussing how to hack a faceless UN complex was psychologically easier by a wide margin. Direct
- engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn’t happen that much on the technical side of
- intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a
- screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful
- confrontation with their consequences.
- I met the man at an embassy function, a party. The embassy had lots of those, and the COs always went, drawn as much
- by the opportunities to spot and assess potential candidates for recruitment as by the open bars and cigar salons.
- Sometimes the COs would bring me along. I’d lectured them on my specialty long enough, I guess, that now they were
- all too happy to lecture me on theirs, cross-training me to help them play “spot the sap” in an
- environment where there were always more people to meet than they could possibly handle on their own. My native
- geekiness meant I could get the young researchers from CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire: European
- Council for Nuclear Research) talking about their work with a voluble excitement that the MBAs and political science
- majors who comprised the ranks of our COs had trouble provoking on their own.
- As a technologist, I found it incredibly easy to defend my cover. The moment some bespoke-suited cosmopolite asked me
- what I did, and I responded with the four words “I work in IT” (or, in my improving French, je travaille dans
- l’informatique), their interest in me was over. Not that this ever stopped the conversation. When you’re a fresh-
- faced professional in a conversation outside your field, it’s never that surprising when you ask a lot of questions,
- and in my experience most people will jump at the chance to explain exactly how much more they know than you do about
- something they care about deeply.
- The party I’m recalling took place on a warm night on the outside terrace of an upscale café on one of the side
- streets alongside Lake Geneva. Some of the COs wouldn’t hesitate to abandon me at such a gathering if they had to in
- order to sit as close as possible to whatever woman happened to match their critical intelligence-value indicators of
- being highly attractive and no older than a student, but I wasn’t about to complain. For me, spotting targets was a
- hobby that came with a free dinner.
- I took my plate and sat down at a table next to a well-dressed Middle Eastern man in a cuff-linked, demonstratively
- Swiss pink shirt. 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, the relative
- beauties of the French and Arabic languages, and the absolute beauty of this one Swiss girl with whom he—yes—had a
- regular date playing laser tag. With a touch of a conspiratorial tone, he said that he worked in private wealth
- management. Within moments I was getting a full-on polished presentation about what, exactly, makes a private bank
- private, and the challenge of investing without moving markets when your clients are the size of sovereign wealth
- funds.
- “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 who
- worked finance targets what I’d learned. After a necessarily too-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 beside the CO’s discarded, smoky-eyed date. Rather than feeling bad, I felt like I’d really earned the
- Pavés de Genève that were passed around for dessert. My job 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, and given Saudi Arabia’s suspected involvement in financing
- terror, Cal felt under tremendous pressure to cultivate a qualifying source. I was sure that in no time at all our
- fellow party guest would be getting a second paycheck from the agency.
- That was not quite how it worked out, however. Despite Cal’s regular forays with the banker to strip clubs and bars,
- the banker wasn’t warming up
- to him—at least not to the point where a pitch could be made—and Cal was getting impatient.
- After a month of failures, Cal was so frustrated that he took the banker out drinking and got him absolutely
- plastered. 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 was calling the make and plate number of his car to the Geneva police, who not fifteen
- minutes later arrested him for driving under the influence. The banker faced an enormous fine, since in Switzerland
- fines aren’t flat sums but based on a percentage of income, and his driver’s license was suspended for three months—a
- stretch of time that Cal would spend, as a truly wonderful friend with a fake-guilty conscience, driving the guy back
- and forth between his home and work, daily, so that the guy could “keep his office from finding out.” When the fine
- was levied, causing his friend cash-flow problems, Cal was ready with a loan. The banker had become dependent, the
- dream of every CO.
- There was only one hitch: when Cal finally made the pitch, the banker turned him down. He was furious, having figured
- out the planned crime and the engineered arrest, and felt betrayed that Cal’s generosity hadn’t been genuine. He cut
- off all contact. Cal made a halfhearted attempt to follow up and do damage control, but it was too late. The banker
- who’d loved Switzerland had lost his job and was returning—or being returned—to Saudi Arabia. Cal himself was rotated
- back to the States.
- Too much had been hazarded, too little had been gained. 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 celebrated its annual Fêtes de Genève, a giant carnival that culminates in fireworks.
- I remember sitting on the left bank of Lake Geneva with the local personnel of the SCS, or Special Collection
- Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that
- allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. These guys worked down the hall from my vault at the embassy, but they
- were older than I was, and their work was not just way above my pay grade but way beyond my abilities—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, when
- 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.” I remember nodding somberly to this, though at the time I barely had a clue of the full implications of
- what that comment meant.
- I steered clear of parties for the rest of the year and mostly just hung around the cafés and parks of Saint-Jean
- Falaises with Lindsay, taking occasional vacations with her to Italy, France, and Spain. Still, something had soured
- my mood, and it wasn’t just the banker debacle. Come to think of it, maybe it was banking in general. Geneva is an
- expensive city and unabashedly posh, but as 2008 drew to a close its elegance seemed to tip over into extravagance,
- with a massive influx of the superrich—most of them from the Gulf states, many of them Saudi—enjoying the profits of
- peak oil prices on the cusp of the global financial crisis. These royal types were booking whole floors of five-star
- grand hotels and buying out the entire inventories of the luxury stores just across the bridge. They were putting on
- lavish banquets at the Michelin-starred restaurants and speeding their chrome-plated Lamborghinis down the cobbled
- streets. It would be hard at any time to miss Geneva’s display of conspicuous consumption, but the profligacy now on
- display was particularly galling—coming as it did during the worst economic disaster, as the American media kept
- telling us, since the Great Depression, and as the European media kept telling us, since the interwar period and
- Versailles.
- It wasn’t that Lindsay and I were hurting: after all, our rent was being paid by Uncle Sam. Rather, it’s that every
- time she or I would talk to our folks back home, the situation seemed grimmer. Both of our families knew people who’d
- worked their entire lives, some of them for the US government, only to have their homes taken away by banks after an
- unexpected illness made a few mortgage payments impossible.
- To live in Geneva was to live in an alternative, even opposite, reality. As the rest of the world became more
- and more impoverished, Geneva flourished, and while the Swiss banks didn’t engage in many of the types of risky
- trades that caused the crash, they gladly hid the money of those who’d profited from the pain and were never held
- accountable. The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later
- would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be,
- and often is, beneficial to the elites. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other
- contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.
- 16
- Tokyo
- The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World
- Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web
- is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage.
- The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control
- that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by
- the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory.
- Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative
- systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite
- constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can
- turn almost anyone on and off at will.
- It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software
- (Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to
- the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking
- and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud
- services to the US government along with half the Internet). Though some of these companies might manufacture their
- devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. The problem is,
- they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil
- virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.
- Given the American nature of the planet’s communications infrastructure, 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, and generally disclaimed the
- practice in courts and in the media in a manner so adamant that the few remaining skeptics who accused it of lying
- were treated like wild-haired conspiracy junkies. Their suspicions about secret NSA programs seemed
- hardly different from paranoid delusions
- involving alien messages being beamed to the radios in our teeth. We—me, you, all of us—were too trusting. But what
- makes this all the more personally painful for me was that the last time I’d made this mistake, I’d supported the
- invasion of Iraq and joined the army. When I arrived in the IC, I felt sure that I’d never be fooled again,
- especially given my top secret clearance. Surely that had to count for some degree of transparency. After all, why
- would the government keep secrets from its secret keepers? This is all to say that the obvious didn’t even become the
- thinkable for me until some time after I moved to Japan in 2009 to work for the NSA, America’s premier signals
- intelligence agency.
- 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. Though mine was officially a contractor position, its responsibilities and, especially, its location were
- more than enough to lure me. It’s ironic that only by going private again was I put in a position to understand what
- my government was doing.
- On paper, I was an employee of Perot Systems, a company founded by that diminutive hyperactive Texan who founded the
- Reform Party and twice ran for the presidency. But almost immediately after my arrival in Japan, Perot Systems was
- acquired by Dell, so on paper I became an employee of Dell. As in the CIA, this contractor status was all just
- formality and cover, and I only ever worked in an NSA facility.
- 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’s vast metropolitan spread.
- The PTC handled the NSA’s infrastructure for the entire Pacific, and provided support for the agency’s spoke sites in
- nearby countries. Most of these were focused on managing the secret relationships that let the NSA cover the Pacific
- Rim with spy gear, as long as the agency promised to share some of the intelligence it gleaned with regional
- governments—and so long as their citizens didn’t find out what the agency was doing. Communications interception was
- the major part of the mission. The PTC would amass “cuts” from captured signals and push them back across the ocean
- to Hawaii, and Hawaii, in turn, would push them back to the continental United States.
- My official job title was systems analyst, with responsibility for maintaining the local NSA systems, though much of
- my initial work was that of a systems administrator, helping to connect the NSA’s systems architecture with the
- CIA’s. Because I was the only one in the region who knew the CIA’s architecture, I’d also travel out to US embassies,
- like the one I’d left in Geneva, establishing and maintaining the links that enabled the agencies to share
- intelligence in ways that hadn’t previously been possible. This was the first time in my life that I truly realized
- the power of being the only one in a room with a sense not just of how one system functioned internally, but of how
- it functioned together with multiple systems—or didn’t. Later, as the chiefs of the PTC came to recognize that I had
- a knack for hacking together solutions to their problems, I was given enough of a leash to propose projects of my
- own.
- 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 in its every iteration, from the compartmentalization of
- information to data encryption. In Geneva, we’d had to haul the hard drives out of the computer every night and lock
- them up in a safe—and what’s more, those drives were encrypted. The NSA, by contrast, hardly bothered to encrypt
- anything.
- In fact, 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, including the most basic: disaster recovery, or
- backup. Each of the NSA’s spoke sites collected its own intel, stored the intel on its own local servers, and,
- because of bandwidth restrictions—limitations on the amount of data that could be transmitted at speed—often didn’t
- send copies back to the main servers at NSA headquarters. This meant that if any data were destroyed at a particular
- site, the intelligence that the agency had worked hard to collect could be lost.
- My chiefs at the PTC understood the risks the agency was taking by not keeping copies of many of its files, so they
- tasked me with engineering a solution and pitching it to the decision makers at headquarters. The result was a backup
- and storage system that would act as a shadow NSA: a complete, automated, and constantly updating copy of all
- of the agency’s most important material, which would allow the agency to reboot and be up and running again, with
- all its archives intact, even if Fort Meade were reduced to smoldering rubble.
- The major problem with creating a global disaster-recovery system—or
- really with creating any type of backup system that involves a truly staggering number of computers—is dealing with
- duplicated data. In plain terms, you have to handle situations in which, say, one thousand computers all have copies
- of the same single file: you have to make sure you’re not backing up that same file one thousand times, because that
- would require one thousand times the amount of bandwidth and storage space. It was this wasteful duplication, in
- particular, that was preventing the agency’s spoke sites from transmitting daily backups of their records to Fort
- Meade: the connection would be clogged with a thousand copies of the same file containing the same intercepted phone
- call, 999 of which the agency did not need.
- The way to avoid this was “deduplication”: a method to evaluate the uniqueness of data. The system that I designed
- would constantly scan the files at every facility at which the NSA stored records, testing each “block” of data down
- to the slightest fragment of a file to find out whether or not it was unique. Only if the agency lacked a copy of it
- back home would the data be automatically queued for transmission—reducing the volume that flowed over the agency’s
- transpacific fiber-optic connection from a waterfall to a trickle.
- The combination of deduplication and constant improvements in storage technology allowed the agency to store
- intelligence data for progressively longer periods of time. Just over the course of my career, the agency’s goal went
- from being able to store intelligence for days, to weeks, to months, to five years or more after its collection. By
- the time of this book’s publication, the agency might already be able to store it for decades. The NSA’s conventional
- wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there
- was no way to predict when exactly that would be. This rationalization was fuel for the agency’s ultimate dream,
- which is permanency—to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, 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. It’s basically an I
- Ching–like stochastic procedure that randomly picks words from two columns. 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. The point of a code name is that it’s not supposed to
- refer to what the program does. (As has been reported, FOXACID was the code name for NSA servers that host malware
- versions of familiar websites; EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE was an NSA program intended to exploit a vulnerability in certain
- Web browsers
- running Tor, since they couldn’t break Tor itself.) But agents at the NSA were so confident of their power and the
- agency’s absolute invulnerability that they rarely complied with the regulations. In short, they’d 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. Within two years of the invention of EPICSHELTER, a variant had been
- implemented and was in standard use under yet another name.
- THE MATERIAL THAT I disseminated to journalists in 2013 documented such an array of abuses by the NSA,
- accomplished through such a diversity of technological capabilities, that no one agent in the daily discharge of
- their responsibilities was ever in the position to know about all of them—not even a systems administrator. To find
- out about even a fraction of the malfeasance,
- you had to go searching. And to go searching, you had to know that it existed.
- It was something as banal as a conference that first clued me in to that existence, sparking my initial suspicion
- about the full scope of what the NSA was perpetrating.
- In the midst of my EPICSHELTER work, the PTC hosted a conference on China sponsored by the Joint Counterintelligence
- Training Academy (JCITA) for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an agency connected to the Department of
- Defense that specializes in spying on foreign militaries and foreign military–related matters. This conference
- featured briefings given by experts from all the intelligence components, the NSA, CIA, FBI, and military, about how
- the Chinese intelligence services were targeting the IC and what the IC could do to cause them trouble. Though China
- certainly interested me, this wasn’t the kind of work I would ordinarily have been involved in, so I didn’t pay the
- conference much mind until it was announced that the only technology briefer was unable to attend at the last minute.
- I’m not sure what the reason was for that absence—maybe flu, maybe kismet— but the course chair for the conference
- asked if there was anyone at the PTC who might be able to step in as a replacement, since it was too late to
- reschedule. One of the chiefs mentioned my name, and when I was asked if I wanted to give it a shot, I said yes. I
- liked my boss, and wanted to help him
- out. Also, I was curious, and relished the opportunity to do something that wasn’t about data deduplication for a
- change.
- My boss was thrilled. Then he told me the catch: the briefing was the next day.
- I called Lindsay and told her I wouldn’t be home. I was going to be up all night preparing the presentation, whose
- nominal topic was the intersection between a very old discipline, counterintelligence, and a very new discipline,
- cyberintelligence, coming together to try to exploit and thwart the adversary’s attempts to use the Internet to
- gather surveillance. 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. Specifically,
- I read up on so-called intrusion sets, which are bundles of data about particular types of attacks, tools,
- and targets. IC analysts used these intrusion sets to identify specific Chinese military cyberintelligence or
- hacking groups, in the same way that detectives might try to identify a suspect responsible for a string of
- burglaries by a common set of characteristics or modus operandi.
- The point of my researching this widely dispersed material was to do more than merely report on how China was hacking
- us, however. My primary task was to provide a summary of the IC’s assessment of China’s ability to
- electronically track American officers and assets operating in the region.
- Everyone knows (or thinks they know) about the draconian Internet measures of the Chinese government, and some people
- know (or think they know) the gravamen of the disclosures I gave to journalists in 2013 about my own government’s
- capabilities. But listen: It’s one thing to casually say, in a science-fiction dystopic type of way, that a
- government can theoretically see and hear everything that all of its citizens are doing. It’s a very different thing
- for a government to actually try to implement such a system. What a science- fiction writer can describe in a
- sentence might take the concerted work of thousands of technologists and millions of dollars of equipment. To read
- the technical details of China’s surveillance of private communications—to read a complete and accurate 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—was utterly mind-boggling. At first I was so
- impressed by the system’s sheer achievement and audacity that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian
- controls.
- After all, China’s government was an explicitly antidemocratic single- party state. NSA agents, even more than most
- Americans, just took it for
- granted that the place was an authoritarian hellhole. Chinese civil liberties weren’t my department. There wasn’t
- anything I could do about them. I worked, I was sure of it, for the good guys, and that made me a good guy, too.
- But there were certain aspects of what I was reading that disturbed me. I was reminded of what is perhaps the
- fundamental rule of technological progress: 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, and I had the sneaking sense while I was looking through all
- this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America. 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 tamped down my unease. Indeed, I did my best
- to ignore it. The distinctions were still fairly clear to me. China’s Great Firewall was domestically censorious and
- repressive, intended to keep its citizens in and America out in the most chilling and demonstrative way, while the
- American systems were invisible and purely defensive. As I then understood US surveillance, anyone in the world could
- come in through America’s Internet infrastructure and access whatever content they pleased, unblocked and unfiltered
- —or at least only blocked and filtered by their home countries and American businesses, which are, presumptively, not
- under US government control. It was only those who’d been expressly targeted for visiting, for example, jihadist
- bombing sites or malware marketplaces who would find themselves tracked and scrutinized.
- Understood this way, the US surveillance model was perfectly okay with me. It was more than okay, actually—I fully
- supported defensive and targeted surveillance, a “firewall” that didn’t keep anybody out, but just burned the guilty.
- But in the sleepless days after that sleepless night, 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. From journalists’ reports, I was aware of the agency’s myriad surveillance
- initiatives authorized by President George W. Bush in the immediate
- aftermath of 9/11. In particular, I knew about its most publicly contested initiative, the warrantless wiretapping
- component of the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), which had been disclosed by the New York Times in 2005
- thanks to the courage of a few NSA and Department of Justice whistleblowers.
- Officially speaking, the PSP was an “executive order,” essentially a set of instructions set down by the American
- president that the government has to consider the equal of public law—even if they’re just scribbled secretly on a
- napkin. The PSP empowered the NSA to collect telephone and Internet communications between the United States
- and abroad. Notably, the PSP allowed the NSA to do this without having to obtain a special warrant from a Foreign
- Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret federal court established in
- 1978 to oversee IC requests for surveillance warrants after the agencies were caught domestically spying on the
- anti–Vietnam War and civil rights movements.
- Following the outcry that attended the Times revelations, and American Civil Liberties Union challenges to the
- constitutionality of the PSP in non- secret, regular courts, the Bush administration claimed to have let the program
- expire in 2007. But the expiration turned out to be a farce. Congress spent the last two years of the Bush
- administration passing legislation that retroactively legalized the PSP. It also retroactively immunized from
- prosecution the telecoms and Internet service providers that had participated in it. This legislation—the Protect
- America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008—employed intentionally misleading language to reassure US
- citizens that their communications were not being explicitly targeted, even as it effectively extended the
- PSP’s remit. In addition to collecting inbound communications coming from foreign countries, the NSA now also had
- policy 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, which was issued
- to the public in an unclassified version in July 2009, the very same summer that I spent delving into Chinese cyber-
- capabilities. This summary, which bore the nondescript title Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance
- Program, was compiled by the Offices of the Inspector Generals of five agencies (Department of Defense, Department of
- Justice, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) and was offered to the public in lieu of
- a full congressional investigation of Bush-era NSA overreach. The fact that President Obama, once in office, refused
- to call for a full congressional
- investigation was the first sign, to me at least, that the new president—for whom Lindsay had enthusiastically
- campaigned—intended to move forward without a proper reckoning with the past. As his administration rebranded and
- recertified PSP-related programs, Lindsay’s hope in him, as well as my own, would prove more and more misplaced.
- While the unclassified report was mostly just old news, I found it informative in a few respects. I remember being
- immediately struck by its curious, they-do-protest-too-much tone, along with more than a few twists of logic and
- language that didn’t compute. As the report laid out its legal arguments in support of various agency
- programs—rarely named, and almost never described—I couldn’t help but notice the fact that hardly any of the
- executive branch officials who had actually authorized these programs had agreed to be interviewed by the inspector
- generals. From Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington to Attorney General John Ashcroft and DOJ
- lawyer John Yoo, nearly every major player had refused to cooperate with the very offices responsible for
- holding the IC accountable, and the IGs couldn’t compel them to cooperate, because this wasn’t a formal investigation
- involving testimony. It was hard for me to interpret their absence from the record as anything other than
- an admission of malfeasance.
- Another aspect of the report that threw me was its repeated, obscure references to “Other Intelligence Activities”
- (the capitalization is the report’s) for which no “viable legal rationale” or no “legal basis” could be found beyond
- President Bush’s claim of executive powers during wartime—a wartime that had no end in sight. Of course, these
- references gave no description whatsoever of what these Activities might actually be, but the process of deduction
- pointed to warrantless domestic surveillance, as it was pretty much the only intelligence activity not provided for
- under the various legal frameworks that appeared subsequent to the PSP.
- As I read on, I wasn’t sure that anything disclosed in the report completely justified the legal machinations
- involved, let alone the threats by then deputy attorney general James Comey and then FBI director Robert Mueller to
- resign if certain aspects of the PSP were reauthorized. Nor did I notice anything that fully explained the risks
- taken by so many fellow agency members—agents much senior to me, with decades of experience—and DOJ personnel
- to contact the press and express their misgivings about how aspects of the PSP were being abused. If they were
- putting their careers, their families, and their lives on the line, it had to be over something graver than the
- warrantless wiretapping that had already made headlines.
- That suspicion sent me searching for the classified version of the report, and it was not in the least dispelled by
- the fact that such a version appeared not to exist. I didn’t understand. If the classified version was merely a
- record of the sins of the past, it should have been easily accessible. But it was nowhere to be found. I wondered
- whether I was looking in the wrong places. After a while of ranging fairly widely and still finding nothing, though,
- I decided to drop the issue. Life took over and I had work to do. When you get asked to give recommendations on how
- to keep IC agents and assets from being uncovered and executed by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, it’s hard
- to remember what you were Googling the week before.
- It was only later, long after I’d forgotten about the missing IG report, that the classified version came skimming
- across my desktop, as if in proof of that old maxim that the best way to find something is to stop looking for it.
- Once the classified version 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’s full classification designation was TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCON/NOFORN, which
- translates to: pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed to read this.
- I was most definitely not one of them. 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, as a sysadmin, had access to. Its caveat of STLW, which I didn’t recognize,
- turned out to be what’s called a “dirty word” on my system: a label signifying a document that wasn’t supposed to be
- stored on lower-security drives. These drives were being constantly checked for any newly appearing dirty words, and
- the moment one was found I was alerted so that I could decide how best to scrub the document from the system. But
- before I did, I’d have to examine the offending file myself, just to confirm that the dirty word search hadn’t
- flagged anything accidentally. Usually I’d take just the briefest glance at the thing. But this time, as soon I
- opened the document and read the title, I knew I’d be reading it all the way through.
- Here was everything that was missing from the unclassified version. Here was everything that the journalism I’d read
- had lacked, and that the court proceedings I’d followed had been denied: a complete accounting of the NSA’s most
- secret surveillance programs, and the agency directives and Department of Justice policies that had been used to
- subvert American law
- and contravene the US Constitution. After reading the thing, I could understand why no IC employee had ever leaked it
- to journalists, and no judge would be able to force the government to produce it in open court. The document was so
- deeply classified that anybody who had access to it who wasn’t a sysadmin would be immediately identifiable. And the
- activities it outlined were so deeply criminal that no government would ever allow it to be released unredacted.
- One issue jumped out at me immediately: it was clear that the unclassified version I was already familiar with
- wasn’t a redaction of the classified version, as would usually be the practice. Rather, it was a wholly
- different document, which the classified version immediately exposed as an outright and carefully concocted lie. The
- duplicity was stupefying, especially given that I’d just dedicated months of my time to deduplicating files. Most of
- the time, when you’re dealing with two versions of the same document, the differences between them are trivial—a few
- commas here, a few words there. But the only thing these two particular reports had in common was their title.
- Whereas the unclassified version merely made reference to the NSA being ordered to intensify its intelligence-
- gathering practices following 9/11, the classified version laid out the nature, and scale, of that intensification.
- The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from targeted collection of communications to “bulk
- collection,” which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance. And whereas the unclassified version obfuscated
- this shift, advocating for expanded surveillance by scaring the public with the specter of terror, the classified
- version made this shift explicit, justifying it as the legitimate corollary of expanded technological
- capability.
- The NSA IG’s portion of the classified report outlined what it called “a collection gap,” noting that existing
- surveillance legislation (particularly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) dated from 1978, a time when most
- communications signals traveled via radio or telephone lines, rather than fiber-optic cables and satellites. In
- essence, the agency was arguing that the speed and volume of contemporary communication had outpaced, and outgrown,
- American law—no court, not even a secret court, could issue enough individually targeted warrants fast enough to keep
- up—and that a truly global world required a truly global intelligence agency. All of this pointed, in the NSA’s
- logic, to the necessity of the bulk collection of Internet communications. The code name for this bulk collection
- initiative was indicated in the very “dirty word” that got it flagged on my system: STLW, an abbreviation of
- STELLARWIND. This turned out to be the single major component of the PSP that had continued, and even grown, in
- secret after the
- rest of the program had been made public in the press.
- STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that
- the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. 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
- by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.
- Such fraudulent redefinitions ran throughout the report, but perhaps the most fundamental and transparently
- desperate involved the government’s vocabulary. STELLARWIND had been collecting communications since the PSP’s
- inception in 2001, but in 2004—when Justice Department officials balked at the continuation of the initiative—
- the Bush administration attempted to legitimize it ex post facto by changing the meanings of basic English words,
- such as “acquire” and “obtain.” According to the report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect
- whatever communications records it wanted to, without having to get a warrant, because it could only be
- said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency “searched for and retrieved” them
- from its database.
- This lexical sophistry was particularly galling to me, as I was well aware that the agency’s goal was to be able to
- retain as much data as it could for as long as it could—for perpetuity. If communications records would only be
- considered definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but collected in storage
- forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation. By redefining the terms “acquire” and “obtain”—from describing
- the act of data being entered into a database, to describing the act of a person (or, more likely, an algorithm)
- querying that database and getting a “hit” or “return” at any conceivable point in the future—the US government was
- developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. 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. This relief is understandable, to a degree, due
- to what each of us must regard as the uniquely revealing and intimate nature of our communications: the sound of our
- voice, almost as personal as a thumbprint; the inimitable facial expression we put on in a selfie sent by text. The
- unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is rarely as revealing as its other elements—
- the unwritten, unspoken information that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.
- The NSA calls this “metadata.” The term’s prefix, “meta,” which traditionally is translated as “above” or “beyond,”
- is here used in the sense of “about”: metadata is data about data. It is, more accurately, data that is made by data
- —a cluster of tags and markers that allow data to be useful. The most direct way of thinking about metadata, however,
- is as “activity 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, where, and when, 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 your surveillant 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 could be 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. Just as it’s collected, stored, and analyzed by machine,
- it’s made by machine, too, without your participation or even consent. Your devices are constantly communicating
- for you whether you want them to or not. And, unlike the humans you communicate with of your own volition, your
- devices don’t withhold private information or use code words in an attempt to be discreet. They merely ping the
- nearest cell phone towers with signals that never lie.
- One major irony here is that law, which always lags behind technological innovation by at least a generation, gives
- substantially more protections to a communication’s content than to its metadata—and yet intelligence agencies are
- far more interested in the metadata—the activity records that allow them both the “big picture” ability to analyze
- data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an
- individual person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior. In sum, metadata can tell
- your surveillant virtually everything they’d ever want or need to know about you, except what’s actually going on
- inside your head.
- 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 far from home, but monitored. I felt more adult than ever, but also cursed with the knowledge that all of us
- had been reduced to something like children, who’d be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental
- supervision. I felt like a fraud, making excuses to Lindsay to explain my sullenness. 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. Being in Japan only accentuated the sense of
- betrayal.
- I’ll explain.
- The Japanese that I’d managed to pick up through community college and my interests in anime and manga was enough for
- me to speak and get through basic conversations, but reading was a different matter. In Japanese, each word can be
- represented by its own unique character, or a combination of characters, called kanji, so there were tens of
- thousands of them—far too many for me to memorize. Often, I was only able to decode particular kanji if they were
- written with their phonetic gloss, the furigana, which are most commonly meant for foreigners and young readers and
- so are typically absent from public texts like street signs. The result of all this was that I walked around
- functionally illiterate. I’d get confused and end up going right when I should have gone left, or left when I should
- have gone right. I’d wander down the wrong streets and misorder from menus. I was a stranger, is what I’m saying, and
- often lost, in more ways than one. There were times when I’d accompany Lindsay out on one of her photography trips
- into the countryside and I’d suddenly stop and realize, in the midst of a village or in the middle of a forest, that
- I knew nothing whatsoever about my surroundings.
- And yet: everything was known about me. I now understood that I was totally transparent to my government. The phone
- that gave me directions, and corrected me when I went the wrong way, and helped me translate the traffic signs, and
- told me the times of the buses and trains, was also making sure that all of my doings were legible to my employers.
