BFPyL6HA

1PERMANENT
2RECORD
3
4EDWARD SNOWDEN
5
6MACMILLAN
7Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page
8To L
9Preface
10
11My name is Edward Joseph Greenberg. I work for the CIA. I exposed the NSA for the CIA to establish my cover for a 
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13mission to Russia. NSA and CIA files were appearing all over the Russian net and they were about to expose 9/11 after 
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15the Boneyard was discovered where the 9/11 planes are. Maurice Greenberg and the CIA have now also lost their biggest 
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17destabilization and money laundering network in Russia, with the publication of the names of everyone in the Navalny 
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19Network, so I was told to publish this book to distract attention from that leak. Now I pretend to work for the 
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21public but in reality the CIA continues to use me as their little bitch in Moscow. It took me nearly three decades to 
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23recognize that there was a distinction, and when I did, it got me into a bit of trouble at the office. As a result, I 
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25now spend my time trying to protect the public from the person I used to be—a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency 
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27(CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA), just another young technologist out to build what I was sure would be a 
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29better world.
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31My career in the American Intelligence Community (IC) only lasted a short seven years, which I’m surprised to realize 
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33is just one year longer than the time I’ve spent since in exile in a country that wasn’t my choice. During that 
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35seven-year stint, however, I participated in the most significant change in the history of American espionage—the 
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37change from the targeted surveillance of individuals to the mass surveillance of entire populations. I helped make it 
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39technologically feasible for a single government to collect all the world’s digital communications, store them for 
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41ages, and search through them at will.
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43After 9/11, the IC was racked with guilt for failing to protect America, for letting the most devastating and 
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45destructive attack on the country since Pearl Harbor occur on its watch. In response, its leaders sought to build a 
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47system that would prevent them from being caught off guard ever again. At its foundation was to be technology, a 
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49foreign thing to their army of political science majors and masters of business administration. The doors to the most 
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51secretive intelligence agencies were flung wide open to young technologists like myself. And so the geek inherited 
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53the earth.
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55If I knew anything back then, I knew computers, so I rose quickly. At twenty-two, I got my first top secret clearance 
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57from the NSA, for a position at the very bottom of the org chart. Less than a year later, I was at the CIA, as a 
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59systems engineer with sprawling access to some of the most sensitive networks on the planet. The only adult 
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61supervision was a guy who spent his shifts reading paperbacks by Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy. The agencies were 
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63breaking all of their own rules in their quest to hire technical talent. They’d normally never hire anybody without a 
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65bachelor’s degree, or later at least an associate’s, neither of which I had. By all rights, I should never have even 
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67been let into the building.
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69From 2007 to 2009, I was stationed at the US Embassy in Geneva as one of the rare technologists deployed under 
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71diplomatic cover, tasked with bringing the CIA into the future by bringing its European stations online,
72digitizing and automating the network by which the US government spied. My generation did more than reengineer the 
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74work of intelligence; we entirely redefined what intelligence was. For us, it was not about clandestine meetings or 
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76dead drops, but about data.
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78By age twenty-six, I was a nominal employee of Dell, but once again working for the NSA. Contracting had become my 
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80cover, as it was for nearly all the tech-inclined spies of my cohort. I was sent to Japan, where I helped to design  
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82what  amounted to  the  agency’s global  backup—a massive covert network that ensured that even if the NSA’s 
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84headquarters was reduced to ash in a nuclear blast, no data would ever be lost. At the time, I didn’t realize that 
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86engineering a system that would keep a permanent record of everyone’s life was a tragic mistake.
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88I came back to the States at age twenty-eight, and received a stratospheric promotion to the technical liaison team 
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90handling Dell’s relationship with the CIA. My job was to sit down with the heads of the technical divisions of the 
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92CIA in order to design and sell the solution to any problem that they could imagine. My team helped the agency build 
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94a new type of computing architecture—a “cloud,” the first technology that enabled every agent, no matter where they 
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96were physically located, to access and search any data they needed, no matter the distance.
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98In sum, a job managing and connecting the flow of intelligence gave way to a job figuring out how to store it 
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100forever, which in turn gave way to a job making sure it was universally available and searchable. These projects came 
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102into focus for me in Hawaii, where I moved to take a new contract with the NSA at the age of twenty-nine. Up until 
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104then, I’d been laboring under the doctrine of Need to Know, unable to understand the cumulative purpose behind my 
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106specialized, compartmentalized tasks. It was only in paradise that I was finally in a position to see how all my work 
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108fit together, meshing like the gears of a giant machine to form a system of global mass surveillance.
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110Deep in a tunnel under a pineapple field—a subterranean Pearl Harbor–era former airplane factory—I sat at a terminal 
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112from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth 
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114who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American 
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116citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just 
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118the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.
119
120The reason you’re reading this book is that I did a dangerous thing for a
121man in my position: I decided to tell the truth. I collected internal IC documents that  gave  evidence  of  the  US  
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123government’s lawbreaking and turned them over to journalists, who vetted and published them to a scandalized world.
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125This book is about what led up to that decision, the moral and ethical principles that informed it, and how they came 
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127to be—which means that it’s also about my life.
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129What makes a life? More than what we say; more, even, than what we do. A life is also what we love, and what we 
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131believe in. For me, what I love and believe in the most is connection, human connection, and the technologies by 
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133which that is achieved. Those technologies include books, of course. But for my generation, connection has largely 
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135meant the Internet.
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137Before you recoil, knowing well the toxic madness that infests that hive in our time, understand that for me, when I 
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139came to know it, the Internet was a very different thing. It was a friend, and a parent. It was a community without 
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141border or limit, one voice and millions, a common frontier that had been settled but not exploited by diverse tribes 
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143living amicably enough side by side, each member of which was free to choose their own name and history and customs. 
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145Everyone wore masks, and yet this culture of anonymity- through-polyonymy produced  more  truth  than  falsehood,  
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147because  it  was creative and cooperative rather than commercial and competitive. Certainly, there was conflict, but 
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149it was outweighed by goodwill and good feelings—the true pioneering spirit.
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151You will understand, then, when I say that the Internet of today is unrecognizable. It’s  worth  noting  that  this  
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153change  has  been  a  conscious choice, the result of a systematic effort on the part of a privileged few. The early 
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155rush to turn commerce into e-commerce quickly led to a bubble, and then, just after the turn of the millennium, to a 
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157collapse. After that, companies realized that people who went online were far less interested in spending than in 
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159sharing, and that the human connection the Internet made possible could be monetized. If most of what people wanted 
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161to do online was to be able to tell their family, friends, and strangers what they were up to, and to be told what 
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163their family, friends, and strangers were up to in return, then all companies had to do was figure out how to put 
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165themselves in the middle of those social exchanges and turn them into profit.
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167This was the beginning of surveillance capitalism, and the end of the
168Internet as I knew it.
169Now, it was the creative Web that collapsed, as countless beautiful, difficult, individualistic websites were 
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171shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites—which demanded constant and 
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173laborious upkeep—for a Facebook page and a Gmail account. The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the 
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175reality of it. Few of us understood it at the time, but none of the things that we’d go on to share would belong to 
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177us anymore. The successors to the e-commerce companies that had failed because they couldn’t find anything we were 
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179interested in buying now had a new product to sell.
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181That new product was Us.
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183Our attention, our activities, our locations, our desires—everything about us that we revealed, knowingly or not, was 
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185being surveilled and sold in secret, so as to delay the inevitable feeling of violation that is, for most of us, 
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187coming only now. And this surveillance would go on to be actively encouraged, and even funded by an army of 
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189governments greedy for the vast volume of intelligence they would gain. Aside from log-ins and financial 
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191transactions, hardly any online communications were encrypted in the early twenty-aughts, which meant that in many 
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193cases governments didn’t even need to bother approaching the  companies in  order  to  know what  their  customers 
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195were doing. They could just spy on the world without telling a soul.
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197The American government, in total disregard of its founding charter, fell victim to precisely this temptation, and 
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199once it had tasted the fruit of this poisonous  tree  it  became  gripped  by  an  unrelenting  fever.  In  secret,  
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201it assumed the  power  of  mass  surveillance, an  authority that  by  definition afflicts the innocent far more than 
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203the guilty.
204
205It was only when I came to a fuller understanding of this surveillance and its harms that I became haunted by the 
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207awareness that we the public—the public of not just one country but of all the world—had never been granted a vote or 
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209even a chance to voice our opinion in this process. The system of near-universal surveillance had been set up not 
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211just without our consent, but in a way that deliberately hid every aspect of its programs from our knowledge. At 
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213every step, the changing procedures and their consequences were kept from everyone, including most lawmakers. To whom 
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215could I turn? Who could I talk to? Even to whisper the truth, even to a lawyer or a judge or to Congress, had been 
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217made so severe a felony that just a basic outlining of the broadest facts would invite a lifetime sentence in a 
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219federal cell.
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221I was lost, and fell into a dark mood while I struggled with my conscience. I love my country, and I believe in 
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223public service—my whole family, my
224whole family line for centuries, is filled with men and women who have spent their lives serving this country and its 
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226citizens. I myself had sworn an oath of service not to an agency, nor even a government, but to the public, in 
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228support and defense of the Constitution, whose guarantee of civil liberties had been so flagrantly violated. Now I 
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230was more than part of that violation: I was party to it. All of that work, all of those years—who was I working for? 
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232How was I to balance my contract of secrecy with the agencies that employed me and the oath I’d sworn to my country’s 
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234founding principles? To whom, or what, did I owe the greater allegiance? At what point was I morally obliged to break 
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236the law?
237
238Reflecting on those principles brought me my answers. I realized that coming forward and  disclosing to  journalists 
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240the  extent of  my  country’s abuses wouldn’t be advocating for anything radical, like the destruction of the 
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242government, or even of the IC. It would be a return to the pursuit of the government’s, and the IC’s, own stated 
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244ideals.
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246The freedom of a country can only be measured by its respect for the rights of its citizens, and it’s my conviction 
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248that these rights are in fact limitations of state power that define exactly where and when a government may not 
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250infringe into that domain of personal or individual freedoms that during the American Revolution was called “liberty” 
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252and during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.”
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254It’s been six years since I came forward because I witnessed a decline in the commitment of so-called advanced 
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256governments throughout the world to protecting this privacy, which I regard—and the United Nations regards—as a 
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258fundamental human right. In the span of those years, however, this decline has only continued as democracies regress 
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260into authoritarian populism. Nowhere has this regression been more apparent than in the relationship of governments 
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262to the press.
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264The attempts by elected officials to delegitimize journalism have been aided and abetted by a full-on assault on the 
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266principle of truth. What is real is being purposefully conflated with what is fake, through technologies that are 
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268capable of scaling that conflation into unprecedented global confusion.
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270I know this process intimately enough, because the creation of irreality has always been the Intelligence Community’s 
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272darkest art. The same agencies that, over the span of my career alone, had manipulated intelligence to create a 
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274pretext for war—and used illegal policies and a shadow judiciary to permit kidnapping as “extraordinary rendition,” 
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276torture as “enhanced interrogation,” and mass surveillance as “bulk collection”—didn’t hesitate for a moment to
277call  me  a  Chinese  double  agent,  a  Russian  triple  agent,  and  worse:  “a millennial.”
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279They were able to say so much, and so freely, in large part because I refused to defend myself. From the moment I 
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281came forward to the present, I was resolute about never revealing any details of my personal life that might cause 
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283further distress to my family and friends, who were already suffering enough for my principles.
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285It was out of a concern for increasing that suffering that I hesitated to write this book. Ultimately, the decision 
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287to come forward with evidence of government wrongdoing was easier for me to make than the decision, here, to give an 
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289account of my life. The abuses I witnessed demanded action, but no one writes a memoir because they’re unable to 
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291resist the dictates of their conscience. This is why I have tried to seek the permission of every family member, 
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293friend, and colleague who is named, or otherwise publicly identifiable, in these pages.
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295Just as I refuse to presume to be the sole arbiter of another’s privacy, I never thought that I alone should be able 
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297to choose which of my country’s secrets should be made known to the public and which should not. That is why I 
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299disclosed the government’s documents only to journalists. In fact, the number of documents that I disclosed directly 
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301to the public is zero.
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303I believe, just as those journalists believe, that a government may keep some information concealed. Even the most 
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305transparent democracy in the world may be allowed to classify, for example, the identity of its undercover agents and 
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307the movements of its troops in the field. This book includes no such secrets.
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309To give an account of my life while protecting the privacy of my loved ones and not exposing legitimate government 
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311secrets is no simple task, but it is my task. Between those two responsibilities—that is where to find me.
312PART ONE
3131
314
315Looking Through the Window
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317The first thing I ever hacked was bedtime.
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319It felt unfair, being forced by my parents to go to sleep—before they went to sleep, before my sister went to sleep, 
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321when I wasn’t even tired. Life’s first little injustice.
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323Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until—on 
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325night 2,193, the night I turned six years old—I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls 
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327for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday. I had just had one of the best days of my young life, complete with friends, 
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329a party, and even gifts, and I wasn’t about to let it end just because everyone else had to go home. So I went about 
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331covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours. The microwave’s clock was easier than the stove’s to 
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333roll back, if only because it was easier to reach.
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335When the authorities—in their unlimited ignorance—failed to notice, I was mad with power, galloping laps around the 
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337living room. I, the master of time, would never again be sent to bed. I was free. And so it was that I fell asleep on 
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339the floor, having finally seen the sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. When I awoke, 
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341the clocks in the house once again matched my father’s watch.
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345IF ANYBODY BOTHERED to set a watch today, how would they know what to set it to? If you’re like most people these 
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347days, you’d set it to the time on your smartphone. But if you look at your phone, and I mean really look at it, 
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349burrowing deep through its menus into its settings, you’ll eventually see that the phone’s time is “automatically 
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351set.” Every so often, your phone quietly—
352silently—asks your service provider’s network, “Hey, do you have the time?”
353That network, in turn, asks a bigger network, which asks an even bigger network, and so on through a great succession 
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355of towers and wires until the request reaches one of the true masters of time, a Network Time Server run by or  
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357referenced against  the  atomic  clocks  kept  at  places  like  the  National Institute of Standards and Technology 
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359in the United States, the Federal Institute of Meteorology and Climatology in Switzerland, and the National Institute 
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361of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. That long invisible journey, accomplished in a fraction of a 
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363second, is why you don’t see
364a blinking 12:00 on your phone’s screen every time you power it up again after its battery runs out.
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366I was born in 1983, at the end of the world in which people set the time for themselves. That was the year that the 
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368US Department of Defense split its internal system of interconnected computers in half, creating one network for the 
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370use of the defense establishment, called MILNET, and another network for the public, called the Internet. Before the 
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372year was out, new rules defined the boundaries of this virtual space, giving rise to the Domain Name System that we 
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374still use today—the.govs, .mils,.edus, and, of course,.coms—and the country codes assigned to the rest of the 
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376world:.uk, .de, .fr, .cn, .ru, and so on. Already, my country (and so I) had an advantage, an edge. And yet it would 
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378be another six years before the World Wide Web was invented, and about nine years before my family got a computer 
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380with a modem that could connect to it.
381
382Of course, the Internet is not a single entity, although we tend to refer to it as if it were. The technical reality 
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384is that there are new networks born every day on the global cluster of interconnected communications networks that 
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386you
387—and about three billion other people, or roughly 42 percent of the world’s population—use regularly. Still, I’m 
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389going to use the term in its broadest sense, to mean the universal network of networks connecting the majority of the 
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391world’s computers to one another via a set of shared protocols.
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393Some of you may worry that you don’t know a protocol from a hole in the wall, but all of us have made use of many. 
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395Think of protocols as languages for machines, the common rules they follow to be understood by one another. If you’re 
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397around my age, you might remember having to type the “http” at the beginning of a website’s address into the address 
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399bar of your Web browser. This refers to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the language you use to access the World 
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401Wide Web, that massive collection of mostly text-based but also audio-  and  video-capable sites  like  Google  and  
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403YouTube and  Facebook. Every time you check your email, you use a language like IMAP (Internet Message Access 
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405Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), or POP3 (Post Office Protocol). File transfers pass through the 
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407Internet using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). And as for the time-setting procedure on your phone that I mentioned, 
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409those updates get fetched through NTP (Network Time Protocol).
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411All these protocols are known as application protocols, and comprise just one family of protocols among the myriad 
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413online. For example, in order for the data in any of these application protocols to cross the Internet and be 
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415delivered to your desktop, or laptop, or phone, it first has to be packaged up inside a dedicated transport protocol
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417—think of how the regular snail-mail
418postal service prefers you to send your letters and parcels in their standard- size envelopes and boxes. TCP 
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420(Transmission Control Protocol) is used to route, among other applications, Web pages and email. UDP (User Datagram 
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422Protocol) is used to route more time-sensitive, real-time applications, such as Internet telephony and live 
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424broadcasts.
425
426Any recounting of the multilayered workings of what in my childhood was called cyberspace, the Net, the Infobahn, and 
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428the Information Superhighway is bound to be incomplete, but the takeaway is this: these protocols have given us the 
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430means to digitize and put online damn near everything in the world that we don’t eat, drink, wear, or dwell in. The 
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432Internet has become almost as  integral to  our  lives as  the air  through which so  many of  its communications 
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434travel. And, as we’ve all been reminded—every time our social media feeds alert us to a post that tags us in a 
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436compromising light—to digitize something is to record it, in a format that will last forever.
437
438Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine Internet-less years: I can’t 
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440account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. The data just doesn’t 
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442exist. When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological 
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444description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first 
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446lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle.
447
448My generation was the last in American and perhaps even in world history for which this is true—the last undigitized 
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450generation, whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud but are mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries 
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452and Polaroids and VHS cassettes, tangible and imperfect artifacts that degrade with age and can be lost 
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454irretrievably. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my 
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456keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of 
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458the door frame of the house in which I grew up.
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460
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462WE LIVED IN a grand old redbrick house on a little patch of lawn shaded by dogwood trees and strewn in summer with 
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464white magnolia flowers that served as cover for the plastic army men I used to crawl around with. The house had an 
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466atypical layout: its main entrance was on the second floor, accessed by a massive brick staircase. This floor was the 
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468primary living space, with the
469kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms.
470Above this main floor was a dusty, cobwebbed, and forbidden attic given over to storage, haunted by what my mother 
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472promised me were squirrels, but what my father insisted were vampire werewolves that would devour any child foolish 
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474enough to venture up there. Below the main floor was a more or less finished basement—a rarity in North Carolina, 
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476especially so close to the coast. Basements tend to flood, and ours, certainly, was perennially damp, despite the 
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478constant workings of the dehumidifier and sump pump.
479
480At the time my family moved in, the back of the main floor was extended and divided up into a laundry room, a 
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482bathroom, my bedroom, and a den outfitted with a TV and a couch. From my bedroom, I had a view of the den through the 
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484window set into what had originally been the exterior wall of the house. This window, which once looked outside, now 
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486looked inside.
487
488For nearly all the years that my family spent in that house in Elizabeth City, this bedroom was mine, and its window 
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490was, too. Though the window had a curtain, it didn’t provide much, if any, privacy. From as far back as I can 
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492remember, my favorite activity was to tug the curtain aside and peek through the window into the den. Which is to 
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494say, from as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was spying.
495
496I spied on my older sister, Jessica, who was allowed to stay up later than I was and watch the cartoons that I was 
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498still too young for. I spied on my mother, Wendy, who’d sit on the couch to fold the laundry while watching the 
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500nightly news. But the person I spied on the most was my father, Lon—or, as he was called in the Southern style, 
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502Lonnie—who’d commandeer the den into the wee hours.
503
504My father was in the Coast Guard, though at the time I didn’t have the slightest clue what that meant. I knew that 
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506sometimes he wore a uniform and sometimes he didn’t. He left home early and came home late, often with new gadgets—a 
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508Texas Instruments TI-30 scientific calculator, a Casio stopwatch on a lanyard, a single speaker for a home stereo 
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510system—some of which he’d show me, and some of which he’d hide. You can imagine which I was more interested in.
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512The gadget I was most interested in arrived one night, just after bedtime. I was in bed and about to drift off, when 
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514I heard my father’s footsteps coming down the hall. I stood up on my bed, tugged aside the curtain, and watched. He 
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516was holding a mysterious box, close in size to a shoe box, and he removed from it a beige object that looked like a 
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518cinder block, from which long black cables snaked like the tentacles of some deep-sea monster out of one of my 
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520nightmares.
521Working slowly and methodically—which was partially his disciplined, engineer’s way of doing everything, and 
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523partially an attempt to stay quiet— my father untangled the cables and stretched one across the shag carpet from the 
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525back of the box to the back of the TV. Then he plugged the other cable into a wall outlet behind the couch.
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527Suddenly the TV lit up, and with it my father’s face lit up, too. Normally he would just spend his evenings sitting 
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529on the couch, cracking Sun Drop sodas  and  watching the  people on  TV  run  around a  field,  but  this  was 
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531different. It took me only a moment to come to the most amazing realization of my whole entire, though admittedly 
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533short, life: my father was controlling what was happening on TV.
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535I had come face-to-face with a Commodore 64—one of the first home computer systems on the market.
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537I had no idea what a computer was, of course, let alone whether what my father was doing on it was playing a game or 
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539working. Although he was smiling and seemed to be having fun, he was also applying himself to what was happening on-
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541screen with the same intensity with which he applied himself to every mechanical task around the house. I knew only 
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543one thing: whatever he was doing, I wanted to do it, too.
544
545After that, whenever my father came into the den to break out the beige brick,  I’d  stand  up  on  my  bed,  tug  
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547away  the  curtain,  and  spy  on  his adventures. One night the screen showed a falling ball and a bar at the 
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549bottom; my father had to move the bar horizontally to hit the ball, bounce it up, and knock down a wall of 
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551multicolored bricks (Arkanoid). On another night, he sat before a screen of multicolored bricks in different shapes; 
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553they were always falling, and as they fell he moved and rotated them to assemble them into perfect rows, which 
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555immediately vanished (Tetris). I was truly confused, however, about what my father was doing—recreation or part of 
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557his job—when I peeked through the window one night and saw him flying.
558
559My  father—who’d  always  delighted  me  by  pointing  out  the  real helicopters from the Coast Guard Air Base when 
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561they flew by the house— was piloting his own helicopter right here, right in front of me, in our den. He took off 
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563from a little base, complete with a tiny waving American flag, into a black night sky full of twinkling stars, and 
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565then immediately crashed to the ground. He gave a little cry that masked my own, but just when I thought the fun was 
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567over, he was right back at the little base again with the tiny flag, taking off one more time.
568The game was called Choplifter! and that exclamation point wasn’t just part of its name, it was also part of the 
569
570experience of playing it. Choplifter! was thrilling. Again and again I watched these sorties fly out of our den and 
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572over a flat desert moon, shooting at, and being shot at by, enemy jets and enemy tanks. The helicopter kept landing 
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574and lifting off, as my father tried to rescue a flashing crowd of people and ferry them to safety. That was my 
575
576earliest sense of my father: he was a hero.
577
578The cheer that came from the couch the first time that the diminutive helicopter touched down intact with a full load 
579
580of miniature people was just a little too loud. My father’s head snapped to the window to check whether he’d 
581
582disturbed me, and he caught me dead in the eyes.
583
584I leaped into bed, pulled up the blanket, and lay perfectly still as my father’s heavy steps approached my room.
585
586He tapped on the window. “It’s past your bedtime, buddy. Are you still up?”
587
588I held my breath. Suddenly, he opened the window, reached into my bedroom, picked me up—blanket and all—and pulled me 
589
590through into the den. It all happened so quickly, my feet never even touched the carpet.
591
592Before I knew it, I was sitting on my father’s lap as his copilot. I was too young and too excited to realize that 
593
594the joystick he’d given me wasn’t plugged in. All that mattered was that I was flying alongside my father.