- It was telling my bosses where I was and when, even if I never touched the thing and just left it in my pocket.
- I remember forcing myself to laugh about this once when Lindsay and I got lost on a hike and Lindsay—to
- whom I’d told nothing—just spontaneously said, “Why don’t you text Fort Meade and have them find us?” She kept
- the joke going, and I tried to find it funny but couldn’t. “Hello,” she mimicked me, “can you help us with
- directions?”
- Later I would live in Hawaii, near Pearl Harbor, where America was attacked and dragged into what might have been its
- last just war. Here, in Japan, I was closer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where that war ignominiously ended. Lindsay
- and I had always hoped to visit those cities, but every time we planned to go we wound up having to cancel. On one of
- my first days off, we were all set to head down Honshu to Hiroshima, but I was called in to work and told to go in
- the opposite direction—to Misawa Air Base in the frozen north. On the day of our next scheduled attempt, Lindsay got
- sick, and then I
- got sick, too. Finally, the night before we intended to go to Nagasaki, Lindsay and I were woken by our first major
- earthquake, jumped up from our futon, ran down seven flights of stairs, and spent the rest of the night out on the
- street with our neighbors, shivering in our pajamas.
- To my true regret, we never went. Those places are holy places, whose memorials honor the two hundred thousand
- incinerated and the countless poisoned by fallout while reminding us of technology’s amorality.
- I think often of what’s called the “atomic moment”—a phrase that in physics describes the moment when a nucleus
- coheres the protons and neutrons spinning around it into an atom, but that’s popularly understood to mean the advent
- of the nuclear age, whose isotopes enabled advances in energy production, agriculture, water potability, and the
- diagnosis and treatment of deadly disease. It also created the atomic bomb.
- Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia,
- industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can
- we,” not “should we.” And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and
- use.
- I do not mean, of course, to compare nuclear weapons with cybersurveillance in terms of human cost. But there is a
- commonality when it comes to the concepts of proliferation and disarmament.
- The only two countries I knew of that had previously practiced mass surveillance were those two other major
- combatants of World War II—one America’s enemy, the other America’s ally. In both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia,
- the earliest public indications of that surveillance took the superficially innocuous form of a
- census, the official enumeration and statistical recording of a population. The First All-Union Census of the Soviet
- Union, in 1926, had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count: it overtly queried Soviet citizens about their
- nationality. Its findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were in the minority
- when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed a Central Asian heritage, such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs,
- Tajiks, Turkmen, Georgians, and Armenians. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate
- these cultures, by “reeducating” their populations in the deracinating ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
- The Nazi German census of 1939 took on a similar statistical project, but with the assistance of computer technology.
- It set out to count the Reich’s
- population in order to control it and to purge it—mainly of Jews and Roma— before exerting its murderous efforts on
- populations beyond its borders. To effect this, the Reich partnered with Dehomag, a German subsidiary of the American
- IBM, which owned the patent to the punch card tabulator, a sort of analog computer that counted holes punched into
- cards. Each citizen was represented by a card, and certain holes on the cards represented certain markers of
- identity. Column 22 addressed the religion rubric: hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, and hole 3 Jewish. Shortly
- thereafter, this census information was used to identify and deport Europe’s Jewish population to the death camps.
- A single current-model smartphone commands more computing power than all of the wartime machinery of the Reich and
- the Soviet Union combined. Recalling this is the surest way to contextualize not just the modern American
- IC’s technological dominance, but also the threat it poses to democratic governance. In the century or so since those
- census efforts, technology has made astounding progress, but the same could not be said for the law or human scruples
- that could restrain it.
- The United States has a census, too, of course. The Constitution established the American census and enshrined it as
- the official federal count of each state’s population in order to determine its proportional delegation to the House
- of Representatives. That was something of a revisionist principle, in that authoritarian governments, including the
- British monarchy that ruled the colonies, had traditionally used the census as a method of assessing taxes and
- ascertaining the number of young men eligible for military conscription. It was the Constitution’s genius to
- repurpose what had been a mechanism of oppression into one of democracy. The census, which is officially under the
- jurisdiction of the Senate, was ordered to be performed every ten years, which was roughly the amount of time it took
- to process the data of most American censuses following the first census of 1790. This decade-long lag was shortened
- by the census of 1890, which was the world’s first census to make use of computers (the prototypes of the models that
- IBM later sold to Nazi Germany). With computing technology, the processing time was cut in half.
- Digital technology didn’t just further streamline such accounting—it is rendering it obsolete. Mass surveillance is
- now a never-ending census, substantially more dangerous than any questionnaire sent through the mail. All our
- devices, from our phones to our computers, are basically miniature census-takers we carry in our backpacks and in our
- pockets—census-takers that remember everything and forgive nothing.
- Japan was my atomic moment. It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and 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 wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and
- indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and
- permanent.
- Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select
- a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching—as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files
- —for evidence of a suitable crime.
- 17
- Home on the Cloud
- In 2011, I was back in the States, working for the same nominal employer, Dell, but now attached to my old agency,
- the CIA. One mild spring day, I came home from my first day at the new job and was amused to notice: the house I’d
- moved into had a mailbox. It was nothing fancy, just one of those subdivided rectangles common to town house
- communities, but still, it made me smile. I hadn’t had a mailbox in years, and hadn’t ever checked this one. I might
- not even have registered its existence had it not been overflowing— stuffed to bursting with heaps of junk mail
- addressed to “Mr. Edward J. Snowden or Current Resident.” The envelopes contained coupons and ad circulars for
- household products. Someone knew that I’d just moved in.
- A memory surfaced from my childhood, a memory of checking the mail and finding a letter to my sister. Although I
- wanted to open it, my mother wouldn’t let me.
- I remember asking why. “Because,” she said, “it’s not addressed to you.” She explained that opening mail intended for
- someone else, even if it was just a birthday card or a chain letter, wasn’t a very nice thing to do. In fact, it was
- a crime.
- I wanted to know what kind of crime. “A big one, buddy,” my mother said. “A federal crime.”
- I stood in the parking lot, tore the envelopes in half, and carried them to the trash.
- I had a new iPhone in the pocket of my new Ralph Lauren suit. I had new Burberry glasses. A new haircut. Keys to this
- new town house in Columbia, Maryland, the largest place I’d ever lived in, and the first place that really felt like
- mine. I was rich, or at least my friends thought so. I barely recognized myself.
- I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved—after
- all, wasn’t that what everybody else did? But it was easier said than done. The denial, I mean. The money—that came
- easy. So easy that I felt guilty.
- 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. I won’t go as far as to say that I felt like a foreigner, but I did find myself mired
- in way too many conversations I didn’t understand. Every other word was the name of 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.
- Contradictory thoughts rained down like Tetris blocks, and I struggled to sort them out—to make them disappear. I
- thought, pity these poor, sweet, innocent people—they’re victims, watched by the government, watched by the very
- screens they worship. Then I thought: Shut up, stop being so dramatic—they’re happy, they don’t care, and you don’t
- have to, either. Grow up, do your work, pay your bills. That’s life.
- A normal life was what Lindsay and I were hoping for. We were ready for the next stage and had decided to settle
- down. We had a nice backyard with a cherry tree that reminded me of a sweeter Japan, a spot on the Tama River where
- Lindsay and I had laughed and rolled around atop the fragrant carpet of Tokyo blossoms as we watched the sakura fall.
- Lindsay was getting certified as a yoga instructor. I, meanwhile, was getting used to my new position—in sales.
- One of the external vendors I’d worked with on EPICSHELTER ended up working for Dell, and convinced me that I was
- wasting my time with getting paid by the hour. I should get into the sales side of Dell’s business, he said, where I
- could earn a fortune—for more ideas like EPICSHELTER. I’d be making an astronomical leap up the corporate ladder, and
- he’d be getting a substantial referral bonus. I was ready to be convinced, especially since it meant distracting
- myself from my growing sense of unease, which could only get me into trouble. The official job title was solutions
- consultant. It meant, in essence, that I had to solve the problems created by my new partner, whom I’m going to call
- Cliff, the account manager.
- Cliff was supposed to be the face, and I was to be the brain. When we sat down with the CIA’s technical royalty and
- purchasing agents, his job was to sell Dell’s equipment and expertise by any means necessary. This meant reaching
- deep into the seat of his pants for unlimited slick promises as to how we’d do things for the agency, things that
- were definitely, definitely not possible for our competitors (and, in reality, not possible for us, either). My job
- was to lead a team of experts in building something that reduced the degree to which Cliff had lied by just enough
- that, when the person who signed the check pressed the Power button, we wouldn’t all be sent to jail.
- No pressure.
- Our main project was to help the CIA catch up with the bleeding edge—or
- just with the technical standards of the NSA—by building it the buzziest of new technologies, a “private cloud.” The
- aim was to unite the agency’s processing and storage while distributing the ways by which data could be accessed.
- In plain American, we wanted to make it so that someone in a tent in Afghanistan could do exactly the same work in
- exactly the same way as someone at CIA headquarters. The agency—and indeed the whole IC’s technical leadership—was
- constantly complaining about “silos”: the problem of having a billion buckets of data spread all over the world that
- they couldn’t keep track of or access. So I was leading a team of some of the smartest people at Dell to come up with
- a way that anyone, anywhere, could reach anything.
- During the proof of concept stage, the working name of our cloud became “Frankie.” Don’t blame me: on the tech side,
- we just called it “The Private Cloud.” It was Cliff who named it, in the middle of a demo with the CIA, saying they
- were going to love our little Frankenstein “because it’s a real monster.”
- The more promises Cliff made, the busier I became, leaving Lindsay and me only the weekends to catch up with our
- parents and old friends. We tried to furnish and equip our new home. The three-story place had come empty, so we had
- to get everything, or everything that our parents hadn’t generously handed down to us. This felt very mature, but was
- at the same time very telling about our priorities: we bought dishes, cutlery, a desk, and a chair, but we still
- slept on a mattress on the floor. I’d become allergic to credit cards, with all their tracking, so we bought
- everything outright, with hard currency. When we needed a car, I bought a ’98 Acura Integra from a classified ad for
- $3,000 cash. Earning money was one thing, but neither Lindsay nor I liked to spend it, unless it was for computer
- equipment—or a special occasion. For Valentine’s Day, I bought Lindsay the revolver she always wanted.
- Our new condo was a twenty-minute drive from nearly a dozen malls, including the Columbia Mall, which has nearly 1.5
- million square feet of shopping, occupied by some two hundred stores, a fourteen-screen AMC multiplex, a P.F.
- Chang’s, and a Cheesecake Factory. As we drove the familiar roads in the beat-up Integra, I was impressed, but also
- slightly taken aback, by all the development that had occurred in my absence. The post-9/11 government spending spree
- had certainly put a lot of money into a lot of local pockets. It was an unsettling and even overwhelming experience
- to come back to America after having been away for a while and to realize anew just how wealthy this part of the
- country was, and how many consumer options it offered—how many big-box retailers and high-end interior
- design
- showrooms. And all of them had sales. For Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus
- Day, Veterans’ Day. Festive banners announced the latest discounts, just below all the flags.
- Our mission was pretty much appliance-based on this one afternoon I’m recalling—we were at Best Buy. Having settled
- on a new microwave, we were checking out, on Lindsay’s healthful insistence, a display of blenders. She had her phone
- out and was in the midst of researching which of the ten or so devices had the best reviews, when I found myself
- wandering over to the computer department at the far end of the store.
- But along the way, I stopped. There, at the edge of the kitchenware section, ensconced atop a brightly decorated
- and lit elevated platform, was a shiny new refrigerator. Rather, it was a “Smartfridge,” which was being advertised
- as “Internet-equipped.”
- This, plain and simple, blew my mind.
- A salesperson approached, interpreting my stupefaction as interest—“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”—and proceeded to
- demonstrate a few of the features. A screen was embedded in the door of the fridge, and next to the screen was a
- holder for a tiny stylus, which allowed you to scribble messages. If you didn’t want to scribble, you could record
- audio and video memos. You could also use the screen as you would your regular computer, because the refrigerator had
- Wi-Fi. You could check your email, or check your calendar. You could watch YouTube clips, or listen to MP3s. You
- could even make phone calls. I had to restrain myself from keying in Lindsay’s number and saying, from across the
- floor, “I’m calling from a fridge.”
- Beyond that, the salesperson continued, the fridge’s computer kept track of internal temperature, and, through
- scanning barcodes, the freshness of your food. It also provided nutritional information and suggested recipes. I
- think the price was over $9,000. “Delivery included,” the salesperson said.
- I remember driving home in a confused silence. This wasn’t quite the stunning moonshot tech-future we’d been
- promised. I was convinced the only reason that thing was Internet-equipped was so that it could report back to its
- manufacturer about its owner’s usage and about any other household data that was obtainable. The manufacturer, in
- turn, would monetize that data by selling it. And we were supposed to pay for the privilege.
- 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, allowing
- themselves to be tracked while browsing in their pantries as efficiently as if they were browsing the Web. It would
- still be another half decade before the domotics revolution, before “virtual assistants” like Amazon Echo and
- Google Home were welcomed into the bedroom and placed proudly on nightstands to record and transmit all
- activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be
- developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash. The data we generate just by living—or just by letting
- ourselves be surveilled while living
- —would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance
- was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance
- was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and
- advertisers.
- Meanwhile, it felt as if every major tech company, including Dell, was rolling out new civilian versions of what I
- was working on for the CIA: a cloud. (In fact, Dell had even tried four years previously to trademark the term “cloud
- computing” but was denied.) 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 uber-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, on every side. “The cloud” was as effective a
- sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amazon and Apple and Google to sell to their users. I can still
- close my eyes and hear Cliff schmoozing some CIA suit about how “with the cloud, you’ll be able to push security
- updates across agency computers worldwide,” or “when the cloud’s up and running, the agency will be able to track who
- has read what file worldwide.” The cloud was white and fluffy and peaceful, floating high above the fray. Though many
- clouds make a stormy sky, a single cloud provided a benevolent bit of shade. It was protective. I think it made
- everyone think of heaven.
- Dell—along with the largest cloud-based private companies, Amazon, Apple, and Google—regarded the rise of the
- cloud as a new age of computing. But in concept, at least, it was something of a regression to the old mainframe
- architecture of computing’s earliest history, where many users all depended upon a single powerful central core that
- could only be maintained by an elite cadre of professionals. The world had abandoned this
- “impersonal” mainframe model only a generation before, once businesses like
- Dell developed “personal” computers cheap enough, and simple enough, to appeal to mortals. The renaissance that
- followed produced desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—all devices that allowed people the freedom to make an
- immense amount of creative work. The only issue was—how to store it?
- This was the genesis of “cloud computing.” Now it didn’t really matter what kind of personal computer you had,
- because the real computers that you relied upon were warehoused in the enormous data centers that the cloud companies
- built throughout the world. These were, in a sense, the new mainframes, row after row of racked, identical
- servers linked together in such a way that each individual machine acted together within a collective computing
- system. The loss of a single server or even of an entire data center no longer mattered, because they were mere
- droplets in the larger, global cloud.
- 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.
- Read your terms of service agreements for cloud storage, which get longer and longer by the year—current ones are
- over six thousand words, twice the average length of one of these book chapters. When we choose to store our data
- online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us, and can
- willfully 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 particularly objectionable or otherwise in violation of
- the terms of service, the companies can unilaterally 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, the Internet that had raised me, was disappearing. And with it, so was my
- youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught
- ordeal. Self-expression now required such strong self-protection as to
- obviate its liberties and nullify its pleasures. Every communication was a matter not of creativity but of safety.
- Every transaction was a potential danger.
- Meanwhile, the private sector was busy leveraging our reliance on technology into market consolidation. The majority
- of American Internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by
- an imperial triumvirate of companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and 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 subversion 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.
- Then there was this other emotion that I felt, a curious sense of being adrift and yet, at the same time, of having
- my privacy violated. It was as if I were dispersed—with parts of my life scattered across servers all over the globe
- —and yet intruded or imposed upon. 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 whether I blew through the
- intersection or stopped. License-plate readers were recording my comings and goings, even if I maintained a speed of
- 35 miles per hour.
- America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a
- core feature of democracy. In the American system, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another.
- In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only
- members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force—including lethal force. Among the
- most important of these restraints are the prohibitions against law enforcement 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, they became
- ubiquitous, and their role became preemptive—with law enforcement 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 would be no mere recording
- device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer—a true robo-cop actively seeking out
- “suspicious” activity, such as apparent drug deals (that is, people embracing or shaking hands) and apparent gang
- affiliation (such as people wearing specific colors and brands of clothing). Even in 2011, it was clear to me that
- this was where technology was leading us, without any substantive public debate.
- Potential monitoring abuses piled up in my mind to cumulatively produce a vision of an appalling future. A world in
- which all people were totally surveilled would logically become a world in which all laws were totally enforced,
- automatically, by computers. After all, it’s difficult to imagine an AI device that’s capable of noticing a person
- breaking the law not holding that person accountable. No policing algorithm would ever be programmed, even if it
- could be, toward leniency or forgiveness.
- I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all
- citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement. I imagined
- the future SmartFridge stationed in my kitchen, monitoring my conduct and habits, and using my tendency to drink
- straight from the carton or not wash my hands to evaluate the probability of my being a felon.
- Such a world of total automated law enforcement—of, say, all pet- ownership laws, or all zoning laws regulating home
- businesses—would be intolerable. Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the
- severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and
- prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow,
- along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about. According to
- Maryland Criminal Law Section
- 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine. In North Carolina, statute 14-309.8 makes it illegal for a
- bingo game to last more than five hours. Both of these laws come from a more prudish past and yet, for one reason or
- another, were never repealed. 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, and 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 was a criminal.
- I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so
- sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d
- be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.”
- She was right. And she was right to be worried about me. 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 and read the love poems she texted me. I
- couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took—not just her public photos, but the intimate ones. I
- couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which
- was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.
- I tried to explain it to her, obliquely, through an analogy. I told her to imagine opening up her laptop one day and
- finding a spreadsheet on her desktop.
- “Why?” she said. “I don’t like spreadsheets.”
- I wasn’t prepared for this response, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Nobody does, but this one’s
- called The End.”
- “Ooh, mysterious.”
- “You don’t remember having created this spreadsheet, but once you open it up, you recognize its contents. Because
- inside it is everything, absolutely everything, that could ruin you. Every speck of information that could destroy
- your life.”
- Lindsay smiled. “Can I see the one for you?”
- She was joking, but I wasn’t. A spreadsheet containing every scrap of data about you would pose a mortal hazard.
- Imagine it: all the secrets big and small that could end your marriage, end your career, poison even your closest
- relationships, and leave you broke, friendless, and in prison. Maybe the spreadsheet would include the joint you
- smoked last weekend at a friend’s house, or the one line of cocaine you snorted off the screen of your phone in a bar
- in college. Or the drunken one-night stand you had with your friend’s girlfriend, who’s now your friend’s wife, which
- you both regret and have agreed never to mention to anyone. Or an abortion you got when you were a teenager, which
- you kept hidden from your parents and that you’d like to keep hidden from your spouse. Or maybe it’s just information
- about a petition you
- signed, or a protest you attended. Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes—if
- not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this
- information was being stored by the US government.
- Some time after our exchange, Lindsay came up to me and said, “I figured out what would be on my Spreadsheet of Total
- Destruction—the secret that would ruin me.”
- “What?”
- “I’m not going to tell you.”
- I tried to chill, but I kept 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, or fail to gauge distances
- accurately and miss what I was reaching for. I’d spill water over myself, or choke on it. Lindsay and I would be in
- the middle of a conversation when I’d miss what she’d said, and she’d ask where I’d gone to—it was like I’d been
- frozen in another world.
- One day when I went to meet Lindsay after her pole-fitness class, I started feeling dizzy. This was the most
- disturbing of the symptoms I’d had thus far. It scared me, and scared Lindsay, too, especially when it led to a
- gradual diminishing of my senses. I had too many explanations for these incidents: poor diet, lack of exercise, lack
- of sleep. I had too many rationalizations: the plate was too close to the edge of the counter, the stairs were
- slippery. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was worse if what I was experiencing was psychosomatic or genuine. 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.
- For those who’ve experienced it, this sense of impending doom needs no description, and for those who haven’t, there
- is no explanation. It strikes so suddenly and primally that it wipes out all other feeling, all thought besides
- helpless resignation. My life was over. I slumped in my chair, a big black padded Aeron that tilted underneath me as
- I fell into a void and lost consciousness.
- 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. It was as if I’d been awake since the beginning of time.
- 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 for a time at least was prone to grand mal seizures: the foaming at the mouth, her limbs
- thrashing, her body rolling around until it stilled into a horrible unconscious rigidity. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t
- previously associated my symptoms with hers, though that was the very same denial she herself had been in for
- decades, attributing her frequent falls to “clumsiness” and “lack of coordination.” She hadn’t been diagnosed until
- her first grand mal in her late thirties, and, after a brief spell on medication, her seizures stopped. She’d always
- told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary 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.
- There is no diagnostic test for epilepsy. The clinical diagnosis is just two or more unexplained seizures—that’s it.
- Very little is known about the condition. Medicine tends to treat epilepsy phenomenologically. Doctors don’t
- talk about “epilepsy,” they talk about “seizures.” They tend to divide seizures into two types: localized and
- generalized, the former being an electrical misfire in a certain section of your brain that doesn’t spread, the
- latter being an electrical misfire that creates a chain reaction. Basically, a wave of misfiring synapses rolls
- across your brain, causing you to lose motor function and, ultimately, consciousness.
- Epilepsy is such a strange syndrome. Its sufferers feel different things, depending on which part of their brain
- has the initial electrical cascade failure. Those who have this failure in their auditory center famously hear
- bells. Those who have it in their visual center either have their vision go dark or see sparkles. If the failure
- happens in the deeper core areas of the brain—
- which was where mine occurred—it can cause severe vertigo. In time, I came to know the warning signs, so I could
- prepare for an oncoming seizure. These signs are called “auras,” in the popular language of epilepsy, though in
- scientific fact these auras are the seizure itself. They are the proprioceptive experience of the misfire.
- I consulted with as many epilepsy specialists as I could find—the best part of working for Dell was the insurance: I
- had CAT scans, MRIs, the works. Meanwhile, Lindsay, who was my stalwart angel throughout all this, driving me back
- and forth from appointments, went about researching all the information that was available about the syndrome. She
- Googled both allopathic and homeopathic treatments so intensely that basically all her Gmail ads were for
- epilepsy pharmaceuticals.
- I felt defeated. The two great institutions of my life had been betrayed and were betraying me: my country and the
- Internet. And now my body was following suit.
- My brain had, quite literally, short-circuited.
- 18
- 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
- to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed by a team of Navy SEALs.
- So there it was. The man who’d masterminded the attacks that had propelled me into the army, and from there
- into the Intelligence Community, was now dead, a dialysis patient shot point-blank in the embrace of his multiple
- wives in their lavish compound just down the road from Pakistan’s major military academy. Site after site showed maps
- indicating where the hell Abbottabad was, alternating with street scenes from cities throughout America, where people
- were fist-pumping, chest-bumping, yelling, getting wasted. Even New York was celebrating, which almost never happens.
- I turned off the phone. I just didn’t have it in me to join in. Don’t get me wrong: I was glad the motherfucker was
- dead. I was just having a pensive moment and felt a circle closing.
- Ten years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes flew into the Twin Towers, and what did we have to show
- for it? What had the last decade actually accomplished? I sat on the couch I’d inherited from my mother’s condo and
- gazed through the window into the street beyond as a neighbor honked the horn of his parked car. I couldn’t shake the
- idea that I’d wasted the last decade of my life.
- The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic
- regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted
- killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland
- Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red–Severe, Orange–High, Yellow–
- Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly
- fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt
- entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation.
- The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened concurrently with the development of digital technology, which
- made much of the earth American soil—whether we liked it or not. Terrorism, of course, was the
- stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and
- opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was
- increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force. American politicians weren’t
- as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their
- campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East. The
- politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in “counterterror”: the panicked actions of
- a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unconcerned about upholding the rule of law.
- After 9/11, the IC’s orders had been “never again,” a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it
- had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response
- to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required
- permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.
- After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon less against terror and
- more against liberty itself. By continuing these programs, by continuing these lies, America was protecting little,
- winning nothing, and losing much—until there would be few distinctions left between those post-9/11 polarities of
- “Us” and “Them.”
- 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 wasn’t sure how I was going to live with what Lindsay was now calling my “condition” without losing my job. Being
- the top technologist for Dell’s CIA account meant I had tremendous flexibility: my office was my phone, and I could
- work from home. But meetings were an issue. They were always in Virginia, and I lived in Maryland, a state whose laws
- prevented people diagnosed with epilepsy from driving. If I were caught behind the wheel, I could lose my driver’s
- license, and with it my ability to attend the meetings that were the single nonnegotiable requirement of my position.
- I finally gave in to the inevitable, took a short-term disability leave from Dell, and decamped to my mother’s
- secondhand couch. It was as blue as my mood, but comfortable. For weeks and weeks it was the center of my existence—
- the place where I slept and ate and read and slept some more, the
- place where I just generally wallowed bleakly as time mocked me.
- 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, the
- uncooperative lump that used to be me spread across the upholstery, 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—while protesters in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen,
- Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were being imprisoned and tortured or just shot in the streets by the
- secret state agents of thuggish regimes, many of which America had helped keep in power. The suffering of that season
- was immense, spiraling out of the regular news cycle. What I was witnessing was desperation, compared with which my
- own struggles seemed cheap. They seemed small—morally and ethically small—and privileged.
- Throughout the Middle East, innocent civilians were living under the constant threat of violence, with work and
- school suspended, no electricity, no sewage. In many regions, they didn’t have access to even the most rudimentary
- medical care. But if at any moment I doubted that my anxieties about surveillance and privacy were relevant, or even
- appropriate, in the face of such immediate danger and privation, I only had to pay a bit more attention to the crowds
- on the street and the proclamations they were making—in Cairo and Sanaa, in Beirut and Damascus, in Ahvaz, Khuzestan,
- and in every other city of the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement. The crowds were calling for an end to
- oppression, censorship, and precarity. They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not
- answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people. Although each crowd in each city, even on
- each day, seemed to have its own specific motivation and its own specific goals, they all had one thing in common:
- a rejection of authoritarianism, a recommitment to the humanitarian principle that an individual’s rights are inborn
- and inalienable.
- 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. In the former, people are subjects, who are only allowed to own
- property, pursue an education, work, pray, and speak because their government permits them to. In the latter, people
- are citizens, who agree to be governed in a covenant of consent that must be periodically renewed and is
- constitutionally revocable. It’s this clash, between the authoritarian and the
- liberal democratic, that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time—not some concocted, prejudiced
- notion of an East-West divide, or of a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam.
- Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but governments of leaders, who demand loyalty from their
- subjects and are hostile to dissent. Liberal-democratic states, by contrast, make no or few such demands, but depend
- almost solely on each citizen voluntarily assuming the responsibility of protecting the freedoms of everyone
- else around them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality, or gender. Any collective
- guarantee, predicated not on blood but on assent, will wind up favoring egalitarianism—and though democracy has often
- 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. In fact, many of the rights most cherished by
- citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication. They exist in that open-ended empty
- space created through the restriction of government power. For example, Americans only have a “right” to free speech
- because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a “right” to a free press
- because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it. They only have a “right” to worship freely
- because the government is forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, and a “right” to
- peaceably assemble and protest because the government is forbidden from making any law that says they can’t.
- In contemporary life, we have a single concept that encompasses all this negative or potential space that’s off-
- limits to the government. That concept is “privacy.” It is an empty zone that lies beyond the reach of the state, a
- void into which the law is only permitted to venture with a warrant—and not a warrant “for everybody,” such as the
- one the US government has arrogated to itself in pursuit of mass surveillance, but a warrant for a specific person or
- purpose supported by a specific probable cause.
- The word “privacy” itself is somewhat empty, because it is essentially indefinable, or over-definable. Each of us has
- our own idea of what it is. “Privacy” means something to everyone. There is no one to whom it means nothing.
- It’s because of this lack of common definition that citizens of pluralistic, technologically sophisticated
- democracies feel that they have to justify their desire for privacy and frame it as a right. But citizens of
- democracies don’t
- have to justify that desire—the state, instead, must justify its violation. To refuse to claim your privacy is
- actually to cede it, either to a state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a “private” business.