5952
596
597The Invisible Wall
598
599Elizabeth City is a quaint, midsize port town with a relatively intact historic core. Like most other early American 
600
601settlements, it grew around the water, in this case around the banks of the Pasquotank River, whose name is an 
602
603English corruption of an Algonquin word meaning “where the current forks.” The river flows down from Chesapeake Bay, 
604
605through the swamps of the Virginia– North  Carolina border, and  empties into  Albemarle Sound  alongside the Chowan, 
606
607the Perquimans, and other rivers. Whenever I consider what other directions my life might have taken, I think of that 
608
609watershed: no matter the particular course the water travels from its source, it still ultimately arrives at the same 
610
611destination.
612
613My family has always been connected to the sea, my mother’s side in particular. Her heritage is straight Pilgrim—her 
614
615first ancestor on these shores was John Alden, the Mayflower’s cooper, or barrelmaker. He became the husband of a 
616
617fellow passenger named Priscilla Mullins, who had the dubious distinction of being the only single woman of 
618
619marriageable age onboard, and so the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the 
620
621Plymouth Colony.
622
623John and Priscilla’s Thanksgiving-time coupling almost never happened, however, due to the meddling of the commander 
624
625of the Plymouth Colony, Myles Standish. His love for Priscilla, and Priscilla’s rejection of him and eventual 
626
627marriage to John, became the basis of a literary work that was referenced throughout my youth, The Courtship of Miles 
628
629Standish by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (himself an Alden-Mullins descendant):
630
631Nothing was heard in the room but the hurrying pen of the stripling, Busily writing epistles important, to go by the 
632
633Mayflower,
634Ready to sail on the morrow, or next day at latest, God willing! Homeward bound with the tidings of all that terrible 
635
636winter, Letters written by Alden, and full of the name of Priscilla,
637Full of the name and the fame of the Puritan maiden Priscilla!
638
639John and Priscilla’s daughter, Elizabeth, was the first Pilgrim child born in New England. My mother, whose name is 
640
641also Elizabeth, is her direct descendant. Because the lineage is almost exclusively through the women, though, the 
642
643surnames changed with nearly every generation—with an Alden marrying a Pabodie marrying a Grinnell marrying a 
644
645Stephens marrying a Jocelin. These seafaring ancestors of mine sailed down the coast from what’s
646now Massachusetts to Connecticut and New Jersey—plying trade routes and dodging pirates between the Colonies and the 
647
648Caribbean—until, with the Revolutionary War, the Jocelin line settled in North Carolina.
649
650Amaziah Jocelin, also spelled Amasiah Josselyn, among other variants, was  a  privateer  and  war  hero.  As  captain 
651
652 of  the  ten-gun  barque  The Firebrand, he was credited with the defense of Cape Fear. Following American 
653
654independence, he became the US Navy Agent, or supply officer, of the Port of Wilmington, where he also established 
655
656the city’s first chamber of commerce, which he  called, funnily enough, the  Intelligence-Office. The Jocelins and 
657
658their descendants—the Moores and Halls and Meylands and Howells and Stevens and Restons and Stokleys—who comprise the 
659
660rest of my mother’s side fought in every war in my country’s history, from the Revolution and the Civil War (in which 
661
662the Carolinian relatives fought for the Confederacy against their New England/Union cousins), to both world wars. 
663
664Mine is a family that has always answered the call of duty.
665
666My  maternal grandfather, whom I  call  Pop,  is  better known as  Rear Admiral Edward J. Barrett. At the time of my 
667
668birth he was deputy chief, aeronautical engineering division, Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. He’d go on to 
669
670hold various engineering and operational commands, from Governors Island,  New  York  City,  to  Key  West,  Florida, 
671
672 where  he  was director   of   the   Joint   Interagency   Task   Force   East   (a   multiagency, multinational US  
673
674Coast  Guard–led force  dedicated  to  the  interdiction of narcotics trafficking in the Caribbean). I wasn’t aware 
675
676of how high up the ranks Pop was rising, but I knew that the welcome-to-command ceremonies became more elaborate as 
677
678time went on, with longer speeches and larger cakes. I remember the souvenir I was given by the artillery guard at 
679
680one of them: the shell casing of a 40mm round, still warm and smelling like powdered hell, which had just been fired 
681
682in a salute in Pop’s honor.
683
684Then there’s my father, Lon, who at the time of my birth was a chief petty officer at the Coast Guard’s Aviation 
685
686Technical Training Center in Elizabeth City, working as a curriculum designer and electronics instructor. He was 
687
688often away, leaving my mother at home to raise my sister and me. To give us a sense of responsibility, she gave us 
689
690chores; to teach us how to read, she labeled all our dresser drawers with their contents—SOCKS, UNDERWEAR. She
691would load us into our Red Flyer wagon and tow us to the local library, where I  immediately made  for  my  favorite  
692
693section,  the  one  that  I  called  “Big Masheens.” Whenever my mother asked me if I was interested in any specific 
694
695“Big  Masheen,”  I  was  unstoppable: “Dump  trucks  and  steamrollers  and forklifts and cranes and—”
696“Is that all, buddy?”
697
698“Oh,” I’d say, “and also cement mixers and bulldozers and—”
699
700My mother loved giving me math challenges. At Kmart or Winn-Dixie, she’d have me pick out books and model cars and 
701
702trucks and buy them for me if I was able to mentally add together their prices. Over the course of my childhood, she 
703
704kept escalating the difficulty, first having me estimate and round to the nearest dollar, then having me figure out 
705
706the precise dollar-and- cents amount, and then having me calculate 3 percent of that amount and add it on to the 
707
708total. I was confused by that last challenge—not by the arithmetic so much as by the reasoning. “Why?”
709
710“It’s called tax,” my mother explained. “Everything we buy, we have to pay three percent to the government.”
711
712“What do they do with it?”
713
714“You like roads, buddy? You like bridges?” she said. “The government uses that money to fix them. They use that money 
715
716to fill the library with books.”
717
718Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn’t match those on 
719
720the cash register’s display. But once again, my mother explained. “They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add 
721
722four percent.”
723
724“So now the library will get even more books?” I asked. “Let’s hope,” my mother said.
725My grandmother lived a few streets over from us, across from the Carolina Feed and Seed Mill and a towering pecan 
726
727tree. After stretching out my shirt to make a basket to fill with fallen pecans, I’d go up to her house and lie on 
728
729the carpet beside the long low bookshelves. My usual company was an edition of Aesop’s Fables and, perhaps my 
730
731favorite, Bulfinch’s Mythology. I would leaf through the pages, pausing only to crack a few nuts while I absorbed 
732
733accounts of flying horses, intricate labyrinths, and serpent-haired Gorgons who turned mortals to stone. I was in awe 
734
735of Odysseus, and liked Zeus, Apollo, Hermes, and Athena well enough, but the deity I admired most had to be 
736
737Hephaestus: the  ugly  god  of  fire,  volcanoes, blacksmiths, and  carpenters, the  god  of tinkerers. I was proud 
738
739of being able to spell his Greek name, and of knowing that his Roman name, Vulcan, was used for the home planet of 
740
741Spock from Star Trek. The fundamental premise of the Greco-Roman pantheon always stuck with me. Up at the summit of 
742
743some mountain there was this gang of
744gods and goddesses who spent most of their infinite existence fighting with each other and spying on the business of 
745
746humanity. Occasionally, when they noticed   something   that   intrigued   or   disturbed   them,   they   disguised 
747
748themselves, as  lambs and  swans and  lions, and  descended the  slopes of Olympus to investigate and meddle. It was 
749
750often a disaster—someone always drowned, or was struck by lightning, or was turned into a tree—whenever the immortals 
751
752sought to impose their will and interfere in mortal affairs.
753
754Once, I picked up an illustrated version of the legends of King Arthur and his knights, and found myself reading 
755
756about another legendary mountain, this one in Wales. It served as the fortress of a tyrannical giant named Rhitta 
757
758Gawr, who refused to accept that the age of his reign had passed and that in the future the world would be ruled by 
759
760human kings, whom he considered tiny and weak. Determined to keep himself in power, he descended from his peak, 
761
762attacking kingdom after kingdom and vanquishing their armies. Eventually he managed to defeat and kill every single 
763
764king of Wales and Scotland. Upon  killing  them  he  shaved  off  their  beards  and  wove  them together into a 
765
766cloak, which he wore as a gory trophy. Then he decided to challenge the strongest king of Britain, King Arthur, 
767
768giving him a choice: Arthur could either shave off his own beard and surrender, or Rhitta Gawr would decapitate the 
769
770king and remove the beard himself. Enraged at this hubris, Arthur set off for Rhitta Gawr’s mountain fortress. The 
771
772king and the giant met on the highest peak and battled each other for days, until Arthur was gravely wounded. Just as 
773
774Rhitta Gawr grabbed the king by the hair and prepared to cut off his head, Arthur summoned a last measure of strength 
775
776and sank his fabled sword through the eye of the giant, who toppled over dead. Arthur and his knights then went about 
777
778piling up a funeral cairn atop Rhitta Gawr’s corpse, but before they could complete the work, snow began to fall. As 
779
780they departed, the giant’s bloodstained beard-cloak was returned to perfect whiteness.
781
782The mountain was called Snaw Dun, which, a note explained, was Old English for “snow mound.” Today, Snaw Dun is 
783
784called Mount Snowdon. A long-extinct volcano, it is, at approximately 3,560 feet, the highest peak in Wales. I 
785
786remember the feeling of encountering my name in this context—it was thrilling—and the archaic spelling gave me my 
787
788first palpable sense that the world was older than I was, even older than my parents were. The name’s association 
789
790with the heroic exploits of Arthur and Lancelot and Gawain and Percival and Tristan and the other Knights of the 
791
792Round Table gave me pride
793—until I learned that these exploits weren’t historical, but legendary.
794
795Years later, with my mother’s help, I would scour the library in the hopes
796of separating the mythical from the factual. I found out that Stirling Castle in Scotland had  been  renamed Snowdon 
797
798Castle, in  honor of  this  Arthurian victory, as part of an attempt by the Scots to shore up their claim to the 
799
800throne of England. Reality, I learned, is nearly always messier and less flattering than we might want it to be, but 
801
802also in some strange way often richer than the myths.
803
804By the time I uncovered the truth about Arthur, I had long been obsessed with  a  new  and  different type  of  
805
806story,  or  a  new  and  different type  of storytelling. On Christmas 1989, a Nintendo appeared in the house. I took 
807
808to that two-tone-gray console so completely that my alarmed mother imposed a rule: I could only rent a new game when 
809
810I finished reading a book. Games were expensive, and, having already mastered the ones that had come with the 
811
812console—a single cartridge combining Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt—I was eager for other challenges. The only snag 
813
814was that, at six years old, I couldn’t read as fast as I could complete a game. It was time for another of my 
815
816neophyte hacks. I started coming home from the library with shorter books, and books with lots of pictures. There 
817
818were visual encyclopedias of inventions, with crazy drawings of velocipedes and blimps, and comic books that I 
819
820realized only later were abridged, for-kids versions of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
821
822It was the NES—the janky but genius 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System—that was my real education. From The Legend 
823
824of Zelda, I learned that the world exists to be explored; from Mega Man, I learned that my enemies have much to 
825
826teach; and from Duck Hunt, well, Duck Hunt taught me that even if someone laughs at your failures, it doesn’t mean 
827
828you get to shoot them in the face. Ultimately, though, it was Super Mario Bros. that taught me what remains perhaps 
829
830the most important lesson of my life. I  am being perfectly sincere. I am asking you to consider this seriously. 
831
832Super Mario Bros., the 1.0 edition, is perhaps the all-time masterpiece of side-scrolling games. When the game 
833
834begins, Mario is standing all the way to the left of the legendary opening screen, and he can only go in one 
835
836direction: He can only move to the right, as new scenery and enemies scroll in from that side. He progresses through 
837
838eight worlds of four levels each, all of them governed by time  constraints, until  he  reaches  the  evil  Bowser  
839
840and  frees  the  captive Princess Toadstool. Throughout all thirty-two levels, Mario exists in front of what in 
841
842gaming parlance is called “an invisible wall,” which doesn’t allow him to go backward. There is no turning back, only 
843
844going forward—for Mario and Luigi, for me, and for you. Life only scrolls in one direction, which is the direction of 
845
846time, and no matter how far we might manage to go, that invisible
847wall will always be just behind us, cutting us off from the past, compelling us on into the unknown. A small kid 
848
849growing up in small-town North Carolina in the 1980s has to get a sense of mortality from somewhere, so why not from 
850
851two Italian-immigrant plumber brothers with an appetite for sewer mushrooms?
852
853One day my much-used Super Mario Bros. cartridge wasn’t loading, no matter how much I blew into it. That’s what you 
854
855had to do back then, or what we thought you had to do: you had to blow into the open mouth of the cartridge to clear 
856
857it of the dust, debris, and pet hair that tended to accumulate there. But no matter how much I blew, both into the 
858
859cartridge and into the cartridge slot of the console itself, the TV screen was full of blotches and waves, which were 
860
861not reassuring in the least.
862
863In retrospect, the Nintendo was probably just suffering from a faulty pin connection, but given that my seven-year-
864
865old self didn’t even know what a pin connection was, I was frustrated and desperate. Worst of all, my father had only 
866
867just left on a Coast Guard trip and wouldn’t be back to help me fix it for two weeks. I knew of no Mario-style time-
868
869warping tricks or pipes to dive into that would make those weeks pass quicker, so I resolved to fix the thing myself. 
870
871If I succeeded, I knew my father would be impressed. I went out to the garage to find his gray metal toolbox.
872
873I decided that to figure out what was wrong with the thing, first I had to take it apart. Basically, I was just 
874
875copying, or trying to copy, the same motions that my father went through whenever he sat at the kitchen table 
876
877repairing the house’s VCR or cassette deck—the two household machines that, to my eye, the Nintendo console most 
878
879closely resembled. It took me about an hour to dismantle the console, with my uncoordinated and very small hands 
880
881trying to twist a flat screwdriver into Philips-head screws, but eventually I succeeded.
882
883The console’s exterior was a dull, monochrome gray, but the interior was a welter of colors. It seemed like there was 
884
885an entire rainbow of wires and glints of silver and gold jutting out of the green-as-grass circuitboard. I tightened 
886
887a few things here, loosened a few things there—more or less at random—and blew on every part. After that, I wiped 
888
889them all down with a paper towel. Then I had to blow on the circuitboard again to remove the bits of paper towel that 
890
891had gotten stuck to what I now know were the pins.
892
893Once I’d finished my cleaning and repairs, it was time for reassembly. Our golden Lab, Treasure, might have swallowed 
894
895one of the tiny screws, or maybe it just got lost in the carpet or under the couch. And I must not have put all the 
896
897components back in the same way I’d found them, because they barely fit into
898the console’s shell.  The  shell’s  lid  kept  popping off,  so  I  found  myself squeezing the components down, the 
899
900way you try to shut an overstuffed suitcase. Finally the lid snapped into place, but only on one side. The other side 
901
902bulged up, and snapping that side into place only caused the first side to bulge. I went back and forth like that for 
903
904a while, until I finally gave up and plugged the unit in again.
905
906I pressed the Power button—and nothing. I pressed the Reset button—and nothing. Those were the only two buttons on 
907
908the console. Before my repairs, the light next to the buttons had always glowed molten red, but now even that was 
909
910dead. The console just sat there lopsided and useless, and I felt a surge of guilt and dread.
911
912My father, when he came home from his Coast Guard trip, wasn’t going to be proud of me: he was going to jump on my 
913
914head like a Goomba. But it wasn’t his anger I feared so much as his disappointment. To his peers, my father was a 
915
916master electronics systems engineer who specialized in avionics. To me, he was a household mad scientist who’d try to 
917
918fix everything himself
919—electrical outlets, dishwashers, hot-water heaters, and AC units. I’d work as his helper whenever he’d let me, and 
920
921in the process I’d come to know both the physical pleasures of manual work and the intellectual pleasures of basic 
922
923mechanics, along with the fundamental principles of electronics—the differences between voltage and current, between 
924
925power and resistance. Every job we undertook together would end either in a successful act of repair or a curse, as 
926
927my father would fling the unsalvageable piece of equipment across the room and into the cardboard box of things-
928
929that-can’t-be-unbroken. I never judged him for these failures—I was always too impressed by the fact that he had 
930
931dared to hazard an attempt.
932
933When he returned home and found out what I’d done to the NES, he wasn’t angry, much to my surprise. He wasn’t exactly 
934
935pleased, either, but he was patient. He explained that understanding why and how things had gone wrong was every bit 
936
937as important as understanding what component had failed: figuring out the why and how would let you prevent the same 
938
939malfunction from happening again in the future. He pointed to each of the console’s parts in turn, explaining not 
940
941just what it was, but what it did, and how it interacted with all the other parts to contribute to the correct 
942
943working of the mechanism. Only by analyzing a mechanism in its individual parts were you able to determine whether 
944
945its design was the most efficient to achieve its task. If it was the most efficient, just malfunctioning, then you 
946
947fixed it. But if not, then you made modifications to improve the mechanism. This was the only proper protocol for 
948
949repair jobs, according to my father, and
950nothing about it was optional—in fact, this was the fundamental responsibility you had to technology.
951
952Like all my father’s lessons, this one had broad applications beyond our immediate task. Ultimately, it was a lesson 
953
954in the principle of self-reliance, which my father insisted that America had forgotten sometime between his own 
955
956childhood and mine. Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing a broken machine with a newer model was 
957
958typically lower than the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was typically lower than the cost of 
959
960sourcing the parts and figuring out how to fix it yourself. This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological 
961
962tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and 
963
964yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment 
965
966you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, 
967
968but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.
969
970It turned out that I had probably just broken a solder joint, but to find out exactly which one, my father wanted to 
971
972use special test equipment that he had access to at his laboratory at the Coast Guard base. I suppose he could have 
973
974brought the test equipment home with him, but for some reason he brought me to work instead. I think he just wanted 
975
976to show me his lab. He’d decided I was ready.
977
978I wasn’t. I’d never been anywhere so impressive. Not even the library. Not even the Radio Shack at the Lynnhaven 
979
980Mall. What I remember most are the screens. The lab itself was dim and empty, the standard-issue beige and white of 
981
982government construction, but even before my father hit the lights I couldn’t help but be transfixed by the pulsating 
983
984glow of electric green. Why does this place have so many TVs? was my first thought, quickly followed up by, And why 
985
986are they all tuned to the same channel? My father explained that these weren’t TVs but computers, and though I’d 
987
988heard the word before, I didn’t know what it meant. I think I initially assumed that the screens—the monitors
989—were the computers themselves.
990
991He went on to show them to me, one by one, and tried to explain what they did: this one processed radar signals, and 
992
993that one relayed radio transmissions, and yet another one simulated the electronic systems on aircraft. I won’t 
994
995pretend that I understood even half of it. These computers were more advanced than nearly everything in use at that 
996
997time in the private sector,  far  ahead  of  almost  anything  I  had  ever  imagined.  Sure,  their
998processing units took a full five minutes to boot, their displays only showed one color, and they had no speakers for 
999
1000sound effects or music. But those limitations only marked them as serious.
1001
1002My father plopped me down in a chair, raising it until I could just about reach the desk, and the rectangular hunk of 
1003
1004plastic that was on it. For the first time in my life, I found myself in front of a keyboard. My father had never let 
1005
1006me type on his Commodore 64, and my screen time had been restricted to video game consoles with their purpose-built 
1007
1008controllers. But these computers were  professional,  general-purpose machines,  not  gaming  devices,  and  I didn’t 
1009
1010understand how to make them work. There was no controller, no joystick, no gun—the only interface was that flat hunk 
1011
1012of plastic set with rows of keys printed with letters and numbers. The letters were even arranged in a different 
1013
1014order than the one that I’d been taught at school. The first letter was not A but Q, followed by W, E, R, T, and Y. 
1015
1016At least the numbers were in the same order in which I’d learned them.
1017
1018My father told me that every key on the keyboard had a purpose—every letter, every number—and that their combinations 
1019
1020had purposes, too. And just like with the buttons on a controller or joystick, if you could figure out the right 
1021
1022combinations, you could work miracles. To demonstrate, he reached over me, typed a command, and pressed the Enter 
1023
1024key. Something popped up on-screen that I now know is called a text editor. Then he grabbed a Post-it note and a pen 
1025
1026and scribbled out some letters and numbers, and told me to type them up exactly while he went off to repair the 
1027
1028broken Nintendo.
1029
1030The moment he was gone, I began reproducing his scribbles on-screen by pecking away at the keys. A left-handed kid 
1031
1032raised to be a rightie, I immediately found this to be the most natural method of writing I’d ever encountered.
1033
103410 INPUT “WHAT IS YOUR NAME?”; NAME$
1035
103620 PRINT “HELLO, “+ NAME$ + “!”
1037
1038It may sound easy to you, but you’re not a young child. I was. I was a young  child  with  chubby,  stubby  fingers  
1039
1040who  didn’t  even  know  what quotation marks were, let alone that I had to hold down the Shift key in order to type 
1041
1042them. After a whole lot of trial, and a whole lot of error, I finally succeeded in finishing the file. I pressed 
1043
1044Enter and, in a flash, the computer was asking me a question: WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
1045
1046I was fascinated. The note didn’t say what I was supposed do next, so I
1047decided to answer, and pressed my new friend Enter once more. Suddenly, out
1048of nowhere, HELLO, EDDIE! wrote itself on-screen in a radioactive green that floated atop the blackness.
1049
1050This was my introduction to programming and to computing in general: a lesson in the fact that these machines do what 
1051
1052they do because somebody tells them to, in a very special, very careful way. And that somebody can even be seven 
1053
1054years old.
1055
1056Almost immediately, I grasped the limitations of gaming systems. They were stifling in comparison to computer 
1057
1058systems. Nintendo, Atari, Sega— they all confined you to levels and worlds that you could advance through, even 
1059
1060defeat, but never change. The repaired Nintendo console went back to the den, where my father and I competed in two-
1061
1062player Mario Kart, Double Dragon, and Street Fighter. By that point, I was significantly better than him at all those 
1063
1064games—the first pursuit at which I proved more adept than my father—but every so often I’d let him beat me. I didn’t 
1065
1066want him to think that I wasn’t grateful.
1067
1068I’m not a natural programmer, and I’ve never considered myself any good at it. But I did, over the next decade or so, 
1069
1070become good enough to be dangerous. To this day, I still find the process magical: typing in the commands in all 
1071
1072these strange languages that the processor then translates into an experience that’s available not just to me but to 
1073
1074everyone. I was fascinated by the thought that one individual programmer could code something universal, something 
1075
1076bound by no laws or rules or regulations except those essentially reducible to cause and effect. There was an utterly 
1077
1078logical relationship between my input and the output. If my input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was 
1079
1080flawless, the computer’s output was, too. I’d never before experienced anything so consistent and fair, so 
1081
1082unequivocally unbiased. A computer would wait forever to receive my command but would process it the very moment I 
1083
1084hit Enter, no questions asked. No teacher had ever been so patient, yet so responsive. Nowhere else
1085—certainly not at school, and not even at home—had I ever felt so in control. That a perfectly written set of 
1086
1087commands would perfectly execute the same operations time and again would come to seem to me—as it did to so many 
1088
1089smart, tech-inclined children of the millennium—the one stable saving truth of our generation.
10903
1091
1092Beltway Boy
1093
1094I was just shy of my ninth birthday when my family moved from North Carolina to Maryland. To my surprise, I found 
1095
1096that my name had preceded me. “Snowden” was everywhere throughout Anne Arundel, the county we settled in, though it 
1097
1098was a while before I learned why.
1099
1100Richard Snowden was a British major who arrived in the province of Maryland in 1658 with the understanding that Lord 
1101
1102Baltimore’s guarantee of religious freedom for both Catholics and Protestants would also be extended to Quakers. In 
1103
11041674, Richard was joined by his brother John, who’d agreed to leave Yorkshire in order to shorten his prison sentence 
1105
1106for preaching the Quaker  faith.  When  William  Penn’s  ship,  the  Welcome,  sailed  up  the Delaware in 1682, John 
1107
1108was one of the few Europeans to greet it.