- There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are interdependent, to surrender your
- own privacy is really to surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the
- popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But 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. You’re
- assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious
- beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music
- tastes and reading preferences.
- 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. Or
- that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. 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—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were
- protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily
- dismantling.
- I wanted to help, but I didn’t know how. I’d had enough of feeling helpless, of being just an asshole in
- flannel lying around on a shabby couch eating Cool Ranch Doritos and drinking Diet Coke while the world went up in
- flames.
- The young people of the Middle East were agitating for higher wages, lower prices, and better pensions, but I
- couldn’t give them any of that, and no one could give them a better shot at self-governance than the one they were
- taking themselves. They were, however, also agitating for a freer Internet. They were decrying Iran’s Ayatollah
- Khamenei, who had been increasingly censoring and blocking threatening Web content, tracking and hacking traffic to
- offending platforms and services, and shutting down certain foreign ISPs entirely. They were protesting Egypt’s
- president, Hosni Mubarak, who’d cut off Internet access for his whole country—which had merely succeeded in
- making every young person in the country even more furious and bored, luring them out into the streets.
- 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 shook off my despair, propelled
- myself off the couch, and staggered over to my home office to set up a bridge relay that would bypass the Iranian
- Internet blockades. 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 who hadn’t
- been able to get online could now bypass the imposed filters and restrictions and connect to me—connect through me—
- 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.
- The guy who started the Arab Spring was almost exactly my age. He was a produce peddler in Tunisia, selling fruits
- and vegetables out of a cart. In protest against repeated harassment and extortion by the authorities, he stood in
- the square and set fire to his life, dying a martyr. If burning himself to death was the last free act he could
- manage in defiance of an illegitimate regime, I could certainly get up off the couch and press a few buttons.
- PART THREE
- 19
- The Tunnel
- Imagine you’re entering a tunnel. Imagine the perspective: as you look down the length that stretches ahead of you,
- notice how the walls seem to narrow to the tiny dot of light at the other end. The light at the end of the tunnel is
- a symbol of hope, and it’s also what people say they see in near-death experiences. They have to go to it, they say.
- They’re drawn to it. But then where else is there to go in a tunnel, except through it? Hasn’t everything led up to
- this point?
- My tunnel was the Tunnel: an enormous Pearl Harbor–era airplane factory turned NSA facility located under a pineapple
- field in Kunia, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The facility was built out of reinforced concrete, its
- eponymous tunnel a kilometer-long tube in the side of a hill opening up into three cavernous floors of server vaults
- and offices. At the time the Tunnel was built, the hill was covered over with huge amounts of sand, soil, desiccated
- pineapple plant leaves, and patches of sun-parched grass to camouflage it from Japanese bombers. Sixty years later it
- resembled the vast burial mound of a lost civilization, or some gigantic arid pile that a weird god had heaped up in
- the middle of a god-size sandbox. Its official name was the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center.
- I went to work there, still on a Dell contract, but now for the NSA again, early in 2012. One day that summer—
- actually, it was my birthday—as I passed through the security checks and proceeded down the tunnel, it struck me:
- this, in front of me, was my future.
- I’m not saying that I made any decisions at that instant. The most important decisions in life are never made that
- way. They’re made subconsciously and only express themselves consciously once fully formed— once you’re finally
- strong enough to admit to yourself that this is what your conscience has already chosen for you, this is the course
- that your beliefs have decreed. That was my twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: the awareness that I had entered
- a tunnel that would narrow my life down toward a single, still-indistinct act.
- Just as Hawaii has always been an important waystation—historically, the US military treated the island chain as
- little more than a mid-Pacific refueling depot for boats and planes—it had also become an important switchpoint for
- American communications. These include the intelligence that flowed between the contiguous forty-eight states
- and my former place of
- employment, Japan, as well as other sites in Asia.
- The job I’d taken was a significant step down the career ladder, with duties I could at this point perform in my
- sleep. It was supposed to mean less stress, a lighter burden. I was the sole employee of the aptly named Office of
- Information Sharing, where I worked as a SharePoint systems administrator. SharePoint is a Microsoft product, a dopey
- poky program, or rather a grab- bag of programs, focused on internal document management: who can read what, who can
- edit what, who can send and receive what, and so on. By making me Hawaii’s SharePoint systems administrator, the NSA
- had made me the manager of document management. I was, in effect, the reader in chief at one of the agency’s most
- significant facilities. As was my typical practice in any new technical position, I spent the earliest days
- automating my tasks— meaning writing scripts to do my work for me—so as to free up my time for something more
- interesting.
- Before I go any further, I want to emphasize this: my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying
- of documents, but with the reading of them. My initial intention was just to confirm the suspicions that I’d first
- had back in 2009 in Tokyo. Three years later, I was determined to find out if an American system of mass
- surveillance existed and, if it did, how it functioned. Though I was uncertain about how to conduct this
- investigation, I was at least sure of this: I had to understand exactly how the system worked before I could decide
- what, if anything, to do about it.
- THIS, OF COURSE, was not why Lindsay and I had come to Hawaii. We hadn’t hauled all the way out to paradise just so I
- could throw our lives away for a principle.
- We’d come to start over. To start over yet again.
- My doctors told me that the climate and more relaxed lifestyle in Hawaii might be beneficial for my epilepsy, since
- lack of sleep was thought to be the leading trigger of the seizures. Also, the move eliminated the driving
- problem: the Tunnel was within bicycling distance of a number of communities in Kunia, the quiet heart of the
- island’s dry, red interior. It was a pleasant, twenty-minute ride to work, through sugarcane fields in brilliant
- sunshine. With the mountains rising calm and high in the clear blue distance, the gloomy mood of the last few months
- lifted like the morning fog.
- Lindsay and I found a decent-size bungalow-type house on Eleu Street in
- Waipahu’s Royal Kunia, which we furnished with our stuff from Columbia,
- Maryland, since Dell paid relocation expenses. The furniture didn’t get much use, though, since the sun and heat
- would often cause us to walk in the door, strip off our clothes, and lie naked on the carpet beneath the overworked
- air conditioner. Eventually, Lindsay turned the garage into a fitness studio, filling it with yoga mats and the
- spinning pole she’d brought from Columbia. I set up a new Tor server. Soon, traffic from around the world was
- reaching the Internet via the laptop sitting in our entertainment center, which had the ancillary benefit of hiding
- my own Internet activity in the noise.
- One night during the summer I turned twenty-nine, Lindsay finally prevailed on me to go out with her to a luau. She’d
- been after me to go for a while, because a few of her pole-fitness friends had been involved in some hula-girl
- capacity, but I’d been resistant. It had seemed like such a cheesy touristy thing to do, and had felt, somehow,
- disrespectful. Hawaiian culture is ancient, although its traditions are very much alive; the last thing I wanted was
- to disturb someone’s sacred ritual.
- Finally, however, I capitulated. I’m very glad I did. What impressed me the most was not the luau itself—though it
- was very much a fire-twirling spectacle—but the old man who was holding court nearby in a little amphitheater down by
- the sea. He was a native Hawaiian, an erudite man with that soft but nasal island voice, who was telling a group of
- people gathered around a fire the creation stories of the islands’ indigenous peoples.
- The one story that stuck with me concerned the twelve sacred islands of the gods. Apparently, there had existed a
- dozen islands in the Pacific that were so beautiful and pure and blessed with freshwater that they had to be kept
- secret from humanity, who would spoil them. Three of them were especially revered: Kane-huna-moku, Kahiki,
- and Pali-uli. The lucky gods who inhabited these islands decided to keep them hidden, because they believed that a
- glimpse of their bounty would drive people mad. After considering numerous ingenious schemes by which these islands
- might be concealed, including dyeing them the color of the sea, or sinking them to the bottom of the ocean, they
- finally decided to make them float in the air.
- Once the islands were airborne, they were blown from place to place, staying constantly in motion. At sunrise and
- sunset, especially, you might think that you’d noticed one, hovering far at the horizon. But the moment you pointed
- it out to anyone, it would suddenly drift away or assume another form entirely, such as a pumice raft, a hunk of rock
- ejected by a volcanic eruption
- —or a cloud.
- I thought about that legend a lot while I went about my search. The
- revelations I was pursuing were exactly like those islands: exotic preserves that a pantheon of self-important,
- self-appointed rulers were convinced had to be kept secret and hidden from humanity. I wanted to know what the NSA’s
- surveillance capabilities were exactly; whether and how they extended beyond the agency’s actual surveillance
- activities; who approved them; who knew about them; and, last but surely not least, how these systems—both technical
- and institutional—really operated.
- The moment I’d think that I spotted one of these “islands”—some capitalized code name I didn’t understand, some
- program referenced in a note buried at the end of a report—I’d go chasing after further mentions of it in other
- documents, but find none. It was as if the program I was searching for had floated away from me and was lost. Then,
- days later, or weeks later, it might surface again under a different designation, in a document from a different
- department.
- Sometimes I’d find a program with a recognizable name, but without an explanation of what it did. Other times I’d
- just find a nameless explanation, with no indication as to whether the capability it described was an active program
- or an aspirational desire. I was running up against compartments within compartments, caveats within caveats, suites
- within suites, programs within programs. This was the nature of the NSA—by design, the left hand rarely knew what the
- right hand was doing.
- In a way, what I was doing reminded me of a documentary I once watched about map-making—specifically, about the way
- that nautical charts were created in the days before imaging and GPS. Ship captains would keep logs and note their
- coordinates, which landbound mapmakers would then try to interpret. It was through the gradual accretion of this
- data, over hundreds of years, that the full extent of the Pacific became known, and all its islands identified.
- But I didn’t have hundreds of years or hundreds of ships. I was alone, one man hunched over a blank blue ocean,
- trying to find where this one speck of dry land, this one data point, belonged in relation to all the others.
- 20
- Heartbeat
- Back in 2009 in Japan, when I went to that fateful China conference as a substitute briefer, I guess I’d made some
- friends, especially at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA) and its parent agency, the Defense
- Intelligence Agency (DIA). In the three years since, JCITA had invited me a half-dozen or so times to give seminars
- and lectures at DIA facilities. Essentially, I was teaching classes in how the American Intelligence Community could
- protect itself from Chinese hackers and exploit the information gained from analyzing their hacks to hack them in
- return.
- I always enjoyed teaching—certainly more than I ever enjoyed being a student—and in the early days of my
- disillusionment, toward the end of Japan and through my time at Dell, I had the sense that were I to stay in
- intelligence work for the rest of my career, the positions in which my principles would be least compromised, and my
- mind most challenged, would almost certainly be academic. Teaching with JCITA was a way of keeping that door open. It
- was also a way of keeping up to date—when you’re teaching, you can’t let your students get ahead of you, especially
- in technology.
- This put me in the regular habit of perusing what the NSA called “readboards.” These are digital bulletin boards that
- function something like news blogs, only the “news” here is the product of classified intelligence activities. Each
- major NSA site maintains its own, which its local staff updates daily with what they regard as the day’s most
- important and interesting documents—everything an employee has to read to keep current.
- As a holdover from my JCITA lecture preparation, and also, frankly, because I was bored in Hawaii, I got into the
- habit of checking a number of these boards every day: my own site’s readboard in Hawaii, the readboard of my former
- posting in Tokyo, and various readboards from Fort Meade. This new low-pressure position gave me as much time to read
- as I wanted. The scope of my curiosity might have raised a few questions at a prior stage of my career, but now I was
- the only employee of the Office of Information Sharing
- —I was the Office of Information Sharing—so my very job was to know what sharable information was out there.
- Meanwhile, most of my colleagues at the Tunnel spent their breaks streaming Fox News.
- In the hopes of organizing all the documents I wanted to read from these various readboards, I put together a
- personal best-of-the-readboards queue. The files quickly began to pile up, until the nice lady who managed the
- digital
- storage quotas complained to me about the folder size. I realized that my personal readboard had become less a daily
- digest than an archive of sensitive information with relevance far beyond the day’s immediacy. Not wanting to erase
- it or stop adding to it, which would’ve been a waste, I decided instead to share it with others. This was the best
- justification for what I was doing that I could think of, especially because it allowed me to more or less
- legitimately collect material from a wider range of sources. So, with my boss’s approval, I set about creating an
- automated readboard—one that didn’t rely on anybody posting things to it, but edited itself.
- Like EPICSHELTER, my automated readboard platform was designed to perpetually scan for new and unique documents. It
- did so in a far more comprehensive manner, however, peering beyond NSAnet, the NSA’s network, into the networks of
- the CIA and the FBI as well as into the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), the Department of
- Defense’s top-secret intranet. The idea was that its findings would be made available to every NSA officer by
- comparing their digital identity badges— called PKI certificates—to the classification of the documents, generating a
- personal readboard customized to their clearances, interests, and office affiliations. Essentially, it would be a
- readboard of readboards, an individually tailored newsfeed aggregator, bringing each officer all the newest
- information pertinent to their work, all the documents they had to read to stay current. It would be run from a
- server that I alone managed, located just down the hall from me. That server would also store a copy of every
- document it sourced, making it easy for me to perform the kind of deep interagency searches that the heads of most
- agencies could only dream of.
- I called this system Heartbeat, because it took the pulse of the NSA and of the wider IC. The volume of information
- that crashed through its veins was simply enormous, as it pulled documents from internal sites dedicated to every
- specialty from updates on the latest cryptographic research projects to minutes of the meetings of the National
- Security Council. I’d carefully configured it to ingest materials at a slow, constant pace, so as not to monopolize
- the undersea fiber-optic cable tying Hawaii to Fort Meade, but it still pulled so many more documents than any human
- ever could that it immediately became the NSAnet’s most comprehensive readboard.
- Early on in its operation I got an email that almost stopped Heartbeat forever. A faraway administrator—apparently
- the only one in the entire IC who actually bothered to look at his access logs—wanted to know why a system in Hawaii
- was copying, one by one, every record in his database. He had immediately blocked me as a precaution, which
- effectively locked me
- out, and was demanding an explanation. I told him what I was doing and showed him how to use the internal website
- that would let him read Heartbeat for himself. His response reminded me of an unusual characteristic of the
- technologists’ side of the security state: once I gave him access, his wariness instantly turned into curiosity. He
- might have doubted a person, but he’d never doubt a machine. He could now see that Heartbeat was just doing what it’d
- been meant to do, and was doing it perfectly. He was fascinated. He unblocked me from his repository of records, and
- even offered to help me by circulating information about Heartbeat to his colleagues.
- Nearly all of the documents that I later disclosed to journalists came to me through Heartbeat. It showed me not just
- the aims but the abilities of the IC’s mass surveillance system. This is something I want to emphasize: in mid-
- 2012, I was just trying to get a handle on how mass surveillance actually worked. Almost every journalist who later
- reported on the disclosures was primarily concerned with the targets of surveillance—the efforts to spy on American
- citizens, for instance, or on the leaders of America’s allies. That is to say, they were more interested in the
- topics of the surveillance reports than in the system that produced them. I respect that interest, of course, having
- shared it myself, but my own primary curiosity was still technical in nature. It’s all well and good to read a
- document or to click through the slides of a PowerPoint presentation to find out what a program is intended to do,
- but the better you can understand a program’s mechanics, the better you can understand its potential for abuse.
- This meant that I wasn’t much interested in the briefing materials—like, for example, what has become perhaps the
- best-known file I disclosed, a slide deck from a 2011 PowerPoint presentation that delineated the NSA’s new
- surveillance posture as a matter of six protocols: “Sniff It All, Know It All, Collect It All, Process It All,
- Exploit It All, Partner It All.” This was just PR speak, marketing jargon. It was intended to impress America’s
- allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, the primary countries with which the United States shares
- intelligence. (Together with the United States, these countries are known as the Five Eyes.) “Sniff It All” meant
- finding a data source; “Know It All” meant finding out what that data was; “Collect It All” meant capturing that
- data; “Process It All” meant analyzing that data for usable intelligence; “Exploit It All” meant using that
- intelligence to further the agency’s aims; and “Partner It All” meant sharing the new data source with allies. While
- this six-pronged taxonomy was easy to remember, easy to sell, and an accurate measure of the scale of the agency’s
- ambition and the degree of its collusion with foreign governments, it gave me no insight into
- how exactly that ambition was realized in technological terms.
- Much more revealing was an order I found from the FISA Court, a legal demand for a private company to turn over its
- customers’ private information to the federal government. Orders such as these were notionally issued on the
- authority of public legislation; however, their contents, even their existence, were classified Top Secret. According
- to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, aka the “business records” provision, the government was authorized to obtain
- orders from the FISA Court that compelled third parties to produce “any tangible thing” that was “relevant” to
- foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations. But as the court order I found made clear, the NSA had
- secretly interpreted this authorization as a license to collect all of the “business records,” or
- metadata, of telephone communications coming through American telecoms, such as Verizon and AT&T, on “an ongoing
- daily basis.” This included, of course, records of telephone communications between American citizens, the practice
- of which was unconstitutional.
- Additionally, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows the IC to target any foreigner outside the United States
- deemed likely to communicate “foreign intelligence information”—a broad category of potential targets that includes
- journalists, corporate employees, academics, aid workers, and countless others innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever.
- This legislation was being used by the NSA to justify its two most prominent Internet surveillance methods: the PRISM
- program and upstream collection.
- PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype,
- AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all
- other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection,
- meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private-sector
- Internet infrastructure—the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in
- orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean. This collection was managed by the NSA’s
- Special Sources Operations unit, which built secret wiretapping equipment and embedded it inside the corporate
- facilities of obliging Internet service providers around the world. Together, PRISM (collection from the servers of
- service providers) and upstream collection (direct collection from Internet infrastructure) ensured that the world’s
- information, both stored and in transit, was surveillable.
- The next stage of my investigation was to figure out how this collection
- was actually accomplished—that is to say, to examine the documents that explained which tools supported this program
- and how they selected from among the vast mass of dragneted communications those that were thought worthy of closer
- inspection. The difficulty was that this information did not exist in any presentation, no matter the level of
- classification, but only in engineering diagrams and raw schematics. These were the most important materials for me
- to find. Unlike the Five Eyes’ pitch-deck cant, they would be concrete proof that the capacities I was reading about
- weren’t merely the fantasies of an overcaffeinated project manager. As a systems guy who was always being prodded to
- build faster and deliver more, I was all too aware that the agencies would sometimes announce technologies before
- they even existed—sometimes because a Cliff-type salesperson had made one too many promises, and sometimes just out
- of unalloyed ambition.
- In this case, the technologies behind upstream collection did exist. As I came to realize, these tools are the most
- invasive elements of the NSA’s mass surveillance system, if only because they’re the closest to the user—that is, the
- closest to the person being surveilled. Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a
- Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of
- its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it
- will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.
- Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size
- of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings
- throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The
- first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in
- charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users.
- You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass.
- Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny.
- Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address,
- credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain
- keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.”
- If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE,
- which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware
- programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your
- computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the
- QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with
- whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you
- don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.
- Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire
- digital life now belongs to them.
- 21
- Whistleblowing
- If any NSA employee who didn’t work with the SharePoint software I managed knew anything at all about SharePoint,
- they knew the calendars. These were pretty much the same as any normal nongovernment group calendars, just
- way more expensive, providing the basic when-and-where-do- I-have-to-be-at-a-meeting scheduling interface for NSA
- personnel in Hawaii. This was about as exciting for me to manage as you might imagine. That’s why I tried to spice it
- up by making sure the calendar always had reminders of all the holidays, and I mean all of them: not just the federal
- holidays, but Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali.
- Then there was my favorite, the seventeenth of September. Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, which is the
- holiday’s formal name, commemorates the moment in 1787 when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention officially
- ratified, or signed, the document. Technically, Constitution Day is not a federal holiday, just a federal observance,
- meaning that Congress didn’t think our country’s founding document and the oldest national constitution still in use
- in the world were important enough to justify giving people a paid day off.
- The Intelligence Community had always had an uncomfortable relationship with Constitution Day,
- which meant its involvement was typically limited to circulating a bland email drafted by its agencies’ press
- shops and signed by Director So-and-So, and setting up a sad little table in a forgotten corner of the cafeteria. On
- the table would be some free copies of the Constitution printed, bound, and donated to the government by the kind and
- generous rabble-rousers at places like the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation, since the IC was rarely
- interested in spending some of its own billions on promoting civil liberties through stapled paper.
- I suppose the staff got the message, or didn’t: over the seven Constitution Days I spent in the IC, I don’t think I’d
- ever known anyone but myself to actually take a copy off the table. Because I love irony almost as much as I love
- freebies, I’d always take a few—one for myself, and the others to salt across my friends’ workstations. I kept my
- copy propped against the Rubik’s Cube on my desk, and for a time made a habit of reading it over lunch, trying not to
- drip grease on “We the People” from one of the cafeteria’s grim slices of elementary-school pizza.
- I liked reading the Constitution partially because its ideas are great,
- partially because its prose is good, but really because it freaked out my coworkers. In an office where everything
- you printed had to be thrown into a shredder after you were done with it, someone would always be intrigued by the
- presence of hard-copy pages lying on a desk. They’d amble over to ask, “What have you got there?”
- “The Constitution.”
- Then they’d make a face and back away slowly.
- On Constitution Day 2012, I picked up the document in earnest. I hadn’t really read the whole thing in quite a few
- years, though I was glad to note that I still knew the preamble by heart. Now, however, I read through it in its
- entirety, from the Articles to the Amendments. I was surprised to be reminded that fully 50 percent of the Bill of
- Rights, the document’s first ten amendments, were intended to make the job of law enforcement harder. The Fourth,
- Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments were all deliberately, carefully designed to create inefficiencies
- and hamper the government’s ability to exercise its power and conduct surveillance.
- This is especially true of the Fourth, which protects people and their property from government scrutiny: The right
- of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
- shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
- particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
- Translation: If officers of the law want to go rooting through your life, they first have to go before a judge and
- show probable cause under oath. This means they have to explain to a judge why they have reason to believe that you
- might have committed a specific crime or that specific evidence of a specific crime might be found on or in a
- specific part of your property. Then they have to swear that this reason has been given honestly and in good faith.
- Only if the judge approves a warrant will they be allowed to go searching— and even then, only for a limited time.
- The Constitution was written in the eighteenth century, back when the only computers were abacuses, gear calculators,
- and looms, and it could take weeks or months for a communication to cross the ocean by ship. It stands to reason that
- computer files, whatever their contents, are our version of the Constitution’s “papers.” We certainly use them like
- “papers,” particularly our word-processing documents and spreadsheets, our messages and histories of inquiry. Data,
- meanwhile, is our version of “effects,” a catchall term for all
- the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online. That includes, by default, metadata, which is the record of all
- the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online—a perfect ledger of our private lives.
- In the centuries since the original Constitution Day, our clouds, computers, and phones have become our homes, just
- as personal and intimate as our actual houses nowadays. If you don’t agree, then answer me this: Would you rather let
- your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your
- unlocked phone?
- The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment
- completely. The agency was essentially making a claim that the amendment’s protections didn’t apply to modern-day
- lives. The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor
- regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure.” Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had
- already “shared” your phone records with a “third party”—your telephone service provider—you had forfeited
- any constitutional privacy interest you may once have had. And it insisted that “search” and “seizure” occurred only
- when its analysts, not its algorithms, actively queried what had already been automatically collected.
- Had constitutional oversight mechanisms been functioning properly, this extremist interpretation of the Fourth
- Amendment—effectively holding that the very act of using modern technologies is tantamount to a surrender of your
- privacy rights—would have been rejected by Congress and the courts. America’s Founders were skilled engineers of
- political power, particularly attuned to the perils posed by legal subterfuge and the temptations of the presidency
- toward exercising monarchical authority. To forestall such eventualities, they designed a system, laid out in the
- Constitution’s first three articles, that established the US government in three coequal branches, each supposed to
- provide checks and balances to the others. But when it came to protecting the privacy of American citizens in the
- digital age, each of these branches failed in its own way, causing the entire system to halt and catch fire.
- The legislative branch, the two houses of Congress, willingly abandoned its supervisory role: even as the number of
- IC government employees and private contractors was exploding, the number of congresspeople who were kept informed
- about the IC’s capabilities and activities kept dwindling, until only a few special committee members were apprised
- in closed-door hearings. Even then they were only informed of some, but not all, of the IC’s activities.
- When rare public hearings on the IC were held, the NSA’s position was made strikingly clear: The agency would not
- cooperate, it would not be honest, and, what was worse, through classification and claims of secrecy it would force
- America’s federal legislatures to collaborate in its deception. In early 2013, for instance, James Clapper, then
- the director of National Intelligence, testified under oath to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
- that the NSA did not engage in bulk collection of the communications of American citizens. To the
- question, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper
- replied, “No, sir,” and then added, “There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not
- wittingly.” That was a witting, bald-faced lie, of course, not just to Congress but to the American people. More than
- a few of the congresspeople to whom Clapper was testifying knew very well that what he was saying was untrue, yet
- they refused, or felt legally powerless, to call him out on it.
- The failure of the judiciary was, if anything, even more disappointing. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
- (FISC), which oversees intelligence surveillance within the United States, is a specialized body that meets in secret
- and hears only from the government. It was designed to grant individual warrants for foreign intelligence
- collection, and has always been especially accommodating to the NSA, approving well over 99 percent of the agency’s
- requests—a rate more suggestive of a ministerial rubber stamp than a deliberative judicial process. After 9/11, the
- court expanded its role from authorizing the surveillance of specific individuals to ruling on the legality and
- constitutionality of broad programmatic surveillance, without any adversarial scrutiny. A body that previously had
- been tasked with approving the surveillance of Foreign Terrorist #1 or Foreign Spy #2 was now being used to
- legitimize the whole combined infrastructure of PRISM and upstream collection. Judicial review of that infrastructure
- was reduced, in the words of the ACLU to a secret court upholding secret programs by secretly reinterpreting federal
- law.
- When civil society groups like the ACLU tried to challenge the NSA’s activities in ordinary, open federal courts, a
- curious thing happened. The government didn’t defend itself on the ground that the surveillance activities were legal
- or constitutional. It declared, instead, that the ACLU and its clients had no right to be in court at all, because
- the ACLU could not prove that its clients had in fact been surveilled. Moreover, the ACLU could not use the
- litigation to seek evidence of surveillance, because the existence (or nonexistence) of that evidence was “a state
- secret,” and leaks to journalists
- didn’t count. In other words, the court couldn’t recognize the information that was publicly known from having been
- published in the media; it could only recognize the information that the government officially confirmed as being
- publicly known. This invocation of classification meant that neither the ACLU, nor anyone else, could ever establish
- standing to raise a legal challenge in open court. To my disgust, in February 2013 the US Supreme Court decided 5 to
- 4 to accept the government’s reasoning and dismissed an ACLU and Amnesty International lawsuit challenging mass
- surveillance without even considering the legality of the NSA’s activities.
- Finally, there was the executive branch, the primary cause of this constitutional breach. The president’s office,
- through the Justice Department, had committed the original sin of secretly issuing directives that authorized mass
- surveillance in the wake of 9/11. Executive overreach has only continued in the decades since, with
- administrations of both parties seeking to act unilaterally and establish policy directives that circumvent law—
- policy directives that cannot be challenged, since their classification keeps them from being publicly known.
- The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When
- all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity. I
- realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to
- distance his administration from President George W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible—for anything.
- It was time to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how broken the process was,
- they were right. The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and
- they used that knowledge to their advantage.
- They’d hacked the Constitution.
- AMERICA WAS BORN from an act of treason. The Declaration of Independence was an outrageous violation of the laws
- of England and yet the fullest expression of what the Founders called the “Laws of Nature,” among which was the
- right to defy the powers of the day and rebel on point of principle, according to the dictates of one’s conscience.
- The first Americans to exercise
- this right, the first “whistleblowers” in American history, appeared one year
- later—in 1777.
- These men, like so many of the men in my family, were sailors, officers of
- the Continental Navy who, in defense of their new land, had taken to the sea. During the Revolution, they served on
- the USS Warren, a thirty-two-gun frigate under the command of Commodore Esek Hopkins, the commander in chief of the
- Continental Navy. Hopkins was a lazy and intractable leader who refused to bring his vessel into combat. His officers
- also claimed to have witnessed him beating and starving British prisoners of war. Ten of the Warren’s officers
- —after consulting their consciences, and with barely a thought for their careers—reported all of this up the chain of
- command, writing to the Marine Committee:
- Much Respected Gentlemen,
- We who present this petition are engaged on board the ship Warren with an earnest desire and fixed expectation of
- doing our country some service. We are still anxious for the Weal of America & wish nothing more earnestly than to
- see her in peace & prosperity. We are ready to hazard every thing that is dear & if necessary sacrifice our lives for
- the welfare of our country. We are desirous of being active in the defence of our constitutional liberties and
- privileges against the unjust cruel claims of tyranny & oppression; but as things are now circumstanced on board this
- frigate, there seems to be no prospect of our being serviceable in our present station. We have been in this
- situation for a considerable space of time. We are personally well acquainted with the real character &
- conduct of our commander, Commodore Hopkins, & we take this method not having a more convenient opportunity of
- sincerely & humbly petitioning the honorable Marine Committee that they would inquire into his character & conduct,
- for we suppose that his character is such & that he has been guilty of such crimes as render him quite unfit for
- the public department he now occupies, which crimes, we the subscribers can sufficiently attest.
- After receiving this letter, the Marine Committee investigated Commodore Hopkins. He reacted by dismissing his
- officers and crew, and in a fit of rage filed a criminal libel suit against Midshipman Samuel Shaw and Third
- Lieutenant Richard Marven, the two officers who admitted to having authored the petition. The suit was filed in the
- courts of Rhode Island, whose last colonial governor had been Stephen Hopkins, a signatory to the Declaration of
- Independence and the commodore’s brother.
- The case was assigned to a judge appointed by Governor Hopkins, but before the trial commenced Shaw and Marven were
- saved by a fellow naval officer, John Grannis, who broke ranks and presented their case directly to the Continental
- Congress. The Continental Congress was so alarmed by the precedent being set by allowing military complaints
- regarding dereliction of duty to be subject to the criminal charge of libel that it intervened. On July 30,
- 1778, it terminated the command of Commodore Hopkins, ordered the Treasury Office to pay Shaw and Marven’s legal
- fees, and by unanimous consent enacted America’s first whistleblower protection law. This law declared it “the duty
- of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest
- information to Congress or
- any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the
- service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”
- The law gave me hope—and it still does. Even at the darkest hour of the Revolution, with the very existence of the
- country at stake, Congress didn’t just welcome an act of principled dissent, it enshrined such acts as duties. By the
- latter half of 2012, I was resolved to perform this duty myself, though I knew I’d be making my disclosures at a very
- different time—a time both more comfortable and more cynical. Few if any of my IC superiors would have sacrificed
- their careers for the same American principles for which military personnel regularly sacrifice their lives. And in
- my case, going up “the chain of command,” which the IC prefers to call “the proper channels,” wasn’t an option as it
- was for the ten men who crewed on the Warren. My superiors were not only aware of what the agency was doing, they
- were actively directing it—they were complicit.
- In organizations like the NSA—in which malfeasance has become so structural as to be a matter not of any particular
- initiative, but of an ideology
- —proper channels can only become a trap, to catch the heretics and disfavorables. I’d already experienced the failure
- of command back in Warrenton, and then again in Geneva, where in the regular course of my duties I had discovered a
- security vulnerability in a critical program. I’d reported the vulnerability, and when nothing was done about it I
- reported that, too. My supervisors weren’t happy that I’d done so, because their supervisors weren’t happy, either.
- The chain of command is truly a chain that binds, and the lower links can only be lifted by the higher.
- Coming from a Coast Guard family, I’ve always been fascinated by how much of the English language vocabulary of
- disclosure has a nautical undercurrent. Even before the days of the USS Warren, organizations, like ships, sprang
- leaks. When steam replaced wind for propulsion, whistles were blown at sea to signal intentions and emergencies: one
- whistle to pass by port, two whistles to pass by starboard, five for a warning.
- The same terms in European languages, meanwhile, often have fraught political valences conditioned by historical
- context. French used dénonciateur throughout much of the twentieth century, until the word’s WWII-era association
- with being a “denouncer” or “informant” for the Germans led to a preference for lanceur d’alerte (“one who launches a
- warning”). German, a language that has struggled with its culture’s Nazi and Stasi past, evolved beyond its own
- Denunziant and Informant to settle on the unsatisfactory
- Hinweisgeber (a “hint- or tip-giver”), Enthueller (“revealer”), Skandalaufdecker (“scandal-uncoverer”), and even
- the pointedly political ethische Dissidenten (“ethical dissident”). German uses few of these words online, however;
- with respect to today’s Internet-based disclosures, it has simply borrowed the noun Whistleblower and the verb
- leaken. The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense
- of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words
- with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an
- honorable duty.
- Ultimately, every language, including English, demonstrates its culture’s relationship to power by how it chooses to
- define the act of disclosure. Even the nautically derived English words that seem neutral and benign frame the act
- from the perspective of the institution that perceives itself wronged, not of the public that the institution has
- failed. When an institution decries “a leak,” it is implying that the “leaker” damaged or sabotaged something.
- Today, “leaking” and “whistleblowing” are often treated as interchangeable. But to my mind, the term “leaking” should
- be used differently than it commonly is. It should be used to describe acts of disclosure done not out of
- public interest but out of self-interest, or in pursuit of institutional or political aims. To be more precise, I
- understand a leak as something closer to a “plant,” or an incidence of “propaganda-seeding”: the selective release of
- protected information in order to sway popular opinion or affect the course of decision making. It is rare for even a
- day to go by in which some “unnamed” or “anonymous” senior government official does not leak, by way of a hint or tip
- to a journalist, some classified item that advances their own agenda or the efforts of their agency or party.
- This dynamic is perhaps most brazenly exemplified by a 2013 incident in which IC officials, likely seeking to inflate
- the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, leaked to a few news websites extraordinarily
- detailed accounts of a conference call between al-Qaeda leader Ayman al- Zawahiri and his global affiliates. In this
- so-called conference call of doom, al-Zawahiri purportedly discussed organizational cooperation with Nasser al-
- Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen, and representatives of the Taliban and Boko Haram. By
- disclosing the ability to intercept this conference call—that is, if we’re to believe this leak, which consisted
- of a description of the call, not a recording—the IC irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of apprising itself of
- the plans and intentions of the highest ranks of terrorist leadership, purely for the sake of a momentary
- political advantage in the news cycle. Not a single person was prosecuted as a result of this stunt, though it was
- most certainly illegal, and cost America the ability to keep wiretapping the alleged al-Qaeda hotline.
- Time and again, America’s political class has proven itself willing to tolerate, even generate leaks that serve its
- own ends. The IC often announces its “successes,” regardless of their classification and regardless of the
- consequences. Nowhere in recent memory has that been more apparent than in the leaks relating to the extrajudicial
- killing of the American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in Yemen. By breathlessly publicizing its drone attack
- on al-Aulaqi to the Washington Post and the New York Times, the Obama administration was tacitly admitting the
- existence of the CIA’s drone program and its “disposition matrix,” or kill list, both of which are officially top
- secret. Additionally, the government was implicitly confirming that it engaged not just in targeted assassinations,
- but in targeted assassinations of American citizens. These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion of a media
- campaign, were shocking demonstrations of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a seal that must be
- maintained for the government to act with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim
- credit.
- It’s only in this context that the US government’s latitudinal relationship to leaking can be fully understood. It
- has forgiven “unauthorized” leaks when they’ve resulted in unexpected benefits, and forgotten “authorized” leaks
- when they’ve caused harm. But if a leak’s harmfulness and lack of authorization, not to mention its essential
- illegality, make scant difference to the government’s reaction, what does? What makes one disclosure permissible, and
- another not?
- The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the
- fundamental prerogatives of an institution. If all the disparate components of an organization, from its mailroom to
- its executive suite, can be assumed to have the same power to discuss internal matters, then its executives
- have surrendered their information control, and the organization’s continued functioning is put in jeopardy.
- Seizing this equality of voice, independent of an organization’s managerial or decision-making hierarchy, is what is
- properly meant by the term “whistleblowing”—an act that’s particularly threatening to the IC, which operates by
- strict compartmentalization under a legally codified veil of secrecy.
- A “whistleblower,” in my definition, is a person who through hard
- experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed
- in—and the loyalty owed to—the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable. This
- person knows that they can’t remain inside the institution, and knows that the institution can’t or won’t be
- dismantled. Reforming the institution might be possible, however, so they blow the whistle and disclose the
- information to bring public pressure to bear.
- This is an adequate description of my situation, with one crucial addition: all the information I intended to
- disclose was classified top secret. To blow the whistle on secret programs, I’d also have to blow the whistle on the
- larger system of secrecy, to expose it not as the absolute prerogative of state that the IC claimed it was but rather
- as an occasional privilege that the IC abused to subvert democratic oversight. Without bringing to light the full
- scope of this systemic secrecy, there would be no hope of restoring a balance of power between citizens and their
- governance. This motive of restoration I take to be essential to whistleblowing: it marks the disclosure not as a
- radical act of dissent or resistance, but a conventional act of return—signaling the ship to return back to port,
- where it’ll be stripped, refitted, and patched of its leaks before being given the chance to start over.
- A total exposure of the total apparatus of mass surveillance—not by me, but by the media, the de facto fourth branch
- of the US government, protected by the Bill of Rights: that was the only response appropriate to the scale of the
- crime. It wouldn’t be enough, after all, to merely reveal a particular abuse or set of abuses, which the agency could
- stop (or pretend to stop) while preserving the rest of the shadowy apparatus intact. Instead, I was resolved to bring
- to light a single, all-encompassing fact: that my government had developed and deployed a global system of
- mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry.
- Whistleblowers can be elected by circumstance at any working level of an institution. But digital technology has
- brought us to an age in which, for the first time in recorded history, the most effective will come up from the
- bottom, from the ranks traditionally least incentivized to maintain the status quo. In the IC, as in virtually every
- other outsize decentralized institution that relies on computers, these lower ranks are rife with technologists like
- myself, whose legitimate access to vital infrastructure is grossly out of proportion to their formal authority to
- influence institutional decisions. In other words, there is usually an imbalance that obtains between what people
- like me are intended to know and what we are able to know, and between the slight power we have to change the
- institutional culture and the vast power we have to
- address our concerns to the culture at large. Though such technological privileges can certainly be abused—
- after all, most systems-level technologists have access to everything—the highest exercise of that privilege is in
- cases involving the technology itself. Specialist abilities incur weightier responsibilities. Technologists seeking
- to report on the systemic misuse of technology must do more than just bring their findings to the public, if the
- significance of those findings is to be understood. They have a duty to contextualize and explain—to demystify.
- A few dozen or so of the people best positioned to do this in the whole entire world were here—they were sitting all
- around me in the Tunnel. My fellow technologists came in every day and sat at their terminals and furthered the work
- of the state. They weren’t merely oblivious to its abuses, but incurious about them, and that lack of
- curiosity made them not evil but tragic. It didn’t matter whether they’d come to the IC out of patriotism or
- opportunism: once they’d gotten inside the machine, they became machines themselves.
- 22
- Fourth Estate
- Nothing is harder than living with a secret that can’t be spoken. Lying to strangers about a cover identity or
- concealing the fact that your office is under the world’s most top-secret pineapple field might sound like it
- qualifies, but at least you’re part of a team: though your work may be secret, it’s a shared secret, and therefore a
- shared burden. There is misery but also laughter.
- When you have a real secret, though, that you can’t share with anyone, even the laughter is a lie. I could talk about
- my concerns, but never about where they were leading me. To the day I die I’ll remember explaining to my colleagues
- how our work was being applied to violate the oaths we had sworn to uphold and their verbal shrug in response: “What
- can you do about it?” I hated that question, its sense of resignation, its sense of defeat, but it still felt valid
- enough that I had to ask myself, “Well, what?”
- When the answer presented itself, I decided to become a whistleblower. Yet to breathe to Lindsay, the love of my
- life, even a word about that decision would have put our relationship to an even crueler test than saying nothing.
- Not wishing to cause her any more harm than I was already resigned to causing, I kept silent, and in my silence I was
- alone.
- I thought that solitude and isolation would be easy for me, or at least easier than it had been for my predecessors
- in the whistleblowing world. Hadn’t each step of my life served as a kind of preparation? Hadn’t I gotten used to
- being alone, after all those years spent hushed and spellbound in front of a screen? I’d been the solo hacker, the
- night-shift harbormaster, the keeper of the keys in an empty office. But I was human, too, and the lack of
- companionship was hard. Each day was haunted by struggle, as I tried and failed to reconcile the moral and the legal,
- my duties and my desires. I had everything I’d ever wanted—love, family, and success far beyond what I ever deserved
- —and I lived in Eden amid plentiful trees, only one of which was forbidden to me. The easiest thing should have been
- to follow the rules.
- And even if I was already reconciled to the dangers of my decision, I wasn’t yet adjusted to the role. After all, who
- was I to put this information in front of the American public? Who’d elected me the president of secrets?
- The information I intended to disclose about my country’s secret regime of mass surveillance was so explosive, and
- yet so technical, that I was as scared of being doubted as I was of being misunderstood. That was why my first
- decision, after resolving to go public, was to go public with documentation. The way to reveal a secret program might
- have been merely to describe its existence, but the way to reveal programmatic secrecy was to describe its workings.
- This required documents, the agency’s actual files—as many as necessary to expose the scope of the abuse though I
- knew that disclosing even one PDF would be enough to earn me prison.
- The threat of government retribution against any entity or platform to which I made the disclosure led me to briefly
- consider self-publishing. That would’ve been the most convenient and safest method: just collecting the documents
- that best communicated my concerns and posting them online, as they were, then circulating a link. Ultimately, one of
- my reasons for not pursuing this course had to do with authentication. Scores of people post “classified secrets” to
- the Internet every day—many of them about time-travel technologies and aliens. I didn’t want my own revelations,
- which were fairly incredible already, to get lumped in with the outlandish and lost among the crazy.
- It was clear to me then, from the earliest stage of the process, that I required, and that the public deserved, some
- person or institution to vouch for the veracity of the documents. I also wanted a partner to vet the potential
- hazards posed by the revelation of classified information, and to help explain that information by putting it in
- technological and legal context. I trusted myself to present the problems with surveillance, and even to analyze
- them, but I’d have to trust others to solve them. Regardless of how wary of institutions I might have
- been by this point, I was far warier of trying to act like one myself. Cooperating with some type of media
- organization would defend me against the worst accusations of rogue activity, and correct for whatever biases I had,
- whether they were conscious or unconscious, personal or professional. I didn’t want any political opinion of mine to
- prejudice anything with regard to the presentation, or reception, of the disclosures. After all, in a country in
- which everyone was being surveilled, no issue was less partisan than surveillance.
- In retrospect, I have to credit at least some of my desire to find ideological filters to Lindsay’s improving
- influence. Lindsay had spent years patiently instilling in me the lesson that my interests and concerns weren’t
- always hers, and certainly weren’t always the world’s, and that just because I shared my knowledge didn’t mean that
- anyone had to share my opinion. Not everybody who was opposed to invasions of privacy might be ready to adopt 256-bit
- encryption standards or drop off the Internet entirely. An illegal act that disturbed one person as a violation of
- the Constitution might upset another
- person as a violation of their privacy, or of that of their spouse or children. Lindsay was my key to unlocking this
- truth—that diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving common goals. She, without even
- knowing it, gave me the confidence to conquer my qualms and reach out to other people.
- But which people? Who? It might be hard to remember, or even to imagine, but at the time when I first
- considered coming forward, the whistleblower’s forum of choice was WikiLeaks. Back then, it operated in many respects
- like a traditional publisher, albeit one that was radically skeptical of state power. WikiLeaks regularly joined up
- with leading international publications like the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El
- País to publish the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news organizations accomplished
- over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected
- sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity.
- WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches
- of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay,
- along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s
- redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received
- them: pristine and unredacted. This switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks
- would not meet my needs. Effectually, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I’d already
- rejected as insufficient. I knew that the story the NSA documents told about a global system of mass surveillance
- deployed in the deepest secrecy was a difficult one to understand—a story so tangled and technical that I was
- increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a “document dump,” but only by the patient and
- careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the best scenario I could conceive of, with the support of multiple
- independent press institutions.
- Though I felt some relief once I’d resolved to disclose directly to journalists, I still had some lingering
- reservations. Most of them involved my country’s most prestigious publications—particularly America’s newspaper of
- record, the New York Times. Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper
- had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn’t stop reminding
- myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the
- government’s warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James
- Risen.
- Those two journalists, by combining information from Justice Department whistleblowers with their own reporting, had
- managed to uncover one aspect of STELLARWIND—the NSA’s original-recipe post-9/11 surveillance initiative—and had
- produced a fully written, edited, and fact-checked article about it, ready to go to press by mid-2004. It was at this
- point that the paper’s editor in chief, Bill Keller, ran the article past the government, as part of a courtesy
- process whose typical purpose is for a publication’s editorial staff to have a chance to assess the government’s
- arguments as to why the publication of certain information might endanger national security. In this case, as in most
- cases, the government refused to provide a specific reason, but implied that one existed and that it was classified,
- too. The Bush administration told Keller and the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, without providing any
- evidence, that the Times would be emboldening America’s enemies and enabling terror if it went public with the
- information that the government was wiretapping American citizens without a warrant. Unfortunately, the paper allowed
- itself to be convinced and spiked the article. Lichtblau and Risen’s reporting finally ran, but over a year later, in
- December 2005, and only after Risen pressured the paper by announcing that the material was included in a book of his
- that was about to be released. Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have changed the
- course of the 2004 election.
- If the Times, or any paper, did something similar to me—if it took my revelations, reported on them, submitted the
- reporting for review, and then suppressed its publication—I’d be sunk. Given the likelihood of my identification as
- the source, it would be tantamount to turning me in before any revelations were brought to the public.
- If I couldn’t trust a legacy newspaper, could I trust any institution? Why even bother? I hadn’t signed up for any of
- this. I had just wanted to screw around with computers and maybe do some good for my country along the way. I had a
- lease and a lover and my health was improved. Every STOP sign on my commute I took as advice to stop this voluntary
- madness. My head and
- heart were in conflict, with the only constant being the desperate hope that
- somebody else, somewhere else, would figure it out on their own. After all, wasn’t journalism about following the
- bread crumbs and connecting the dots? What else did reporters do all day, besides tweet?
- I knew at least two things about the denizens of the Fourth Estate: they competed for scoops, and they knew very
- little about technology. It was this
- lack of expertise or even interest in tech that largely caused journalists to miss two events that stunned me during
- the course of my fact-gathering about mass surveillance.
- The first was the NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah. The agency
- called it the Massive Data Repository, until somebody with a knack for PR realized the name might be tough to explain
- if it ever got out, so it was renamed the Mission Data Repository—because as long as you don’t change the acronym,
- you don’t have to change all the briefing slides. The MDR was projected to contain a total of four twenty-five-
- thousand-square-foot halls, filled with servers. It could hold an immense amount of data, basically a rolling history
- of the entire planet’s pattern of life, insofar as life can be understood through the connection of payments to
- people, people to phones, phones to calls, calls to networks, and the synoptic array of Internet activity moving
- along those networks’ lines.
- The only prominent journalist who seemed to notice the announcement was James Bamford, who wrote about it for Wired
- in March 2012. There were a few follow-ups in the nontech press, but none of them furthered the reporting. No one
- asked what, to me at least, were the most basic questions: Why does any government agency, let alone an intelligence
- agency, need that much space? What data, and how much of it, do they really intend to store there, and for how long?
- Because there was simply no reason to build something to those specs unless you were planning on storing absolutely
- everything, forever. Here was, to my mind, the corpus delicti—the plain-as- day corroboration of a crime, in a
- gigantic concrete bunker surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, sucking up a city’s worth of electricity from
- its own power grid in the middle of the Utah desert. And no one was paying attention.
- The second event happened one year later, in March 2013—one week after Clapper lied to Congress and Congress gave him
- a pass. A few periodicals had covered that testimony, though they merely regurgitated Clapper’s denial that the NSA
- collected bulk data on Americans. But no so- called mainstream publication at all covered a rare public appearance by
- Ira “Gus” Hunt, the chief technology officer of the CIA.
- I’d known Gus slightly from my Dell stint with the CIA. He was one of our top customers, and every vendor loved his
- apparent inability to be discreet: he’d always tell you more than he was supposed to. For sales guys, he was like a
- bag of money with a mouth. Now he was appearing as a special
- guest speaker at a civilian tech event in New York called the GigaOM Structure: Data conference. Anyone
- with $40 could go to it. The major talks, such as Gus’s, were streamed for free live online.
- The reason I’d made sure to catch his talk was that I’d just read, through internal NSA channels, that the CIA had
- finally decided on the disposition of its cloud contract. It had refused my old team at Dell, and turned down HP,
- too, instead signing a ten-year, $600 million cloud development and management deal with Amazon. I had no negative
- feelings about this— actually, at this juncture, I was pleased that my work wasn’t going to be used by the agency. I
- was just curious, from a professional standpoint, whether Gus might obliquely address this announcement and offer any
- insight into why Amazon had been chosen, since rumors were going around that the proposal process had been rigged in
- Amazon’s favor.
- I got insight, certainly, but of an unexpected kind. I had the opportunity of witnessing the highest-ranking
- technical officer at the CIA stand onstage in a rumpled suit and brief a crowd of uncleared normies—and, via the
- Internet, the uncleared world—about the agency’s ambitions and capacities. As his presentation unfolded, and he
- alternated bad jokes with an even worse command of PowerPoint, I grew more and more incredulous.
- “At the CIA,” he said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” As if that wasn’t
- clear enough, he went on: “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human generated information.” The
- underline was Gus’s own. He was reading from his slide deck, ugly words in an ugly font illustrated with the
- government’s signature four-color clip art.
- There were a few journalists in the crowd, apparently, though it seemed as if almost all of them were from specialty
- tech-government publications like Federal Computer Week. It was telling that Gus stuck around for a Q & A toward the
- conclusion of his presentation. Rather, it wasn’t quite a Q & A, but more like an auxiliary presentation, offered
- directly to the journalists. He must have been trying to get something off his chest, and it wasn’t just his clown
- tie.
- Gus told the journalists that the agency could track their smartphones, even when they were turned off—that the
- agency could surveil every single one of their communications. Remember: this was a crowd of domestic
- journalists. American journalists. And the way that Gus said “could” came off as “has,” “does,” and “will.” He
- perorated in a distinctly disturbed, and disturbing, manner, at least for a CIA high priest: “Technology is moving
- faster than government or law can keep up. It’s moving faster … than you can
- keep up: you should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.” I was floored—anybody
- more junior than Gus who had given a presentation like this would’ve been wearing orange by the end of the day.
- Coverage of Gus’s confession ran only in the Huffington Post. But the performance itself lived on at YouTube, where
- it still remains, at least at the time of this writing six years later. The last time I checked, it had 313 views— a
- dozen of them mine.
- The lesson I took from this was that for my disclosures to be effective, I had to do more than just hand some
- journalists some documents—more, even, than help them interpret the documents. I had to become their partner, to
- provide the technological training and tools to help them do their reporting accurately and safely. Taking this
- course of action would mean giving myself over totally to one of the capital crimes of intelligence work: whereas
- other spies have committed espionage, sedition, and treason, I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism. The
- perverse fact is that legally, those crimes are virtually synonymous. American law makes no distinction between
- providing classified information to the press in the public interest and providing it, even selling it, to the enemy.
- The only opinion I’ve ever found to contradict this came from my first indoctrination into the IC: there, I was told
- that it was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic
- reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.
- Given the risks I was taking, I needed to identify people I could trust who were also trusted by the public. I needed
- reporters who were diligent yet discreet, independent yet reliable. They would need to be strong enough to challenge
- me on the distinctions between what I suspected and what the evidence proved, and to challenge the government when it
- falsely accused their work of endangering lives. Above all, I had to be sure that whoever I picked wouldn’t
- ultimately cave to power when put under pressure that was certain to be like nothing they, or I, had ever experienced
- before.
- I cast my net not so widely as to imperil the mission, but widely enough to avoid a single point of failure—the New
- York Times problem. One journalist, one publication, even one country of publication wouldn’t be enough, because the
- US government had already demonstrated its willingness to stifle such reporting. Ideally, I’d give each journalist
- their own set of documents simultaneously, leaving me with none. This would shift the focus of scrutiny to them, and
- ensure that even if I were arrested the truth would still get out.
- As I narrowed down my list of potential partners, I realized I’d been going about this all wrong, or just wastefully.
- Instead of trying to select the journalists on my own, I should have been letting the system that I was trying to
- expose select them for me. My best partners, I decided, would be journalists whom the national security
- state had already targeted.
- Laura Poitras I knew as a documentarian, primarily concerned with America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Her film My
- Country, My Country depicted the 2005 Iraqi national elections that were conducted under (and frustrated by) the US
- occupation. She had also made The Program, about the NSA cryptanalyst William Binney—who had raised objections
- through proper channels about TRAILBLAZER, the predecessor of STELLARWIND, only to be accused of leaking classified
- information, subjected to repeated harassment, and arrested at gunpoint in his home, though never charged. Laura
- herself had been frequently harassed by the government because of her work, repeatedly detained and interrogated by
- border agents whenever she traveled in or out of the country.
- Glenn Greenwald I knew as a civil liberties lawyer turned columnist, initially for Salon—where he was one of the
- few who wrote about the unclassified version of the NSA IG’s Report back in 2009—and later for the US edition of
- the Guardian. I liked him because he was skeptical and argumentative, the kind of man who’d fight with the devil, and
- when the devil wasn’t around fight with himself. Though Ewen MacAskill, of the British edition of the Guardian, and
- Bart Gellman of the Washington Post would later prove stalwart partners (and patient guides to the journalistic
- wilderness), I found my earliest affinity with Laura and Glenn, perhaps because they weren’t merely
- interested in reporting on the IC but had personal stakes in understanding the institution.
- The only hitch was getting in touch.
- Unable to reveal my true name, I contacted the journalists under a variety of identities, disposable masks worn for a
- time and then discarded. The first of these was “Cincinnatus,” after the legendary farmer who became a Roman consul
- and then voluntarily relinquished his power. That was followed by “Citizenfour,” a handle that some journalists took
- to mean that I considered myself the fourth dissident-employee in the NSA’s recent history, after Binney and his
- fellow TRAILBLAZER whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis
- —though the triumvirate I actually had in mind consisted of Thomas Drake, who disclosed the existence of TRAILBLAZER
- to journalists, and Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, whose disclosure of The Pentagon Papers
- helped expose the deceptions of the Vietnam War and bring it to an end. The final name I chose for my correspondence
- was “Verax,” Latin for “speaker of truth,” in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called
- “Mendax” (“speaker of lies”)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.
- You can’t really appreciate how hard it is to stay anonymous online until you’ve tried to operate as if your life
- depended on it. Most of the communications systems set up in the IC have a single basic aim: the observer of a
- communication must not be able to discern the identities of those involved, or in any way attribute them to
- an agency. This is why the IC calls these exchanges “non-attributable.” The pre-Internet spycraft of anonymity is
- famous, mostly from TV and the movies: a safe-house address coded in bathroom-stall graffiti, for instance, or
- scrambled into the abbreviations of a classified ad. Or think of the Cold War’s “dead drops,” the chalk marks on
- mailboxes signaling that a secret package was waiting inside a particular hollowed-out tree in a public park. The
- modern version might be fake profiles trading fake chats on a dating site, or, more commonly, just a superficially
- innocuous app that leaves superficially innocuous messages on a superficially innocuous Amazon server secretly
- controlled by the CIA. What I wanted, however, was something even better than that—something that required none of
- that exposure, and none of that budget.
- I decided to use somebody else’s Internet connection. I wish that were simply a matter of going to a McDonald’s or
- Starbucks and signing on to their Wi-Fi. But those places have CCTV, and receipts, and other people— memories with
- legs. Moreover, every wireless device, from a phone to a laptop, has a globally unique identifier called a MAC
- (Machine Address Code), which it leaves on record with every access point it connects to—a forensic marker of its
- user’s movements.
- So I didn’t go to McDonald’s or Starbucks—I went driving. Specifically, I went war-driving, which is when you convert
- your car into a roving Wi-Fi sensor. For this you need a laptop, a high-powered antenna, and a magnetic GPS sensor,
- which can be slapped atop the roof. Power is provided by the car or by a portable battery, or else by the laptop
- itself. Everything you need can fit into a backpack.
- I took along a cheap laptop running TAILS, which is a Linux-based “amnesiac” operating system—meaning it forgets
- everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of
- anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof,” or disguise,
- the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way
- associable with mine. Usefully enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.