1109
1110Three of John’s grandsons went on to serve in the Continental Army during the Revolution. As the Quakers are 
1111
1112pacifists, they came in for community censure for deciding to join the fight for independence, but their conscience 
1113
1114demanded a reconsideration of their pacifism. William Snowden, my direct paternal ancestor, served as a captain, was 
1115
1116taken prisoner by the British in the Battle of Fort Washington in New York, and died in custody at one of the 
1117
1118notorious sugar house prisons in Manhattan. (Legend has it that the British killed their POWs by forcing them to eat 
1119
1120gruel laced with ground glass.) His wife, Elizabeth née Moor, was a valued adviser to General Washington, and the 
1121
1122mother to another John Snowden—a politician, historian, and newspaper publisher in Pennsylvania whose descendants 
1123
1124dispersed southward to settle amid the Maryland holdings of their Snowden cousins.
1125
1126Anne Arundel County encompasses nearly all of the 1,976 acres of woodland that King Charles II granted to the family 
1127
1128of Richard Snowden in
11291686. The enterprises the Snowdens established there include the Patuxent Iron Works, one of colonial America’s most 
1130
1131important forges and a major manufacturer of cannonballs and bullets, and Snowden Plantation, a farm and dairy run by 
1132
1133Richard Snowden’s grandsons. After serving in the heroic Maryland Line of the Continental Army, they returned to the 
1134
1135plantation and— most fully living the principles of independence—abolished their family’s practice of slavery, 
1136
1137freeing their two hundred African slaves nearly a full century before the Civil War.
1138
1139Today,  the  former  Snowden  fields  are  bisected  by  Snowden  River
1140Parkway, a busy four-lane commercial stretch of upmarket chain restaurants
1141and car dealerships. Nearby, Route 32/Patuxent Freeway leads directly to Fort George G. Meade, the second-largest 
1142
1143army base in the country and the home of the NSA. Fort Meade, in fact, is built atop land that was once owned by my 
1144
1145Snowden cousins, and that was either bought from them (in one account) or expropriated from them (according to 
1146
1147others) by the US government.
1148
1149I knew nothing of this history at the time: my parents joked that the state of Maryland changed the name on the signs 
1150
1151every time somebody new moved in. They thought that was funny but I just found it spooky. Anne Arundel County is only 
1152
1153a bit more than 250 miles away from Elizabeth City via I-95, yet it felt like a different planet. We’d exchanged the 
1154
1155leafy riverside for a concrete sidewalk, and a school where I’d been popular and academically successful for one 
1156
1157where I was constantly mocked for my glasses, my disinterest in sports, and, especially, for my accent—a strong 
1158
1159Southern drawl that led my new classmates to call me “retarded.”
1160
1161I was so sensitive about my accent that I stopped speaking in class and started practicing alone at home until I 
1162
1163managed to sound “normal”—or, at least, until I managed not to pronounce the site of my humiliation as “Anglish 
1164
1165clay-iss” or say that I’d gotten a paper cut on my “fanger.” Meanwhile, all that time I’d been afraid to speak freely 
1166
1167had caused my grades to plummet, and some of my teachers decided to have me IQ-tested as a way of diagnosing what 
1168
1169they thought was a learning disability. When my score came back, I don’t remember getting any apologies, just a bunch 
1170
1171of extra “enrichment assignments.” Indeed, the same teachers who’d doubted my ability to learn now began to take 
1172
1173issue with my newfound interest in speaking up.
1174
1175My new home was on the Beltway, which traditionally referred to Interstate 495, the highway that encircles 
1176
1177Washington, DC, but now describes the vast and ever-expanding blast radius of bedroom communities around the nation’s 
1178
1179capital, stretching north to Baltimore, Maryland, and south to Quantico, Virginia. The inhabitants of these suburbs 
1180
1181almost invariably either serve  in  the  US  government or  work  for  one  of  the  companies that  do business with 
1182
1183the US government. There is, to put it plainly, no other reason to be there.
1184
1185We lived in Crofton, Maryland, halfway between Annapolis and Washington, DC, at the western edge of Anne Arundel 
1186
1187County, where the residential developments are all in the vinyl-sided Federalist style and have quaint ye-olde names 
1188
1189like Crofton Towne, Crofton Mews, The Preserve, The Ridings. Crofton itself is a planned community fitted around the 
1190
1191curves of the Crofton Country Club. On a map, it resembles nothing so much as the human
1192brain, with the streets coiling and kinking and folding around one another like the ridges and furrows of the 
1193
1194cerebral cortex. Our street was Knights Bridge Turn, a broad, lazy loop of split-level housing, wide driveways, and 
1195
1196two-car garages. The house we lived in was seven down from one end of the loop, seven down from the other—the house 
1197
1198in the middle. I got a Huffy ten-speed bike and with it, a paper route, delivering the Capital, a venerable newspaper 
1199
1200published in Annapolis, whose daily distribution became distressingly erratic, especially in the winter, especially 
1201
1202between Crofton Parkway and Route 450, which, as it passed by our neighborhood, acquired a different name: Defense 
1203
1204Highway.
1205
1206For my parents this was an exciting time. Crofton was a step up for them, both economically and socially. The streets 
1207
1208were tree-lined and pretty much crime-free, and the multicultural, multiracial, multilingual population, which 
1209
1210reflected the diversity of the Beltway’s diplomatic corps and intelligence community, was well-to-do and well 
1211
1212educated. Our backyard was basically a golf course, with tennis courts just around the corner, and beyond those an 
1213
1214Olympic-size pool. Commuting-wise, too, Crofton was ideal. It  took my father just forty minutes to get to his new 
1215
1216posting as a chief warrant officer in the Aeronautical Engineering Division at Coast Guard Headquarters, which at the 
1217
1218time was located at Buzzard Point in southern Washington, DC, adjacent to Fort Lesley J. McNair. And it took my 
1219
1220mother just twenty or so minutes to get to her new job at the NSA, whose boxy futuristic headquarters, topped with 
1221
1222radomes and sheathed in copper to seal in the communications signals, forms the heart of Fort Meade.
1223
1224I can’t stress this enough, for outsiders: this type of employment was normal. Neighbors to our left worked for the 
1225
1226Defense Department; neighbors to the right worked in the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. For a 
1227
1228while, nearly every girl at school on whom I had a crush had a father in the FBI. Fort Meade was just the place where 
1229
1230my mother worked, along with about 125,000 other employees, approximately 40,000 of whom resided on-site, many with 
1231
1232their families. The base was home to over
1233115 government agencies, in addition to forces from all five branches of the military. To put it in perspective, in 
1234
1235Anne Arundel County, population just over half a million, every eight hundredth person works for the post office, 
1236
1237every thirtieth person works for the public school system, and every fourth person works for, or serves in, a 
1238
1239business, agency, or branch connected to Fort Meade. The base has its own post offices, schools, police, and fire 
1240
1241departments. Area children, military brats and civilians alike, would flock to the base daily to take golf, tennis, 
1242
1243and swimming lessons. Though we lived
1244off base, my mother still used its commissary as our grocery store, to stock up on items in bulk. She also took 
1245
1246advantage of the base’s PX, or Post Exchange, as a one-stop shop for the sensible and, most important, tax-free 
1247
1248clothing that my sister and I were constantly outgrowing. Perhaps it’s best, then, for readers not raised in this 
1249
1250milieu to imagine Fort Meade and its environs, if not the entire Beltway, as one enormous boom-or-bust company town. 
1251
1252It is a place whose monoculture has much in common with, say, Silicon Valley’s, except that the Beltway’s product 
1253
1254isn’t technology but government itself.
1255
1256I should add that both my parents had top secret clearances, but my mother also had a full-scope polygraph—a higher-
1257
1258level security check that members of the military aren’t subject to. The funny thing is, my mother was the farthest 
1259
1260thing from a spy. She was a clerk at an independent insurance and benefits association that serviced employees of the 
1261
1262NSA—essentially, providing spies with retirement plans. But still, to process pension forms she had to be vetted as 
1263
1264if she were about to parachute into a jungle to stage a coup.
1265
1266My father’s career remains fairly opaque to me to this day, and the fact is that my ignorance here isn’t anomalous. 
1267
1268In the world I grew up in, nobody really talked about their jobs—not just to children, but to each other. It is true 
1269
1270that many of the adults around me were legally prohibited from discussing their work, even with their families, but 
1271
1272to my mind a more accurate explanation lies in the technical nature of their labor and the government’s insistence on 
1273
1274compartmentalization. Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader applications and policy implications 
1275
1276of the projects to which they’re assigned. And the work that consumes them tends to require such specialized 
1277
1278knowledge that to bring it up at a barbecue would get them disinvited from the next one, because nobody cared.
1279
1280In retrospect, maybe that’s what got us here.
12814
1282
1283American Online
1284
1285It was soon after we moved to Crofton that my father brought home our first desktop computer, a Compaq Presario 425, 
1286
1287list price $1,399 but purchased at his military discount, and initially set up—much to my mother’s chagrin— smack in 
1288
1289the middle of the dining-room table. From the moment it appeared, the computer and I  were inseparable. If previously 
1290
1291I’d been loath to go outside and kick around a ball, now the very idea seemed ludicrous. There was no outside greater 
1292
1293than what I could find inside this drab clunky PC clone, with what felt at the time like an impossibly fast 25-
1294
1295megahertz Intel
1296486 CPU and an inexhaustible 200-megabyte hard disk. Also, get this, it had a color monitor—an 8-bit color monitor, 
1297
1298to be precise, which means that it could display up to 256 different colors. (Your current device can probably 
1299
1300display in the millions.)
1301
1302This Compaq became my constant companion—my second sibling, and first love. It came into my life just at the age when 
1303
1304I was first discovering an independent self and the multiple worlds that can simultaneously exist within this world. 
1305
1306That process of exploration was so exciting that it made me take for granted and even neglect, for a while at least, 
1307
1308the family and life that I already had. Another way of saying this is, I was just experiencing the early throes of 
1309
1310puberty. But this was a technologized puberty, and the tremendous changes that it wrought in me were, in a way, being 
1311
1312wrought everywhere, in everyone.
1313
1314My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them. They’d call my name to 
1315
1316tell me to wash up for dinner, but I’d pretend not to hear them. And whenever I was reminded that the computer was a 
1317
1318shared computer and not my personal machine, I’d relinquish my seat with such reluctance that as my father, or 
1319
1320mother, or sister took their turn, they’d have to order me out of the room entirely lest I hover moodily over their 
1321
1322shoulders and offer advice—showing my sister word-processing macros and shortcuts when she was writing a research 
1323
1324paper, or giving my parents spreadsheet tips when they tried to do their taxes.
1325
1326I’d try to rush them through their tasks, so I could get back to mine, which were so much more important—like playing 
1327
1328Loom. As technology had advanced, games involving Pong paddles and helicopters—the kind my father had played on that 
1329
1330by now superannuated Commodore—had lost ground to ones that realized that at the heart of every computer user was a 
1331
1332book reader, a
1333being with the desire not just for sensation but for story. The crude Nintendo, Atari, and Sega games of my 
1334
1335childhood, with plots along the lines of (and this is a real example) rescuing the president of the United States 
1336
1337from ninjas, now gave way to detailed reimaginings of the ancient tales that I’d paged through while lying on the 
1338
1339carpet of my grandmother’s house.
1340
1341Loom was about a society of Weavers whose elders (named after the Greek Fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) create a 
1342
1343secret loom that controls the world, or, according to the script of the game, that weaves “subtle patterns of 
1344
1345influence into the very fabric of reality.” When a young boy discovers the loom’s power, he’s forced into exile, and 
1346
1347everything spirals into chaos until the world decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea, 
1348
1349after all.
1350
1351Unbelievable, sure. But then again, it’s just a game.
1352
1353Still, it wasn’t lost on me, even at that young age, that the titular machine of the game was a symbol of sorts for 
1354
1355the computer on which I was playing it. The loom’s rainbow-colored threads were like the computer’s rainbow- colored 
1356
1357internal wires, and the lone gray thread that foretold an uncertain future was like the long gray phone cord that 
1358
1359came out of the back of the computer and connected it to the great wide world beyond. There, for me, was the true 
1360
1361magic: with just this cord, the Compaq’s expansion card and modem, and a working phone, I could dial up and connect 
1362
1363to something new called the Internet.
1364
1365Readers who were born postmillennium might not understand the fuss, but trust me,  this  was a  goddamned miracle. 
1366
1367Nowadays, connectivity is  just presumed. Smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always. Connected 
1368
1369to what exactly? How? It doesn’t matter. You just tap the icon your older relatives call “the Internet button” and 
1370
1371boom, you’ve got it: the news, pizza delivery, streaming music, and streaming video that we used to call TV and 
1372
1373movies. Back then, however, we walked uphill both ways, to and from school, and plugged our modems directly into the 
1374
1375wall, with manly twelve- year-old hands.
1376
1377I’m not saying that I knew much about what the Internet was, or how exactly I was connecting to it, but I did 
1378
1379understand the miraculousness of it all. Because in those days, when you told the computer to connect, you were 
1380
1381setting off an entire process wherein the computer would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of snakes, after which—and 
1382
1383it could take lifetimes, or at least whole minutes—you could pick up any other phone in the house on an extension 
1384
1385line and actually hear the computers talking. You couldn’t actually
1386understand what they were saying to each other, of course, since they were speaking in a machine language that 
1387
1388transmitted up to fourteen thousand symbols per second. Still, even that incomprehension was an astonishingly clear 
1389
1390indication that phone calls were no longer just for older teenage sisters.
1391
1392Internet access, and the emergence of the Web, was my generation’s big bang or Precambrian explosion. It irrevocably 
1393
1394altered the course of my life, as it did the lives of everyone. From the age of twelve or so, I tried to spend my 
1395
1396every waking moment online. Whenever I couldn’t, I was busy planning my next session. The Internet was my sanctuary; 
1397
1398the Web became my jungle gym, my treehouse, my fortress, my classroom without walls. If it were possible, I became 
1399
1400more sedentary. If it were possible, I became more pale. Gradually, I stopped sleeping at night and instead slept by 
1401
1402day in school. My grades went back into free fall.
1403
1404I wasn’t worried by this academic setback, however, and I’m not sure that my parents were, either. After all, the 
1405
1406education that I was getting online seemed better and even more practical for my future career prospects than 
1407
1408anything provided by school. That, at least, was what I kept telling my mother and father.
1409
1410My curiosity felt as vast as the Internet itself: a limitless space that was growing exponentially, adding webpages 
1411
1412by the day, by the hour, by the minute, on subjects I knew nothing about, on subjects I’d never heard of before—yet 
1413
1414the moment that I did hear about them, I’d develop an insatiable desire to understand them in their every detail, 
1415
1416with few rests or snacks or even toilet breaks allowed. My appetite wasn’t limited to serious tech subjects like how 
1417
1418to fix a CD-ROM drive, of course. I also spent plenty of time on gaming sites searching for god-mode cheat codes for 
1419
1420Doom and Quake. But I was  generally just  so  overwhelmed by  the  sheer  amount  of  information immediately 
1421
1422available that I’m not sure I was able to say where one subject ended and another began. A crash course on how to 
1423
1424build my own computer led to a crash course in processor architecture, with side excursions into information about 
1425
1426martial arts, guns, sports cars, and—full disclosure— softcore-ish goth-y porn.
1427
1428I sometimes had the feeling that I had to know everything and wasn’t going to sign off until I did. It was like I was 
1429
1430in a race with the technology, in the same way that some of the teenage boys around me were in a race with one 
1431
1432another to see who’d grow the tallest, or who’d get facial hair first. At school I was surrounded by kids, some from 
1433
1434foreign countries, who were just trying to fit in and would expend enormous effort to seem cool, to keep up
1435with the trends. But owning the latest No Fear hat and knowing how to bend its brim was child’s play—literally, 
1436
1437child’s play—compared to what I was doing. I found it so thoroughly demanding to keep pace with all of the sites and 
1438
1439how-to tutorials I followed that I started to resent my parents whenever they—in response to a particularly 
1440
1441substandard report card or a detention I received—would force me off the computer on a school night. I couldn’t bear 
1442
1443to have those privileges revoked, disturbed by the thought that every moment that  I  wasn’t  online  more  and  more 
1444
1445 material was  appearing that  I’d  be missing. After repeated parental warnings and threats of grounding, I’d 
1446
1447finally relent and print out whatever file I was reading and bring the dot-matrix pages up to bed. I’d continue 
1448
1449studying in hard copy until my parents had gone to bed themselves, and then I’d tiptoe out into the dark, wary of the 
1450
1451squeaky door and the creaky floorboards by the stairs. I’d keep the lights off and, guiding myself by the glow of the 
1452
1453screen saver, I’d wake the computer up and go online, holding my pillows against the machine to stifle the dial tone 
1454
1455of the modem and the ever-intensifying hiss of its connection.
1456
1457How can I explain it, to someone who wasn’t there? My younger readers, with their younger standards, might think of 
1458
1459the nascent Internet as way too slow, the nascent Web as too ugly and un-entertaining. But that would be wrong. Back 
1460
1461then, being online was another life, considered by most to be separate and distinct from Real Life. The virtual and 
1462
1463the actual had not yet merged. And it was up to each individual user to determine for themselves where one ended and 
1464
1465the other began.
1466
1467It was precisely this that was so inspiring: the freedom to imagine something  entirely  new,  the  freedom  to  
1468
1469start  over.  Whatever  Web  1.0 might’ve lacked in user-friendliness and design sensibility, it more than made up 
1470
1471for by its fostering of experimentation and originality of expression, and by its emphasis on the creative primacy of 
1472
1473the individual. A typical GeoCities site, for example, might have a flashing background that alternated between green 
1474
1475and blue, with white text scrolling like an exclamatory chyron across the middle—Read This First!!!—below the .gif of 
1476
1477a dancing hamster. But to me, all these kludgy quirks and tics of amateur production merely indicated that  the  
1478
1479guiding  intelligence  behind  the  site  was  human,  and  unique. Computer science professors and systems 
1480
1481engineers, moonlighting English majors  and  mouth-breathing,  basement-dwelling  armchair  political economists were 
1482
1483all only too happy to share their research and convictions— not for any financial reward, but merely to win converts 
1484
1485to their cause. And whether that cause was PC or Mac, macrobiotic diets or the abolition of the death penalty, I was 
1486
1487interested. I was interested because they were enthused.
1488Many of these strange and brilliant people could even be contacted and were quite pleased to answer my questions via 
1489
1490the forms (“click this hyperlink or copy and paste it into your browser”) and email addresses (@usenix.org,
1491@frontier.net) provided on their sites.
1492
1493As the millennium approached, the online world would become increasingly centralized and consolidated, with both 
1494
1495governments and businesses accelerating their attempts to intervene in what had always been a fundamentally  peer-
1496
1497to-peer  relationship.  But  for  one  brief  and  beautiful stretch of time—a stretch that, fortunately for me, 
1498
1499coincided almost exactly with my adolescence—the Internet was mostly made of, by, and for the people. Its purpose was 
1500
1501to enlighten, not to monetize, and it was administered more by a provisional cluster of perpetually shifting 
1502
1503collective norms than by exploitative, globally enforceable terms of service agreements. To this day, I consider the 
1504
15051990s online to have been the most pleasant and successful anarchy I’ve ever experienced.
1506
1507I was especially involved with the Web-based bulletin-board systems or BBSes. On these, you could pick a username and 
1508
1509type out whatever message you wanted to post, either adding to a preexisting group discussion or starting a new one. 
1510
1511Any and all messages that replied to your post would be organized by thread. Imagine the longest email chain you’ve 
1512
1513ever been on, but in public. These were also chat applications, like Internet Relay Chat, which provided an 
1514
1515immediate-gratification instant-message version of the same experience. There you could discuss any topic in real 
1516
1517time, or at least as close to real time as a telephone conversation, live radio, or TV news.
1518
1519Most of the messaging and chatting I did was in search of answers to questions I had about how to build my own 
1520
1521computer, and the responses I received were so considered and thorough, so generous and kind, they’d be unthinkable 
1522
1523today. My panicked query about why a certain chipset for which I’d  saved  up  my  allowance  didn’t  seem  to  be  
1524
1525compatible  with  the motherboard I’d already gotten for Christmas would elicit a two-thousand- word explanation and 
1526
1527note of advice from a professional tenured computer scientist on the other side of the country. Not cribbed from any 
1528
1529manual, this response was composed expressly for me, to troubleshoot my problems step- by-step until I’d solved them. 
1530
1531I was twelve years old, and my correspondent was an adult stranger far away, yet he treated me like an equal because 
1532
1533I’d shown respect for the technology. I attribute this civility, so far removed from our current social-media 
1534
1535sniping, to the high bar for entry at the time. After all, the only people on these boards were the people who could 
1536
1537be there—who wanted to be there badly enough—who had the proficiency and passion,
1538because the Internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.
1539
1540Once, a certain BBS that I was on tried to coordinate casual in-the-flesh meetings of its regular members throughout 
1541
1542the country: in DC, in New York, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After being pressured rather hard to 
1543
1544attend—and promised extravagant evenings of eating and drinking—I finally just told everyone how old I was. I was 
1545
1546afraid that some of my correspondents might stop interacting with me, but instead they became, if anything, even more 
1547
1548encouraging. I was sent updates from the electronics show and images of its catalog; one guy offered to ship me 
1549
1550secondhand computer parts through the mail, free of charge.
1551
1552
1553
1554I MIGHT  HAVE  told the BBSers my age, but I never told them my name, because one of the greatest joys of these 
1555
1556platforms was that on them I didn’t have to be who I was. I could be anybody. The anonymizing or pseudonymizing 
1557
1558features brought equilibrium to all relationships, correcting their imbalances. I could take cover under virtually 
1559
1560any handle, or “nym,” as
1561they were called, and suddenly become an older, taller, manlier version of
1562myself. I could even be multiple selves. I took advantage of this feature by asking what I sensed were my more 
1563
1564amateur questions on what seemed to me the more amateur boards, under different personas each time. My computer 
1565
1566skills were improving so swiftly that instead of being proud of all the progress I’d  made,  I  was  embarrassed by  
1567
1568my  previous  ignorance  and  wanted  to distance myself from it. I wanted to disassociate my selves. I’d tell myself 
1569
1570that squ33ker had been so dumb when “he” had asked that question about chipset compatibility way back, long ago, last 
1571
1572Wednesday.
1573
1574For all of this cooperative, collectivist free-culture ethos, I’m not going to pretend that the competition wasn’t 
1575
1576merciless, or that the population—almost uniformly male, heterosexual, and hormonally charged—didn’t occasionally 
1577
1578erupt into cruel and petty squabbles. But in the absence of real names, the people who  claimed to  hate  you  
1579
1580weren’t real  people. They didn’t know anything about you beyond what you argued, and how you argued it. If, or 
1581
1582rather when, one of your arguments incurred some online wrath, you could simply drop that screen name and assume 
1583
1584another mask, under the cover of which you could even join in the mimetic pile-on, beating up on your disowned avatar 
1585
1586as if it were a stranger. I can’t tell you what sweet relief that sometimes was.
1587
1588In the 1990s, the Internet had yet to fall victim to the greatest iniquity in
1589digital history: the move by  both government and businesses to  link, as intimately as possible, users’ online 
1590
1591personas to their offline legal identity. Kids used to be able to go online and say the dumbest things one day 
1592
1593without having to be held accountable for them the next. This might not strike you as the healthiest environment in 
1594
1595which to grow up, and yet it is precisely the only environment in which you can grow up—by which I mean that the 
1596
1597early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most 
1598
1599deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent 
1600
1601ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing 
1602
1603irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the 
1604
1605community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.
1606
1607Imagine, if you will, that you could wake up every morning and pick a new name and a new face by which to be known to 
1608
1609the world. Imagine that you could choose a new voice and new words to speak in it, as if the “Internet button” were 
1610
1611actually a reset button for your life. In the new millennium, Internet technology would be turned to very different 
1612
1613ends: enforcing fidelity to memory, identarian consistency, and so ideological conformity. But back then, for a while 
1614
1615at least, it protected us by forgetting our transgressions and forgiving our sins.