- At nights and on weekends, I drove around what seemed like the entire island of Oahu, letting my antenna pick up the
- pulses of each Wi-Fi network. My GPS sensor tagged each access point with the location at which it was noticed,
- thanks to a mapping program I used called Kismet. What resulted was a map of the invisible networks we pass by every
- day without even noticing, a scandalously high percentage of which had either no security at all or security I could
- trivially bypass. Some of the networks required more sophisticated hacking. I’d briefly jam a network, causing its
- legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their
- “authentication packets,” which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on
- just like any other “authorized” user.
- With this network map in hand, I’d drive around Oahu like a madman, trying to check my email to see which of the
- journalists had replied to me. Having made contact with Laura Poitras, I’d spend much of the evening writing to her—
- sitting behind the wheel of my car at the beach, filching the Wi-Fi from a nearby resort. Some of the journalists I’d
- chosen needed convincing to use encrypted email, which back in 2012 was a pain. In some cases, I had to show them
- how, so I’d upload tutorials—sitting in my idling car in a parking lot, availing myself of the network of a library.
- Or of a school. Or of a gas station. Or of a bank—which had horrifyingly poor protections. The point was to not
- create any patterns.
- Atop the parking garage of a mall, secure in the knowledge that the moment I closed the lid of my laptop, my secret
- was safe, I’d draft manifestos explaining why I’d gone public, but then delete them. And then I’d try writing emails
- to Lindsay, only to delete them, too. I just couldn’t find the words.
- 23
- Read, Write, Execute
- Read, Write, Execute: in computing, these are called permissions. Functionally speaking, they determine the extent of
- your authority within a computer or computer network, defining what exactly you can and cannot do. The right to read
- a file allows you to access its contents, while the right to write a file allows you to modify it. Execution,
- meanwhile, means that you have the ability to run a file or program, to carry out the actions it was designed to do.
- Read, Write, Execute: this was my simple three-step plan. I wanted to burrow into the heart of the world’s most
- secure network to find the truth, make a copy of it, and get it out into the world. And I had to do all this without
- getting caught—without being read, written, and executed myself.
- Almost everything you do on a computer, on any device, leaves a record. Nowhere is this more true than at the NSA.
- Each log-in and log-out creates a log entry. Each permission I used left its own forensic trace. Every time I opened
- a file, every time I copied a file, that action was recorded. Every time I downloaded, moved, or deleted a file, that
- was recorded, too, and security logs were updated to reflect the event. There were network flow records, public key
- infrastructure records—people even joked about cameras hidden in the bathrooms, in the bathroom stalls. The agency
- had a not inconsiderable number of counterintelligence programs spying on the people who were spying on people,
- and if even one caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, it wouldn’t be a file that was getting
- deleted.
- Luckily, the strength of these systems was also their weakness: their complexity meant that not even the people
- running them necessarily knew how they worked. Nobody actually understood where they overlapped and where their gaps
- were. Nobody, that is, except the systems administrators. After all, those sophisticated monitoring systems you’re
- imagining, the ones with scary names like MIDNIGHTRIDER—somebody’s got to install them in the first place. The NSA
- may have paid for the network, but sysadmins like myself were the ones who really owned it.
- The Read phase would involve dancing through the digital grid of tripwires laid across the routes
- connecting the NSA to every other intelligence agency, domestic and foreign. (Among these was the NSA’s UK partner,
- the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which was setting up dragnets like OPTICNERVE, a program that
- saved a snapshot every five
- minutes from the cameras of people video-chatting on platforms like Yahoo Messenger, and PHOTONTORPEDO, which grabbed
- the IP addresses of MSN Messenger users.) By using Heartbeat to bring in the documents I wanted, I could turn “bulk
- collection” against those who’d turned it against the public, effectively Frankensteining the IC. The agency’s
- security tools kept track of who read what, but it didn’t matter: anyone who bothered to check their logs was used to
- seeing Heartbeat by now. It would sound no alarms. It was the perfect cover.
- But while Heartbeat would work as a way of collecting the files—far too many files—it only brought them to the server
- in Hawaii, a server that kept logs even I couldn’t get around. I needed a way to work with the files, search them,
- and discard the irrelevant and uninteresting, along with those containing legitimate secrets that I wouldn’t
- be giving to journalists. At this point, still in my Read phase, the hazards were manifold, due mainly to the fact
- that the protocols I was up against were no longer geared to monitoring but to prevention. If I ran my searches on
- the Heartbeat server, it would light a massive electronic sign blinking ARREST ME.
- I thought about this for a while. I couldn’t just copy the files directly from the Heartbeat server onto a personal
- storage device and waltz out of the Tunnel without being caught. What I could do, though, was bring the files closer,
- directing them to an intermediate way station.
- I couldn’t send them to one of our regular computers, because by 2012 all of the Tunnel had been upgraded to
- new “thin client” machines: small helpless computers with crippled drives and CPUs that couldn’t store or process
- data on their own, but did all of their storage and processing on the cloud. In a forgotten corner of the office,
- however, there was a pyramid of disused desktop computers—old, moldering legacy machines the agency had wiped clean
- and discarded. When I say old here, I mean young by the standards of anyone who doesn’t live on a budget the
- size of the NSA’s. They were Dell PCs from as recently as 2009 or 2010, large gray rectangles of comforting weight,
- which could store and process data on their own without being connected to the cloud. What I liked about them was
- that though they were still in the NSA system, they couldn’t really be closely tracked as long as I kept them off the
- central networks.
- I could easily justify needing to use these stolid, reliable boxes by claiming that I was trying to
- make sure Heartbeat worked with older operating systems. After all, not everybody at every NSA site had one of
- the new “thin clients” just yet. And what if Dell wanted to implement a civilian
- version of Heartbeat? Or what if the CIA, or FBI, or some similarly backward organization wanted to use it? Under the
- guise of compatibility testing, I could transfer the files to these old computers, where I could search, filter, and
- organize them as much as I wanted, as long as I was careful. I was carrying one of the big old hulks back to my desk
- when I passed one of the IT directors, who stopped me and asked me what I needed it for—he’d been a major proponent
- of getting rid of them. “Stealing secrets,” I answered, and we laughed.
- The Read phase ended with the files I wanted all neatly organized into folders. But they were still on a computer
- that wasn’t mine, which was still in the Tunnel underground. Enter, then, the Write phase, which for my purposes
- meant the agonizingly slow, boring-but-also-cripplingly-scary process of copying the files from the legacy Dells
- something that I could spirit out of the building.
- The easiest and safest way to copy a file off any IC workstation is also the oldest: a camera. Smartphones, of
- course, are banned in NSA buildings, but workers accidentally bring them in all the time without anyone noticing.
- They leave them in their gym bags or in the pockets of their windbreakers. If they’re caught with one in a random
- search and they act goofily abashed instead of screaming panicked Mandarin into their wristwatch, they’re often
- merely warned, especially if it’s their first offense. But getting a smartphone loaded with NSA secrets out of the
- Tunnel is a riskier gambit. Odds are that nobody would’ve noticed—or cared—if I walked out with a smartphone, and it
- might have been an adequate tool for a staffer trying to copy a single torture report, but I wasn’t wild about the
- idea of taking thousands of pictures of my computer screen in the middle of a top secret facility. Also, the phone
- would have had to be configured in such a way that even the world’s foremost forensic experts could seize and search
- it without finding anything on it that they shouldn’t.
- I’m going to refrain from publishing how exactly I went about my own writing—my own copying and encryption—so that
- the NSA will still be standing tomorrow. I will mention, however, what storage technology I used for the copied
- files. Forget thumbdrives; they’re too bulky for the relatively small amount they store. I went, instead, for SD
- cards—the acronym stands for Secure Digital. Actually, I went for the mini- and micro-SD cards.
- You’ll recognize SD cards if you’ve ever used a digital camera or video camera, or needed more storage on a
- tablet. They’re tiny little buggers, miracles of nonvolatile flash storage, and—at 20 x 21.5 mm for the mini, 15 x
- 11 mm for the micro, basically the size of your pinkie fingernail—eminently concealable. You can fit one inside the
- pried-off square of a Rubik’s Cube, then stick the square back on, and nobody will notice. In other attempts I
- carried a card in my sock, or, at my most paranoid, in my cheek, so I could swallow it if I had to. Eventually, as I
- gained confidence, and certainty in my methods of encryption, I’d just keep a card at the bottom of my pocket. They
- hardly ever triggered metal detectors, and who wouldn’t believe I’d simply forgotten something so small?
- The size of SD cards, however, has one downside: they’re extremely slow to write. Copying times for massive volumes
- of data are always long—at least always longer than you want—but the duration tends to stretch even more when you’re
- copying not to a speedy hard drive but to a minuscule silicon wafer embedded in plastic. Also, I wasn’t just copying.
- I was deduplicating, compressing, encrypting, none of which processes could be accomplished simultaneously with any
- other. I was using all the skills I’d ever acquired in my storage work, because that’s what I was doing, essentially.
- I was storing the NSA’s storage, making an off-site backup of evidence of the IC’s abuses.
- It could take eight hours or more—entire shifts—to fill a card. And though I switched to working nights again, those
- hours were terrifying. There was the old computer chugging, monitor off, with all but one fluorescent ceiling panel
- dimmed to save energy in the after-hours. And there I was, turning the monitor back on every once in a while to
- check the rate of progress and cringing. You know the feeling—the sheer hell of following the completion bar as it
- indicates 84 percent completed, 85 percent completed … 1:58:53 left … As it filled toward the sweet relief of 100
- percent, all files copied, I’d be sweating, seeing shadows and hearing footsteps around every corner.
- EXECUTE: THAT WAS the final step. As each card filled, I had to run my getaway routine. I had to get that vital
- archive out of the building, past the bosses and military uniforms, down the stairs and out the empty hall, past the
- badge scans and armed guards and mantraps—those two-doored security zones in which the next door doesn’t open until
- the previous door shuts and
- your badge scan is approved, and if it isn’t, or if anything else goes awry, the
- guards draw their weapons and the doors lock you in and you say, “Well, isn’t this embarrassing?” This—per all the
- reports I’d been studying, and all the nightmares I’d been having—was where they’d catch me, I was sure of it. Each
- time I left, I was petrified. I’d have to force myself not to think about the SD card. When you think about it, you
- act differently, suspiciously.
- One unexpected upshot of gaining a better understanding of NSA surveillance was that I’d also gained a better
- understanding of the dangers I faced. In other words, learning about the agency’s systems had taught me how not to
- get caught by them. My guides in this regard were the indictments that the government had brought against former
- agents—mostly real bastards who, in IC jargon, had “exfiltrated” classified information for profit. I compiled, and
- studied, as many of these indictments as I could. The FBI—the agency that investigates all crime within the IC—took
- great pride in explaining exactly how they caught their suspects, and believe me, I didn’t mind benefiting from their
- experience. It seemed that in almost every case, the FBI would wait to make its arrest until the suspect had finished
- their work and was about to go home. Sometimes they would let the suspect take the material out of a SCIF—a Sensitive
- Compartmented Information Facility, which is a type of building or room shielded against surveillance—and out into
- the public, where its very presence was a federal crime. I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me—
- there, out in the public light, just at the far end of the Tunnel.
- I’d usually try to banter with the guards, and this was where my Rubik’s Cube came in most handy. I was known to the
- guards and to everybody else at the Tunnel as the Rubik’s Cube guy, because I was always working the cube as I walked
- down the halls. I got so adept I could even solve it one-handed. It became my totem, my spirit toy, and a distraction
- device as much for myself as for my coworkers. Most of them thought it was an affectation, or a nerdy conversation
- starter. And it was, but primarily it relieved my anxiety. It calmed me.
- I bought a few cubes and handed them out. Anyone who took to it, I’d give them pointers. The more that people got
- used to them, the less they’d ever want a closer look at mine.
- I got along with the guards, or I told myself I did, mostly because I knew where their minds were: elsewhere. I’d
- done something like their job before, back at CASL. I knew how mind-numbing it was to spend all night standing,
- feigning vigilance. Your feet hurt. After a while, all the rest of you hurts. And you can get so lonely that you’ll
- talk to a wall.
- I aimed to be more entertaining than the wall, developing my own patter for each human obstacle. There was the one
- guard I talked to about insomnia and the difficulties of day-sleeping (remember, I was on nights, so this
- would’ve been around two in the morning). Another guy, we discussed politics. He called Democrats “Demon Rats,” so
- I’d read Breitbart News in
- preparation for the conversation. What they all had in common was a reaction to my cube: it made them smile. Over the
- course of my employment at the Tunnel, pretty much all the guards said some variation of, “Oh man, I used to play
- with that when I was a kid,” and then, invariably, “I tried to take the stickers off to solve it.” Me too, buddy. Me
- too.
- It was only once I got home that I was able to relax, even just slightly. I was still worried about the house being
- wired—that was another one of those charming methods the FBI used against those it suspected of inadequate loyalty.
- I’d rebuff Lindsay’s concerns about my insomniac ways until she hated me and I hated myself. She’d go to bed and I’d
- go to the couch, hiding with my laptop under a blanket like a child because cotton beats cameras. With the threat of
- immediate arrest out of the way, I could focus on transferring the files to a larger external storage device via my
- laptop—only somebody who didn’t understand technology very well would think I’d keep them on the laptop forever—and
- locking them down under multiple layers of encryption algorithms using differing implementations, so that even if one
- failed the others would keep them safe.
- I’d been careful not to leave any traces at my work, and I took care that my encryption left no traces of the
- documents at home. Still, I knew the documents could lead back to me once I’d sent them to the journalists and they’d
- been decrypted. Any investigator looking at which agency employees had accessed, or could access, all these materials
- would come up with a list with probably only a single name on it: mine. I could provide the journalists with fewer
- materials, of course, but then they wouldn’t be able to most effectively do their work. Ultimately, I had to contend
- with the fact that even one briefing slide or PDF left me vulnerable, because all digital files contain metadata,
- invisible tags that can be used to identify their origins.
- I struggled with how to handle this metadata situation. I worried that if I didn’t strip the identifying information
- from the documents, they might incriminate me the moment the journalists decrypted and opened them. But I also
- worried that by thoroughly stripping the metadata, I risked altering the files—if they were changed in any way, that
- could cast doubt on their authenticity. Which was more important: personal safety, or the public good? It might sound
- like an easy choice, but it took me quite a while to bite the bullet. I owned the risk, and left the metadata intact.
- Part of what convinced me was my fear that even if I had stripped away the metadata I knew about, there could be
- other digital watermarks I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t scan for. Another part had to do with the difficulty of
- scrubbing single-user documents. A single-user document is a document marked with a user-specific code, so that if
- any publication’s editorial staff decided to run it by the government, the government would know its source.
- Sometimes the unique identifier was hidden in the date and time-stamp coding, sometimes it involved the
- pattern of microdots in a graphic or logo. But it might also be embedded in something, in some way, I hadn’t even
- thought of. This phenomenon should have discouraged me, but instead it emboldened me. The technological difficulty
- forced me, for the first time, to confront the prospect of discarding my lifetime practice of anonymity and coming
- forward to identify myself as the source. I would embrace my principles by signing my name to them and let myself be
- condemned.
- Altogether, the documents I selected fit on a single drive, which I left out in the open on my desk at home. I knew
- that the materials were just as secure now as they had ever been at the office. Actually, they were more secure,
- thanks to multiple levels and methods of encryption. That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A
- little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.
- 24
- Encrypt
- Most people who use computers, and that includes members of the Fourth Estate, think there’s a fourth basic
- permission besides Read, Write, and Execute, called “Delete.”
- Delete is everywhere on the user side of computing. It’s in the hardware as a key on the keyboard, and it’s in the
- software as an option that can be chosen from a drop-down menu. There’s a certain finality that comes with choosing
- Delete, and a certain sense of responsibility. Sometimes a box even pops up to double-check: “Are you sure?” If the
- computer is second-guessing you by requiring confirmation—click “Yes”—it makes sense that Delete would be a
- consequential, perhaps even the ultimate decision.
- Undoubtedly, that’s true in the world outside of computing, where the powers of deletion have historically been vast.
- Even so, as countless despots have been reminded, to truly get rid of a document you can’t just destroy every copy of
- it. You also have to destroy every memory of it, which is to say you have to destroy all the people who remember it,
- along with every copy of all the other documents that mention it and all the people who remember all those other
- documents. And then, maybe, just maybe, it’s gone.
- Delete functions appeared from the very start of digital computing. Engineers understood that in a world of
- effectively unlimited options, some choices would inevitably turn out to be mistakes. Users, regardless of whether or
- not they were really in control at the technical level, had to feel in control, especially with regard to anything
- that they themselves had created. If they made a file, they should be able to unmake it at will. The ability to
- destroy what they created and start over afresh was a primary function that imparted a sense of agency to the user,
- despite the fact that they might be dependent on proprietary hardware they couldn’t repair and software they couldn’t
- modify, and bound by the rules of third-party platforms.
- Think about the reasons that you yourself press Delete. On your personal computer, you might want to get rid of some
- document you screwed up, or some file you downloaded but no longer need—or some file you don’t want anyone to know
- you ever needed. On your email, you might delete an email from a former lover that you don’t want to remember or
- don’t want your spouse to find, or an RSVP for that protest you went to. On your phone, you might delete the history
- of everywhere that phone has traveled, or some of the pictures, videos, and private records it automatically uploaded
- to the cloud. In
- every instance, you delete, and the thing—the file—appears to be gone.
- The truth, though, is that deletion has never existed technologically in the way that we conceive of it. Deletion is
- just a ruse, a figment, a public fiction, a not-quite-noble lie that computing tells you to reassure you and give you
- comfort. Although the deleted file disappears from view, it is rarely gone. In technical terms, deletion is really
- just a form of the middle permission, a kind of Write. Normally, when you press Delete for one of your files, its
- data— which has been stashed deep down on a disk somewhere—is not actually touched. Efficient modern operating
- systems are not designed to go all the way into the bowels of a disk purely for the purposes of erasure. Instead,
- only the computer’s map of where each file is stored—a map called the “file table”—is rewritten to say “I’m no longer
- using this space for anything important.” What this means is that, like a neglected book in a vast library, the
- supposedly erased file can still be read by anyone who looks hard enough for it. If you only erase the reference to
- it, the book itself still remains.
- This can be confirmed through experience, actually. Next time you copy a file, ask yourself why it takes so long when
- compared with the instantaneous act of deletion. The answer is that deletion doesn’t really do anything to a file
- besides conceal it. Put simply, computers were not designed to correct mistakes, but to hide them—and to hide them
- only from those parties who don’t know where to look.
- THE WANING DAYS of 2012 brought grim news: the few remaining legal protections that prohibited mass
- surveillance by some of the most prominent members of the Five Eyes network were being dismantled. The governments of
- both Australia and the UK were proposing legislation for the mandatory recording of telephony and Internet metadata.
- This was the first time that
- notionally democratic governments publicly avowed the ambition to establish
- a sort of surveillance time machine, which would enable them to technologically rewind the events of any person’s
- life for a period going back months and even years. These attempts definitively marked, to my mind at least, the
- so-called Western world’s transformation from the creator and defender of the free Internet to its
- opponent and prospective destroyer. Though these laws were justified as public safety measures, they represented
- such a breathtaking intrusion into the daily lives of the innocent that they terrified—quite rightly—even the
- citizens of other countries who didn’t think themselves affected (perhaps because their own governments chose to
- surveil them in secret).
- These public initiatives of mass surveillance proved, once and for all, that there could be no natural alliance
- between technology and government. The rift between my two strangely interrelated communities, the American IC and
- the global online tribe of technologists, became pretty much definitive. In my earliest years in the IC, I could
- still reconcile the two cultures, transitioning smoothly between my spy work and my relationships with civilian
- Internet privacy folks—everyone from the anarchist hackers to the more sober academic Tor types who kept me
- current about computing research and inspired me politically. For years, I was able to fool myself that we were all,
- ultimately, on the same side of history: we were all trying to protect the Internet, to keep it free for speech and
- free of fear. But my ability to sustain that delusion was gone. Now the government, my employer, was definitively the
- adversary. What my technologist peers had always suspected, I’d only recently confirmed, and I couldn’t tell them. Or
- I couldn’t tell them yet.
- What I could do, however, was help them out, so long as that didn’t imperil my plans. This was how I found myself in
- Honolulu, a beautiful city in which I’d never had much interest, as one of the hosts and teachers of a CryptoParty.
- This was a new type of gathering invented by an international grassroots cryptological movement, at which
- technologists volunteered their time to teach free classes to the public on the topic of digital self-defense—
- essentially, showing anyone who was interested how to protect the security of their communications. In many ways,
- this was the same topic I taught for JCITA, so I jumped at the chance to participate.
- Though this might strike you as a dangerous thing for me to have done, given the other activities I was involved with
- at the time, it should instead just reaffirm how much faith I had in the encryption methods I taught—the very methods
- that protected that drive full of IC abuses sitting back at my house, with locks that couldn’t be cracked even by the
- NSA. I knew that no number of documents, and no amount of journalism, would ever be enough to address the threat the
- world was facing. People needed tools to protect themselves, and they needed to know how to use them. Given that I
- was also trying to provide these tools to journalists, I was worried that my approach had become too technical. After
- so many sessions spent lecturing colleagues, this opportunity to simplify my treatment of the subject for a general
- audience would benefit me as much as anyone. Also, I honestly missed teaching: it had been a year since I’d stood at
- the front of a class, and the moment I was back in that position I realized I’d been teaching the right things to the
- wrong people all along.
- When I say class, I don’t mean anything like the IC’s schools or briefing
- rooms. The CryptoParty was held in a one-room art gallery behind a furniture store and coworking space. While I was
- setting up the projector so I could share slides showing how easy it was to run a Tor server to help, for example,
- the citizens of Iran—but also the citizens of Australia, the UK, and the States
- —my students drifted in, a diverse crew of strangers and a few new friends I’d only met online. All in all, I’d say
- about twenty people showed up that December night to learn from me and my co-lecturer, Runa Sandvik, a bright young
- Norwegian woman from the Tor Project. (Runa would go on to work as the senior director of information security for
- the New York Times, which would sponsor her later CryptoParties.) What united our audience wasn’t an interest in Tor,
- or even a fear of being spied on as much as a desire to re- establish a sense of control over the private spaces in
- their lives. There were some grandparent types who’d wandered in off the street, a local journalist covering the
- Hawaiian “Occupy!” movement, and a woman who’d been victimized by revenge porn. I’d also invited some of my NSA
- colleagues, hoping to interest them in the movement and wanting to show that I wasn’t concealing my involvement from
- the agency. Only one of them showed up, though, and sat in the back, legs spread, arms crossed, smirking throughout.
- I began my presentation by discussing the illusory nature of deletion, whose objective of total erasure could never
- be accomplished. The crowd understood this instantly. I went on to explain that, at best, the data they wanted no one
- to see couldn’t be unwritten so much as overwritten: scribbled over, in a sense, with random or pseudo-random data
- until the original was rendered unreadable. But, I cautioned, even this approach had its drawbacks. There was always
- a chance that their operating system had silently hidden away a copy of the file they were hoping to delete in some
- temporary storage nook they weren’t privy to.
- That’s when I pivoted to encryption.
- Deletion is a dream for the surveillant and a nightmare for the surveilled, but encryption is, or should be, a
- reality for all. It is the only true protection against surveillance. If the whole of your storage drive is encrypted
- to begin with, your adversaries can’t rummage through it for deleted files, or for anything else—unless they have the
- encryption key. If all the emails in your inbox are encrypted, Google can’t read them to profile you—unless they have
- the encryption key. If all your communications that pass through hostile Australian or British or American or Chinese
- or Russian networks are encrypted, spies can’t read them—unless they have the encryption key. This is the ordering
- principle of encryption: all power to the key holder.
- Encryption works, I explained, by way of algorithms. An encryption algorithm sounds intimidating, and certainly
- looks intimidating when written out, but its concept is quite elementary. It’s a mathematical method of reversibly
- transforming information—such as your emails, phone calls, photos, videos, and files—in such a way that it becomes
- incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a copy of the encryption key. You can think of a modern encryption
- algorithm as a magic wand that you can wave over a document to change each letter into a language that only you and
- those you trust can read, and the encryption key as the unique magic words that complete the incantation and put the
- wand to work. It doesn’t matter how many people know that you used the wand, so long as you can keep your personal
- magic words from the people you don’t trust.
- Encryption algorithms are basically just sets of math problems designed to be incredibly difficult even for computers
- to solve. The encryption key is the one clue that allows a computer to solve the particular set of math problems
- being used. You push your readable data, called plaintext, into one end of an encryption algorithm, and
- incomprehensible gibberish, called ciphertext, comes out the other end. When somebody wants to read the ciphertext,
- they feed it back into the algorithm along with—crucially—the correct key, and out comes the plaintext again. While
- different algorithms provide different degrees of protection, the security of an encryption key is often based on its
- length, which indicates the level of difficulty involved in solving a specific algorithm’s underlying math problem.
- In algorithms that correlate longer keys with better security, the improvement is exponential. If we presume that an
- attacker takes one day to crack a 64-bit key—which scrambles your data in one of 264 possible ways
- (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique permutations)
- —then it would take double that amount of time, two days, to break a 65-bit key, and four days to break a 66-bit key.
- Breaking a 128-bit key would take
- 264 times longer than a day, or fifty million billion years. By that time, I might even be pardoned.
- In my communications with journalists, I used 4096- and 8192-bit keys. This meant that absent major innovations
- in computing technology or a fundamental redefining of the principles by which numbers are factored, not even all
- of the NSA’s cryptanalysts using all of the world’s computing power put together would be able to get into my drive.
- For this reason, encryption is the single best hope for fighting surveillance of any kind. If all of our data,
- including our communications, were enciphered in this fashion, from end to end (from the sender end to the recipient
- end), then no government—no entity conceivable under our current knowledge of physics, for that matter—would
- be able to understand them. A government could still intercept and collect the signals, but it would be intercepting
- and collecting pure noise. Encrypting our communications would essentially delete them from the memories of every
- entity we deal with. It would effectively withdraw permission from those to whom it was never granted to begin with.
- Any government hoping to access encrypted communications has only two options: it can either go after the keymasters
- or go after the keys. For the former, they can pressure device manufacturers into intentionally selling
- products that perform faulty encryption, or mislead international standards organizations into accepting flawed
- encryption algorithms that contain secret access points known as “back doors.” For the latter, they can launch
- targeted attacks against the endpoints of the communications, the hardware and software that perform the process of
- encryption. Often, that means exploiting a vulnerability that they weren’t responsible for creating but merely found,
- and using it to hack you and steal your keys—a technique pioneered by criminals but today embraced by major state
- powers, even though it means knowingly preserving devastating holes in the cybersecurity of critical international
- infrastructure.
- The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called “zero knowledge,” a method that ensures that any data you
- try to store externally— say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform—is encrypted by an algorithm running on
- your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the
- users’ hands—and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.
- My key to the NSA’s secrets went beyond zero knowledge: it was a zero- knowledge key consisting of multiple zero-
- knowledge keys.
- Imagine it like this: Let’s say that at the conclusion of my CryptoParty lecture, I stood by the exit as each of the
- twenty audience members shuffled out. Now, imagine that as each of them passed through the door and into the Honolulu
- night, I whispered a word into their ear—a single word that no one else could hear, and that they were only allowed
- to repeat if they were all together, once again, in the same room. Only by bringing back all twenty of these folks
- and having them repeat their words in the same order in which I’d originally distributed them could anyone reassemble
- the complete twenty- word incantation. If just one person forgot their word, or if the order of recitation was in any
- way different from the order of distribution, no spell would be cast, no magic would happen.
- My keys to the drive containing the disclosures resembled this
- arrangement, with a twist: while I distributed most of the pieces of the incantation, I retained one for
- myself. Pieces of my magic spell were hidden everywhere, but if I destroyed just the single lone piece that I kept on
- my person, I would destroy all access to the NSA’s secrets forever.
- 25
- The Boy
- It’s only in hindsight that I’m able to appreciate just how high my star had risen. I’d gone from being the student
- who couldn’t speak in class to being the teacher of the language of a new age, from the child of modest, middle-class
- Beltway parents to the man living the island life and making so much money that it had lost its meaning. In just the
- seven short years of my career, I’d climbed from maintaining local servers to crafting and implementing globally
- deployed systems—from graveyard-shift security guard to key master of the puzzle palace.