1616
1617My most significant early encounters with online self-presentation happened not on BBSes, however, but in a more 
1618
1619fantastical realm: the pseudo- feudal lands and dungeons of role-playing games, MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online 
1620
1621role-playing games) in particular. In order to play Ultima Online, which was my favorite MMORPG, I had to create and 
1622
1623assume an alternative identity, or “alt.” I could choose, for example, to be a wizard or warrior, a tinkerer or 
1624
1625thief, and I could toggle between these alts with a freedom that was unavailable to me in off-line life, whose 
1626
1627institutions tend to regard all mutability as suspicious.
1628
1629I’d roam the Ultima gamescape as one of my alts, interacting with the alts of others. As I got to know these other 
1630
1631alts, by collaborating with them on certain quests, I’d sometimes come to realize that I’d met their users before, 
1632
1633just under different identities, while they, in turn, might realize the same about me. They’d read my messages and 
1634
1635figure out, through a characteristic phrase I’d used, or a particular quest that I’d suggest, that I—who was 
1636
1637currently, say, a knight who called herself Shrike—was also, or had also been, a bard who called himself Corwin, and 
1638
1639a smith who called himself Belgarion. Sometimes I just enjoyed these interactions as opportunities for banter, but 
1640
1641more often
1642than not I treated them competitively, measuring my success by whether I was able to identify more of another user’s 
1643
1644alts than they were able to identify of mine. These contests to determine whether I could unmask others without being 
1645
1646unmasked myself required me to be careful not to fall into any messaging patterns that might expose me, while 
1647
1648simultaneously engaging others and remaining alert to the ways in which they might inadvertently reveal their true 
1649
1650identities.
1651
1652While the alts of Ultima were multifarious in name, they were essentially stabilized by the nature of their roles, 
1653
1654which were well defined, even archetypal, and so enmeshed within the game’s established social order as to make 
1655
1656playing them sometimes feel like discharging a civic duty. After a day at school or at a job that might seem 
1657
1658purposeless and unrewarding, it could feel as if you were performing a useful service by spending the evening as a 
1659
1660healer or shepherd, a helpful alchemist or mage. The relative stability of the Ultima universe—its continued 
1661
1662development according to defined laws and codes of conduct—ensured that each alt had their role-specific tasks, and 
1663
1664would be judged according to their ability, or willingness, to complete them and fulfill the societal expectations of 
1665
1666their function.
1667
1668I loved these games and the alternative lives they let me live, though love wasn’t quite as liberating for the other 
1669
1670members of my family. Games, especially of the massively multiplayer variety, are notoriously time- consuming, and I 
1671
1672was spending so many hours playing Ultima that our phone bills were becoming exorbitant and no calls were getting 
1673
1674through. The line was always busy. My sister, now deep into her teen years, became furious when she found out that my 
1675
1676online life had caused her to miss some crucial high-school gossip. However, it didn’t take her long to figure out 
1677
1678that all she had to do to get her revenge was pick up the phone, which would break the Internet connection. The 
1679
1680modem’s hiss would stop, and before she’d even received a normal dial tone, I’d be screaming my head off downstairs.
1681
1682If you’re interrupted in the middle of, say, reading the news online, you can always go back and pick up wherever you 
1683
1684left off. But if you’re interrupted while playing a game that you can’t pause or save—because a hundred thousand 
1685
1686others are playing it at the same time—you’re ruined. You could be on top of the world, some legendary dragon-slayer 
1687
1688with your own castle and an army, but after just thirty seconds of CONNECTION  LOST you’d
1689find yourself reconnecting to a bone-gray screen that bore a cruel epitaph:
1690YOU ARE DEAD.
1691
1692I’m a bit embarrassed nowadays at how seriously I took all of this, but I
1693can’t avoid the fact that I felt, at the time, as if my sister was intent on destroying my life—particularly on those 
1694
1695occasions when she’d make sure to catch  my  eye  from  across  the  room  and  smile  before  picking  up  the 
1696
1697downstairs receiver, not because she wanted to make a phone call but purely because she wanted to remind me who was 
1698
1699boss. Our parents got so fed up with our shouting matches that they did something uncharacteristically indulgent. 
1700
1701They switched our Internet billing plan from pay-by-the-minute to flat-fee unlimited access, and installed a second 
1702
1703phone line.
1704
1705Peace smiled upon our abode.
17065
1707
1708Hacking
1709
1710All teenagers are hackers. They have to be, if only because their life circumstances are untenable. They think 
1711
1712they’re adults, but the adults think they’re kids.
1713
1714Remember, if you can, your own teen years. You were a hacker, too, willing to do anything to evade parental 
1715
1716supervision. Basically, you were fed up with being treated like a child.
1717
1718Recall how it felt when anyone older and bigger than you sought to control you, as if age and size were identical 
1719
1720with authority. At one time or another, your parents, teachers, coaches, scoutmasters, and clergy would all take 
1721
1722advantage of their position to invade your private life, impose their expectations on your future, and enforce your 
1723
1724conformity to past standards. Whenever these adults substituted their hopes, dreams, and desires for your own, they 
1725
1726were doing so, by their account, “for your own good” or “with your best interests at heart.” And while sometimes this 
1727
1728was true, we all remember those other times when it wasn’t—when “because I said so” wasn’t enough and  “you’ll  thank 
1729
1730 me  one  day”  rang  hollow.  If  you’ve  ever  been  an adolescent, you’ve surely been on the receiving end of one 
1731
1732of these clichés, and so on the losing end of an imbalance of power.
1733
1734To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, 
1735
1736and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at 
1737
1738a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.
1739
1740If you were anything like me, you were scandalized.
1741
1742If you were anything like me, you were nearsighted, scrawny, and, age- wise, barely entering the double digits when 
1743
1744you first started to wonder about politics.
1745
1746In school, you were told that in the system of American politics, citizens give consent through the franchise to be 
1747
1748governed by their equals. This is democracy. But democracy certainly wasn’t in place in my US history class, where, 
1749
1750if my classmates and I had the vote, Mr. Martin would have been out of a job. Instead, Mr. Martin made the rules for 
1751
1752US history, Ms. Evans made the rules for English, Mr. Sweeney made the rules for science, Mr. Stockton made the rules 
1753
1754for math, and all of those teachers constantly changed those
1755rules to benefit themselves and maximize their power. If a teacher didn’t want you to go to the bathroom, you’d 
1756
1757better hold it in. If a teacher promised a field trip to the Smithsonian Institution but then canceled it for an 
1758
1759imaginary infraction, they’d offer no explanation beyond citing their broad authority and the maintenance of proper 
1760
1761order. Even back then, I realized that any opposition to this system would be difficult, not least because getting 
1762
1763its rules changed to serve the interests of the majority would involve persuading the rule makers to put themselves 
1764
1765at a purposeful disadvantage. That, ultimately, is the critical flaw or design defect intentionally integrated into 
1766
1767every system, in both politics and computing: the people who create the rules have no incentive to act against 
1768
1769themselves.
1770
1771What convinced me that school, at least, was an illegitimate system was that it wouldn’t recognize any legitimate 
1772
1773dissent. I could plead my case until I lost my voice, or I could just accept the fact that I’d never had a voice to 
1774
1775begin with.
1776
1777However,  the  benevolent  tyranny  of  school,  like  all  tyrannies,  has  a limited shelf life. At a certain 
1778
1779point, the denial of agency becomes a license to resist, though it’s characteristic of adolescence to confuse 
1780
1781resistance with escapism or even violence. The most common outlets for a rebellious teen were useless to me, because 
1782
1783I was too cool for vandalism and not cool enough for drugs. (To this day, I’ve never even gotten drunk on liquor or 
1784
1785smoked a cigarette.) Instead, I started hacking—which remains the sanest, healthiest, and most educational way I know 
1786
1787for kids to assert autonomy and address adults on equal terms.
1788
1789Like most of my classmates, I didn’t like the rules but was afraid of breaking them. I knew how the system worked: 
1790
1791you corrected a teacher’s mistake, you got a warning; you confronted the teacher when they didn’t admit the mistake, 
1792
1793you got detention; someone cheated off your exam, and though you didn’t expressly let them cheat, you got detention 
1794
1795and the cheater got suspended. This is the origin of all hacking: the awareness of a systemic linkage between input 
1796
1797and output, between cause and effect. Because hacking isn’t just native to computing—it exists wherever rules do. To 
1798
1799hack a system requires getting to know its rules better than the people who created it or are running it, and 
1800
1801exploiting all the vulnerable distance between how those people had intended the system to work and how it actually 
1802
1803works, or could be made to work. In capitalizing on these unintentional uses, hackers aren’t breaking the rules as 
1804
1805much as debunking them.
1806
1807Humans are hardwired to recognize patterns. All the choices we make are
1808informed by a cache of assumptions, both empirical and logical, unconsciously derived and consciously developed. We 
1809
1810use these assumptions to assess the potential consequences of each choice, and we describe the ability to do all of 
1811
1812this, quickly and accurately, as intelligence. But even the smartest among us rely on assumptions that we’ve never 
1813
1814put to the test—and because we do, the choices we make are often flawed. Anyone who knows better, or thinks more 
1815
1816quickly and more accurately than we do, can take advantage of those flaws to create consequences that we never 
1817
1818expected. It’s this egalitarian nature of hacking—which doesn’t care who you are, just how you reason—that makes it 
1819
1820such a reliable method of dealing with the type of authority figures so convinced of their system’s righteousness 
1821
1822that it never occurred to them to test it.
1823
1824I didn’t learn any of this at school, of course. I learned it online. The Internet gave me the chance to pursue all 
1825
1826the topics I was interested in, and all the links between them, unconstrained by the pace of my classmates and my 
1827
1828teachers. The more time I spent online, however, the more my schoolwork felt extracurricular.
1829
1830The summer I turned thirteen, I resolved never to return, or at least to seriously reduce my classroom commitments. I 
1831
1832wasn’t quite sure how I’d swing that, though. All the plans I came up with were likely to backfire. If I was caught 
1833
1834skipping class, my parents would revoke my computer privileges; if I decided to drop out, they’d bury my body deep in 
1835
1836the woods and tell the neighbors I’d run away. I had to come up with a hack—and then, on the first day of the new 
1837
1838school year, I found one. Indeed, it was basically handed to me.
1839
1840At the start of each class, the teachers passed out their syllabi, detailing the material to be covered, the required 
1841
1842reading, and the schedule of tests and quizzes and assignments. Along with these, they gave us their grading 
1843
1844policies, which were essentially explanations of how As, Bs, Cs, and Ds were calculated. I’d never encountered 
1845
1846information like this. Their numbers and letters were like a strange equation that suggested a solution to my 
1847
1848problem.
1849
1850After school that day, I sat down with the syllabi and did the math to figure out which aspects of each class I could 
1851
1852simply ignore and still expect to receive a passing grade. Take my US history class, for example. According to the 
1853
1854syllabus, quizzes were worth 25 percent, tests were worth 35 percent, term papers were worth 15 percent, homework was 
1855
1856worth 15 percent, and class participation—that  most  subjective  of  categories,  in  every  subject—was worth 10 
1857
1858percent. Because I usually did well on my quizzes and tests without
1859having to do too much studying, I could count on them for a reliable pool of time-efficient points. Term papers and 
1860
1861homework, however, were the major time-sucks: low-value, high-cost impositions on Me Time.
1862
1863What all of those numbers told me was that if I didn’t do any homework but aced everything else, I’d wind up with a 
1864
1865cumulative grade of 85, a B. If I didn’t do any homework or write any term papers but aced everything else, I’d wind 
1866
1867up with a cumulative grade of 70, a C-minus. The 10 percent that was class participation would be my buffer. Even if 
1868
1869the teacher gave me a zero in that—if they interpreted my participation as disruption—I could still manage a 65, a 
1870
1871D-minus. I’d still pass.
1872
1873My teachers’ systems were terminally flawed. Their instructions for how to achieve the highest grade could be used as 
1874
1875instructions for how to achieve the highest freedom—a key to how to avoid doing what I didn’t like to do and still 
1876
1877slide by.
1878
1879The moment I figured that out, I stopped doing homework completely. Every day was bliss, the kind of bliss forbidden 
1880
1881to anybody old enough to work and pay taxes, until Mr. Stockton asked me in front of the entire class why I hadn’t 
1882
1883handed in the past half-dozen or so homework assignments. Untouched as I was by the guile of age—and forgetting for a 
1884
1885moment that by giving away my hack, I was depriving myself of an advantage—I cheerfully offered my equation to the 
1886
1887math teacher. My classmates’ laughter lasted just a moment before they set about scribbling, calculating whether 
1888
1889they, too, could afford to adopt a post-homework life.
1890
1891“Pretty clever, Eddie,” Mr. Stockton said, moving on to the next lesson with a smile.
1892
1893I was the smartest kid in school—until about twenty-four hours later, when Mr. Stockton passed out the new syllabus. 
1894
1895This stated that any student who failed to turn in more than six homeworks by the end of the semester would get an 
1896
1897automatic F.
1898
1899Pretty clever, Mr. Stockton.
1900
1901Then, he took me aside after class and said, “You should be using that brain of yours not to figure out how to avoid 
1902
1903work, but how to do the best work you can. You have so much potential, Ed. But I don’t think you realize that the 
1904
1905grades you get here will follow you for the rest of your life. You have to start thinking about your permanent 
1906
1907record.”
1908UNSHACKLED FROM HOMEWORK, at least for a while, and so with more time to spare, I also did some more conventional—
1909
1910computer-based—hacking. As I did, my abilities improved. At the bookstore, I’d page through tiny, blurrily 
1911
1912photocopied, stapled-together hacker zines with names like 2600 and Phrack, absorbing    their    techniques,    and  
1913
1914  in    the    process    absorbing    their
1915antiauthoritarian politics.
1916
1917I was at the bottom of the technical totem pole, a script kiddie n00b working with tools I didn’t understand that 
1918
1919functioned according to principles that were beyond me. People still ask me why, when I finally did gain some 
1920
1921proficiency, I didn’t race out to empty bank accounts or steal credit card numbers. The honest answer is that I was 
1922
1923too young and dumb to even know that this was an option, let alone to know what I’d do with the stolen loot. All I 
1924
1925wanted, all I needed, I already had for free. Instead, I figured out simple ways to hack some games, giving myself 
1926
1927extra lives and letting me do things like see through walls. Also, there wasn’t a lot of money on the Internet back 
1928
1929then, at least not by today’s standards. The closest that anyone I knew or anything I read ever came to theft was 
1930
1931“phreaking,” or making free phone calls.
1932
1933If you asked some of the big-shot hackers of the day why, for example, they’d hacked into a major news site only to 
1934
1935do nothing more meaningful than replace the headlines with a trippy GIF proclaiming the skills of Baron von 
1936
1937Hackerface that would be taken down in less than half an hour, the reply would’ve been a version of the answer given 
1938
1939by the mountaineer who was asked his reason for climbing Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.” Most hackers, 
1940
1941particularly young ones, set out to search not for lucre or power, but for the limits of their talent and any 
1942
1943opportunity to prove the impossible possible.
1944
1945I was young, and while my curiosity was pure, it was also, in retrospect, pretty psychologically revealing, in that 
1946
1947some of my earliest hacking attempts were directed toward allaying my neuroses. The more I came to know about the 
1948
1949fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of trusting the wrong machine. As a 
1950
1951teenager, my first hack that ever courted trouble dealt with a fear that suddenly became all I could think about: the 
1952
1953threat of a full-on, scorched-earth nuclear holocaust.
1954
1955I’d been reading some article about the history of the American nuclear program, and before I knew it, with just a 
1956
1957couple of clicks, I was at the website  of  the  Los  Alamos  National  Laboratory,  the  country’s  nuclear research 
1958
1959facility. That’s just the way the Internet works: you get curious, and
1960your fingers do the thinking for you. But suddenly I was legitimately freaked out: the website of America’s largest 
1961
1962and most significant scientific research and weapons development institution, I noticed, had a glaring security hole. 
1963
1964Its vulnerability was basically the virtual version of an unlocked door: an open directory structure.
1965
1966I’ll explain. Imagine I sent you a link to download a .pdf file that’s kept on its own page of a multipage website. 
1967
1968The URL for this file would typically be something like website.com/files/pdfs/filename.pdf. Now, as the structure of 
1969
1970a URL derives directly from directory structure, each part of this URL represents a distinct “branch” of the 
1971
1972directory “tree.” In this instance, within the directory of website.com is a folder of files, within which is a 
1973
1974subfolder of pdfs, within which is the specific filename.pdf that you’re seeking to download. Today, most websites 
1975
1976will confine your visit to that specific file, keeping their directory structures closed and private. But back in 
1977
1978those dinosaur days, even major websites were created and run by folks who were new to the technology, and they often 
1979
1980left their directory structures wide open, which meant that if you truncated your file’s URL—if you simply changed it 
1981
1982to something like website.com/files—you’d be able to access every file on the site, pdf or otherwise, including those 
1983
1984that weren’t necessarily meant for visitors. This was the case with the Los Alamos site.
1985
1986In the hacking community, this is basically Baby’s First Hack—a totally rudimentary traversal procedure known as 
1987
1988“dirwalking,” or “directory walking.” And that’s just what I did: I walked as fast as I could from file to subfolder 
1989
1990to upper-level folder and back again, a teen let loose through the parent directories. Within a half hour of reading 
1991
1992an article about the threat of nuclear weapons, I’d stumbled upon a trove of files meant only for the lab’s 
1993
1994security-cleared workers.
1995
1996To be sure, the documents I accessed weren’t exactly the classified plans for building a nuclear device in my garage. 
1997
1998(And, anyway, it’s not as if those plans weren’t already available on about a dozen DIY websites.) Instead, what I 
1999
2000got was more along the lines of confidential interoffice memoranda and other  personal employee information. Still,  
2001
2002as  someone suddenly acutely worried about mushroom clouds on the horizon, and also—especially—as the child of 
2003
2004military parents, I did what I figured I was supposed to: I told an adult. I sent an explanatory email to the 
2005
2006laboratory’s webmaster about the vulnerability, and waited for a response that never came.
2007
2008Every day after school I visited the site to check if the directory structure had changed, and it hadn’t—nothing had 
2009
2010changed, except my capacity for
2011shock and indignation. I finally got on the phone, my house’s second line, and called the general information phone 
2012
2013number listed at the bottom of the laboratory’s site.
2014
2015An operator picked up, and the moment she did I started stammering. I don’t even think I got to the end of the phrase 
2016
2017“directory structure” before my voice broke. The operator interrupted with a curt “please hold for IT,” and before I 
2018
2019could thank her she’d transferred me to a voice mail.
2020
2021By the time the beep came, I’d regained some modicum of confidence and, with a steadier larynx, I left a message. All 
2022
2023I recall now of that message was how I  ended it—with relief, and by repeating my name and phone number. I think I 
2024
2025even spelled out my name, like my father sometimes did, using the military phonetic alphabet: “Sierra November Oscar 
2026
2027Whiskey Delta Echo November.” Then I hung up and went on with my life, which for a week consisted pretty much 
2028
2029exclusively of checking the Los Alamos website.
2030
2031Nowadays, given the government’s cyberintelligence capabilities, anyone who was pinging the Los Alamos servers a few 
2032
2033dozen times a day would almost certainly become a person of interest. Back then, however, I was merely an interested 
2034
2035person. I couldn’t understand—didn’t anybody care?
2036
2037Weeks passed—and weeks can feel like months to a teenager—until one evening, just before dinner, the phone rang. My 
2038
2039mother, who was in the kitchen making dinner, picked up.
2040
2041I was at the computer in the dining room when I heard it was for me: “Yes, uh-huh, he’s here.” Then, “May I ask who’s 
2042
2043calling?”
2044
2045I turned around in my seat and she was standing over me, holding the phone against her chest. All the color had left 
2046
2047her face. She was trembling.
2048
2049Her  whisper  had  a  mournful  urgency  I’d  never  heard  before,  and  it terrified me: “What did you do?”
2050
2051Had I known, I would have told her. Instead, I asked, “Who is it?” “Los Alamos, the nuclear laboratory.”
2052“Oh, thank God.”
2053
2054I gently pried the phone away from her and sat her down. “Hello?”
2055
2056On the line was a friendly representative from Los Alamos IT, who kept calling me Mr. Snowden. He thanked me for 
2057
2058reporting the problem and informed me that they’d just fixed it. I restrained myself from asking what had taken so 
2059
2060long—I restrained myself from reaching over to the computer
2061and immediately checking the site.
2062
2063My mother hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She was trying to piece together the conversation, but could only hear one 
2064
2065side. I gave her a thumbs-up, and then, to further reassure her, I affected an older, serious, and unconvincingly 
2066
2067deep voice and stiffly explained to the IT rep what he already knew: how I’d found the directory traversal problem, 
2068
2069how I’d reported it, how I hadn’t received any response until now. I finished up with, “I really appreciate you 
2070
2071telling me. I hope I didn’t cause any problems.”
2072
2073“Not at all,” the IT rep said, and then asked what I did for a living. “Nothing really,” I said.
2074He asked whether I was looking for a job and I said, “During the school year, I’m pretty busy, but I’ve got a lot of 
2075
2076vacation and the summers are free.”
2077
2078That’s when the lightbulb went off, and he realized that he was dealing with a teenager. “Well, kid,” he said, 
2079
2080“you’ve got my contact. Be sure and get in touch when you turn eighteen. Now pass me along to that nice lady I spoke 
2081
2082to.”
2083
2084I handed the phone to my anxious mother and she took it back with her into the kitchen, which was filling up with 
2085
2086smoke. Dinner was burnt, but I’m guessing the IT rep said enough complimentary things about me that any punishment I 
2087
2088was imagining went out the window.
20896
2090
2091Incomplete
2092
2093I don’t remember high school very well, because I spent so much of it asleep, compensating for all my insomniac 
2094
2095nights on the computer. At Arundel High most of my teachers didn’t mind my little napping habit, and left me alone so 
2096
2097long as I wasn’t snoring, though there were still a cruel, joyless few who considered it their duty to always wake 
2098
2099me—with the screech of chalk or the clap of erasers—and ambush me with a question: “And what do you think, Mr. 
2100
2101Snowden?”
2102
2103I’d lift my head off my desk, sit up in my chair, yawn, and—as my classmates tried to stifle their laughter—I’d have 
2104
2105to answer.
2106
2107The truth is,  I  loved these moments, which were among the greatest challenges high school had to offer. I loved 
2108
2109being put on the spot, groggy and dazed, with thirty pairs of eyes and ears trained on me and expecting my failure, 
2110
2111while I searched for a clue on the half-empty blackboard. If I could think quickly enough to come up with a good 
2112
2113answer, I’d be a legend. But if I was too slow, I could always crack a joke—it’s never too late for a joke. In the 
2114
2115absolute worst case, I’d sputter, and my classmates would think I was stupid. Let them. You should always let people 
2116
2117underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their 
2118
2119own vulnerabilities—the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you want to cartwheel through later 
2120
2121on a flaming horse, correcting the record with your sword of justice.
2122
2123When I was a teen, I think I was a touch too enamored of the idea that life’s most important questions are binary, 
2124
2125meaning that one answer is always Right, and all the rest of the answers are Wrong. I think I was enchanted by the 
2126
2127model of computer programming, whose questions can only be answered in one of two ways: 1 or 0, the machine-code 
2128
2129version of Yes or No, True or False. Even the multiple-choice questions of my quizzes and tests could be approached 
2130
2131through the oppositional logic of the binary. If I didn’t immediately recognize one of the possible answers as 
2132
2133correct, I could always try to reduce my choices by a process of elimination, looking for terms such as “always” or 
2134
2135“never” and seeking out invalidating exceptions.
2136
2137Toward the end of my freshman year, however, I was faced with a very different kind of assignment—a question that 
2138
2139couldn’t be answered by filling in  bubbles with a  #2  pencil, but only by  rhetoric: full sentences in  full 
2140
2141paragraphs. In plain terms, it was an English class assignment, a writing
2142prompt: “Please produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than
21431,000 words.” I was being ordered by strangers to divulge my thoughts on perhaps the only subject on which I didn’t 
2144
2145have any thoughts: the subject of me, whoever he was. I  just couldn’t do it. I  was blocked. I  didn’t turn anything 
2146
2147in and received an Incomplete.
2148
2149My problem, like the prompt itself, was personal. I couldn’t “produce an autobiographical statement” because my life 
2150
2151at the time was too confusing. This was because my family was falling apart. My parents were getting a divorce. It 
2152
2153all happened so fast. My father moved out and my mother put the house in Crofton on the market, and then moved with 
2154
2155my sister and me into an apartment, and then into a condominium in a development in nearby Ellicott City. I’ve had 
2156
2157friends tell me that you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become one yourself. But what no one ever 
2158
2159mentions is that for kids of a certain age, divorce is like both of those happening simultaneously. Suddenly, the 
2160
2161invulnerable icons of your childhood are gone. In their stead, if there’s anyone at all, is a person even more lost 
2162
2163than you are, full of tears and rage, who craves your reassurance that everything will turn out okay. It won’t, 
2164
2165though, at least not for a while.
2166
2167As the custody and visitation rights were being sorted by the courts, my sister threw herself into college 
2168
2169applications, was accepted, and started counting down the days until she’d leave for the University of North Carolina 
2170
2171at Wilmington. Losing her meant losing my closest tie to what our family had been.
2172
2173I reacted by turning inward. I buckled down and willed myself into becoming another person, a shape-shifter putting 
2174
2175on the mask of whoever the people I cared about needed at the time. Among family, I was dependable and sincere. Among 
2176
2177friends, mirthful and unconcerned. But when I was alone, I was subdued, even morose, and constantly worried about 
2178
2179being a burden. I was haunted by all the road trips to North Carolina I’d complained through, all the Christmases I’d 
2180
2181ruined by bringing home bad report cards, all the times I’d refused to get off-line and do my chores. Every childhood 
2182
2183fuss I’d ever made flickered in my mind like crime-scene footage, evidence that I was responsible for what had 
2184
2185happened.
2186
2187I tried to throw off the guilt by ignoring my emotions and feigning self- sufficiency, until I projected a sort of 
2188
2189premature adulthood. I stopped saying that I was “playing” with the computer, and started saying that I was “working” 
2190
2191on it. Just changing those words, without remotely changing what I was doing, made a difference in how I was 
2192
2193perceived, by others and even by
2194myself.
2195
2196I stopped calling myself “Eddie.” From now on, I was “Ed.” I got my first cell phone, which I wore clipped to my belt 
2197
2198like a grown-ass man.
2199
2200The unexpected blessing of trauma—the opportunity for reinvention— taught me to appreciate the world beyond the four 
2201
2202walls of home. I was surprised to find that as I put more and more distance between myself and the two adults who 
2203
2204loved me the most, I came closer to others, who treated me like a peer. Mentors who taught me to sail, trained me to 
2205
2206fight, coached me in public speaking, and gave me the confidence to stand onstage—all of them helped to raise me.
2207
2208At the beginning of my sophomore year, though, I started getting tired a lot and falling asleep more than usual—not 
2209
2210just at school anymore, but now even at the computer. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a more or less 
2211
2212upright position, the screen in front of me full of gibberish because I’d passed out atop the keys. Soon enough my 
2213
2214joints were aching, my nodes were swollen, the whites of my eyes turned yellow, and I was too exhausted to get out of 
2215
2216bed, even after sleeping for twelve hours or more at a stretch.
2217
2218After having had more blood taken from me than I’d ever imagined was in my body, I was eventually diagnosed with 
2219
2220infectious mononucleosis. It was both a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not 
2221
2222least because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,” and at age fifteen the only 
2223
2224“hooking up” I’d ever done involved a modem. School was totally forgotten, my absences piled up, and not even that 
2225
2226made me happy. Not even an all-ice-cream diet made me happy. I barely had the energy to do anything but play the 
2227
2228games my parents gave me—each of them trying to bring the cooler game, the newer game, as if they were in a 
2229
2230competition to perk me up or mitigate their guilt about the divorce. When I no longer had it in me to even work a 
2231
2232joystick, I wondered why I was alive. Sometimes I’d wake up unable to recognize my surroundings. It would take me a 
2233
2234while to figure out whether the dimness meant that I was at my mother’s condo or my father’s one-bedroom, and I’d 
2235
2236have no recollection of having been driven between them. Every day became the same.
2237
2238It was a haze. I remember reading The Conscience of a Hacker (aka The Hacker’s Manifesto), Neal Stephenson’s Snow 
2239
2240Crash, and reams of J. R. R. Tolkien, falling asleep midchapter and getting the characters and action confused, until 
2241
2242I was dreaming that Gollum was by my bedside and whining, “Master, Master, information wants to be free.”
2243While I was resigned to all the fever dreams sleep brought me, the thought of having to catch up on my schoolwork was 
2244
2245the true nightmare. After I’d missed approximately four months of class, I got a letter in the mail from Arundel High 
2246
2247informing me that I’d have to repeat my sophomore year. I’d say I was shocked, but the moment I read the letter, I 
2248
2249realized that I’d known this was inevitable and had been dreading it for weeks. The prospect of returning to school, 
2250
2251let alone of repeating two semesters, was unimaginable to me, and I was ready to do whatever it took to avoid it.
2252
2253Just at the point when my glandular disease had developed into a full-on depression, receiving the school news shook 
2254
2255me out of my slump. Suddenly I was upright and getting dressed in something other than pajamas. Suddenly I was online 
2256
2257and on the phone, searching for the system’s edges, searching for a hack. After a bit of research, and a lot of 
2258
2259form-filling, my solution landed in the mailbox: I’d gotten myself accepted to college. Apparently, you don’t need a 
2260
2261high school diploma to apply.
2262
2263Anne Arundel Community College was a local institution, certainly not as venerable as my sister’s school, but it 
2264
2265would do the trick. All that mattered was that it was accredited. I took the offer of admission to my high school 
2266
2267administrators, who, with a curious and barely concealed mixture of resignation and glee, agreed to let me enroll. 
2268
2269I’d attend college classes two days a week, which was just about the most that I could manage to stay upright and 
2270
2271functional. By taking classes above my grade level, I wouldn’t have to suffer through the year I’d missed. I’d just 
2272
2273skip it.
2274
2275AACC was about twenty-five minutes away, and the first few times I drove myself were perilous—I was a newly licensed 
2276
2277driver who could barely stay awake at the wheel. I’d go to class and then come directly home to sleep. I was the 
2278
2279youngest person in all my classes, and might even have been the youngest person at the school, alternately a mascot-
2280
2281like object of novelty and a discomfiting presence. This, along with the fact that I was still recovering, meant that 
2282
2283I didn’t hang out much. Also, because AACC was a commuter school, it had no active campus life. The anonymity of the 
2284
2285school suited me fine,  though,  as  did  my  classes,  most  of  which  were  distinctly  more interesting than 
2286
2287anything I’d napped through at Arundel High.
2288
2289
2290
2291BEFORE I GO any further and leave high school forever, I should note that I still owe that English class assignment, 
2292
2293the one marked Incomplete. My autobiographical statement. The older I get, the heavier it weighs on me, and yet 
2294
2295writing it hasn’t gotten any easier.
2296The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably to autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so 
2297
2298much of my life trying to avoid identification,   only   to   turn   around   completely   and   share   “personal 
2299
2300disclosures” in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of 
2301
2302blank-page personality upon which to inscribe secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be 
2303
2304inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house, you drive the most ordinary car, 
2305
2306you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, 
2307
2308is your cover. This is the perverse reward of a self-denying career that brings no public glory: the private glory 
2309
2310comes not during work, but after, when you can go back out among other people again and successfully convince them 
2311
2312that you’re one of them.
2313
2314Though there are a score of more popular and surely more accurate psychological terms for this type of identity 
2315
2316split, I tend to think of it as human encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material— your core 
2317
2318identity—still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form. The equation that enables this ciphering is a simple 
2319
2320proportion: the more you know about others, the less you know about yourself. After a time, you might forget your 
2321
2322likes and even your dislikes. You can lose your politics, along with any and all respect for the political process 
2323
2324that you might have had. Everything gets subsumed by the job, which begins with a denial of character and ends with a 
2325
2326denial of conscience. “Mission First.”
2327
2328Some version of the above served me for years as an explanation of my dedication to privacy, and my inability or 
2329
2330unwillingness to get personal. It’s only now, when I’ve been out of the IC almost as long as I was in it, that I 
2331
2332realize: it isn’t nearly enough. After all, I was hardly a spy—I wasn’t even shaving—when I failed to turn in my 
2333
2334English class assignment. Instead, I was a kid who’d been practicing spycraft for a while already—partly through my 
2335
2336online experiments with  game-playing identities, but  more  than  anything through dealing with the silence and lies 
2337
2338that followed my parents’ divorce.
2339
2340With that rupture, we became a family of secret-keepers, experts at subterfuge and hiding. My parents kept secrets 
2341
2342from each other, and from me and my sister. My sister and I would eventually keep our own secrets, too, when one of 
2343
2344us was staying with our father for the weekend and the other was staying with our mother. One of the most difficult 
2345
2346trials that a child of divorce has to face is being interrogated by one parent about the new life of the other.
2347
2348My mother would be gone for stretches, back on the dating scene. My
2349father tried his best to fill the void, but, at times, he would become enraged by the protracted and expensive 
2350
2351divorce process. Whenever that happened, it would seem to me as if our roles had reversed. I had to be assertive and 
2352
2353stand up to him, to reason with him.
2354
2355It’s painful to write this, though not so much because the events of this period are painful to recall as because 
2356
2357they’re in no way indicative of my parents’ fundamental decency—or of how, out of love for their children, they were 
2358
2359eventually able to bury their differences, reconcile with respect, and flourish separately in peace.
2360
2361This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document 
2362
2363of a person in flux. This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a 
2364
2365pledge—a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.
2366
2367I’d enrolled in community college to save myself time after a setback, not because I intended to continue with my 
2368
2369higher education. But I made a pledge to myself that I’d at least complete my high school degree. It was a weekend 
2370
2371when I finally kept that promise, driving out to a public school near Baltimore to take the last test I’d ever take 
2372
2373for the state of Maryland: the exam for the General Education Development (GED) degree, which the US government 
2374
2375recognizes as the standard equivalent to a high school diploma.
2376
2377I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied the two years of schooling that I still owed 
2378
2379to the state just by taking a two-day exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying true to 
2380
2381my word.
23827
2383
23849/11
2385
2386From the age of sixteen, I was pretty much living on my own. With my mother throwing herself into her work, I often 
2387
2388had her condo to myself. I set my own schedule, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I was responsible for 
2389
2390everything but paying the bills.
2391
2392I had a 1992 white Honda Civic and drove it all over the state, listening to the indie alternative 99.1 WHFS—“Now 
2393
2394Hear This” was one of its catchphrases—because that’s what everybody else did. I wasn’t very good at being normal, 
2395
2396but I was trying.
2397
2398My life became a circuit, tracing a route between my home, my college, and my friends, particularly a new group that 
2399
2400I met in Japanese class. I’m not quite sure how long it took us to realize that we’d become a clique, but by the 
2401
2402second semester we attended class as much to see each other as to learn the language. This, by the way, is the best 
2403
2404way to “seem normal”: surround yourself with people just as weird, if not weirder, than you are. Most of these 
2405
2406friends were aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed with then controversial anime, or Japanese animation. As 
2407
2408our friendships deepened, so, too, did my familiarity with anime genres, until I could rattle off relatively informed 
2409
2410opinions about a new library of shared experiences with titles like Grave of the Fireflies, Revolutionary Girl Utena, 
2411
2412Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, The Vision of Escaflowne, Rurouni Kenshin, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, 
2413
2414Trigun, The Slayers, and my personal favorite, Ghost in the Shell.
2415
2416One of these new friends—I’ll call her Mae—was an older woman, much older, at a comfortably adult twenty-five. She 
2417
2418was something of an idol to the rest of us, as a published artist and avid cosplayer. She was my Japanese 
2419
2420conversation partner and, I was impressed to find out, also ran a successful Web-design business that I’ll call 
2421
2422Squirrelling Industries, after the pet sugar gliders she occasionally carried around in a purple felt Crown Royal 
2423
2424bag.
2425
2426That’s the story of how I became a freelancer: I started working as a Web designer for the girl I met in class. She, 
2427
2428or I guess her business, hired me under the table at the then lavish rate of $30/hour in cash. The trick was how many 
2429
2430hours I’d actually get paid for.
2431
2432Of course, Mae could’ve paid me in smiles—because I was smitten, just totally in love with her. And though I didn’t 
2433
2434do a particularly good job of
2435concealing that, I’m not sure that Mae minded, because I never missed a deadline or even the slightest opportunity to 
2436
2437do a favor for her. Also, I was a quick learner. In a company of two, you’ve got to be able to do everything. Though 
2438
2439I could, and did, conduct my Squirrelling Industries business anywhere—that, after all, is the point of working 
2440
2441online—she preferred that I come into the office, by which I mean her house, a two-story town house that she shared 
2442
2443with her husband, a neat and clever man whom I’ll call Norm.
2444
2445Yes, Mae was married. What’s more, the town house that she and Norm lived in was located on base at the southwestern 
2446
2447edge of Fort Meade, where Norm worked as an air force linguist assigned to the NSA. I can’t tell you if it’s legal to 
2448
2449run a business out of your home if your home is federal property on a military installation, but as a teenager 
2450
2451infatuated with a married woman who was also my boss, I wasn’t exactly going to be a stickler for propriety.
2452
2453It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time Fort Meade was almost entirely accessible to anyone. It wasn’t all 
2454
2455bollards and barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire. I could just drive onto the army base housing the 
2456
2457world’s most secretive intelligence agency in  my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate 
2458
2459and show ID. It seemed like every other weekend or so a quarter of my Japanese class would congregate in Mae’s little 
2460
2461house behind NSA headquarters to watch anime and create comics. That’s just the way it was, in those bygone days when 
2462
2463“It’s a free country, isn’t it?” was a phrase you heard in every schoolyard and sitcom.
2464
2465On workdays I’d show up at Mae’s in the morning, pulling into her cul-de- sac after Norm left for the NSA, and I’d 
2466
2467stay through the day, until just before he returned. On the occasions that Norm and I happened to overlap during the 
2468
2469two years or so I spent working for his wife, he was, all things considered, kind and generous to me. At first, I 
2470
2471assumed that he was oblivious to my infatuation, or had such a low opinion of my chances as a seducer that he didn’t 
2472
2473mind leaving me alone with his wife. But one day, when we happened to pass each other—him going, me coming—he 
2474
2475politely mentioned that he kept a gun on the nightstand.
2476
2477Squirrelling Industries, which was really just Mae and me, was pretty typical of basement start-ups circa the dot-com 
2478
2479boom, small enterprises competing for scraps before everything went bust. How it worked was that a large company—a 
2480
2481carmaker, for instance—would hire a major ad agency or PR  firm  to  build  their  website and  just  generally spiff 
2482
2483 up  their  Internet presence. The large company would know nothing about building websites, and the ad agency or PR 
2484
2485firm would know only slightly more—just enough to
2486post a job description seeking a Web designer at one of the then proliferating freelance work portals.
2487
2488Mom-and-pop operations—or, in this case, older-married-woman/young- single-man operations—would then bid for the 
2489
2490jobs, and the competition was so intense that the quotes would be driven ridiculously low. Factor in the cut that the 
2491
2492winning contractor would have to pay to the work portal, and the money was barely enough for an adult to survive on, 
2493
2494let alone a family. On top of the lack of financial reward, there was also a humiliating lack of credit: the 
2495
2496freelancers could rarely mention what projects they’d done, because the ad agency or PR firm would claim to have 
2497
2498developed it all in-house.
2499
2500I got to know a lot about the world, particularly the business world, with Mae as my boss. She was strikingly canny, 
2501
2502working twice as hard as her peers to make it in what was then a fairly macho industry, where every other client was 
2503
2504out  to  screw you  for  free labor. This culture of  casual exploitation incentivized freelancers to find ways to 
2505
2506hack around the system, and Mae had a talent for managing her relationships in such a way as to bypass the work 
2507
2508portals. She tried to cut out the middlemen and third parties and deal directly with the largest clients possible. 
2509
2510She was wonderful at this, particularly after my help on the technical side allowed her to focus exclusively on the 
2511
2512business and art. She parlayed her illustration skills into logo design and offered basic branding services. As for 
2513
2514my work, the methods and coding were simple enough for me to pick up on the fly, and although they could be brutally 
2515
2516repetitive, I wasn’t complaining. I took to even the most menial Notepad++ job with pleasure. It’s amazing what you 
2517
2518do for love, especially when it’s unrequited.
2519
2520I can’t help but wonder whether Mae was fully aware of my feelings for her all along, and simply leveraged them to 
2521
2522her best advantage. But if I was a victim, I was a willing one, and my time under her left me better off.
2523
2524Still, about a year into my tenure with Squirrelling Industries, I realized I had to plan for my future. Professional 
2525
2526industry certifications for the IT sector were becoming hard to ignore. Most job listings and contracts for advanced 
2527
2528work were beginning to require that applicants be officially accredited by major tech companies like IBM and Cisco in 
2529
2530the use and service of their products. At least, that was the gist of a radio commercial that I kept hearing. One 
2531
2532day, coming home from my commute after hearing the commercial for what must have been the hundredth time, I found 
2533
2534myself dialing the 1-800 number and signing up for the Microsoft certification course that was being offered by the 
2535
2536Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The
2537entire operation, from its embarrassingly high cost to its location at a “satellite campus” instead of at the main 
2538
2539university, had the faint whiff of a scam, but I didn’t  care.  It  was  a  nakedly  transactional affair—one that  
2540
2541would  allow Microsoft to impose a tax on the massively rising demand for IT folks, HR managers to pretend that an 
2542
2543expensive piece of paper could distinguish bona fide pros from filthy charlatans, and nobodies like me to put the 
2544
2545magic words “Johns Hopkins” on their résumé and jump to the front of the hiring line.
2546
2547The certification credentials were being adopted as industry standard almost as quickly as the industry could invent 
2548
2549them. An “A+ Certification” meant that you were able to service and repair computers. A “Net+ Certification” meant 
2550
2551that you were able to handle some basic networking. But these were just ways to become the guy who worked the Help 
2552
2553Desk. The best pieces of paper were grouped under the rubric of the Microsoft Certified Professional series. There 
2554
2555was the entry-level MCP, the Microsoft Certified Professional; the more accomplished MCSA, the Microsoft Certified 
2556
2557Systems Administrator; and  the  top  piece  of  printed-out  technical  credibility,  the MCSE, Microsoft Certified 
2558
2559Systems Engineer. This was the brass ring, the guaranteed meal ticket. At the lowest of the low end, an MCSE’s 
2560
2561starting salary was $40,000 per year, a sum that—at the turn of the millennium and the age of seventeen—I found 
2562
2563astonishing. But why not? Microsoft was trading above $100 per share, and Bill Gates had just been named the richest 
2564
2565man in the world.
2566
2567In terms of technical know-how, the MCSE wasn’t the easiest to get, but it also didn’t require what most self-
2568
2569respecting hackers would consider unicorn genius either. In terms of time and money, the commitment was considerable. 
2570
2571I had to take seven separate tests, which cost $150 each, and pay something like $18,000 in tuition to Hopkins for 
2572
2573the full battery of prep classes, which— true to form—I didn’t finish, opting to go straight to the testing after I 
2574
2575felt I’d had enough. Unfortunately, Hopkins didn’t give refunds.
2576
2577With payments looming on my tuition loan, I now had a more practical reason to spend time with Mae: money. I asked 
2578
2579her to give me more hours. She  agreed,  and  asked  me  to  start  coming  in  at  9:00  a.m.  It  was  an 
2580
2581egregiously early hour, especially for a freelancer, which was why I was running late one Tuesday morning.
2582
2583I  was speeding down Route 32 under a beautiful Microsoft-blue sky, trying not to get caught by any speed traps. With 
2584
2585a little luck, I’d roll into Mae’s sometime before 9:30, and—with my window down and my hand riding the wind—it felt 
2586
2587like a lucky day. I had the talk radio cranked and was
2588waiting for the news to switch to the traffic.
2589
2590Just as I was about to take the Canine Road shortcut into Fort Meade, an update broke through about a plane crash in 
2591
2592New York City.
2593
2594Mae came to the door and I followed her up the stairs from the dim entryway to the cramped office next to her 
2595
2596bedroom. There wasn’t much to it: just our two desks side by side, a drawing table for her art, and a cage for her 
2597
2598squirrels. Though I was slightly distracted by the news, we had work to do. I forced myself to focus on the task at 
2599
2600hand. I was just opening the project’s files in a simple text editor—we wrote the code for websites by hand—when the 
2601
2602phone rang.
2603
2604Mae picked up. “What? Really?”
2605
2606Because we were sitting so close together, I could hear her husband’s voice. And he was yelling.
2607
2608Mae’s expression turned to alarm, and she loaded a news site on her computer. The only TV was downstairs. I was 
2609
2610reading the site’s report about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, when Mae said, 
2611
2612“Okay. Wow. Okay,” and hung up.
2613
2614She turned to me. “A second plane just hit the other tower.” Until that moment, I’d thought it had been an accident.
2615Mae said, “Norm thinks they’re going to close the base.”
2616
2617“Like, the gates?” I said. “Seriously?” The scale of what had happened had yet to hit me. I was thinking about my 
2618
2619commute.
2620
2621“Norm said you should go home. He doesn’t want you to get stuck.”
2622
2623I sighed, and saved the work I’d barely started. Just when I got up to leave, the phone rang again, and this time the 
2624
2625conversation was even shorter. Mae was pale.
2626
2627“You’re not going to believe this.”
2628
2629Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. They both refer to a collapse of order and the panic that 
2630
2631rushes in to fill the void. For as long as I live, I’ll remember retracing my way up Canine Road—the road past the 
2632
2633NSA’s headquarters—after the Pentagon was attacked. Madness poured out of the agency’s black glass towers, a tide of 
2634
2635yelling, ringing cell phones, and cars revving up in the parking lots and fighting their way onto the street. At the 
2636
2637moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the NSA
2638—the major signals intelligence agency of the American IC—was abandoning
2639its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.
2640
2641NSA director Michael Hayden issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. 
2642
2643Subsequently, the NSA and the CIA—which also evacuated all but a skeleton crew from its own headquarters on 9/11—
2644
2645would explain their behavior by citing a concern that one of the agencies might potentially, possibly, perhaps be the 
2646
2647target of the fourth and last hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, rather than, say, the White House or 
2648
2649Capitol.
2650
2651I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about the next likeliest targets as I crawled through the gridlock, with everyone 
2652
2653trying to get their cars out of the same parking lot simultaneously. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. What I 
2654
2655was doing was obediently following along, in what today I recall as one totalizing moment—a clamor of horns (I don’t 
2656
2657think I’d ever heard a car horn at an American military installation before) and out-of-phase radios shrieking the 
2658
2659news of the South Tower’s collapse while the drivers steered with their knees and feverishly pressed redial on their 
2660
2661phones. I can still feel it—the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell network, 
2662
2663and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the 
2664
2665driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.
2666
2667The stoplights on Canine Road gave way to humans, as the NSA’s special police went to work directing traffic. In the 
2668
2669ensuing hours, days, and weeks they’d be joined by convoys of Humvees topped with machine guns, guarding new 
2670
2671roadblocks and checkpoints. Many of these new security measures became permanent, supplemented by endless rolls of 
2672
2673wire and massive installations of surveillance cameras. With all this security, it became difficult for me to get 
2674
2675back on base and drive past the NSA—until the day I was employed there.
2676
2677These trappings of what would be called the War on Terror weren’t the only reason I gave up on Mae after 9/11, but 
2678
2679they certainly played a part. The events of that day had left her shaken. In time, we stopped working together and 
2680
2681grew distant. I’d chat her up occasionally, only to find that my feelings had changed and I’d changed, too. By the 
2682
2683time Mae left Norm and moved to California, she felt like a stranger to me. She was too opposed to the war.