- But there’s always a danger in letting even the most qualified person rise too far, too fast, before they’ve had
- enough time to get cynical and abandon their idealism. I occupied one of the most unexpectedly omniscient positions
- in the Intelligence Community—toward the bottom rung of the managerial ladder, but high atop heaven in terms of
- access. And while this gave me the phenomenal, and frankly undeserved, ability to observe the IC in its grim
- fullness, it also left me more curious than ever about the one fact I was still finding elusive: the absolute limit
- of who the agency could turn its gaze against. It was a limit set less in policy or law than in the ruthless,
- unyielding capabilities of what I now knew to be a world-spanning machine. Was there anyone this machine could not
- surveil? Was there anywhere this machine could not go?
- The only way to discover the answer was to descend, abandoning my panoptic perch for the narrow vision of an
- operational role. The NSA employees with the freest access to the rawest forms of intelligence were those who sat in
- the operator’s chair and typed into their computers the names of the individuals who’d fallen under suspicion,
- foreigners and US citizens alike. For one reason or another, or for no reason at all, these individuals had become
- targets of the agency’s closest scrutiny, with the NSA interested in finding out everything about them and their
- communications. My ultimate destination, I knew, was the exact point of this interface—the exact point where the
- state cast its eye on the human and the human remained unaware.
- The program that enabled this access was called XKEYSCORE, which is perhaps best understood as a search engine that
- lets an analyst search through all the records of your life. Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages
- from the public Internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything.
- Though I’d read enough about the
- program to understand how it worked, I hadn’t yet used it, and I realized I ought to know more about it. By pursuing
- XKEYSCORE, I was looking for a personal confirmation of the depths of the NSA’s surveillance intrusions—the kind of
- confirmation you don’t get from documents but only from direct experience.
- One of the few offices in Hawaii with truly unfettered access to XKEYSCORE was the National Threat Operations Center.
- NTOC worked out of the sparkling but soulless new open-plan office the NSA had formally named the Rochefort Building,
- after Joseph Rochefort, a legendary World War II–era Naval cryptanalyst who broke Japanese codes. Most employees had
- taken to calling it the Roach Fort, or simply “the Roach.” At the time I applied for a job there, parts of the Roach
- were still under construction, and I was immediately reminded of my first cleared job, with CASL: it was my fate to
- begin and end my IC career in unfinished buildings.
- In addition to housing almost all of the agency’s Hawaii-based translators and analysts, the Roach also accommodated
- the local branch of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division. This was the NSA unit responsible for remotely
- hacking into the computers of people whom analysts had selected as targets—the agency’s equivalent of the old
- burglary teams that once snuck into enemies’ homes to plant bugs and find compromising material. NTOC’s main job, by
- contrast, was to monitor and frustrate the activity of the TAO’s foreign equivalents. As luck would have it,
- NTOC had a position open through a contractor job at Booz Allen Hamilton, a job they euphemistically described as
- “infrastructure analyst.” The role involved using the complete spectrum of the NSA’s mass surveillance tools,
- including XKEYSCORE, to monitor activity on the “infrastructure” of interest, the Internet.
- Though I’d be making slightly more money at Booz, around $120,000 a year, I considered it a demotion—the first of
- many as I began my final descent, jettisoning my accesses, my clearances, and my agency privileges. I was an engineer
- who was becoming an analyst who would ultimately become an exile, a target of the very technologies I’d once
- controlled. From that perspective, this particular fall in prestige seemed pretty minor. From that perspective,
- everything seemed pretty minor, as the arc of my life bent back toward earth, accelerating toward the point of impact
- that would end my career, my relationship, my freedom, and possibly my life.
- I’D DECIDED TO bring my archives out of the country and pass them to the journalists I’d contacted, but before I
- could even begin to contemplate the
- logistics of that act I had to go shake some hands. I had to fly east to DC and spend a few weeks meeting and
- greeting my new bosses and colleagues, who had high hopes for how they might apply my keen understanding of online
- anonymization to unmask their more clever targets. This was what brought me back home to the Beltway for the very
- last time, and back to the site of my first encounter with an institution that had lost control: Fort Meade. This
- time I was arriving as an insider.
- The day that marked my coming of age, just over ten tumultuous years earlier, had profoundly changed not just the
- people who worked at NSA headquarters but the place itself. I first noticed this fact when I got stopped in my rental
- car trying to turn off Canine Road into one of the agency’s parking lots, which in my memory still howled with panic,
- ringtones, car horns, and sirens. Since 9/11, all the roads that led to NSA headquarters had been permanently
- closed to anyone who didn’t possess one of the special IC badges now hanging around my neck.
- Whenever I wasn’t glad-handing NTOC leadership at headquarters, I spent my time learning everything I could—“hot-
- desking” with analysts who worked different programs and different types of targets, so as to be able to teach my
- fellow team members back in Hawaii the newest ways the agency’s tools might be used. That, at least, was the
- official explanation of my curiosity, which as always exceeded the requirements and earned the gratitude of the
- technologically inclined. They, in turn, were as eager as ever to demonstrate the power of the
- machinery they’d developed, without expressing a single qualm about how that power was applied. While
- at headquarters, I was also put through a series of tests on the proper use of the system, which were more like
- regulatory compliance exercises or procedural shields than meaningful instruction. The other analysts told me that
- since I could take these tests as many times as I had to, I shouldn’t bother learning the rules: “Just click the
- boxes until you pass.”
- The NSA described XKEYSCORE, in the documents I’d later pass on to journalists, as its “widest-ranging” tool, used to
- search “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.” The technical specs I studied went into more detail as to how
- exactly this was accomplished—by “packetizing” and “sessionizing,” or cutting up the data of a user’s online sessions
- into manageable packets for analysis—but nothing could prepare me for seeing it in action.
- It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you
- to type in pretty much anyone’s
- address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity.
- In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at
- was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search
- history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person
- or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the
- packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted
- each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the screen.
- But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.
- My weeks at Fort Meade, and the short stint I put in at Booz back in Hawaii, were the only times I saw,
- firsthand, the abuses actually being committed that I’d previously read about in internal documentation. Seeing
- them made me realize how insulated my position at the systems level had been from the ground zero of immediate
- damage. I could only imagine the level of insulation of the agency’s directorship or, for that matter, of the US
- president.
- I didn’t type the names of the agency director or the president into XKEYSCORE, but after enough time with the system
- I realized I could have. Everyone’s communications were in the system—everyone’s. I was initially fearful that if I
- searched those in the uppermost echelons of state, I’d be caught and fired, or worse. But it was surpassingly simple
- to disguise a query regarding even the most prominent figure by encoding my search terms in a machine format that
- looked like gibberish to humans but would be perfectly understandable to XKEYSCORE. If any of the auditors who were
- responsible for reviewing the searches ever bothered to look more closely, they would see only a snippet of
- obfuscated code, while I would be able to scroll through the most personal activities of a Supreme Court justice or a
- congressperson.
- As far as I could tell, none of my new colleagues intended to abuse their powers so grandly, although if they had
- it’s not like they’d ever mention it. Anyway, when analysts thought about abusing the system, they were far less
- interested in what it could do for them professionally than in what it could do for them personally. This led to the
- practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used
- the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection—reading
- their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only
- the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of
- surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, no one in the agency’s history had been
- sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly
- prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you
- refuse to admit the existence of the system itself. The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat
- along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts,
- whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as
- one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of
- informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check
- her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to
- be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target— or someone in communication with a target—you
- had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could
- trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.
- One thing you come to understand very quickly while using XKEYSCORE is that nearly everyone in the world who’s online
- has at least two things in common: they have all watched porn at one time or another, and they all store photos and
- videos of their family. This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race, and age—from the
- meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or
- cousin.
- It’s the family stuff that got to me the most. I remember this one child in particular, a little boy in Indonesia.
- Technically, I shouldn’t have been interested in this little boy, but I was, because my employers were interested in
- his father. I had been reading through the shared targeting folders of a “persona” analyst, meaning someone who
- typically spent most of their day sifting through artifacts like chat logs and Gmail inboxes and Facebook
- messages, rather than the more obscure and difficult, typically hacker- generated traffic of the infrastructure
- analysts.
- The boy’s father, like my own father, was an engineer—but unlike my father, this guy wasn’t government- or
- military-affiliated. He was just a regular academic who’d been caught up in a surveillance dragnet. I can’t even
- remember how or why he’d come to the agency’s attention, beyond sending a job application to a research university in
- Iran. The grounds for suspicion
- were often poorly documented, if they were documented at all, and the connections could be incredibly
- tenuous—“believed to be potentially associated with” and then the name of some international organization that could
- be anything from a telecommunications standards body to UNICEF to something you might actually agree is menacing.
- Selections from the man’s communications had been sieved out of the stream of Internet traffic and assembled into
- folders—here was the fatal copy of the résumé sent to the suspect university; here were his texts; here was his Web
- browser history; here was the last week or so of his correspondence both sent and received, tagged to IP addresses.
- Here were the coordinates of a “geo-fence” the analyst had placed around him to track whether he strayed too far from
- home, or perhaps traveled to the university for his interview.
- Then there were his pictures, and a video. He was sitting in front of his computer, as I was sitting in front of
- mine. Except that in his lap he had a toddler, a boy in a diaper.
- The father was trying to read something, but the kid kept shifting around, smacking the keys and giggling. The
- computer’s internal mic picked up his giggling and there I was, listening to it on my headphones. The father held the
- boy tighter, and the boy straightened up, and, with his dark crescent eyes, looked directly into the computer’s
- camera—I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was looking directly at me. Suddenly I realized that I’d been holding my
- breath. I shut the session, got up from the computer, and left the office for the bathroom in the hall, head down,
- headphones still on with the cord trailing.
- Everything about that kid, everything about his father, reminded me of my own father, whom I met for dinner one
- evening during my stint at Fort Meade. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but there in the midst of dinner, over bites of
- Caesar salad and a pink lemonade, I had the thought: I’ll never see my family again. My eyes were dry—I was exerting
- as much control as I could— but inside, I was devastated. I knew that if I told him what I was about to do, he
- would’ve called the cops. Or else he would’ve called me crazy and had me committed to a mental hospital. He would’ve
- done anything he thought he had to do to prevent me from making the gravest of mistakes.
- I could only hope that his hurt would in time be healed by pride.
- Back in Hawaii between March and May 2013, a sense of finality suffused nearly every experience for me, and though
- the experiences themselves might seem trivial, they eased my path. It was far less painful to think that this was the
- last time I’d ever stop at the curry place in Mililani or drop by the art-
- gallery hacker space in Honolulu or just sit on the roof of my car and scan the nighttime sky for falling stars than
- to think that I only had another month left with Lindsay, or another week left of sleeping next to her and waking up
- next to her and yet trying to keep my distance from her, for fear of breaking down.
- The preparations I was making were those of a man about to die. I emptied my bank accounts, putting cash into an old
- steel ammo box for Lindsay to find so that the government couldn’t seize it. I went around the house doing oft-
- procrastinated chores, like fixing windows and changing lightbulbs. I erased and encrypted my old computers,
- reducing them to the silent husks of better times. In sum, I was putting my affairs in order to try to make
- everything easier for Lindsay, or just for my conscience, which periodically would switch allegiance from a world
- that hadn’t earned it to the woman who had and the family I loved.
- Everything was imbued with this sense of an ending, and yet there were moments when it seemed that no end was in
- sight and that the plan I’d developed was collapsing. It was difficult to get the journalists to commit to a meeting,
- mostly because I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with, or even, for a while at least, where and when it was
- happening. I had to reckon with the prospect of them never showing up, or of them showing up but then dropping out.
- Ultimately I decided that if either of those happened, I’d just abandon the plan and return to work and to Lindsay as
- if everything was normal, to wait for my next chance.
- In my wardrives back and forth from Kunia—a twenty-minute ride that could become a two-hour Wi-Fi scavenger
- hunt—I’d been researching various countries, trying to find a location for my meeting with the
- journalists. It felt like I was picking out my prison, or rather my grave. All of the Five Eyes countries were
- obviously off-limits. In fact, all of Europe was out, because its countries couldn’t be counted upon to uphold
- international law against the extradition of those charged with political crimes in the face of what was sure to
- be significant American pressure. Africa and Latin America were no-go zones too—the United States had a history of
- acting there with impunity. Russia was out because it was Russia, and China was China: both were totally out of
- bounds. The US government wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at the map. The optics would
- only be worse in the Middle East. It sometimes seemed as if the most challenging hack of my life wasn’t
- going to be plundering the NSA but rather trying to find a meeting venue independent enough to hold off the White
- House and free enough not to interfere with my activities.
- The process of elimination left me with Hong Kong. In geopolitical terms, it was the closest I could get to no-
- man’s-land, but with a vibrant media and protest culture, not to mention largely unfiltered Internet. It was an
- oddity, a reasonably liberal world city whose nominal autonomy would distance me from China and restrain Beijing’s
- ability to take public action against me or the journalists—at least immediately—but whose de facto existence in
- Beijing’s sphere of influence would reduce the possibility of unilateral US intervention. In a situation with no
- promise of safety, it was enough to have the guarantee of time. Chances were that things weren’t going to end well
- for me, anyway: the best I could hope for was getting the disclosures out before I was caught.
- The last morning I woke up with Lindsay, she was leaving on a camping trip to Kauai—a brief getaway with friends that
- I’d encouraged. We lay in bed and I held her too tightly, and when she asked with sleepy bewilderment why I was
- suddenly being so affectionate, I apologized. I told her how sorry I was for how busy I’d been, and that I was going
- to miss her—she was the best person I’d ever met in my life. She smiled, pecked me on the cheek, and then got up to
- pack.
- The moment she was out the door, I started crying, for the first time in years. I felt guilty about everything
- except what my government would accuse me of, and especially guilty about my tears, because I knew that my pain
- would be nothing compared to the pain I’d cause to the woman I loved, or to the hurt and confusion I’d cause my
- family.
- At least I had the benefit of knowing what was coming. Lindsay would return from her camping trip to find me gone,
- ostensibly on a work assignment, and my mother basically waiting on our doorstep. I’d invited my mother to visit, in
- a move so uncharacteristic that she must have expected another type of surprise—like an announcement that Lindsay and
- I were engaged. I felt horrible about the false pretenses and winced at the thought of her disappointment, but I kept
- telling myself I was justified. My mother would take care of Lindsay and Lindsay would take care of her. Each would
- need the other’s strength to weather the coming storm.
- The day after Lindsay left, I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant
- luggage and four laptops: secure communications, normal communications, a decoy, and an “airgap” (a computer that had
- never gone and would never go online). I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I
- scribbled in pen: Got called away for work. I love you. I signed it with my call-letter
- nickname, Echo. Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I
- bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20 arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me.
- 26
- Hong Kong
- The deep psychological appeal of games, which are really just a series of increasingly difficult challenges, is the
- belief that they can be won. Nowhere is this more clear to me than in the case of the Rubik’s Cube, which satisfies a
- universal fantasy: that if you just work hard enough and twist yourself through all of the possibilities,
- everything in the world that appears scrambled and incoherent will finally click into position and become perfectly
- aligned; that human ingenuity is enough to transform the most broken and chaotic system into something logical and
- orderly where every face of three- dimensional space shines with perfect uniformity.
- I’d had a plan—I’d had multiple plans—in which a single mistake would have meant getting caught, and yet I hadn’t
- been: I’d made it out of the NSA, I’d made it out of the country. I had beaten the game. By every standard I could
- imagine, the hard part was over. But my imagination hadn’t been good enough, because the journalists I’d asked to
- come meet me weren’t showing up. They kept postponing, giving excuses, apologizing.
- I knew that Laura Poitras—to whom I’d already sent a few documents and the promise of many more—was ready to fly
- anywhere from New York City at a moment’s notice, but she wasn’t going to come alone. She was busy trying to get
- Glenn Greenwald to commit, trying to get him to buy a new laptop that he wouldn’t put online. Trying to get him to
- install encryption programs so we could better communicate. And there I was, in Hong Kong, watching the clock tick
- away the hours, watching the calendar tick off the days, beseeching, begging: please come before the NSA realizes
- I’ve been gone from work too long. It was tough to think about all the lengths I’d gone to only to face the prospect
- of being left in Hong Kong high and dry. I tried to work up some sympathy for these journalists who seemed too busy
- or too nervous to lock down their travel plans, but then I’d recall just how little of the material for which I was
- risking everything would actually make it to the public if the police arrived first. I thought about my family and
- Lindsay and how foolish it was to have put my life in the hands of people who didn’t even know my name.
- I barricaded myself in my room at the Mira Hotel, which I chose because of its central location in a crowded shopping
- and business district. I put the “Privacy Please—Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle to keep housekeeping out.
- For ten days, I didn’t leave the room for fear of giving a
- foreign spy the chance to sneak in and bug the place. With the stakes so high, the only move I had was to wait. I
- converted the room into a poor man’s operations center, the invisible heart of the network of encrypted Internet
- tunnels from which I’d send increasingly shrill pleas to the absent emissaries of our free press. Then I’d stand at
- the window hoping for a reply, looking out onto the beautiful park I’d never visit. By the time Laura and Glenn
- finally arrived, I’d eaten every item on the room service menu.
- That isn’t to say that I just sat around during that week and a half writing wheedling messages. I also tried to
- organize the last briefing I’d ever give— going through the archive, figuring out how best to explain its contents to
- the journalists in the surely limited time we’d have together. It was an interesting problem: how to most cogently
- express to nontechnical people who were almost certainly inclined to be skeptical of me the fact that the
- US government was surveilling the world and the methods by which it was doing so. I put together dictionaries of
- terms of art like “metadata” and “communications bearer.” I put together glossaries of acronyms and abbreviations:
- CCE, CSS, DNI, NOFORN. I made the decision to explain not through technologies, or systems, but through
- surveillance programs—in essence, through stories—in an attempt to speak their language. But I couldn’t decide which
- stories to give them first, and I kept shuffling them around, trying to put the worst crimes in the best order.
- I had to find a way to help at least Laura and Glenn understand something in the span of a few days that it had taken
- me years to puzzle out. Then there was another thing: I had to help them understand who I was and why I’d decided to
- do this.
- AT LONG LAST, Glenn and Laura showed up in Hong Kong on June 2. When they came to meet me at the Mira, I think I
- disappointed them, at least initially. They even told me as much, or Glenn did: He’d been expecting someone older,
- some chain-smoking, tipsy depressive with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience. He didn’t understand how a person
- as young as I was
- —he kept asking me my age—not only had access to such sensitive
- documents, but was also so willing to throw his life away. For my part, I didn’t know how they could have expected
- some graybeard, given my instructions to them about how to meet: Go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel
- restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s
- Cube. The funny thing was that I’d originally been wary of using that bit of tradecraft, but the cube was the only
- thing I’d brought with me that was likely to be unique and identifiable from a distance. It also helped me hide the
- stress of waiting for what I feared might be the surprise of handcuffs.
- That stress would reach its visible peak just ten or so minutes later, when I’d brought Laura and Glenn up to my
- room—#1014, on the tenth floor. Glenn had barely had the chance to stow his smartphone in my minibar fridge at my
- request when Laura started rearranging and adjusting the lights in the room. Then she unpacked her digital video
- camera. Though we’d agreed, over encrypted email, that she could film our encounter, I wasn’t ready for the reality.
- Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when she pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a
- cramped, messy room that I hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of experience: the
- more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self- conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or
- might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that
- somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all of my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which
- experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the
- latter is now difficult for everyone.
- In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight,
- kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I
- wasn’t having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look when it was played back in
- court. I realized there were so many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-
- service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers,
- piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor.
- It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I had never met any
- journalists before serving as their source. The first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US
- government’s system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. In the
- end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it
- showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never could. The footage she shot
- over the course of our days together in Hong Kong can’t be distorted. Its existence is a tribute not
- just to her professionalism as a documentarian but to her foresight.
- I spent the week between June 3 and June 9 cloistered in that room with Glenn and his colleague from the Guardian,
- Ewen MacAskill, who joined us a bit later that first day. We talked and talked, going through the NSA’s programs,
- while Laura hovered and filmed. In contrast to the frenetic days, the nights were empty and desolate. Glenn and Ewen
- would retreat to their own hotel, the nearby W, to write up their findings into articles. Laura would disappear to
- edit her footage and do her own reporting with Bart Gellman of the Washington Post, who never made it to Hong Kong
- but worked remotely with the documents he received from her.
- I’d sleep, or try to—or else I’d put on the TV, find an English-language channel like the BBC or CNN, and watch the
- international reaction. On June
- 5, the Guardian broke Glenn’s first story, the FISA court order that authorized the NSA to collect information from
- the American telecom Verizon about every phone call it handled. On June 6, it ran Glenn’s PRISM story, pretty much
- simultaneously with a similar account in the Washington Post by Laura and Bart. I knew, and I think we all knew, that
- the more pieces came out the more likely it was that I’d be identified, particularly because my office had begun
- emailing me asking for status updates and I wasn’t answering. But though Glenn and Ewen and Laura were
- unfailingly sympathetic to my ticking time-bomb situation, they never let their desire to serve the truth be
- tempered by that knowledge. And following their example, neither did I.
- Journalism, like documentary film, can only reveal so much. It’s interesting to think about what a medium is
- forced to omit, both by convention and technology. In Glenn’s prose, especially in the Guardian, you got a
- laser-focused statement of fact, stripped of the dogged passion that defines his personality. Ewen’s prose more fully
- reflected his character: sincere, gracious, patient, and fair. Meanwhile, Laura, who saw all but was rarely seen, had
- an omniscient reserve and a sardonic wit—half master spy, half master artist.
- As the revelations ran wall to wall on every TV channel and website, it became clear that the US government had
- thrown the whole of its machinery into identifying the source. It was also clear that when they did, they would use
- the face they found—my face—to evade accountability: instead of addressing the revelations, they’d impugn the
- credibility and motives of “the leaker.” Given the stakes, I had to seize the initiative before it was too late. If I
- didn’t explain my actions and intentions, the government would, in a way that would swing the focus away from its
- misdeeds.
- The only hope I had of fighting back was to come forward first and identify myself. I’d give the media just enough
- personal detail to satisfy their mounting curiosity, with a clear statement that what mattered wasn’t me, but rather
- the subversion of American democracy. Then I’d vanish just as quickly as I’d appeared. That, at least, was the plan.
- Ewen and I decided that he’d write a story about my IC career and Laura suggested filming a video statement to appear
- alongside it in the Guardian. In it, I’d claim direct and sole responsibility as the source behind the reporting on
- global mass surveillance. But even though Laura had been filming all week (a lot of that footage would make it into
- her feature documentary, Citizenfour), we just didn’t have the time for her to go through everything she’d shot in
- search of snippets of me speaking coherently and making eye contact. What she proposed, instead, was my first
- recorded statement, which she started filming right there and then—the one that begins, “Uh, my name is Ed Snowden.
- I’m, ah, twenty-nine years old.”
- Hello, world.
- WHILE I’VE NEVER once regretted tugging aside the curtain and revealing my identity, I do wish I had done it with
- better diction and a better plan in mind for what was next. In truth, I had no plan at all. I hadn’t given much
- thought to answering the question of what to do once the game was over, mainly because a winning conclusion was
- always so unlikely. All I’d cared about was
- getting the facts out into the world: I figured that by putting the documents
- into the public record, I was essentially putting myself at the public’s mercy. No exit strategy could be the only
- exit strategy, because any next step I might have premeditated taking would have run the risk of undermining the
- disclosures.
- If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek asylum, for example, I would’ve been
- called a foreign agent of that country. Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to
- be arrested upon landing and charged under the Espionage Act. That would’ve entitled me to a show trial
- deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.
- The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in
- my position would not even be allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically
- beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to
- argue that the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain laws regarding surveillance,
- or convinced the courts to strike down a certain mass surveillance program as illegal, or influenced the
- attorney general and the president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance was a crucial
- one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the country. All these claims would be deemed not
- just irrelevant but inadmissible in the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing my
- government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified information to journalists, a fact that is not
- in dispute. This is why anyone who says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to
- come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then, surely be a cruel one. The penalty for
- disclosing top secret documents, whether to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per
- document.
- From the moment that Laura’s video of me was posted on the Guardian website on June 9, I was marked. There was a
- target on my back. I knew that the institutions I’d shamed would not relent until my head was bagged and my limbs
- were shackled. And until then—and perhaps even after then—they would harass my loved ones and disparage my character,
- prying into every aspect of my life and career, seeking information (or opportunities for disinformation) with which
- to smear me. I was familiar enough with how this process went, both from having read classified examples of it within
- the IC and from having studied the cases of other whistleblowers and leakers. I knew the stories of heroes like
- Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, and more recent opponents of government secrecy like Thomas Tamm, an attorney with
- the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review who served as a source for much of the warrantless
- wiretapping reporting of the mid-2000s. There were also Drake, Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis, the digital-age
- successors to Perry Fellwock, who back in 1971 had revealed the existence of the then-unacknowledged NSA in the
- press, which caused the Senate’s Church Committee (the forerunner of today’s Senate Select Committee on
- Intelligence) to try to ensure that the agency’s brief was limited to the gathering of foreign rather than
- domestic signals intelligence. And then there was US Army Private Chelsea Manning, who for the crime of exposing
- America’s war crimes was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, of which she served seven, her
- sentence commuted only after an international outcry arose over the treatment she received during solitary
- confinement.
- All of these people, whether they faced prison or not, encountered some
- sort of backlash, most often severe and derived from the very abuse that I’d just helped expose: surveillance. If
- ever they’d expressed anger in a private communication, they were “disgruntled.” If they’d ever visited a
- psychiatrist or a psychologist, or just checked out books on related subjects from a library, they were “mentally
- unsound.” If they’d been drunk even once, they were said to be alcoholics. If they’d had even one extramarital
- affair, they were said to be sexual deviants. Not a few lost their homes and were bankrupted. It’s easier for an
- institution to tarnish a reputation than to substantively engage with principled dissent—for the IC, it’s just a
- matter of consulting the files, amplifying the available evidence, and, where no evidence exists, simply fabricating
- it.
- As sure as I was of my government’s indignation, I was just as sure of the support of my family, and of Lindsay, who
- I was certain would understand— perhaps not forgive, but understand—the context of my recent behavior. I took comfort
- from recalling their love: it helped me cope with the fact that there was nothing left for me to do, no further plans
- in play. I could only extend the belief I had in my family and Lindsay into a perhaps idealistic belief in my fellow
- citizens, a hope that once they’d been made aware of the full scope of American mass surveillance they’d mobilize and
- call for justice. They’d be empowered to seek that justice for themselves, and, in the process, my own destiny would
- be decided. This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.
- WITHIN HOURS AFTER my Guardian video ran, one of Glenn’s regular readers in Hong Kong contacted him and offered to
- put me in touch with Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Man, two local attorneys who then volunteered to take on my case.
- These were the men who helped get me out of the Mira when the press finally located me and besieged the hotel. As a
- diversion, Glenn went
- out the front lobby door, where he was immediately thronged by the cameras
- and mics. Meanwhile, I was bundled out of one of the Mira’s myriad other exits, which connected via a skybridge to a
- mall.
- I like Robert—to have been his client is to be his friend for life. He’s an idealist and a crusader, a tireless
- champion of lost causes. Even more impressive than his lawyering, however, was his creativity in finding safe houses.
- While journalists were scouring every five-star hotel in Hong Kong, he took me to one of the poorest neighborhoods of
- the city and introduced me to some of his other clients, a few of the nearly twelve thousand forgotten refugees in
- Hong Kong—under Chinese pressure, the city has maintained a
- dismal 1 percent approval rate for permanent residency status. I wouldn’t usually name them, but since they have
- bravely identified themselves to the press, I will: Vanessa Mae Bondalian Rodel from the Philippines, and Ajith
- Pushpakumara, Supun Thilina Kellapatha, and Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, all from Sri Lanka.
- These unfailingly kind and generous people came through with charitable grace. The solidarity they showed me was not
- political. It was human, and I will be forever in their debt. They didn’t care who I was, or what dangers they might
- face by helping me, only that there was a person in need. They knew all too well what it meant to be forced into a
- mad escape from mortal threat, having survived ordeals far in excess of anything I’d dealt with and hopefully ever
- will: torture by the military, rape, and sexual abuse. They let an exhausted stranger into their homes—and
- when they saw my face on TV, they didn’t falter. Instead, they smiled, and took the opportunity to reassure me of
- their hospitality.