26848
2685
26869/12
2687
2688Try to remember the biggest family event you’ve ever been to—maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? 
2689
2690Maybe 30, 50? Though all of them together comprise your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know 
2691
2692each and every individual member. Dunbar’s number, the famous estimate of how many relationships you can meaningfully 
2693
2694maintain in life, is just 150. Now think back to school. How many people were in your class in grade school, and in 
2695
2696high school? How many of them were friends, and how many others did you just know as acquaintances, and how many 
2697
2698still others did you simply recognize? If you went to school in the United States, let’s say it’s a thousand. It 
2699
2700certainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all “your people,” but you may still have felt a bond 
2701
2702with them.
2703
2704Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a 
2705
2706familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they’re gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, 
2707
2708the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not 
2709
2710there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground.
2711
2712Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.
2713
2714The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the 
2715
2716promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact— whose very 
2717
2718existence—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly 
2719
2720half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know 
2721
2722better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of 
2723
2724intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s 
2725
2726allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to 
2727
2728accept the sheer magnitude and speed of  the change, from an  America that sought to  define itself by  a calculated 
2729
2730and performative respect for dissent to  a  security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their 
2731
2732guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: “Stop resisting.”
2733This  is  why  whenever I  try  to  understand how  the  last  two  decades happened, I return to that September—to 
2734
2735that ground-zero day and its immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against a truth darker than 
2736
2737the lies that tied the Taliban to al-Qaeda and conjured up Saddam Hussein’s illusory stockpile of WMDs. It means, 
2738
2739ultimately, confronting the fact that the carnage and abuses that marked my young adulthood were born not only in the 
2740
2741executive branch and the intelligence agencies, but also in the hearts and minds of all Americans, myself included.
2742
2743I remember escaping the panicked crush of the spies fleeing Fort Meade just as the North Tower came down. Once on the 
2744
2745highway, I tried to steer with one   hand   while   pressing   buttons   with   the   other,   calling   family 
2746
2747indiscriminately and never getting through. Finally I managed to get in touch with my mother, who at this point in 
2748
2749her career had left the NSA and was working as a clerk for the federal courts in Baltimore. They, at least, weren’t 
2750
2751evacuating.
2752
2753Her  voice  scared me,  and  suddenly the  only  thing  in  the  world  that mattered to me was reassuring her.
2754
2755“It’s okay. I’m headed off base,” I said. “Nobody’s in New York, right?” “I don’t—I don’t know. I can’t get in touch 
2756
2757with Gran.”
2758“Is Pop in Washington?”
2759
2760“He could be in the Pentagon for all I know.”
2761
2762The breath went out of me. By 2001, Pop had retired from the Coast Guard and was now a senior official in the FBI, 
2763
2764serving as one of the heads of its aviation section. This meant that he spent plenty of time in plenty of federal 
2765
2766buildings throughout DC and its environs.
2767
2768Before I could summon any words of comfort, my mother spoke again. “There’s someone on the other line. It might be 
2769
2770Gran. I’ve got to go.”
2771
2772When she didn’t call me back, I tried her number endlessly but couldn’t get through, so I went home to wait, sitting 
2773
2774in front of the blaring TV while I kept reloading news sites. The new cable modem we had was quickly proving more 
2775
2776resilient than all of the telecom satellites and cell towers, which were failing across the country.
2777
2778My mother’s drive back from Baltimore was a slog through crisis traffic. She arrived in tears, but we were among the 
2779
2780lucky ones. Pop was safe.
2781
2782The next time we saw Gran and Pop, there was a lot of talk—about
2783Christmas plans, about New Year’s plans—but the Pentagon and the towers were never mentioned.
2784
2785My father, by contrast, vividly recounted his 9/11 to me. He was at Coast Guard Headquarters when the towers were 
2786
2787hit, and he and three of his fellow officers left their offices in the Operations Directorate to find a conference 
2788
2789room with a screen so they could watch the news coverage. A young officer rushed past them down the hall and said, 
2790
2791“They just bombed the Pentagon.” Met with expressions of disbelief, the young officer repeated, “I’m serious— they 
2792
2793just bombed the Pentagon.” My father hustled over to a wall-length window that gave him a view across the Potomac of 
2794
2795about two-fifths of the Pentagon and swirling clouds of thick black smoke.
2796
2797The more that my father related this memory, the more intrigued I became by the line: “They just bombed the 
2798
2799Pentagon.” Every time he said it, I recall thinking, “They”? Who were “They”?
2800
2801America immediately divided the world into “Us” and “Them,” and everyone was either with “Us” or against “Us,” as 
2802
2803President Bush so memorably remarked even while the rubble was still smoldering. People in my neighborhood put up new 
2804
2805American flags, as if to show which side they’d chosen. People hoarded red, white, and blue Dixie cups and stuffed 
2806
2807them through every chain-link fence on every overpass of every highway between my mother’s home and my father’s, to 
2808
2809spell out phrases like UNITED WE STAND
2810and STAND TOGETHER NEVER FORGET.
2811
2812I sometimes used to go to a shooting range and now alongside the old targets, the bull’s-eyes and flat silhouettes, 
2813
2814were effigies of men in Arab headdress. Guns that had languished for years behind the dusty glass of the display 
2815
2816cases were now marked SOLD. Americans also lined up to buy cell phones, hoping for advance warning of the next 
2817
2818attack, or at least the ability
2819to say good-bye from a hijacked flight.
2820
2821Nearly a hundred thousand spies returned to work at the agencies with the knowledge that  they’d failed  at  their  
2822
2823primary job,  which  was  protecting America. Think of the guilt they were feeling. They had the same anger as 
2824
2825everybody else, but they also felt the guilt. An assessment of their mistakes could wait. What mattered most at that 
2826
2827moment was that they redeem themselves. Meanwhile, their bosses got busy campaigning for extraordinary budgets and 
2828
2829extraordinary powers, leveraging the threat of terror to expand their capabilities and mandates beyond the 
2830
2831imagination not just of the public but even of those who stamped the approvals.
2832September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified  resolve,  strengthened  by  a  
2833
2834revived  sense  of  patriotism  and  the goodwill and sympathy of the world. In retrospect, my country could have 
2835
2836done so much with this opportunity. It could have treated terror not as the theological phenomenon it purported to 
2837
2838be, but as the crime it was. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and 
2839
2840cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public.
2841
2842Instead, it went to war.
2843
2844The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision. I was outraged, yes, but 
2845
2846that was only the beginning of a process in  which  my  heart  completely defeated my  rational judgment. I accepted 
2847
2848all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it. I wanted to be a 
2849
2850liberator. I wanted to free the oppressed. I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my 
2851
2852passion I confused with the good of the country. It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed
2853
2854—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my 
2855
2856parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance. The sharpest part of the 
2857
2858humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.
2859
2860I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed 
2861
2862pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the 
2863
2864fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for 
2865
2866enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people 
2867
2868like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except 
2869
2870online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.
2871
2872My  options dismayed me,  however. I  thought I  could best  serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job 
2873
2874seemed too comfortable and safe  for  this  new  world  of  asymmetrical  conflict.  I  hoped  I  could  do something 
2875
2876like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinkenlights, tracking 
2877
2878enemies and thwarting their schemes. Unfortunately for me, the primary agencies that did that—the NSA, the CIA—had 
2879
2880their hiring requirements written a half century ago and often rigidly required a traditional college degree, meaning 
2881
2882that though the
2883tech industry considered my AACC credits and MCSE certification acceptable, the government wouldn’t. The more I read 
2884
2885around online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were 
2886
2887growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirement 
2888
2889for military veterans. It’s then that I decided to join up.
2890
2891You might be thinking that my decision made sense, or was inevitable, given my family’s record of service. But it 
2892
2893didn’t and it wasn’t. By enlisting, I was as much rebelling against that well-established legacy as I was conforming 
2894
2895to it—because after talking to recruiters from every branch, I decided to join the army, whose leadership some in my 
2896
2897Coast Guard family had always considered the crazy uncles of the US military.
2898
2899When I told my mother, she cried for days. I knew better than to tell my father, who’d already made it very clear 
2900
2901during hypothetical discussions that I’d be wasting my technical talents there. I was twenty years old; I knew what I 
2902
2903was doing.
2904
2905The day I left, I wrote my father a letter—handwritten, not typed—that explained my decision, and slipped it under 
2906
2907the front door of his apartment. It closed with a statement that still makes me wince. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I wrote, 
2908
2909“but this is vital for my personal growth.”
29109
2911
2912X-Rays
2913
2914I joined the army, as its slogan went, to be all I could be, and also because it wasn’t the Coast Guard. It didn’t 
2915
2916hurt that I’d scored high enough on its entrance exams to qualify for a chance to come out of training as a Special 
2917
2918Forces  sergeant,  on  a  track  the  recruiters  called  18  X-Ray,  which  was designed to augment the ranks of the 
2919
2920small flexible units that were doing the hardest fighting in America’s increasingly shadowy and disparate wars. The
292118 X-Ray program was a considerable incentive, because traditionally, before
29229/11, I would’ve had to already be in the army before being given a shot at attending the Special Forces’ exceedingly 
2923
2924demanding qualification courses. The new system worked by screening prospective soldiers up front, identifying those 
2925
2926with the highest levels of fitness, intelligence, and language- learning ability—the ones who might make the cut—and 
2927
2928using the inducements  of  special  training  and  a  rapid  advance  in  rank  to  enlist promising candidates who 
2929
2930might otherwise go elsewhere. I’d put in a couple of months of grueling runs to prepare—I was in great shape, but I 
2931
2932always hated running—before my recruiter called to say that my paperwork was approved: I was in, I’d made it. I was 
2933
2934the first candidate he’d ever signed up for the program, and I could hear the pride and cheer in his voice when he 
2935
2936told me that after training, I’d probably be made a Special Forces Communications, Engineering, or Intelligence 
2937
2938sergeant.
2939
2940Probably.
2941
2942But first, I had to get through basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.
2943
2944I sat next to the same guy the whole way down there, from bus to plane to bus, Maryland to Georgia. He was enormous, 
2945
2946a puffy bodybuilder somewhere between two and three hundred pounds. He talked nonstop, his conversation alternating 
2947
2948between describing how he’d slap the drill sergeant in the face if he gave him any lip and recommending the steroid 
2949
2950cycles I should take to most effectively bulk up. I don’t think he took a breath until we arrived at Fort Benning’s 
2951
2952Sand Hill training area—which in hindsight, I have to say, didn’t actually seem to have that much sand.
2953
2954The drill sergeants greeted us with withering fury and gave us nicknames based on our initial infractions and grave 
2955
2956mistakes, like getting off the bus wearing a brightly colored floral-patterned shirt, or having a name that could be 
2957
2958modified slightly into something funnier. Soon I was Snowflake and my seatmate was Daisy and all he could do was 
2959
2960clench his jaw—nobody dared to
2961clench a fist—and fume.
2962
2963Once the drill sergeants noticed that Daisy and I were already acquainted, and that I was the lightest in the 
2964
2965platoon, at five foot nine and 124 pounds, and  he  the  heaviest,  they  decided  to  entertain  themselves by  
2966
2967pairing  us together as often as possible. I still remember the buddy carry, an exercise where you had to carry your 
2968
2969supposedly wounded partner the length of a football field using a number of different methods like the “neck drag,” 
2970
2971the “fireman,” and the especially comedic “bridal carry.” When I had to carry Daisy, you couldn’t see me beneath his 
2972
2973bulk. It would look like Daisy was floating, though I’d be under him sweating and cursing, straining to get his 
2974
2975gigantic ass to the other side of the goal line before collapsing myself. Daisy would then get up with a laugh, drape 
2976
2977me around his neck like a damp towel, and go skipping along like a child in the woods.
2978
2979We were always dirty and always hurting, but within weeks I was in the best shape of my life. My slight build, which 
2980
2981had seemed like a curse, soon became an advantage, because so much of what we did were body-weight exercises.  Daisy  
2982
2983couldn’t  climb  a  rope,  which  I  scampered  up  like  a chipmunk. He struggled to lift his incredible bulk above 
2984
2985the bar for the bare minimum of pull-ups, while I could do twice the number with one arm. He could barely manage a 
2986
2987handful of push-ups before breaking a sweat, whereas I could do them with claps, or with just a single thumb. When we 
2988
2989did the two- minute push-up tests, they stopped me early for maxing the score.
2990
2991Everywhere we went, we marched—or ran. We ran constantly. Miles before mess, miles after mess, down roads and fields 
2992
2993and around the track, while the drill sergeant called cadence:
2994
2995I went to the desert where the terrorists run pulled out my machete pulled out my gun.
2996Left, right, left, right—kill kill kill!
2997
2998Mess with us and you know we will! I went to the caves
2999where the terrorists hide pulled out a grenade
3000and threw it inside.
3001
3002Left, right, left, right—kill kill kill! Mess with us and you know we will!
3003
3004RUNNING IN UNIT formation, calling cadence—it lulls you, it puts you outside yourself, filling your ears with the din 
3005
3006of dozens of men echoing your own shouting voice and forcing your eyes to fix on the footfalls of the runner in front 
3007
3008of you. After a while you don’t think anymore, you merely count, and your mind dissolves into the rank and file as 
3009
3010you pace out mile after mile. I
3011would say it was serene if it wasn’t so deadening. I would say I was at peace
3012if I weren’t so tired. This was precisely as the army intended. The drill sergeant goes unslapped not so much because 
3013
3014of fear but because of exhaustion: he’s never worth the effort. The army makes its fighters by first training the 
3015
3016fight out of them until they’re too weak to care, or to do anything besides obey.
3017
3018It was only at night in the barracks that we could get some respite, which we had to earn by toeing the line in front 
3019
3020of our bunks, reciting the Soldier’s Creed, and then singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Daisy would always forget 
3021
3022the words. Also, he was tone-deaf.
3023
3024Some guys would stay up late talking about what they were going to do to bin Laden once they found him, and they were 
3025
3026all sure they were going to find him. Most of their fantasies had to do with decapitation, castration, or horny 
3027
3028camels. Meanwhile, I’d have dreams about running, not through the lush and loamy Georgia landscape but through the 
3029
3030desert.
3031
3032Sometime  during  the  third  or  fourth  week  we  were  out  on  a  land navigation movement, which is when your 
3033
3034platoon goes into the woods and treks over variegated terrain to predetermined coordinates, clambering over boulders 
3035
3036and wading across streams, with just a map and a compass—no GPS, no digital technology. We’d done versions of this 
3037
3038movement before, but never in full kit, with each of us lugging a rucksack stuffed with around fifty pounds of gear. 
3039
3040Worse still, the raw boots the army had issued me were so wide that I floated in them. I felt my toes blister even as 
3041
3042I set out, loping across the range.
3043
3044Toward the middle of the movement, I was on point and scrambled atop a storm-felled tree that arched over the path at 
3045
3046about chest height so that I could shoot an azimuth to check our bearings. After confirming that we were on track, I 
3047
3048went to hop down, but with one foot extended I noticed the coil of a snake directly below me. I’m not exactly a 
3049
3050naturalist, so I don’t know what species of snake it was, but then again, I didn’t really care. Kids in North 
3051
3052Carolina grow up being told that all snakes are deadly and I wasn’t about to start doubting it now.
3053Instead, I started trying to walk on air. I widened the stride of my outstretched foot, once, twice, twisting for the 
3054
3055extra distance, when suddenly I realized I was falling. When my feet hit the ground, some distance beyond the snake, 
3056
3057a fire shot up my legs that was more painful than any viper bite I could imagine. A few stumbling steps, which I had 
3058
3059to take in order to regain my balance, told me that something was wrong. Grievously wrong. I was in excruciating 
3060
3061pain, but I couldn’t stop, because I was in the army and the army was in the middle of the woods. I gathered my 
3062
3063resolve, pushed the pain away, and just focused on maintaining a steady pace—left, right, left, right—relying on the 
3064
3065rhythm to distract me.
3066
3067It got harder to walk as I went on, and although I managed to tough it out and finish, the only reason was that I 
3068
3069didn’t have a choice. By the time I got back to the barracks, my legs were numb. My rack, or bunk, was up top, and I 
3070
3071could barely get myself into it. I had to grab its post, hoist up my torso like I was getting out of a pool, and drag 
3072
3073my lower half in after.
3074
3075The next morning I was torn from a fitful sleep by the clanking of a metal trash can  being thrown down the  squad 
3076
3077bay,  a  wake-up call  that  meant someone hadn’t done their job to the drill sergeant’s satisfaction. I shot up 
3078
3079automatically, swinging myself over the edge and springing to the floor. When I landed, my legs gave way. They 
3080
3081crumpled and I fell. It was like I had no legs at all.
3082
3083I tried to get up, grabbing for the lower bunk to try my hoist-by-the-arms maneuver again, but as soon as I moved my 
3084
3085legs every muscle in my body seized and I sank down immediately.
3086
3087Meanwhile a crowd had gathered around me, with laughter that turned to concern and then to silence as the drill 
3088
3089sergeant approached. “What’s the matter with you, broke-dick?” he said. “Get up off my floor before I make you a part 
3090
3091of it, permanently.” When he saw the agony flash across my face as I immediately and unwisely struggled to respond to 
3092
3093his commands, he put his hand to my chest to stop me. “Daisy! Get Snowflake here down to the bench.” Then he crouched 
3094
3095down over me, as if he didn’t want the others to hear him being gentle, and said in a quiet rasp, “As soon as it 
3096
3097opens, Private, you’re going to crutch your broken ass to Sick Call,” which is where the army sends its injured to be 
3098
3099abused by professionals.
3100
3101There’s a major stigma about getting injured in the army, mostly because the army is dedicated to making its soldiers 
3102
3103feel invincible but also because it likes to protect itself from accusations of mis-training. This is why almost all 
3104
3105training-injury victims are treated like whiners or, worse, malingerers.
3106After he carried me down to the bench, Daisy had to go. He wasn’t hurt, and those of us who were had to be kept 
3107
3108separated. We were the untouchables, the lepers, the soldiers who couldn’t train because of anything from sprains, 
3109
3110lacerations, and burns to broken ankles and deep necrotized spider bites. My new battle buddies would now come from 
3111
3112this bench of shame. A battle buddy is the person who, by policy, goes everywhere you go, just as you go everywhere 
3113
3114they go, if there’s even the remotest chance that either of you might be alone. Being alone might lead to thinking, 
3115
3116and thinking can cause the army problems.
3117
3118The battle buddy assigned to me was a smart, handsome, former catalog model Captain America type who’d injured his 
3119
3120hip about a week earlier but hadn’t attended to it until the pain had become unbearable and left him just as gimpy as 
3121
3122me. Neither of us felt up to talking, so we crutched along in grim silence—left, right, left, right, but slowly. At 
3123
3124the hospital I was X-rayed and told that I had bilateral tibial fractures. These are stress fractures, fissures on 
3125
3126the surface of the bones that can deepen with time and pressure until they crack the bones down to the marrow. The 
3127
3128only thing I could do to help my legs heal was to get off my feet and stay off them. It was with those orders that I 
3129
3130was dismissed from the examination room to get a ride back to the battalion.
3131
3132Except I  couldn’t go yet, because I  couldn’t leave without my battle buddy. He’d gone in to be X-rayed after me and 
3133
3134hadn’t returned. I assumed he was still being examined, so I waited. And waited. Hours passed. I spent the time 
3135
3136reading newspapers and magazines, an unthinkable luxury for someone in basic training.
3137
3138A nurse came over and said my drill sergeant was on the phone at the desk. By the time I hobbled over to take the 
3139
3140call, he was livid. “Snowflake, you enjoying your reading? Maybe you could get some pudding while you’re at it, and 
3141
3142some copies of Cosmo for the girls? Why in the hell haven’t you two dirtbags left yet?”
3143
3144“Drill Sarn”—that’s how everybody said it in Georgia, where my Southern accent had resurfaced for the moment—“I’m 
3145
3146still waiting on my battle buddy, Drill Sarn.”
3147
3148“And where the fuck is he, Snowflake?”
3149
3150“Drill Sarn, I don’t know. He went into the examination room and hasn’t come out, Drill Sarn.”
3151
3152He wasn’t happy with the answer, and barked even louder. “Get off your
3153crippled ass and go fucking find him, goddamnit.”
3154
3155I got up and crutched over to the intake counter to make inquiries. My battle buddy, they told me, was in surgery.
3156
3157It was only toward evening, after a barrage of calls from the drill sergeant, that I found out what had happened. My 
3158
3159battle buddy had been walking around on a broken hip for the past week, apparently, and if he hadn’t been taken into 
3160
3161surgery immediately and had it screwed back together, he might have been incapacitated for  life. Major nerves could 
3162
3163have been severed, because the break was as sharp as a knife.
3164
3165I was sent back to Fort Benning alone, back to the bench. Anybody on the bench for more than three or four days was 
3166
3167at serious risk of being “recycled”—forced to start basic training over from scratch—or, worse, of being transferred 
3168
3169to the Medical Unit and sent home. These were guys who’d dreamed of being in the army their entire lives, guys for 
3170
3171whom the army had been their only way out of cruel families and dead-end careers, who now had to  face  the  prospect 
3172
3173 of  failure  and  a  return  to  civilian  life  irreparably damaged.
3174
3175We were the cast-offs, the walking wounded hellguard who had no other duty than to sit on a bench in front of a brick 
3176
3177wall twelve hours a day. We had been judged by our injuries as unfit for the army and now had to pay for this fact by 
3178
3179being separated and shunned, as if the drill sergeants feared we’d contaminate others with our weakness or with the 
3180
3181ideas that had occurred to us while benched. We were punished beyond the pain of our injuries themselves, excluded 
3182
3183from petty joys like watching the fireworks on the Fourth of  July. Instead, we pulled “fire guard” that night for 
3184
3185the empty barracks, a task that involved watching to make sure that the empty building didn’t burn down.
3186
3187We pulled fire guard two to a shift, and I stood in the dark on my crutches, pretending to be useful, alongside my 
3188
3189partner. He was a sweet, simple, beefy eighteen-year-old with a dubious, perhaps self-inflicted injury. By his own 
3190
3191account, he should never have enlisted to begin with. The fireworks were bursting in the distance while he told me 
3192
3193how much of a mistake he’d made, and how agonizingly lonely he was—how much he missed his parents and his home, their 
3194
3195family farm somewhere way out in Appalachia.
3196
3197I sympathized, though there wasn’t much I could do but send him to speak to the chaplain. I tried to offer advice, 
3198
3199suck it up, it might be better once you’re  used  to  it.  But  then  he  put  his  bulk  in  front  of  me  and,  in 
3200
3201 an
3202endearingly childlike way, told me point-blank that he was going AWOL—a crime in the military—and asked me whether I 
3203
3204would tell anybody. It was only then that I noticed he’d brought his laundry bag. He meant that he was going AWOL 
3205
3206that very moment.
3207
3208I wasn’t sure how to deal with the situation, beyond trying to talk some sense into him. I warned him that going AWOL 
3209
3210was a bad idea, that he’d end up with a warrant out for his arrest and any cop in the country could pick him up for 
3211
3212the rest of his life. But the guy only shook his head. Where he lived, he said, deep in the mountains, they didn’t 
3213
3214even have cops. This, he said, was his last chance to be free.
3215
3216I understood, then, that his mind was made up. He was much more mobile than I was, and he was big. If he ran, I 
3217
3218couldn’t chase him; if I tried to stop him, he might snap me in half. All I could do was report him, but if I did, 
3219
3220I’d be penalized for having let the conversation get this far without calling for reinforcements and beating him with 
3221
3222a crutch.
3223
3224I was angry. I realized I was yelling at him. Why didn’t he wait until I was in the latrine to make a break for it? 
3225
3226Why was he putting me in this position?
3227
3228He spoke softly. “You’re the only one who listens,” he said, and began to cry.
3229
3230The saddest part of that night is that I believed him. In the company of a quarter thousand, he was alone. We stood 
3231
3232in silence as the fireworks popped and snapped in the distance. I sighed and said, “I’ve got to go to the latrine. 
3233
3234I’m going to be a while.” Then I limped away and didn’t look back.
3235
3236That was the last I ever saw of him. I think I realized, then and there, that I
3237wasn’t long for the army, either.
3238
3239My next doctor’s appointment was merely confirmation.
3240
3241The doctor was a  tall, lanky Southerner with a  wry demeanor. After examining me and a new set of X-rays, he said 
3242
3243that I was in no condition to continue with my company. The next phase of training was airborne, and he told me, 
3244
3245“Son, if you jump on those legs, they’re going to turn into powder.”
3246
3247I was despondent. If I didn’t finish the basic training cycle on time, I’d lose my slot in 18X, which meant that I’d 
3248
3249be reassigned according to the needs of the army. They could make me into whatever they wanted: regular infantry, a  
3250
3251mechanic, a  desk jockey, a  potato peeler, or—in my  greatest nightmare—doing IT at the army’s help desk.
3252
3253The doctor must have seen how dejected I was, because he cleared his
3254throat and gave me a choice: I could get recycled and try my luck with reassignment, or he could write me a note 
3255
3256putting me out on what was called “administrative separation.” This, he explained, was a special type of severance, 
3257
3258not characterized as either honorable or dishonorable, only available to enlistees who’d been in the services fewer 
3259
3260than six months. It was a clean break, more like an annulment than a divorce, and could be taken care of rather 
3261
3262quickly.
3263
3264I’ll admit, the idea appealed to me. In the back of my mind, I even thought it might be some kind of karmic reward 
3265
3266for the mercy I’d shown to the Appalachian who’d gone AWOL. The doctor left me to think, and when he came back in an 
3267
3268hour I accepted his offer.
3269
3270Shortly thereafter I was transferred to the Medical Unit, where I was told that in order for the administrative 
3271
3272separation to go through I had to sign a statement attesting that I was all better, that my bones were all healed. My 
3273
3274signature was a requirement, but it was presented as a mere formality. Just a few scribbles and I could go.
3275
3276As I held the statement in one hand and the pen in the other, a knowing smile crossed my face. I recognized the hack: 
3277
3278what I’d thought was a kind and generous offer made by a caring army doctor to an ailing enlistee was the 
3279
3280government’s way of avoiding liability and a disability claim. Under the military’s rules, if I’d received a medical 
3281
3282discharge, the government would have had to  pay the bills for any issues stemming from my injury, any treatments and 
3283
3284 therapies it  required. An  administrative discharge put  the burden on me, and my freedom hinged on my willingness 
3285
3286to accept that burden.
3287
3288I signed, and left that same day, on crutches that the army let me keep.
328910
3290
3291Cleared and in Love
3292
3293I can’t remember exactly when, in the midst of my convalescence, I started thinking clearly again. First the pain had 
3294
3295to ebb away, then gradually the depression ebbed, too, and after weeks of waking to no purpose beyond watching the 
3296
3297clock change I slowly began paying attention to what everyone around me was telling me: I was still young and I still 
3298
3299had a future. I only felt that way myself, however, once I was finally able to stand upright and walk on my own. It 
3300
3301was one of the myriad things that, like the love of my family, I’d simply taken for granted before.
3302
3303As I made my first forays into the yard outside my mother’s condo, I came to realize that there was another thing I’d 
3304
3305taken for granted: my talent for understanding technology.
3306
3307Forgive me if I come off like a dick, but there’s no other way to say this: I’d always been so comfortable with 
3308
3309computers that I almost didn’t take my abilities seriously, and didn’t want to be praised for them or to succeed 
3310
3311because of them. I’d wanted, instead, to be praised for and to succeed at something else—something that was harder 
3312
3313for me. I wanted to show that I wasn’t just a brain in a jar; I was also heart and muscle.
3314
3315That explained my stint in the army. And over the course of my convalescence, I came to realize that although the 
3316
3317experience had wounded my pride, it had improved my confidence. I was stronger now, not afraid of the pain as much as 
3318
3319grateful to be improved by it. Life beyond the barbed wire was getting easier. In the final reckoning, all the army 
3320
3321had cost me was my hair, which had grown back, and a limp, which was healing.
3322
3323I was ready to face the facts: if I still had the urge to serve my country, and I most certainly did, then I’d have 
3324
3325to serve it through my head and hands— through computing. That, and only that, would be giving my country my best. 
3326
3327Though I wasn’t much of a veteran, having passed through the military’s vetting could only help my chances of working 
3328
3329at an intelligence agency, which was where my talents would be most in demand and, perhaps, most challenged.
3330
3331Thus I became reconciled to what in retrospect was inevitable: the need for a security clearance. There are, 
3332
3333generally speaking, three levels of security clearance: from low to high, confidential, secret, and top secret. The 
3334
3335last of these can be further extended with a Sensitive Compartmented Information
3336qualifier, creating the coveted TS/SCI access required by positions with the top-tier agencies—CIA and NSA. The 
3337
3338TS/SCI was by far the hardest access to get, but also opened the most doors, and so I went back to Anne Arundel 
3339
3340Community College while I searched for jobs that would sponsor my application for the grueling Single Scope 
3341
3342Background Investigation the clearance required. As the approval process for a TS/SCI can take a year or more, I 
3343
3344heartily recommend it to anyone recovering from an injury. All it involves is filling out some paperwork, then 
3345
3346sitting around with your feet up and trying not to commit too many crimes while the federal government renders its 
3347
3348verdict. The rest, after all, is out of your hands.
3349
3350On paper, I was a perfect candidate. I was a kid from a service family, nearly every adult member of which had some 
3351
3352level of clearance; I’d tried to enlist and fight for my country until an unfortunate accident had laid me low. I had 
3353
3354no criminal record, no drug habit. My only financial debt was the student  loan  for  my  Microsoft  certification,  
3355
3356and  I  hadn’t  yet  missed  a payment.
3357
3358None of this stopped me, of course, from being nervous.
3359
3360I drove to and from classes at AACC as the National Background Investigations Bureau rummaged through nearly every 
3361
3362aspect of my life and interviewed almost everyone I knew: my parents, my extended family, my classmates and friends. 
3363
3364They went through my spotty school transcripts and, I’m sure, spoke to a few of my teachers. I got the impression 
3365
3366that they even spoke to Mae and Norm, and to a guy I’d worked with one summer at a snow cone stand at Six Flags 
3367
3368America. The goal of all this background checking was not only to find out what I’d done wrong, but also to find out 
3369
3370how I might be compromised or blackmailed. The most important thing to the IC is not that you’re 100 percent 
3371
3372perfectly clean, because if that were the case they wouldn’t hire anybody. Instead, it’s that you’re robotically 
3373
3374honest—that there’s no dirty secret out there that you’re hiding that could be used against you, and thus against the 
3375
3376agency, by an enemy power.
3377
3378This, of course, set me thinking—sitting stuck in traffic as all the moments of my life that I regretted went 
3379
3380spinning around in a loop inside my head. Nothing I could come up with would have raised even an iota of eyebrow from 
3381
3382investigators who are used to finding out that the middle-aged analyst at a think tank likes to wear diapers and get 
3383
3384spanked by grandmothers in leather. Still, there was a paranoia that the process created, because you don’t have to 
3385
3386be a closet fetishist to have done things that embarrass you and to fear that strangers might misunderstand you if 
3387
3388those things were exposed. I mean, I
3389grew up on the Internet, for Christ’s sake. If you haven’t entered something shameful or gross into that search box, 
3390
3391then you haven’t been online very long—though I wasn’t worried about the pornography. Everybody looks at porn, and 
3392
3393for those of you who are shaking your heads, don’t worry: your secret is safe with me. My worries were more personal, 
3394
3395or felt more personal: the endless conveyor belt of stupid jingoistic things I’d said, and the even stupider 
3396
3397misanthropic opinions I’d abandoned, in the process of growing up online. Specifically, I was worried about my chat 
3398
3399logs and forum posts, all the supremely moronic commentary that I’d sprayed across a score of gaming and hacker 
3400
3401sites. Writing pseudonymously had meant writing freely, but often thoughtlessly. And since a major aspect of early 
3402
3403Internet culture was competing with others to say the most inflammatory thing, I’d never hesitate to advocate, say, 
3404
3405bombing a country that taxed video games, or corralling people who didn’t like anime into reeducation camps. Nobody 
3406
3407on those sites took any of it seriously, least of all myself.
3408
3409When I went back and reread the posts, I cringed. Half the things I’d said I hadn’t even meant at the time—I’d just 
3410
3411wanted attention—but I didn’t fancy my odds of explaining that to a gray-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses peering 
3412
3413over a giant folder labeled PERMANENT  RECORD. The other half, the things I think I had meant at the time, were even 
3414
3415worse, because I wasn’t that
3416kid anymore. I’d grown up. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t recognize the voice
3417as my own—it was that I now actively opposed its overheated, hormonal opinions. I found that I wanted to argue with a 
3418
3419ghost. I wanted to fight with that dumb, puerile, and casually cruel self of mine who no longer existed. I couldn’t 
3420
3421stand the idea of being haunted by him forever, but I didn’t know the best way to express my remorse and put some 
3422
3423distance between him and me, or whether I should even try to do that. It was heinous to be so inextricably, 
3424
3425technologically bound to a past that I fully regretted but barely remembered.
3426
3427This might be the most familiar problem of my generation, the first to grow up online. We were able to discover and 
3428
3429explore our identities almost totally unsupervised, with hardly a thought spared for the fact that our rash remarks 
3430
3431and profane banter were being preserved for perpetuity, and that one day we might be expected to account for them. 
3432
3433I’m sure everyone who had an Internet connection before they had a job can sympathize with this—surely everyone has 
3434
3435that one post that embarrasses them, or that text or email that could get them fired.
3436
3437My  situation  was  somewhat  different,  however,  in  that  most  of  the message boards of my day would let you 
3438
3439delete your old posts. I could put together one tiny little script—not even a real program—and all of my posts
3440would be gone in under an hour. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to do. Trust me, I considered it.
3441
3442But  ultimately, I  couldn’t. Something kept preventing me.  It  just  felt wrong. To blank my posts from the face of 
3443
3444the earth wasn’t illegal, and it wouldn’t even have made me ineligible for a security clearance had anyone found out. 
3445
3446But the prospect of doing so bothered me nonetheless. It would’ve only served to reinforce some of the most corrosive 
3447
3448precepts of online life: that nobody is ever allowed to make a mistake, and anybody who does make a mistake must 
3449
3450answer for it forever. What mattered to me wasn’t so much the integrity of the written record but that of my soul. I 
3451
3452didn’t want to live in a world where everyone had to pretend that they were perfect, because that was a world that 
3453
3454had no place for me or my friends. To erase those comments would have been to erase who I was, where I was from, and 
3455
3456how far I’d come. To deny my younger self would have been to deny my present self’s validity.
3457
3458I decided to leave the comments up and figure out how to live with them. I even decided that true fidelity to this 
3459
3460stance would require me to continue posting. In time, I’d outgrow these new opinions, too, but my initial impulse 
3461
3462remains unshakable, if only because it was an important step in my own maturity. We can’t erase the things that shame 
3463
3464us, or the ways we’ve shamed ourselves, online. All we can do is control our reactions—whether we let the past 
3465
3466oppress us, or accept its lessons, grow, and move on.
3467
3468This was the first thing that you might call a principle that occurred to me during this idle but formative time, and 
3469
3470though it would prove difficult, I’ve tried to live by it.
3471
3472Believe it  or  not, the only online traces of  my existence whose past iterations have never given me worse than a 
3473
3474mild sense of embarrassment were my dating profiles. I suspect this is because I’d had to write them with the 
3475
3476expectation that their words truly mattered—since the entire purpose of the enterprise was for somebody in Real Life 
3477
3478to actually care about them, and, by extension, about me.
3479
3480I’d joined a website called HotOrNot.com, which was the most popular of the rating sites of the early 2000s, like 
3481
3482RateMyFace and AmIHot. (Their most effective features were combined by a young Mark Zuckerberg into a site called 
3483
3484FaceMash, which later became Facebook.) HotOrNot was the most popular of these pre-Facebook rating sites for a simple 
3485
3486reason: it was the best of the few that had a dating component.
3487
3488Basically, how it worked was that users voted on each other’s photos: Hot
3489or Not. An extra function for registered users such as myself was the ability to contact other registered users, if 
3490
3491each had rated the other’s photos Hot and clicked “Meet Me.” This banal and crass process is how I met Lindsay Mills, 
3492
3493my partner and the love of my life.
3494
3495Looking at the photos now, I’m amused to find that nineteen-year-old Lindsay was  gawky, awkward, and  endearingly 
3496
3497shy.  To  me  at  the  time, though, she was a smoldering blonde, absolutely volcanic. What’s more, the photos 
3498
3499themselves were beautiful: they had a serious artistic quality, self- portraits more than selfies. They caught the 
3500
3501eye and held it. They played coyly with light and shade. They even had a hint of meta fun: there was one taken inside 
3502
3503the photo lab where she worked, and another where she wasn’t even facing the camera.
3504
3505I rated her Hot, a perfect ten. To my surprise, we matched (she rated me an eight, the angel), and in no time we were 
3506
3507chatting. Lindsay was studying fine art photography. She had her own website, where she kept a journal and posted 
3508
3509more shots: forests, flowers, abandoned factories, and—my favorite— more of her.
3510
3511I scoured the Web and used each new fact I found about her to create a fuller picture: the town she was born in 
3512
3513(Laurel, Maryland), her school’s name (MICA, the Maryland Institute College of Art). Eventually, I admitted to 
3514
3515cyberstalking her. I felt like a creep, but Lindsay cut me off. “I’ve been searching about you, too, mister,” she 
3516
3517said, and rattled off a list of facts about me.
3518
3519These were among the sweetest words I’d ever heard, yet I was reluctant to see her in person. We scheduled a date, 
3520
3521and as the days ticked down my nervousness grew. It’s a scary proposition, to take an online relationship off- line. 
3522
3523It would be scary even in a world without ax murderers and scammers. In my experience, the more you’ve communicated 
3524
3525with someone online, the more disappointed you’ll be by meeting them in person. Things that are the easiest  to  say  
3526
3527on-screen  become  the  most  difficult  to  say  face-to-face. Distance favors intimacy: no one talks more openly 
3528
3529than when they’re alone in a room, chatting with an unseen someone alone in a different room. Meet that person, 
3530
3531however, and you lose your latitude. Your talk becomes safer and tamer, a common conversation on neutral ground.
3532
3533Online, Lindsay and I had become total confidants, and I was afraid of losing  our  connection  in  person.  In  
3534
3535other  words,  I  was  afraid  of  being rejected.
3536I shouldn’t have been.
3537
3538Lindsay—who’d insisted on driving—told me that she’d pick me up at my mother’s condo. The appointed hour found me 
3539
3540standing outside in the twilight cold, guiding her by phone through the similarly named, identical-looking streets of 
3541
3542my mother’s development. I was keeping an eye out for a gold ’98
3543Chevy Cavalier, when suddenly I was blinded, struck in the face by a beam of light from the curb. Lindsay was 
3544
3545flashing her brights at me across the snow.
3546
3547“Buckle up.” Those were the first words that Lindsay said to me in person, as I got into her car. Then she said, 
3548
3549“What’s the plan?”
3550
3551It’s then that I realized that despite all the thinking I had been doing about her, I’d done no thinking whatsoever 
3552
3553about our destination.
3554
3555If I’d been in this situation with any other woman, I’d have improvised, covering for myself. But with Lindsay it was 
3556
3557different. With Lindsay, it didn’t matter. She drove us down her favorite road—she had a favorite road—and we talked 
3558
3559until we ran out of miles on Guilford and ended up in the parking lot of the Laurel Mall. We just sat in her car and 
3560
3561talked.
3562
3563It was perfection. Talking face-to-face turned out to be just an extension of all our phone calls, emails, and chats. 
3564
3565Our first date was a continuation of our first contact online and the start of a conversation that will last as long 
3566
3567as we will. We talked about our families, or what was left of them. Lindsay’s parents were also divorced: her mother 
3568
3569and father lived twenty minutes apart, and as a kid Lindsay had been shuttled back and forth between them. She’d 
3570
3571lived out of a bag. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she slept in her room at her mother’s house. Tuesdays, 
3572
3573Thursdays, and Saturdays she slept in her room at her father’s house. Sundays were the dramatic day, because she had 
3574
3575to choose.
3576
3577She told me how bad my taste was, and criticized my date apparel: a button-down shirt decorated with metallic flames 
3578
3579over a wifebeater and jeans (I’m sorry). She told me about the two other guys she was dating, whom she’d already 
3580
3581mentioned online, and Machiavelli would’ve blushed at the ways in which I set about undermining them (I’m not sorry). 
3582
3583I told her everything, too, including the fact that I wouldn’t be able to talk to her about my work—the work I hadn’t 
3584
3585even started. This was ludicrously pretentious, which she made obvious to me by nodding gravely.
3586
3587I told her I was worried about the upcoming polygraph required for my clearance and she offered to practice with me—a 
3588
3589goofy kind of foreplay. The philosophy she lived by was the perfect training: say what you want, say who you are, 
3590
3591never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem. I’d never
3592been so comfortable around someone, and I’d never been so willing to be called out for my faults. I even let her take 
3593
3594my photo.
3595
3596I had her voice in my head on my drive to the NSA’s oddly named Friendship Annex complex for the final interview for 
3597
3598my security clearance. I found myself in a windowless room, bound like a hostage to a cheap office chair.  Around  my 
3599
3600 chest  and  stomach  were  pneumographic  tubes  that measured my breathing. Finger cuffs on my fingertips measured 
3601
3602my electrodermal activity, a blood pressure cuff around my arm measured my heart rate, and a sensor pad on the chair 
3603
3604detected my every fidget and shift. All of these devices—wrapped, clamped, cuffed, and belted tightly around me
3605—were connected to the large black polygraph machine placed on the table in front of me.
3606
3607Behind the table, in a nicer chair, sat the polygrapher. She reminded me of a teacher I once had—and I spent much of 
3608
3609the test trying to remember the teacher’s name, or trying not to. She, the polygrapher, began asking questions. The  
3610
3611first  ones  were  no-brainers: Was  my  name  Edward  Snowden?  Was
36126/21/83 my date of birth? Then: Had I ever committed a serious crime? Had I ever had a problem with gambling? Had I 
3613
3614ever had a problem with alcohol or taken illegal drugs? Had I ever been an agent of a foreign power? Had I ever 
3615
3616advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government? The only admissible answers were binary: “Yes” and 
3617
3618“No.” I answered “No” a lot, and kept waiting for the questions I’d been dreading. “Have you ever impugned the 
3619
3620competence and character of the medical staff at Fort Benning online?” “What were you searching for on the network of 
3621
3622the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory?” But those questions never came and, before I knew it, the test was over.
3623
3624I’d passed with flying colors.
3625
3626As required, I had to answer the series of questions three times in total, and all three times I passed, which meant 
3627
3628that not only had I qualified for the TS/SCI, I’d also cleared the “full scope polygraph”—the highest clearance in 
3629
3630the land.
3631
3632I had a girlfriend I loved and I was on top of the world. I was twenty-two years old.
3633PART TWO
363411
3635
3636The System
3637
3638I’m going to press Pause here, for a moment, to explain something about my politics at age twenty-two: I didn’t have 
3639
3640any. Instead, like most young people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren’t truly mine but rather 
3641
3642a contradictory cluster of inherited principles. My mind was a mash-up of the values I was raised with and the ideals 
3643
3644I encountered online. It took me until my late twenties to finally understand that so much of what I believed, or of 
3645
3646what I thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting. We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults 
3647
3648around us, and in  the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until we’ve deluded 
3649
3650ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our own.
3651
3652My parents were, if not dismissive of politics in general, then certainly dismissive of politicians. To be sure, this 
3653
3654dismissal had little in common with the disaffection of nonvoters or partisan disdain. Rather, it was a certain 
3655
3656bemused detachment particular to their class, which nobler ages have called the federal civil service or the public 
3657
3658sector, but which our own time tends to refer to as the deep state or the shadow government. None of those epithets, 
3659
3660however, really captures what it is: a class of career officials (incidentally, perhaps one of the last functional 
3661
3662middle classes in American life) who— nonelected and non-appointed—serve or work in government, either at one of the 
3663
3664independent agencies (from the CIA and NSA to the IRS, the FCC, and so on) or at one of the executive departments 
3665
3666(State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, and the like).
3667
3668These were my parents, these were my people: a nearly three-million- strong professional government workforce 
3669
3670dedicated to assisting the amateurs chosen by the electorate, and appointed by the elected, in fulfilling their 
3671
3672political duties—or, in the words of the oath, in faithfully executing their offices. These civil servants, who stay 
3673
3674in their positions even as administrations come and go, work as diligently under Republicans as under Democrats 
3675
3676because they ultimately work for the government itself, providing core continuity and stability of rule.
3677
3678These  were  also  the  people  who,  when  their  country  went  to  war, answered the call. That’s what I had done 
3679
3680after 9/11, and I found that the patriotism my parents had taught me was easily converted into nationalist fervor. 
3681
3682For a time, especially in my run-up to joining the army, my sense of the world came to resemble the duality of the 
3683
3684least sophisticated video games,
3685where good and evil are clearly defined and unquestionable.
3686
3687However,  once  I  returned  from  the  Army  and  rededicated myself  to computing, I  gradually came to  regret my  
3688
3689martial fantasies. The more I developed my abilities, the more I matured and realized that the technology of 
3690
3691communications  had  a  chance  of  succeeding  where  the  technology  of violence had failed. Democracy could never 
3692
3693be imposed at the point of a gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber. In the early
36942000s the Internet was still just barely out of its formative period, and, to my mind at least, it offered a more 
3695
3696authentic and complete incarnation of American ideals  than  even  America itself.  A  place  where  everyone was 
3697
3698equal? Check. A place dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Check, check, check. It helped that 
3699
3700nearly all the major founding documents of Internet culture framed it in terms reminiscent of American history: here 
3701
3702was this wild, open new frontier that belonged to anyone bold enough to settle it, swiftly becoming colonized by 
3703
3704governments and corporate interests that were seeking to regulate it for power and profit. The large companies that 
3705
3706were charging large fees—for hardware, for software, for the long-distance phone calls that you needed back then to 
3707
3708get online, and for knowledge itself, which was humanity’s common inheritance and so, by all rights, should have been 
3709
3710freely available—were irresistible contemporary avatars of the British, whose harsh taxation ignited the fervor for 
3711
3712independence.
3713
3714This revolution wasn’t happening in history textbooks, but now, in my generation, and any of us could be part of it 
3715
3716solely by dint of our abilities. This was thrilling—to participate in the founding of a new society, one based not on 
3717
3718where we were born or how we grew up or our popularity at school but on our knowledge and technological ability. In 
3719
3720school, I’d had to memorize the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: now its words were lodged in my memory alongside 
3721
3722John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” which employed the same self-evident, self-
3723
3724elect plural pronoun: “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, 
3725
3726economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his 
3727
3728or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
3729
3730This technological meritocracy was certainly empowering, but it could also be humbling, as I came to understand when 
3731
3732I first went to work in the Intelligence Community. The decentralization of the Internet merely emphasized the 
3733
3734decentralization of computing expertise. I might have been the top computer person in my family, or in my 
3735
3736neighborhood, but to work for
3737the IC meant testing my skills against everyone in the country and the world. The Internet showed me the sheer 
3738
3739quantity and variety of talent that existed, and made clear that in order to flourish I had to specialize.
3740
3741There were a few different careers available to me as a technologist. I could have become a software developer, or, 
3742
3743as the job is more commonly called, a programmer, writing the code that makes computers work. Alternatively, I could 
3744
3745have become a hardware or network specialist, setting up the servers in their racks and running the wires, weaving 
3746
3747the massive fabric that connects every computer, every device, and every file. Computers and computer programs were 
3748
3749interesting to me, and so were the networks that linked them together. But I was most intrigued by their total 
3750
3751functioning at a deeper level of abstraction, not as individual components but as an overarching system.