- Though their resources were limited—Supun, Nadeeka, Vanessa, and two little girls lived in a crumbling, cramped
- apartment smaller than my room at the Mira—they shared everything they had with me, and they shared it
- unstintingly, refusing my offers to reimburse them for the cost of taking me in so vociferously that I had to hide
- money in the room to get them to accept it. They fed me, they let me bathe, they let me sleep, and they protected me.
- I will never be able to explain what it meant to be given so much by those with so little, to be accepted by them
- without judgment as I perched in corners like a stray street cat, skimming the Wi-Fi of distant hotels with a special
- antenna that delighted the children.
- Their welcome and friendship was a gift, for the world to even have such people is a gift, and so it pains me that,
- all these years later, the cases of Ajith, Supun, Nadeeka, and Nadeeka’s daughter are still pending. The admiration I
- feel for these folks is matched only by the resentment I feel toward the bureaucrats in Hong Kong, who continue to
- deny them the basic dignity of asylum. If folks as fundamentally decent and selfless as these aren’t deemed worthy of
- the protection of the state, it’s because the state itself is unworthy. What gives me hope, however, is that just as
- this book was going to press, Vanessa and her daughter received asylum in Canada. I look forward to the day when I
- can visit all of my old Hong Kong friends in their new homes, wherever those may be, and we can make happier memories
- together in freedom.
- On June 14, the US government charged me under the Espionage Act in a
- sealed complaint, and on June 21 they formally requested my extradition. I
- knew it was time to go. It was also my thirtieth birthday.
- Just as the US State Department sent its request, my lawyers received a reply to my appeal for assistance from
- the UN High Commissioner on Refugees: there was nothing that could be done for me. The Hong Kong government,
- under Chinese pressure or not, resisted any UN effort at affording me international protection on its
- territory, and furthermore asserted that it would first have to consider the claims of my country of citizenship. In
- other words, Hong Kong was telling me to go home and deal with the UN from prison. I wasn’t just on my own—I was
- unwelcome. If I was going to leave freely, I had to leave now. I wiped my four laptops completely clean and destroyed
- the cryptographic key, which meant that I could no longer access any of the documents even if compelled. Then I
- packed the few clothes I had and headed out. There was no safety to be found in the “fragrant harbor.”
- 27
- Moscow
- For a coastal country at the northwestern edge of South America, half a globe away from Hong Kong, Ecuador is in the
- middle of everything: not for nothing does its name translate to “The Republic of the Equator.” Most of my fellow
- North Americans would correctly say that it’s a small country, and some might even know enough to call it
- historically oppressed. But they are ignorant if they think it’s a backwater. When Rafael Correa became president in
- 2007, as part of a tide of so-called democratic socialist leaders who swept elections in the late 1990s and early
- 2000s in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela, he initiated a spate of policies intended to oppose and
- reverse the effects of US imperialism in the region. One of these measures, reflecting President Correa’s previous
- career as an economist, was an announcement that Ecuador would consider its national debt illegitimate— technically,
- it would be classified as “odious debt,” which is national debt incurred by a despotic regime or through despotic
- imperialist trade policies. Repayment of odious debt is not enforceable. With this announcement, Correa freed his
- people from decades of economic serfdom, though he made not a few enemies among the class of financiers who direct
- much of US foreign policy.
- Ecuador, at least in 2013, had a hard-earned belief in the institution of political asylum. Most famously, the
- Ecuadorean embassy in London had become, under Correa, the safe haven and redoubt of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. I
- had no desire to live in an embassy, perhaps because I’d already worked in one. Still, my Hong Kong lawyers agreed
- that, given the circumstances, Ecuador seemed to be the most likely country to defend my right to political asylum
- and the least likely to be cowed by the ire of the hegemon that ruled its hemisphere. My growing but ad hoc team of
- lawyers, journalists, technologists, and activists concurred. My hope was to make it to Ecuador proper.
- With my government having decided to charge me under the Espionage Act, I stood accused of a political crime, meaning
- a crime whose victim is the state itself rather than a person. Under international humanitarian law, those accused in
- this way are generally exempt from extradition, because the charge of political criminality is more often than not an
- authoritarian attempt at quashing legitimate dissent. In theory, this means that government whistleblowers should be
- protected against extradition almost everywhere. In practice, of course, this is rarely the case, especially when the
- government
- that perceives itself wronged is America’s—which claims to foster democracy abroad yet secretly maintains fleets of
- privately contracted aircraft dedicated to that form of unlawful extradition known as rendition, or, as everyone else
- calls it, kidnapping.
- The team supporting me had reached out to officials everywhere from Iceland to India, asking if they would respect
- the prohibition against extradition of those accused of political crimes and commit to noninterference in my
- potential travel. It soon became evident that even the most advanced democracies were afraid of incurring the wrath
- of the US government. They were happy to privately express their sympathies, but reluctant to offer even unofficial
- guarantees. The common denominator of the advice that filtered back to me was to land only in non-extradition
- countries, and avoid any route that crossed the airspace of any countries with a record of cooperation with or
- deference to the US military. One official, I think from France, suggested that the odds of my successful transit
- might be significantly increased if I were issued a laissez-passer, a UN-recognized one-way travel document typically
- issued to grant safe passage to refugees crossing borders—but obtaining one of those was easier said than done.
- Enter Sarah Harrison, a journalist and an editor for WikiLeaks. The moment the news broke that an American had
- unmasked a global system of mass surveillance, she had immediately flown to Hong Kong. Through her experience with
- the website and particularly with the fate of Assange, she was poised to offer me the world’s best asylum advice. It
- didn’t hurt that she also had family connections with the legal community in Hong Kong.
- People have long ascribed selfish motives to Assange’s desire to give me aid, but I believe he was genuinely invested
- in one thing above all—helping me evade capture. That doing so involved tweaking the US government was just a bonus
- for him, an ancillary benefit, not the goal. It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even
- bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with
- him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to
- know, a battle he will do anything to win. It’s for this reason that I regard it as too reductive to interpret his
- assistance as merely an instance of scheming or self-promotion. More important to him, I believe, was the opportunity
- to establish a counterexample to the case of the organization’s most famous source, US Army Private Chelsea
- Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to
- whistleblowers everywhere. Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation
- gave him a chance to right a wrong. There was nothing he could have done to save Manning, but he seemed, through
- Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me.
- That said, I was initially wary of Sarah’s involvement. But Laura told me that she was serious, competent, and, most
- important, independent: one of the few at WikiLeaks who dared to openly disagree with Assange. Despite my caution, I
- was in a difficult position, and as Hemingway once wrote, the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.
- Laura informed me of Sarah’s presence in Hong Kong only a day or so before she communicated with me on an encrypted
- channel, which itself was only a day or two before I actually met her in person—and if I’m somewhat loose on my dates
- here, you’ll have to forgive me: one frenetic day bled into the next. Sarah had been a whirlwind, apparently, since
- the moment of her landing in Hong Kong. Though she wasn’t a lawyer, she had deep expertise when it came to what I’ll
- call the interpersonal or subofficial nuances of avoiding extradition. She met with local Hong Kong human rights
- attorneys to seek independent opinions, and I was deeply impressed by both her pace and her circumspection. Her
- connections through WikiLeaks and the extraordinary courage of the Ecuadorean consul in London, Fidel Narváez,
- together produced a laissez-passer in my name. This laissez-passer, which was meant to get me to Ecuador, had been
- issued by the consul on an emergency basis, since we didn’t have time for his home government to formally approve
- it. The moment it was in hand, Sarah hired a van to take us to the airport.
- That’s how I met her—in motion. I’d like to say that I started off our acquaintance by offering my thanks, but
- instead the first thing I said was: “When was the last time you slept?” Sarah looked just as ragged and disheveled as
- I did. She stared out the window, as if trying to recall the answer, but then just shook her head: “I don’t know.”
- We were both developing colds and our careful conversation was punctuated by sneezes and coughs. By her own account,
- she was motivated to support me out of loyalty to her conscience more than to the ideological demands of her
- employer. Certainly her politics seemed shaped less by Assange’s feral opposition to central power than by her own
- conviction that too much of what passed for contemporary journalism served government interests rather than
- challenged them. As we hurtled to the airport, as we checked in, as we cleared passport control for the first of what
- should have been three flights, I kept waiting for her to ask me for something—anything,
- even just for me to make a statement on Assange’s, or the organization’s, behalf. But she never did, although she did
- cheerfully share her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the
- public and the truth. For that instance of straight talk, and for many others, I’ll always admire Sarah’s honesty.
- We were traveling to Quito, Ecuador, via Moscow via Havana via Caracas for a simple reason: it was the only safe
- route available. There were no direct flights to Quito from Hong Kong, and all of the other connecting flights
- traveled through US airspace. While I was concerned about the massive layover in Russia—we’d have almost twenty
- hours before the Havana flight departed—my primary fear was actually the next leg of the journey, because traveling
- from Russia to Cuba meant passing through NATO airspace. I didn’t particularly relish flying over a country like
- Poland, which during my lifetime has done everything to please the US government, including hosting CIA black sites
- where my former IC colleagues subjected prisoners to “enhanced interrogations,” another Bush-era euphemism for
- “torture.”
- I wore my hat down over my eyes to avoid being recognized, and Sarah did the seeing for me. She took my arm and led
- me to the gate, where we waited until boarding. This was the last moment for her to back out, and I told her so. “You
- don’t have to do this,” I said.
- “Do what?”
- “Protect me like this.”
- Sarah stiffened. “Let’s get one thing clear,” she said as we boarded, “I’m not protecting you. No one can protect
- you. What I’m here for is to make it harder for anyone to interfere. To make sure everyone’s on their best behavior.”
- “So you’re my witness,” I said.
- She gave a slight wry smile. “Someone has to be the last person to ever see you alive. It might as well be me.”
- Though the three points where I’d thought we were most likely to get stopped were now behind us (check-in, passport
- control, and the gate), I didn’t feel safe on the plane. I didn’t want to get complacent. I took the window seat and
- Sarah sat next to me, to screen me from the other passengers across the row. After what felt like an eternity, the
- cabin doors were shut, the skybridge pulled away, and finally, we were moving. But just before the plane rolled from
- the tarmac onto the runway, it halted sharply. I was nervous. Pressing the brim of my hat up against the glass, I
- strained to catch the sound
- of sirens or the flashing of blue lights. It felt like I was playing the waiting game all over again—it was a wait
- that wouldn’t end. Until, suddenly, the plane rolled into motion again and took a turn, and I realized that we were
- just far back in the line for takeoff.
- My spirits rose with the wheels, but it was hard to believe I was out of the fire. Once we were airborne, I loosened
- my grip from my thighs and felt an urge to take my lucky Rubik’s Cube out of my bag. But I knew I couldn’t, because
- nothing would make me more conspicuous. Instead, I sat back, pulled my hat down again, and kept my half-open eyes on
- the map on the seatback screen just in front of me, tracking the pixelated route across China, Mongolia,
- and Russia—none of which would be especially amenable to doing any favors for the US State Department. However, there
- was no predicting what the Russian government would do once we landed, beyond hauling us into an inspection so they
- could search through my blank laptops and empty bag. What I hoped might spare us any more invasive treatment was that
- the world was watching and my lawyers and WikiLeaks’ lawyers were aware of our itinerary.
- It was only once we’d entered Chinese airspace that I realized I wouldn’t be able to get any rest until I asked Sarah
- this question explicitly: “Why are you helping me?”
- She flattened out her voice, as if trying to tamp down her passions, and told me that she wanted me to have a better
- outcome. She never said better than what outcome or whose, and I could only take that answer as a sign of her
- discretion and respect.
- I was reassured, enough at least to finally get some sleep.
- WE LANDED AT Sheremetyevo on June 23 for what we assumed would be a twenty-hour layover. It has now dragged on for
- over six years. Exile is an endless layover.
- In the IC, and in the CIA in particular, you get a lot of training on how not to get into trouble at customs. You
- have to think about how you dress, how you act. You have to think about the things in your bag and the things in your
- pockets and the tales they tell about you. Your goal is to be the most boring person in line, with the most perfectly
- forgettable face. But none of that really matters when the name on your passport is all over the news.
- I handed my little blue book to the bearish guy in the passport control
- booth, who scanned it and rifled through its pages. Sarah stood stalwart behind me. I’d made sure to take note of the
- time it took for the people ahead of us in line to clear the booth, and our turn was taking too long. Then the guy
- picked up his phone, grumbled some words in Russian, and almost immediately—far too quickly—two security officers
- in suits approached. They must have been waiting. The officer in front took my little blue book from the guy in the
- booth and leaned in close to me. “There is problem with passport,” he said. “Please, come with.”
- Sarah immediately stepped to my side and unleashed a fast flurry of English: “I’m his legal adviser. Wherever he
- goes, I go. I’m coming with you. According to the—”
- But before she could cite the relevant UN covenants and Genevan codicils, the officer held up his hand and glanced at
- the line. He said, “Okay, sure, okay. You come.”
- I don’t know whether the officer had even understood what she said. He just clearly didn’t want to make a scene.
- The two security officers marched us briskly toward what I assumed was going to be a special room for secondary
- inspection, but instead turned out to be one of Sheremetyevo’s plush business lounges—like a business-class or
- first-class area, with just a few passengers basking obliviously in their luxury seats. Sarah and I were directed
- past them and down a hall into a conference room of sorts, filled with men in gray sitting around a table. There were
- a half-dozen of them or so, with military haircuts. One guy sat separately, holding a pen. He was a notetaker, a kind
- of secretary, I guessed. He had a folder in front of him containing a pad of paper. On the cover of the folder was a
- monocolor insignia that I didn’t need Russian in order to understand: it was a sword and shield, the symbol of
- Russia’s foremost intelligence service, the Federal Security Service (FSB). Like the FBI in the United States, the
- FSB exists not only to spy and investigate but also to make arrests.
- At the center of the table sat an older man in a finer suit than the others, the white of his hair shining like a
- halo of authority. He gestured for Sarah and me to sit opposite him, with an authoritative sweep of the hand and a
- smile that marked him as a seasoned case officer, or whatever the term is for a CO’s Russian equivalent. Intelligence
- services the world over are full of such figures—dedicated actors who will try on different emotions until they get
- the response they want.
- He cleared his throat and gave me, in decent English, what the CIA calls a
- cold pitch, which is basically an offer by a foreign intelligence service that can be summarized as “come and work
- for us.” In return for cooperation, the foreigners dangle favors, which can be anything from stacks of cash to a get-
- out-of-jail-free card for pretty much anything from fraud to murder. The catch, of course, is that the foreigners
- always expect something of equal or better value in exchange. That clear and unambiguous transaction, however, is
- never how it starts. Come to think of it, it’s funny that it’s called a cold pitch, because the person making it
- always starts warm, with grins, levity, and words of sympathy.
- I knew I had to cut him off. If you don’t cut off a foreign intelligence officer right away, it might not matter
- whether you ultimately reject their offer, because they can destroy your reputation simply by leaking a recording of
- you considering it. So as the man apologized for inconveniencing us, I imagined the hidden devices recording us, and
- tried to choose my words carefully.
- “Listen, I understand who you are, and what this is,” I said. “Please let me be clear that I have no intention to
- cooperate with you. I’m not going to cooperate with any intelligence service. I mean no disrespect, but this isn’t
- going to be that kind of meeting. If you want to search my bag, it’s right here,” and I pointed to it under my chair.
- “But I promise you, there’s nothing in it that can help you.”
- As I was speaking, the man’s face changed. He started to act wounded. “No, we would never do that,” he said. “Please
- believe me, we only want to help you.”
- Sarah cleared her throat and jumped in. “That’s quite kind of you, but I
- hope you can understand that all we’d like is to make our connecting flight.”
- For the briefest instant, the man’s feigned sorrow became irritation. “You are his lawyer?”
- “I’m his legal adviser,” Sarah answered.
- The man asked me, “So you are not coming to Russia to be in Russia?” “No.”
- “And so may I ask where you are trying to go? What is your final destination?”
- I said, “Quito, Ecuador, via Caracas, via Havana,” even though I knew that he already knew the answer. He certainly
- had a copy of our itinerary, since Sarah and I had traveled from Hong Kong on Aeroflot, the Russian flagship
- airline.
- Up until this point, he and I had been reading from the same intelligence script, but now the conversation swerved.
- “You haven’t heard?” he said. He stood and looked at me like he was delivering the news of a death in the family. “I
- am afraid to inform you that your passport is invalid.”
- I was so surprised, I just stuttered. “I’m sorry, but I—I don’t believe that.” The man leaned over the table and
- said, “No, it is true. Believe me. It is
- the decision of your minister, John Kerry. Your passport has been canceled by
- your government, and the air services have been instructed not to allow you to travel.”
- I was sure it was a trick, but I wasn’t quite sure to what purpose. “Give us a minute,” I said, but even before I
- could ask, Sarah had snatched her laptop out of her bag and was getting onto the airport Wi-Fi.
- “Of course, you will check,” the man said, and he turned to his colleagues and chatted amiably to them in Russian, as
- if he had all the time in the world.
- It was reported on every site Sarah looked at. After the news had broken that I’d left Hong Kong, the US State
- Department announced that it had canceled my passport. It had revoked my travel document while I was still in midair.
- I was incredulous: my own government had trapped me in Russia. The State Department’s move might merely have been the
- result of bureaucratic proceduralism—when you’re trying to catch a fugitive, putting out an Interpol alert and
- canceling their passport is just standard operating procedure. But in the final accounting it was self-defeating, as
- it handed Russia a massive propaganda victory.
- “It’s true,” said Sarah, with a shake of her head.
- “So what will you do?” the man asked, and he walked around to our side of the table.
- Before I could take the Ecuadorean safe conduct pass out of my pocket, Sarah said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m going to
- have to advise Mr. Snowden not to answer any more questions.”
- The man pointed at me, and said, “You will come.”
- He gestured me to follow him to the far end of the conference room, where there was a window. I went and stood next
- to him and looked. About three or four floors below was street level and the largest media scrum I’ve
- ever seen, scads of reporters wielding cameras and mics.
- It was an impressive show, perhaps choreographed by the FSB, perhaps not, most likely half and half. Almost
- everything in Russia is half and half. But at least now I knew why Sarah and I had been brought to this conference
- room in this lounge.
- I went back to my chair but didn’t sit down again.
- The man turned from the window to face me and said, “Life for a person in your situation can be very difficult
- without friends who can help.” He let the words linger.
- Here it comes, I thought—the direct solicitation.
- He said, “If there is some information, perhaps, some small thing you could share with us?”
- “We’ll be okay on our own,” I said. Sarah stood up next to me.
- The man sighed. He turned to mumble in Russian, and his comrades rose and filed out. “I hope you will not regret your
- decision,” he said to me. Then he gave a slight bow and made his own exit, just as a pair of officials from the
- airport administration entered.
- I demanded to be allowed to go to the gate for the flight to Havana, but they ignored me. I finally reached into my
- pocket and brandished the Ecuadorean safe conduct pass, but they ignored that, too.
- All told, we were trapped in the airport for a biblical forty days and forty nights. Over the course of those days, I
- applied to a total of twenty-seven countries for political asylum. Not a single one of them was willing to stand up
- to American pressure, with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring that they were unable to even
- consider my request until I arrived in their territory—a feat that was impossible. Ultimately, the only head of state
- that proved sympathetic to my cause was Burger King, who never denied me a Whopper (hold the tomato and onion).
- Soon, my presence in the airport became a global spectacle. Eventually the Russians found it a nuisance. On July 1,
- the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, left another airport in Moscow, Vnukovo, in his Bolivian state plane after
- attending the annual GECF, or Gas Exporting Countries Forum. The US government, suspecting that I was onboard due to
- President Morales’s expressions of solidarity, pressured the governments of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal to
- deny the plane access to their airspace, and succeeded in diverting it to Vienna, Austria. There it was grounded,
- searched, and only
- allowed to continue on its journey once no traces of me were found. This was a startling violation of sovereignty,
- which occasioned UN censure. The incident was an affront to Russia, which couldn’t guarantee a visiting head of state
- safe passage home. And it confirmed to Russia and to me that any flight that America suspected me of stowing away on
- ran the same risk of being diverted and grounded.
- The Russian government must have decided that it would be better off without me and the media swarm clogging up the
- country’s major airport. On August 1 it granted me temporary asylum. Sarah and I were allowed to leave Sheremetyevo,
- but eventually only one of us would be heading home. Our time together served to bind us as friends for life. I will
- always be grateful for the weeks she spent by my side, for her integrity and her fortitude.
- 28
- From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills
- As far away from home as I was, my thoughts were consumed with Lindsay. I’ve been wary of telling her story—the story
- of what happened to her once I was gone: the FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the press attention, the online
- harassment, the confusion and pain, the anger and sadness. Finally, I realized that only Lindsay herself should be
- the person to recount that period. No one else has the experience, but more than that: no one else has the right.
- Luckily, Lindsay has kept a diary since adolescence, using it to record her life and draft her art. She has
- graciously agreed to let me include a few pages here. In the entries that follow, all names have been changed (except
- those of family), some typos fixed, and a few redactions made. Otherwise, this is how it was, from the moment that I
- left Hawaii.
- 5.22.2013
- Stopped in at K-Mart to get a lei. Trying to welcome Wendy with proper aloha spirit, but I’m pissed. Ed’s been
- planning his mother’s visit for weeks. He’s the one who invited her. I was hoping he’d be there when I woke up this
- morning. On the drive back to Waipahu from the airport Wendy was worried. She’s not used to him having to go away on
- a moment’s notice. I tried to tell her this was usual. But it was usual when we lived overseas, not in Hawaii, and I
- can’t remember any other time that Ed was away and wasn’t in touch. We went to a nice dinner to distract ourselves
- and Wendy talked about how she thought Ed was on medical leave. It didn’t make any sense to her that he’d be called
- away for work while on medical leave. The moment we got home Wendy went to bed. I checked my phone and found I had
- three missed calls from an unknown number, and one missed call from a long foreign number, no voicemails. I Googled
- the long foreign number. Ed must be in Hong Kong.
- 5.24.2013
- Wendy was home all day alone, thoughts just running circles in her brain. I feel bad for her and can only console
- myself by thinking how Ed would handle having to entertain my own mother by himself. Over dinner, Wendy
- kept asking me about Ed’s health, which I guess is understandable, given her own history of epilepsy. She said she’s
- worried that he had another seizure, and then she started crying, and then I started crying. I’m just realizing that
- I’m worried too. But instead of epilepsy, I’m thinking, What if he’s off having an affair? Who is she? Just try and
- get through this
- visit and have a good time. Take a puddle jumper to the Big Island. To
- Kilauea, the volcano, as planned. Once Wendy goes back, reassess things.
- 6.3.2013
- Brought Wendy to the airport, to fly back to MD. She didn’t want to go back, but she has work. I took her as far as I
- could go and hugged her. I didn’t want to let go of the hug. Then she got in line for security. Came home to find
- Ed’s Skype status has changed to: “Sorry but it had to be done.” I don’t know when he changed it. Could’ve been
- today, could’ve been last month. I just checked on Skype and happened to notice it, and I’m crazy enough to think
- he’s sending me a message.
- 6.7.2013
- Woke up to a call from NSA Special Agent Megan Smith asking me to call her back about Ed. Still feeling sick with
- fever. I had to drop off my car at the autobody shop and Tod gave me a ride back on his Ducati. When we pulled onto
- the street I saw a white gov vehicle in the driveway and gov agents talking to our neighbors. I’ve never even met the
- neighbors. I don’t know why but my first instinct was to tell Tod to keep driving. I ducked my head down to pretend
- to look for something in my purse. We went to Starbucks, where Tod pointed out a newspaper, something about the NSA.
- I tried to read the headlines but my paranoia just ran wild. Is that why the white SUV was in my driveway? Is that
- the same SUV in the parking lot outside this Starbucks? Should I even be writing this stuff down? Went home again and
- the SUV was gone. Took some meds and realized I hadn’t eaten. In the middle of lunch, cops showed up at the kitchen
- window. Through the window, I could hear them radioing that someone was inside the residence. By someone they meant
- me. I opened the front door to two agents and an HPD1 officer. They were frightening. The HPD officer searched
- through the house as Agent Smith asked me about Ed, who’d been due back at work on May 31. The HPD officer said it
- was suspicious when a workplace reported someone missing before the person’s spouse or girlfriend did. He was looking
- at me like I killed Ed. He was looking around the house for his body. Agent Smith asked if she could see all the
- computers in the house and that made me angry. I told her she could get a warrant. They left the house but camped out
- on the corner.
- San Diego, 6.8.2013
- I got a little afraid that TSA wouldn’t let me leave the island. The TVs in the airport were all full of news about
- the NSA. Once onboard the plane, I
- emailed Agent Smith and the HPD Missing Persons’ detective that my grandma was having open heart surgery, requiring
- me to be off-island for a few weeks. The surgery isn’t scheduled until the end of the month and it’s in Florida, not
- San Diego, but this was the only excuse I could think of for getting to the mainland. It was a better excuse than
- saying, I just need to be with my best friend Sandra and also it’s her bday. When the wheels left the ground I fell
- into a momentary coma of relief. When I landed, I had a raging fever. Sandra picked me up. I hadn’t told her anything
- because my paranoia was off the charts, but she could tell that something was up, that I wasn’t just visiting her for
- her bday. She asked me if Ed and I had broken up. I answered maybe.
- 6.9.2013
- I got a phone call from Tiffany. She asked how I was doing and said she was worried about me. I didn’t understand.
- She got quiet. Then she asked if I’d seen the news. She told me Ed had made a video and was on the homepage of the
- Huffington Post. Sandra hooked up her laptop to the flatscreen. I calmly waited for the 12-minute YouTube video to
- load. And then there he was. Real. Alive. I was shocked. He looked thin, but he sounded like his old self. The old
- Ed, confident and strong. Like how he was before this last tough year. This was the man I loved, not the cold distant
- ghost I’d recently been living with. Sandra hugged me and I didn’t know what to say. We stood in silence. We drove
- out to Sandra’s bday bbq, at her cousins’ house on this pretty hill south of the city, right on the Mexican border.
- Gorgeous place and I could barely see any of it. I was shutting down. Not knowing how to even begin to parse the
- situation. We arrived to friendly faces that had no clue what I was going through on the inside. Ed, what have you
- done? How can you come back from this? I was barely present for all the party small talk. My phone was blowing up
- with calls and texts. Dad. Mom. Wendy. Driving back up to San Diego from the bbq I drove Sandra’s cousin’s Durango,
- which Sandra needs this week to move. As we drove, a black gov SUV followed us and a police car pulled Sandra’s car
- over, which was the car I’d come in. I just kept driving the Durango, hoping I knew where I was going because
- my phone was already dead from all the calls.
- 6.10.2013
- I knew Eileen2 was important in local politics, but I didn’t know she was also a fucking gangster. She’s been taking
- care of everything. While we were waiting for her contacts to recommend a lawyer, I got a call from the
- FBI. An agent named Chuck Landowski, who asked me what I was doing in San Diego. Eileen told me to hang up. The agent
- called back and I picked up, even though Eileen said I shouldn’t. Agent Chuck said he didn’t want to show up at the
- house unannounced, so he was just calling “out of courtesy” to tell us that agents were coming. This sent Eileen into
- overdrive. She’s so goddamned tough, it’s amazing. She had me leave my phone at the house and we took her car and
- drove around to think. Eileen got a text from a friend of hers recommending a lawyer, a guy named Jerry Farber, and
- she handed me her phone and had me call him. A secretary picked up and I told her that my name was Lindsay Mills and
- I was the girlfriend of Edward Snowden and needed representation. The secretary said, “Oh, let me put you right
- through.” It was funny to hear the recognition in her voice.
- Jerry picked up the phone and asked how he could help. I told him about the FBI calls and he asked for the agent’s
- name, so he could talk to the feds. While we waited to hear back from Jerry, Eileen suggested we go get burner
- phones, one to use with family and friends, one to use with Jerry. After the phones, Eileen asked which bank I kept
- my money at. We drove to the nearest branch and she had me withdraw all of my money immediately in case the feds
- froze my accounts. I went and took out all my life savings, split between cashier’s checks and cash. Eileen insisted
- I split the money like that and I just followed her instructions. The bank manager asked me what I needed all that
- cash for and I said, “Life.” I really wanted to say STFU, but I decided if I was polite I’d be forgettable. I was
- concerned that people were going to recognize me since they were showing my face alongside Ed’s on the news. When we
- got out of the bank I asked Eileen how she’d become such an expert at what to do when you’re in trouble. She told me,
- very chill, “You get to know these things, as a woman. Like, you always take the money out of the bank, when you’re
- getting a divorce.” We got some Vietnamese takeout and took it back to Eileen’s house and ate it on the floor in the
- upstairs hallway. Eileen and Sandra plugged in their hairdryers and kept them blowing to make noise, as we whispered
- to each other, just in case they were listening in on us.
- Lawyer Jerry called and said we had to meet with the FBI today. Eileen drove us to his office, and on the way she
- noticed we were being followed. It made no sense. We were going to a meeting to talk to the feds but also the feds
- were behind us, two SUVs and a Honda Accord without plates. Eileen got the idea that maybe they weren’t the FBI. She
- thought that
- maybe they were some other agency or even a foreign government, trying to kidnap me. She started driving fast and
- erratically, trying to lose them, but every traffic light was turning red just when we approached it. I told her that
- she was being crazy, she had to slow down. There was a plainclothes agent by the door of Jerry’s building, he had gov
- written all over his face. We went up in the elevator and when the door opened, three men were waiting: two of them
- were agents, one of them was Jerry. He was the only man who shook hands with me. Jerry told Eileen that she couldn’t
- come with us to the conference room. He’d call her when we were finished. Eileen insisted that she’d wait. She sat in
- the lobby with an expression on her face like she was ready to wait for a million years. On the way to the conference
- room Jerry took me aside and said he’d negotiated “limited immunity,” which I said was pretty meaningless, and he
- didn’t disagree. He told me never to lie, and that when I didn’t know what to say, I should say IDK and let him talk.
- Agent Mike had a grin that was a bit too kind, while Agent Leland kept looking at me like I was an experiment and he
- was studying my reactions. Both of them creeped me out. They started with questions about me that were so basic, it
- was like they were just trying to show me that they already knew everything about me. Of course they did. That was
- Ed’s point. The gov always knows everything. They had me talk about the last two months, twice, and then when I was
- finished with the “timeline,” Agent Mike asked me to start all over again from the beginning. I said, “The beginning
- of what?” He said, “Tell me how you met.”
- 6.11.2013
- Coming out of the interrogation exhausted, late at night, with days of interrogations ahead of me. They wouldn’t tell
- me how many exactly. Eileen drove us to meet Sandra for dinner at some diner, and as we left Downtown we noticed we
- still had our tails. Eileen tried to lose them by speeding and making illegal U-turns again, and I begged her to
- stop. I thought her driving like that just made me look worse. It made me look suspicious. But Eileen is a stubborn
- mama bear. In the parking lot of the diner, Eileen banged on the windows of the surveillance vehicles and yelled that
- I was cooperating, so there was no reason for them to be following. It was a little embarrassing, like when your
- mother sticks up for you in school, but mostly I was just in awe. The nerve to go up to a vehicle with federal agents
- and tell them off. Sandra was at a table in the back and we ordered and talked about “media exposure.” I was all over
- the news.
- Halfway through dinner, two men walked up to our table. One tall guy in a baseball hat, who had braces, and his
- partner who was dressed like a guy going clubbing. The tall guy identified himself as Agent Chuck, the agent who’d
- called me before. He asked to speak with me about “the driving behavior” once we’d finished eating. The moment he
- said that we decided we were finished. The agents were out in front of the diner. Agent Chuck showed his badge and
- told me that his main goal was my protection. He said there could be threats against my life. He tapped his jacket
- and said if there was any danger he would take care of it, because he was on “the armed team.” It was all such macho
- posturing or an attempt to get me to trust him, by putting me in a vulnerable position. He went on to say I was going
- to be surveilled/followed by the FBI 24/7, for the foreseeable future, and the reckless driving Eileen was doing
- would not be tolerated. He said agents are never supposed to talk to their assignments but he felt that, given the
- circumstances, he had to “take the team in this direction for everyone’s safety.” He handed me a business card with
- his contact info and said he’d be parked just outside Eileen’s house all night, and I should call him if I needed
- him, or needed anything, for any reason. He told me I was free to go anywhere (you’re damn right, I thought), but
- that whenever I planned to go anywhere, I should text him. He said, “Open communication will make everything easier.”
- He said, “If you give us a heads-up, you’ll be that much safer, I promise.”
- 6.16.2013–6.18.2013
- Haven’t written for days. I’m so angry that I have to take a deep breath and figure out who and what exactly I’m
- angry at, because it all just blurs together. Fucking Feds! Exhausting interrogations where they treat me like I’m
- guilty and follow me everywhere, but what’s worse is that they’ve broken my routine. Usually I’d tear off into the
- woods and shoot or write, but now I have a surveillance team audience wherever I go. It’s like by taking away my
- energy and time and desire to write, they took away the last little bit of privacy I had. I need to remember
- everything that’s happened. First they had me bring in my laptop and copied the hard drive. They probably put a bunch
- of bugs on it, too. Then they had copies of all my emails and chats printed out, and they were reading me things I
- wrote to Ed and things Ed wrote to me and demanding I explain them. The FBI thinks that everything’s a code. And
- sure, in a vacuum anyone’s messages look strange. But this is just how people who’ve been together for eight years
- communicate! They act like they’ve never been in a relationship! They were asking questions to try to emotionally
- exhaust me so that when
- we returned to “the timeline,” my answers would change. They won’t accept I know nothing. But still, we keep
- returning to “the timeline,” now with transcripts of all my emails and chats and my online calendar printed out in
- front of us.
- I would expect that gov guys would understand that Ed was always secretive about his work and I had to accept this
- secrecy to be with him, but they don’t. They refuse to. After a while, I just broke down in tears, so the session
- ended early. Agent Mike and Agent Leland offered to give me a ride back to Eileen’s, and before I left, Jerry took me
- aside and said that the FBI seemed sympathetic. “They seem to have taken a liking to you, especially Mike.” He told
- me to be careful, though, about being too casual on the ride home. “Don’t answer any of their questions.” The moment
- we drove away Mike chimed in with, “I’m sure Jerry said not to answer any questions, but I only have a couple.” Once
- Mike got talking, he told me that the FBI office in San Diego had a bet. Apparently, the agents had a pool going to
- bet how long it would be before the media figured out my location. The winner would get a free martini. Later, Sandra
- said she had her doubts. “Knowing men,” she said, “the bet’s about something else.”
- 6.19.2013–6.20.2013
- While the rest of the country is coming to grips with the fact that their privacy is being violated, mine’s being
- stripped from me on a whole new level. Both things thanks to Ed. I hate sending Chuck “departure updates,” and then I
- hate myself that I don’t have the nerve not to send them. The worst was this one night sending a “departure update”
- that I’m leaving to meet Sandra and then getting lost on the way but not wanting to stop and ask the agents following
- me for help, so I was just leading them around in circles. I got to thinking maybe they’d bugged Eileen’s car, so I
- began talking aloud in the car, thinking maybe they could hear me. I wasn’t talking, I was cursing them out. I had to
- pay Jerry, and after I did all I could think about was all the tax money being wasted on just following me to my
- lawyer’s office and the gym. After the first two days of meetings I’d already run out of the only decent clothes I
- had, so I went to Macy’s. Agents followed me around the women’s department. I wondered if they’d come into the
- fitting room, too, and tell me that looks good, that doesn’t, green’s not your color. At the fitting room’s entrance
- was a TV blaring the news and I froze when the announcer said “Edward Snowden’s girlfriend.” I fled the stall, and
- stood in front of the screen. Watching as my photos flicked by. I whipped out my phone and made the mistake of
- Googling myself. So many comments labeling me a stripper or whore. None of this
- is me. Just like the feds, they had already decided who I was.
- 6.22.2013–6.24.2013
- Interrogations over, for now. But a tail still following. I left the house, happy to get back in the air at this
- local aerial silks studio. Made it to the studio and couldn’t find street parking, but my tail did. He had to leave
- his spot when I drove out of range, so I doubled back and stole his spot. Had a phone call with Wendy, where we both
- said that however badly Ed hurt us, he did the right thing by trying to ensure that when he was gone, Wendy and I
- were together. That’s why he’d invited her and been so insistent about her coming. He’d wanted us to be together in
- Hawaii when he went public, so that we could keep each other company and give each other strength and comfort. It’s
- so hard to be angry at someone you love. And even harder to be angry at someone you love and respect for doing the
- right thing. Wendy and I were both in tears and then we both went quiet. I think we had the same thought, at the same
- time. How can we talk like normal people when they’re eavesdropping on all our calls?
- 6.25.2013
- LAX to HNL. Wore the copper-colored wig to the airport, through security, and throughout the flight. Sandra
- came with. We grabbed a gross preflight lunch in the food court. More TVs tuned to CNN, still showing Ed, and still
- surreal, which is the new real for everyone, I think. Got a text from Agent Mike, telling me and Sandra to come see
- him at Gate 73. Really? He came up to LA from San Diego? Gate 73 was roped off and empty. Mike was sitting waiting
- for us on a row of chairs. He crossed his legs and showed us he was wearing an ankle pistol. More macho bullshit
- intimidation. He had paperwork for me to sign in order for the FBI to release Ed’s car keys to me in Hawaii. He said
- two agents would be waiting for us in Honolulu with the key. Other agents would be with us on the flight. He
- apologized that he wasn’t coming personally. Ugh.
- 6.29.2013
- Been packing the house for days now with only minor interruptions from the FBI, coming by with more forms to sign.
- It’s torture, going through everything. Finding all these little things that remind me of him. I’m like a crazy
- woman, cleaning up, and then just gazing at his side of the bed. More often, though, I find what’s missing.
- What the FBI took. Technology, yes, but also books. What they left behind were footprints, scuff marks on the
- walls, and dust.
- 6.30.2013
- Waipahu yard sale. Three men responded to Sandra’s “take it all, best offer” Craigslisting. They showed up to rummage
- through Ed’s life, his piano, guitar, and weight set. Anything I couldn’t bear to live with or afford to ship to the
- mainland. The men filled their pickup with as much as they could, and then came back for a second load. To my
- surprise, and I think to Sandra’s, too, I wasn’t too bothered by their scavenging. But the moment they were gone, the
- second time, I lost it.
- 7.2.2013
- Everything got shipped today, except the futons and couch, which I’m just ditching. All that was left of Ed’s stuff
- after the FBI raided the house fit into one small cardboard box. Some photos and his clothes, lots of mismatched
- socks. Nothing that could be used as evidence in court, just evidence of our life together. Sandra brought some
- lighter fluid and brought the metal trash can back around to the lanai. I dumped all of Ed’s stuff, the photos and
- clothes, inside, and lit a book of matches on fire and tossed it in. Sandra and I sat around while it burned and the
- smoke rose into the sky. The glow and the smoke reminded me of the trip I took with Wendy to Kilauea, the volcano on
- the Big Island. That was just over a month ago, but it feels like years in the past. How could we have known that our
- own lives were about to erupt? That Volcano Ed was going to destroy everything? But I remember the guide at Kilauea
- saying that volcanoes are only destructive in the short term. In the long term, they move the world. They create
- islands, cool the planet, and enrich the soil. Their lava flows uncontrolled and then cools and hardens. The ash they
- shoot into the air sprinkles down as minerals, which fertilize the earth and make new life grow.
- 29
- Love and Exile
- If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or
- investigate further and typed it into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way
- suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
- But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out
- that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether
- you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit
- card.
- All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through
- language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to
- connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such as your email, your phone,
- and the IP address of your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across
- every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to
- record and store for perpetuity the data of your life.
- And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to
- passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning
- the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or “exploits,” they developed the ability to
- gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device,
- including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern
- machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you
- turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up
- your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets them
- positively identify you.
- This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation—the final product of a political and professional class
- that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has
- now become an open book.
- IF MASS SURVEILLANCE was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life, then I wanted the dangers it posed, and
- the damage it had already done, to be a constant presence too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to make
- this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world, could not ignore.In the years since 2013,
- awareness has grown, both in scope
- and subtlety. But in this social media age, we have always to remind
- ourselves: awareness alone is not enough.
- In America, the initial press reports on the disclosures started a “national conversation,” as President Obama
- himself conceded. While I appreciated the sentiment, I remember wishing that he had noted that what made it
- “national,” what made it a “conversation,” was that for the first time the American public was informed enough to
- have a voice.
- The revelations of 2013 particularly roused Congress, both houses of which launched multiple investigations into NSA
- abuses. Those investigations concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the nature and efficacy of its
- mass surveillance programs, even to the most highly cleared Intelligence Committee legislators.
- In 2015, a federal court of appeals ruled in the matter of ACLU v. Clapper, a suit challenging the legality of the
- NSA’s phone records collection program. The court ruled that the NSA’s program had violated even the loose standards
- of the Patriot Act and, moreover, was most probably unconstitutional. The ruling focused on the NSA’s interpretation
- of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government to demand from third parties “any tangible thing”
- that it deemed “relevant” to foreign intelligence and terror investigations. In the court’s opinion, the government’s
- definition of “relevant” was so expansive as to be virtually meaningless. To call some collected data “relevant”
- merely because it might become relevant at some amorphous point in the future was “unprecedented and unwarranted.”
- The court’s refusal to accept the government’s definition caused not a few legal scholars to interpret the ruling as
- casting doubt on the legitimacy of all government bulk-collection programs predicated on this doctrine of future
- relevance. In the wake of this opinion, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which amended Section 215 to explicitly
- prohibit the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Going forward, those records would remain where they
- originally had been, in the private control of the telecoms, and the government would have to formally request
- specific ones with a FISC warrant
- in hand if it wanted to access them.
- ACLU v. Clapper was a notable victory, to be sure. A crucial precedent was set. The court declared that the American
- public had standing: American citizens had the right to stand in a court of law and challenge the
- government’s officially secret system of mass surveillance. But as the numerous other cases that resulted from the
- disclosures continue to wend their slow and deliberate ways through the courts, it becomes ever clearer to me that
- the American legal resistance to mass surveillance was just the beta phase of what has to be an international
- opposition movement, fully implemented across both governments and private sector.
- The reaction of technocapitalists to the disclosures was immediate and forceful, proving once again that with extreme
- hazards come unlikely allies. The documents revealed an NSA so determined to pursue any and all information it
- perceived as being deliberately kept from it that it had undermined the basic encryption protocols of the Internet—
- making citizens’ financial and medical records, for example, more vulnerable, and in the process harming
- businesses that relied on their customers entrusting them with such sensitive data. In response, Apple adopted strong
- default encryption for its iPhones and iPads, and Google followed suit for its Android products and Chromebooks. But
- perhaps the most important private-sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set about switching
- their website platforms, replacing http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) with the encrypted https (the S signifies
- security), which helps prevent third-party interception of Web traffic. The year 2016 was a landmark in tech history,
- the first year since the invention of the Internet that more Web traffic was encrypted than unencrypted.
- The Internet is certainly more secure now than it was in 2013, especially given the sudden global recognition of the
- need for encrypted tools and apps. I’ve been involved with the design and creation of a few of these myself, through
- my work heading the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering
- public-interest journalism in the new millennium. A major part of the organization’s brief is to preserve and
- strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights through the development of encryption technologies. To that end, the FPF
- financially supports Signal, an encrypted texting and calling platform created by Open Whisper Systems, and develops
- SecureDrop (originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz), an open-source submission system that allows media
- organizations to securely accept documents from anonymous whistleblowers and other sources. Today, SecureDrop is
- available in ten languages and used
- by more than seventy media organizations around the world, including the
- New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New Yorker.
- In a perfect world, which is to say in a world that doesn’t exist, just laws would make these tools obsolete. But in
- the only world we have, they have never been more necessary. A change in the law is infinitely more difficult to
- achieve than a change in a technological standard, and as long as legal innovation lags behind technological
- innovation institutions will seek to abuse that disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to
- independent, open- source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties
- protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.
- In my current situation, I’m constantly reminded of the fact that the law is country-specific, whereas technology is
- not. Every nation has its own legal code but the same computer code. Technology crosses borders and carries almost
- every passport. As the years go by, it has become increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming
- the surveillance regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of
- my exile, but an encrypted smartphone might.
- INTERNATIONALLY, THE DISCLOSURES helped to revive debates about surveillance in places with long histories of
- abuses. The countries whose citizenries were most opposed to American mass surveillance were those whose governments
- had most cooperated with it, from the Five Eyes nations (especially the UK, whose GCHQ remains the NSA’s primary
- partner) to
- nations of the European Union. Germany, which has done much to reckon
- with its Nazi and Communist past, provides the primary example of this disjunction. Its citizens and legislators were
- appalled to learn that the NSA was surveilling German communications and had even targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
- smartphone. At the same time, the BND, Germany’s premier intelligence agency, had collaborated with the NSA in
- numerous operations, even carrying out certain proxy surveillance initiatives that the NSA was unable or unwilling to
- undertake on its own.
- Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit.
- Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as
- anathema to democracy has effectively ceased to be a democracy. Such cognitive dissonance on a geopolitical
- scale has helped to bring individual privacy concerns back into the international dialogue within the context of
- human rights.
- For the first time since the end of World War II, liberal democratic governments throughout the world were discussing
- privacy as the natural, inborn right of every man, woman, and child. In doing so they were harking back to the 1948
- UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article
- 12 states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor
- to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such
- interference or attacks.” Like all UN declarations, this aspirational document was never enforceable, but it had
- been intended to inculcate a new basis for transnational civil liberties in a world that had just survived
- nuclear atrocities and attempted genocides and was facing an unprecedented surfeit of refugees and the stateless.
- The EU, still under the sway of this postwar universalist idealism, now became the first transnational body to
- put these principles into practice, establishing a new directive that seeks to standardize whistleblower
- protections across its member states, along with a standardized legal framework for privacy protection. In 2016, the
- EU Parliament passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the most significant effort yet made to forestall
- the incursions of technological hegemony—which the EU tends to regard, not unfairly, as an extension of American
- hegemony.
- The GDPR treats the citizens of the European Union, whom it calls “natural persons,” as also being “data
- subjects”—that is, people who generate personally identifiable data. In the US, data is usually regarded as
- the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of the person it represents, which
- allows it to treat our data subjecthood as deserving of civil liberties protections.
- The GDPR is undoubtedly a major legal advance, but even its transnationalism is too parochial: the Internet is
- global. Our natural personhood will never be legally synonymous with our data subjecthood, not least because the
- former lives in one place at a time while the latter lives in many places simultaneously.
- Today, no matter who you are, or where you are, bodily, physically, you are also elsewhere, abroad—multiple selves
- wandering along the signal paths, with no country to call your own, and yet beholden to the laws of every country
- through which you pass. The records of a life lived in Geneva dwell in the Beltway. The photos of a wedding in Tokyo
- are on a honeymoon in Sydney. The videos of a funeral in Varanasi are up on Apple’s iCloud, which
- is partially located in my home state of North Carolina and partially scattered across the partner servers of Amazon,
- Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, throughout the EU, UK, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China.
- Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.
- We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies detect us in utero, and our data will continue to
- proliferate even after we die. Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep,
- comprise just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives
- —most of it unconsciously, or without our consent—by business and government surveillance. We are the first people in
- the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that
- our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these
- records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.
- Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new generation. Not yet born on 9/11, they have
- spent their entire lives under the omnipresent specter of this surveillance. These young people who have
- known no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s their political creativity and
- technological ingenuity that give me hope.
- Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able to do so. Then they, and their
- children, will be trapped too—each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one,
- subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not
- just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.
- Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the
- answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of
- ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to
- come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. Once you
- go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that
- its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website
- that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t
- offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
- We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used
- to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely
- the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not the honest collective
- conversation that’s necessary. We can’t let the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our
- citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what
- kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our
- financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often
- assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify
- us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image
- of the technology that seeks its control.
- Of course, all of the above has already happened.
- EXILE: NOT A day has passed since August 1, 2013, in which I don’t recall that “exile” was what my teenage self used
- to call getting booted off-line. The Wi- Fi died? Exile. I’m out of signal range? Exile. The self who used to say
- that now seems so young to me. He seems so distant.
- When people ask me what my life is like now, I tend to answer that it’s a lot like theirs in that I spend a lot of
- time in front of the computer—reading, writing, interacting. From what the press likes to describe as an “undisclosed
- location”—which is really just whatever two-bedroom apartment in Moscow I happen to be renting—I beam myself onto
- stages around the world, speaking about the protection of civil liberties in the digital age to audiences
- of students, scholars, lawmakers, and technologists.
- Some days I take virtual meetings with my fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, or talk with
- my European legal team, led by Wolfgang Kaleck, at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Other
- days, I just pick up some Burger King—I know where my loyalties lie—and play games I have to pirate because I can no
- longer use credit cards. One fixture of my existence is my daily check-in with my American lawyer, confidant, and
- all-around consigliere Ben Wizner at the ACLU, who has been my guide to the world as it is and puts up with my
- musings about the world as it should be.
- That’s my life. It got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of
- 2014, when Lindsay came to visit—the first time I’d seen her since Hawaii. I tried not to expect too much, because I
- knew I didn’t deserve the chance; the only thing I deserved was a slap in the face. But when I opened the door, she
- placed her hand on my cheek and I told her I loved her.
- “Hush,” she said, “I know.”
- We held each other in silence, each breath like a pledge to make up for lost time.
- From that moment, my world was hers. Previously, I’d been content to hang around indoors—indeed, that was my
- preference before I was in Russia
- —but Lindsay was insistent: she’d never been to Russia and now we were going to be tourists together.
- My Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who helped me get asylum in the country—he was the only lawyer who had the
- foresight to show up at the airport with a translator—is a cultured and resourceful man, and he proved as adept at
- obtaining last-minute tickets to the opera as he is at navigating my legal issues. He helped arrange two box seats at
- the Bolshoi Theater, so Lindsay and I got dressed and went, though I have to admit I was wary. There were so many
- people, all packed so tightly into a hall. Lindsay could sense my growing unease. As the lights dimmed and the
- curtain rose, she leaned over, nudged me in the ribs, and whispered, “None of these people are here for you. They’re
- here for this.”
- Lindsay and I also spent time at some of Moscow’s museums. The Tretyakov Gallery contains one of the world’s richest
- collection of Russian Orthodox icon paintings. The artists who made these paintings for the Church were essentially
- contractors, I thought, and so were typically not allowed to sign their names to their handiwork, or preferred
- not to. The time and tradition that fostered these works was not given much to recognizing individual
- achievement. As Lindsay and I stood in front of one of the icons, a young tourist, a teenage girl, suddenly stepped
- between us. This wasn’t the first time I was recognized in public, but given Lindsay’s presence, it
- certainly threatened to be the most headline-worthy. In German-accented English, the girl asked whether she could
- take a selfie with us. I’m not sure what explains my reaction—maybe it was this German girl’s shy and polite way of
- asking, or maybe it was Lindsay’s always mood-improving, live-and- let-live presence—but without hesitation, for
- once, I agreed. Lindsay smiled as the girl posed between us and took a photo. Then, after a few sweet words of
- support, she departed.
- I dragged Lindsay out of the museum a moment later. I was afraid that if the girl posted the photo to social media we
- could be just minutes away from unwanted attention. I feel foolish now for thinking that. I kept nervously checking
- online, but the photo didn’t appear. Not that day, and not the day after. As far as I can tell, it was never shared—
- just kept as a private memory of a personal moment.
- WHENEVER I GO outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get rid of my beard, maybe I wear different
- glasses. I never liked the cold until I realized that a hat and scarf provide the world’s most convenient and
- inconspicuous anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk, and, contrary to the sage advice of my mother, I
- look away from traffic when
- crossing the street, which is why I’ve never been caught on any of the car
- dashcams that are ubiquitous here. Passing buildings equipped with CCTV I keep my head down, so that no one will see
- me as I’m usually seen online— head-on. I used to worry about the bus and metro, but nowadays everybody’s too busy
- staring at their phones to give me a second glance. If I take a cab, I’ll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a
- few blocks away from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks away from where I’m going.
- Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even
- blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.
- Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is more patient and generous and kind.
- Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here three years ago, and two years ago today, we
- married.
- NOTES
- 1. Hawaii Police Department
- 2. Sandra’s mother
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- In May 2013, as I sat in that hotel room in Hong Kong wondering whether any journalists would show up to meet me, I’d
- never felt more alone. Six years later, I find myself in quite the opposite situation, having been
- welcomed into an extraordinary and ever-expanding global tribe of journalists, lawyers,
- technologists, and human rights advocates to whom I owe an incalculable debt. At the conclusion of a book, it’s
- traditional for an author to thank the people who helped make the book possible, and I certainly intend to do that
- here, but given the circumstances I’d be remiss if I didn’t also thank the people who have helped make my life
- possible—by advocating for my freedom and, especially, by working ceaselessly and selflessly to protect our open
- societies as well as the technologies that have brought us, and that bring everyone, together.
- Over the last nine months, Joshua Cohen has taken me to writing school, helping to transform my rambling
- reminiscences and capsule manifestos into a book that I hope he can be proud of.
- Chris Parris-Lamb proved himself a shrewd and patient agent, while Sam Nicholson provided astute and clarifying edits
- and support, as did the entire team at Metropolitan, from Gillian Blake to Sara Bershtel, Riva Hocherman, and Grigory
- Tovbis.
- The success of this team is a testament to its members’ talents, and to the talents of the man who assembled it—Ben
- Wizner, my lawyer, and, I am honored to say, my friend.
- In the same vein, I’d like to thank my international team of lawyers who have worked tirelessly to keep me free. I
- would also like to thank Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s director, who embraced my cause at a time of considerable
- political risk for the organization, along with the other ACLU staff who have helped me throughout the years,
- including Bennett Stein, Nicola Morrow, Noa Yachot, and Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
- Additionally, I’d like to acknowledge the work of Bob Walker, Jan Tavitian, and their team at the American Program
- Bureau, who have allowed me to make a living by spreading my message to new audiences around the world.
- Trevor Timm and my fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation have provided the space and resources
- for me to return to my true passion, engineering for social good. I am especially grateful to our CTO
- Micah Lee, former FPF operations manager Emmanuel Morales, and current FPF board member Daniel Ellsberg, who has
- given the world the model of his rectitude, and given me the warmth and candor of his friendship.
- This book was written using free and open-source software. I would like to thank the Qubes Project, the Tor
- Project, and the Free Software Foundation.
- My earliest intimations of what it was like to write against deadline came from the masters, Glenn Greenwald, Laura
- Poitras, Ewen Macaskill, and Bart Gellman, whose professionalism is informed by a passionate integrity. Having been
- edited now myself, I have gained a new appreciation of their editors, who refused to be intimidated and took the
- risks that gave meaning to their principles.
- My deepest gratitude is reserved for Sarah Harrison.
- And my heart belongs to my family, extended and immediate—to my father, Lon, to my mother, Wendy, and to my brilliant
- sister, Jessica.
- The only way I can end this book is the way I began it: with a dedication to Lindsay, whose love makes life out of
- exile.
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- Edward Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and grew up in the shadow of Fort Meade. A systems
- engineer by training, he served as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency and worked as a contractor for
- the National Security Agency. He has received numerous awards for his public service, including the Right Livelihood
- Award, the German Whistleblower Prize, the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal from
- the International League of Human Rights. Currently, he serves as president of the board of directors of the Freedom
- of the Press Foundation.
- Title Page Dedication Preface
- PART ONE
- CONTENTS
- 1. Looking Through the Window
- 2. The Invisible Wall
- 3. Beltway Boy
- 4. American Online
- 5. Hacking
- 6. Incomplete
- 7. 9/11
- 8. 9/12
- 9. X-Rays
- 10. Cleared and in Love
- PART TWO
- 11. The System
- 12. Homo contractus
- 13. Indoc
- 14. The Count of the Hill
- 15. Geneva
- 16. Tokyo
- 17. Home on the Cloud
- 18. On the Couch
- PART THREE
- 19. The Tunnel
- 20. Heartbeat
- 21. Whistleblowing
- 22. Fourth Estate
- 23. Read, Write, Execute
- 24. Encrypt
- 25. The Boy
- 26. Hong Kong
- 27. Moscow
- 28. From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills
- 29. Love and Exile Notes Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright
- First published 2019 by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC First published in the UK 2019 by Macmillan
- This electronic edition first published in the UK 2019 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan 20 New Wharf Road,
- London N1 9RR Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com
- ISBN 978-1-5290-3567-4
- Copyright © Edward Snowden 2019. Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral Jacket photograph © Platon
- The right of Edward Snowden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with
- the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
- You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of
- it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
- without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this
- publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
- A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
- Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author
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