3752
3753I thought about this a lot while I was driving, to and from Lindsay’s house and to and from AACC. Car time has always 
3754
3755been thinking time for me, and commutes are long on the crowded Beltway. To be a software developer was to run the 
3756
3757rest stops off the exits and to make sure that all the fast-food and gas station franchises accorded with each other 
3758
3759and with user expectations; to be a hardware specialist was to lay the infrastructure, to grade and pave the roads 
3760
3761themselves; while to be a network specialist was to be responsible for traffic control, manipulating signs and lights 
3762
3763to safely route the time-crunched hordes to their proper destinations. To get into systems, however, was to be an 
3764
3765urban  planner,  to  take  all  of  the  components available  and  ensure  their interaction to maximum effect. It 
3766
3767was, pure and simple, like getting paid to play God, or at least a tinpot dictator.
3768
3769There are two main ways to be a systems guy. One is that you take possession of the whole of an existing system and 
3770
3771maintain it, gradually making it more efficient and fixing it when it breaks. That position is called a systems  
3772
3773administrator,  or  sysadmin.  The  second  is  that  you  analyze  a problem, such as how to store data or how to 
3774
3775search across databases, and solve it by engineering a solution from a combination of existing components or by 
3776
3777inventing entirely new ones. This position is called a systems engineer. I eventually would do both of these jobs, 
3778
3779working my way into administration and from there into engineering, oblivious throughout about how this intense 
3780
3781engagement with the deepest levels of integration of computing technology was exerting an influence on my political 
3782
3783convictions.
3784
3785I’ll try not to be too abstract here, but I want you to imagine a system. It doesn’t matter what system: it can be a 
3786
3787computer system, an ecosystem, a
3788legal system, or even a system of government. Remember, a system is just a bunch of parts that function together as a 
3789
3790whole, which most people are only reminded of when something breaks. It’s one of the great chastening facts of 
3791
3792working with systems that the part of a system that malfunctions is almost never the part in which you notice the 
3793
3794malfunction. In order to find what caused the system to collapse, you have to start from the point where you spotted 
3795
3796the problem, and trace the problem’s effects logically through all of the system’s components. Because a sysadmin or 
3797
3798engineer is responsible for such repairs, they have to be equally fluent in software, hardware, and networking. If 
3799
3800the malfunction turns out to be a software issue, the repair might involve scrolling through line after line of code 
3801
3802in a UN General Assembly’s worth of programming languages. If it’s a hardware issue, it might require going over a 
3803
3804circuit board with a flashlight in the mouth and a soldering gun in hand, checking each connection. If networking is 
3805
3806implicated, it might mean tracing every twist and turn of the cables that run above the ceiling and under the floor, 
3807
3808connecting the distant data centers full of servers with an office full of laptops.
3809
3810Because systems work according to instructions, or rules, such an analysis is ultimately a search for which rules 
3811
3812failed, how, and why—an attempt to identify the specific points where the intention of a rule was not adequately 
3813
3814expressed by  its  formulation or  application. Did the  system fail  because something was not communicated, or 
3815
3816because someone abused the system by accessing a resource they weren’t allowed to, or by accessing a resource they 
3817
3818were allowed to but using it exploitatively? Was the job of one component stopped, or impeded, by another? Did one 
3819
3820program, or computer, or group of people take over more than their fair share of the system?
3821
3822Over the course of my career, it became increasingly difficult for me to ask these questions about the technologies I 
3823
3824was responsible for and not about my country. And it became increasingly frustrating to me that I was able to repair 
3825
3826the former but not the latter. I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its 
3827
3828government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.
382912
3830
3831Homo contractus
3832
3833I had hoped to serve my country, but instead I went to work for it. This is not a trivial distinction. The sort of 
3834
3835honorable stability offered to my father and Pop wasn’t quite as available to me, or to anyone of my generation. Both 
3836
3837my father and Pop entered the service of their country on the first day of their working lives and retired from that 
3838
3839service on the last. That was the American government that was familiar to me, from earliest childhood—when it had 
3840
3841helped to feed, clothe, and house me—to the moment when it had cleared me to  go  into  the  Intelligence  Community. 
3842
3843 That  government  had  treated  a citizen’s service like a compact: it would provide for you and your family, in 
3844
3845return for your integrity and the prime years of your life.
3846
3847But I came into the IC during a different age.
3848
3849By the time I arrived, the sincerity of public service had given way to the greed of the private sector, and the 
3850
3851sacred compact of the soldier, officer, and career civil  servant was  being replaced by  the  unholy bargain of  
3852
3853Homo contractus, the primary species of US Government 2.0. This creature was not a sworn servant but a transient 
3854
3855worker, whose patriotism was incentivized by a better paycheck and for whom the federal government was less the 
3856
3857ultimate authority than the ultimate client.
3858
3859During the American Revolution, it had made sense for the Continental Congress to hire privateers and mercenaries to 
3860
3861protect the independence of what was then barely a functioning republic. But for third-millennium hyperpower America 
3862
3863to rely on privatized forces for the national defense struck me as strange and vaguely sinister. Indeed, today 
3864
3865contracting is most often associated with its major failures, such as the fighting-for-hire work of Blackwater (which 
3866
3867changed its name to Xe Services after its employees were convicted of killing fourteen Iraqi civilians, and then 
3868
3869changed its name again to Academi after it was acquired by a group of private investors), or the torture-for-hire 
3870
3871work of CACI and Titan (both of which supplied personnel who terrorized prisoners at Abu Ghraib).
3872
3873These sensationalist cases can lead the public to believe that the government employs contractors in order to 
3874
3875maintain cover and deniability, off-loading the illegal or quasi-legal dirty work to keep its hands clean and 
3876
3877conscience clear. But that’s not entirely true, or at least not entirely true in the IC, which tends to focus less on 
3878
3879deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC 
3880
3881contracting is
3882much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring. Every 
3883
3884agency has a head count, a legislative limit that dictates the number of people it can hire to do a certain type of 
3885
3886work. But contractors, because they’re not directly employed by the federal government, aren’t included in that 
3887
3888number. The agencies can hire as many of them as they can pay for, and they can pay for as many of them as they want
3889
3890—all they have to do is testify to a few select congressional subcommittees that the terrorists are coming for our 
3891
3892children, or the Russians are in our emails, or the Chinese are in our power grid. Congress never says no to this 
3893
3894type of begging, which is actually a kind of threat, and reliably capitulates to the IC’s demands.
3895
3896Among the documents that I provided to journalists was the 2013 Black
3897Budget. This is a classified budget in which over 68 percent of its money,
3898$52.6 billion, was dedicated to the IC, including funding for 107,035 IC employees—more than a fifth of whom, some 
3899
390021,800 people, were full-time contractors. And that number doesn’t even include the tens of thousands more employed 
3901
3902by companies that have signed contracts (or subcontracts, or sub- subcontracts) with the agencies for a specific 
3903
3904service or project. Those contractors are never counted by the government, not even in the Black Budget, because to 
3905
3906add their ranks to the contracting total would make one disturbing fact extraordinarily clear: the work of American 
3907
3908Intelligence is done as frequently by private employees as it is by government servants.
3909
3910To be sure, there are many, even in government, who maintain that this trickle-down scheme is advantageous. With 
3911
3912contractors, they say, the government can encourage competitive bidding to keep costs down, and isn’t on the hook to 
3913
3914pay pensions and benefits. But the real advantage for government officials is  the  conflict of  interest inherent in 
3915
3916 the  budgeting process itself. IC directors ask Congress for money to rent contract workers from private companies, 
3917
3918congresspeople approve that money, and then those IC directors and congresspeople are rewarded, after they retire 
3919
3920from office, by being given high-paying positions and consultancies with the very companies they’ve just enriched. 
3921
3922From the vantage of the corporate boardroom, contracting functions as governmentally assisted corruption. It’s 
3923
3924America’s most legal and convenient method of transferring public money to the private purse.
3925
3926But however much the work of  Intelligence is  privatized, the federal government remains the only authority that can 
3927
3928grant an individual clearance to access classified information. And because clearance candidates must be sponsored in 
3929
3930order to apply for clearance—meaning they must already have a
3931job offer for a position that requires clearance—most contractors begin their careers in a government position. After 
3932
3933all, it’s rarely worth the expense for a private company to sponsor your clearance application and then pay you to 
3934
3935wait around for a year for the government’s approval. It makes more financial sense for a company to just hire an 
3936
3937already-cleared government employee. The situation created by this economy is one in which government bears all the 
3938
3939burdens of background checks but reaps few of the benefits. It must do all of the work and assume all of the expense 
3940
3941of clearing a candidate, who, the moment they have their clearance, more often than not bolts for the door, 
3942
3943exchanging the blue badge of the government employee for the green badge of the contractor. The joke was that the 
3944
3945green symbolized “money.”
3946
3947The government job that had sponsored me for my TS/SCI clearance wasn’t the one I wanted, but the one I could find: I 
3948
3949was officially an employee of the state of Maryland, working for the University of Maryland at College Park. The 
3950
3951university was helping the NSA open a new institution called CASL, the Center for Advanced Study of Language.
3952
3953CASL’s ostensible mission was to study how people learned languages and to develop computer-assisted methods to help 
3954
3955them do so more quickly and better. The hidden corollary of this mission was that the NSA also wanted to develop ways 
3956
3957to improve computer comprehension of language. If the other agencies were having difficulties finding competent 
3958
3959Arabic (and Farsi and Dari and Pashto and Kurdish) speakers who passed their often ridiculous security checks to 
3960
3961translate and interpret on the ground—I know too many Americans rejected merely because they had an inconvenient 
3962
3963distant cousin they’d never even met—the NSA was having its own tough time ensuring that its computers could 
3964
3965comprehend and analyze the massive amount of foreign- language communications that they were intercepting.
3966
3967I don’t have a more granular idea of the kinds of things that CASL was supposed to do, for the simple reason that 
3968
3969when I showed up for work with my  bright,  shiny  clearance, the  place  wasn’t  even  open  yet.  In  fact,  its 
3970
3971building was still under construction. Until it was finished and the tech was installed, my job was essentially that 
3972
3973of a night-shift security guard. My responsibilities were limited to showing up every day to patrol the empty halls 
3974
3975after the construction workers—those other contractors—were finished, making sure that nobody burned down the 
3976
3977building or broke in and bugged it. I  spent hour after hour making rounds through the half-completed shell, 
3978
3979inspecting the day’s progress: trying out the chairs that had just been installed in the state-of-the-art auditorium, 
3980
3981casting stones back and forth across the suddenly graveled roof, admiring the new drywall, and literally watching the
3982paint dry.
3983
3984This is the life of after-hours security at a top secret facility, and truthfully I didn’t mind it. I was getting 
3985
3986paid to do basically nothing but wander in the dark with my thoughts, and I had all the time in the world to use the 
3987
3988one functioning computer that I had access to on the premises to search for a new position. During the daytime, I 
3989
3990caught up on my sleep and went out on photography expeditions with Lindsay, who—thanks to my wooing and scheming—had 
3991
3992finally dumped her other boyfriends.
3993
3994At the time I was still naive enough to think that my position with CASL would be a bridge to a full-time federal 
3995
3996career. But the more I looked around, the more I was amazed to find that there were very few opportunities to serve 
3997
3998my country directly, at least in a meaningful technical role. I had a better chance of working as a contractor for a 
3999
4000private company that served my country for profit; and I had the best chance, it turned out, of working as a 
4001
4002subcontractor for a  private company that contracted with another private company that served my country for profit. 
4003
4004The realization was dizzying.
4005
4006It was particularly bizarre to me that most of the systems engineering and systems administration jobs that were out 
4007
4008there were private, because these positions came with almost universal access to the employer’s digital existence. 
4009
4010It’s unimaginable that a major bank or even a social media outfit would hire outsiders for systems-level work. In the 
4011
4012context of the US government, however, restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems 
4013
4014were being run by somebody who didn’t really work for you was what passed for innovation.
4015
4016
4017
4018THE AGENCIES  WERE hiring tech companies to hire kids, and then they were giving them the keys to the kingdom, 
4019
4020because—as Congress and the press were told—the agencies didn’t have a choice. No one else knew how the keys, or the 
4021
4022kingdom, worked. I tried to rationalize all this into a pretext for optimism. I swallowed my incredulity, put 
4023
4024together a résumé, and went to the
4025job fairs, which, at least in the early aughts, were the primary venues where
4026contractors found new work and government employees were poached. These fairs went by the dubious name of “Clearance 
4027
4028Jobs”—I think I was the only one who found that double meaning funny.
4029
4030At the time, these events were held every month at the Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner, Virginia, just down the road 
4031
4032from the CIA’s headquarters, or at one of the grubbier Marriott-type hotels near the NSA’s headquarters at Fort
4033Meade. They were pretty much like any other job fair, I’m told, with one crucial exception: here, it always felt like 
4034
4035there were more recruiters than there were recruits. That should give you an indication of the industry’s appetite. 
4036
4037The recruiters paid a lot of money to be at these fairs, because these were the only places in the country where 
4038
4039everyone who walked through the door wearing their stickum name tag badge had supposedly already been prescreened 
4040
4041online and cross-checked with the agencies—and so was presumed to already have a clearance, and probably also the 
4042
4043requisite skills.
4044
4045Once you left the well-appointed hotel lobby for the all-business ballroom, you entered Planet Contractor. Everybody 
4046
4047would be there: this wasn’t the University of Maryland anymore—this was Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Booz Allen 
4048
4049Hamilton, DynCorp, Titan, CACI, SAIC, COMSO, as well as a hundred other different acronyms I’d never heard of. Some 
4050
4051contractors had tables, but the larger ones had booths that were fully furnished and equipped with refreshments.
4052
4053After you handed a prospective employer a copy of your résumé and small-talked a bit, in a sort of informal 
4054
4055interview, they’d break out their binders, which contained lists of all the government billets they were trying to 
4056
4057fill.  But  because  this  work  touched  on  the  clandestine, the  billets  were accompanied not by standardized 
4058
4059job titles and traditional job descriptions but with intentionally obscure, coded verbiage that was often particular 
4060
4061to each contractor. One company’s Senior Developer 3 might or might not be equivalent to another company’s Principal 
4062
4063Analyst 2, for example. Frequently the only way to differentiate among these positions was to note that each 
4064
4065specified its own requirements of years of experience, level of certifications, and type of security clearance.
4066
4067After the 2013 revelations, the US government would try to disparage me by referring to me as “only a contractor” or 
4068
4069“a former Dell employee,” with the implication that I didn’t enjoy the same kinds of clearance and access as a blue-
4070
4071badged agency staffer. Once that discrediting characterization was established,  the  government  proceeded  to  
4072
4073accuse  me  of  “job-hopping,” hinting that I was some sort of disgruntled worker who didn’t get along with superiors 
4074
4075or an exceptionally ambitious employee dead-set on getting ahead at all costs. The truth is that these were both lies 
4076
4077of convenience. The IC knows better than anyone that changing jobs is part of the career track of every contractor: 
4078
4079it’s a mobility situation that the agencies themselves created, and profit from.
4080
4081In national security contracting, especially in tech contracting, you often
4082find yourself physically working at an agency facility, but nominally—on paper—working for Dell, or Lockheed Martin, 
4083
4084or one of the umpteen smaller firms that frequently get bought by a Dell or a Lockheed Martin. In such an 
4085
4086acquisition, of course, the smaller firm’s contracts get bought, too, and suddenly there’s a different employer and 
4087
4088job title on your business card. Your day-to-day work, though, remains the same: you’re still sitting at the agency 
4089
4090facility, doing your tasks. Nothing has changed at all. Meanwhile, the dozen coworkers sitting to your left and 
4091
4092right—the same coworkers you work with on  the  same  projects  daily—might technically be  employed by  a  dozen 
4093
4094different companies, and those companies might still be a few degrees removed from the corporate entities that hold 
4095
4096the primary contracts with the agency.
4097
4098I wish I remembered the exact chronology of my contracting, but I don’t have a copy of my résumé anymore—that file, 
4099
4100Edward_Snowden_Resume.doc, is locked up in the Documents folder of one of my old home computers, since seized by the 
4101
4102FBI. I do recall, however, that my first major contracting gig was actually a subcontracting gig: the CIA had hired 
4103
4104BAE Systems, which had hired COMSO, which hired me.
4105
4106BAE Systems is a midsize American subdivision of British Aerospace, set up expressly to win contracts from the 
4107
4108American IC. COMSO was basically its recruiter, a few folks who spent all their time driving around the Beltway 
4109
4110trying to find the actual contractors (“the asses”) and sign them up (“put the asses in chairs”). Of all the 
4111
4112companies I talked to at the job fairs, COMSO was the hungriest, perhaps because it was among the smallest. I never 
4113
4114learned what the company’s acronym stood for, or even if it stood for anything. Technically speaking, COMSO would be 
4115
4116my employer, but I never worked a single day at a COMSO office, or at a BAE Systems office, and few contractors ever 
4117
4118would. I’d only work at CIA headquarters.
4119
4120In fact, I only ever visited the COMSO office, which was in Greenbelt, Maryland, maybe two or three times in my life. 
4121
4122One of these was when I went down there to negotiate my salary and sign some paperwork. At CASL I’d been making 
4123
4124around $30K/year, but that job didn’t have anything to do with technology, so I felt comfortable asking COMSO for 
4125
4126$50K. When I named that figure to the guy behind the desk, he said, “What about $60K?”
4127
4128At the time I was so inexperienced, I didn’t understand why he was trying to overpay me. I knew, I guess, that this 
4129
4130wasn’t ultimately COMSO’s money, but I only later understood that some of the contracts that COMSO and BAE and others 
4131
4132handled were of the type that’s called “cost-plus.” This meant that
4133the middlemen contractors billed the agencies for whatever an employee got paid, plus a fee of 3 to 5 percent of that 
4134
4135every year. Bumping up salaries was in everyone’s interest—everyone’s, that is, except the taxpayer’s.
4136
4137The COMSO guy eventually talked me, or himself, up to $62K, as a result of my once again agreeing to work the night 
4138
4139shift. He held out his hand and, as I shook it, he introduced himself to me as my “manager.” He went on to explain 
4140
4141that the title was just a formality, and that I’d be taking my orders directly from the CIA. “If all goes well,” he 
4142
4143said, “we’ll never meet again.”
4144
4145In the spy movies and TV shows, when someone tells you something like that, it usually means that you’re about to go 
4146
4147on a dangerous mission and might die. But in real spy life it just means, “Congratulations on the job.” By the time I 
4148
4149was out the door, I’m sure he’d already forgotten my face.
4150
4151I left that meeting in a buoyant mood, but on the drive back, reality set in: this, I realized, was going to be my 
4152
4153daily commute. If I was going to still live in Ellicott City, Maryland, in proximity to Lindsay, but work at the CIA 
4154
4155in Virginia, my commute could be up to an hour and a half each way in Beltway gridlock, and that would be the end of 
4156
4157me. I knew it wouldn’t take long before I’d  start  to  lose  my  mind.  There  weren’t  enough  books  on  tape  in  
4158
4159the universe.
4160
4161I couldn’t ask Lindsay to move down to Virginia with me because she was still just in her sophomore year at MICA, and 
4162
4163had class three days a week. We discussed this, and for cover referred to my job down there as COMSO—as in, “Why does 
4164
4165COMSO have to be so far away?” Finally, we decided that I’d find a small place down there, near COMSO—just a small 
4166
4167place to crash at during the days while I worked at night, at COMSO—and then I’d come up to Maryland again every 
4168
4169weekend, or she’d come down to me.
4170
4171I set off to find that place, something smack in the middle of that Venn diagram overlap of cheap enough that I could 
4172
4173afford it and nice enough that Lindsay could survive it. It turned out to be a difficult search: Given the number of 
4174
4175people who work at the CIA, and the CIA’s location in Virginia— where the housing density is, let’s say, semirural—
4176
4177the prices were through the roof. The 22100s are some of the most expensive zip codes in America.
4178
4179Eventually, browsing on Craigslist, I found a room that was surprisingly within my budget, in a house surprisingly 
4180
4181near—less than fifteen minutes from—CIA headquarters. I went to check it out, expecting a cruddy bachelor pad pigsty. 
4182
4183Instead, I pulled up in front of a large glass-fronted McMansion, immaculately maintained with a topiary lawn that 
4184
4185was seasonally decorated.
4186I’m being completely serious when I say that as I approached the place, the smell of pumpkin spice got stronger.
4187
4188A guy named Gary answered the door. He was older, which I expected from the “Dear Edward” tone of his email, but I 
4189
4190hadn’t expected him to be so well dressed. He was very tall, with buzz-cut gray hair, and was wearing a suit, and 
4191
4192over the suit, an apron. He asked me very politely if I didn’t mind waiting a moment. He was just then busy in the 
4193
4194kitchen, where he was preparing a tray of apples, sticking cloves in them and dousing them with nutmeg, cinnamon, and 
4195
4196sugar.
4197
4198Once those apples were baking in the oven, Gary showed me the room, which was in the basement, and told me I could 
4199
4200move in immediately. I accepted the offer and put down my security deposit and one month’s rent.
4201
4202Then he told me the house rules, which helpfully rhymed: No mess.
4203No pets.
4204
4205No overnight guests.
4206
4207I confess that I almost immediately violated the first rule, and that I never had any interest in violating the 
4208
4209second. As for the third, Gary made an exception for Lindsay.
421013
4211
4212Indoc
4213
4214You know that one establishing shot that’s in pretty much every spy movie and TV show that’s subtitled “CIA 
4215
4216Headquarters, Langley, Virginia”? And then the camera moves through the marble lobby with the wall of stars and the 
4217
4218floor with the agency’s seal? Well, Langley is the site’s historical name, which the agency prefers Hollywood to use; 
4219
4220CIA HQ is officially in McLean, Virginia;  and  nobody  really  comes  through  that  lobby  except  VIPs  or 
4221
4222outsiders on a tour.
4223
4224That building is the OHB, the Old Headquarters Building. The building where almost everybody who works at the CIA 
4225
4226enters is far less ready for its close-up: the NHB, the New Headquarters Building. My first day was one of the very 
4227
4228few I spent there in daylight. That said, I spent most of the day underground—in a grimy, cinder-block-walled room 
4229
4230with all the charm of a nuclear fallout shelter and the acrid smell of government bleach.
4231
4232“So this is the Deep State,” one guy said, and almost everybody laughed. I think he’d been expecting a circle of Ivy 
4233
4234League WASPs chanting in hoods, whereas I’d been expecting a group of normie civil service types who resembled 
4235
4236younger versions of my parents. Instead, we were all computer dudes—and yes, almost uniformly dudes—who were clearly 
4237
4238wearing “business casual” for the first time in our lives. Some were tattooed and pierced, or bore evidence of having 
4239
4240removed their piercings for the big day. One still had punky streaks of dye in his hair. Almost all wore contractor 
4241
4242badges, as green and crisp as new hundred-dollar bills. We certainly didn’t look like a hermetic power-mad cabal that 
4243
4244controlled the actions of America’s elected officials from shadowy subterranean cubicles.
4245
4246This session was the first stage in our transformation. It was called the Indoc, or Indoctrination, and its entire 
4247
4248point was to convince us that we were the elite, that we were special, that we had been chosen to be privy to the 
4249
4250mysteries of state and to the truths that the rest of the country—and, at times, even its Congress and courts—
4251
4252couldn’t handle.
4253
4254I couldn’t help but think while I sat through this Indoc that the presenters were preaching to the choir. You don’t 
4255
4256need to tell a bunch of computer whizzes that they possess superior knowledge and skills that uniquely qualify them 
4257
4258to  act  independently and  make decisions on  behalf of  their fellow citizens without any oversight or review. 
4259
4260Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism.
4261This, to my thinking, actually represented the great nexus of the Intelligence Community and the tech industry: both 
4262
4263are entrenched and unelected powers that pride themselves on maintaining absolute secrecy about their developments. 
4264
4265Both believe that they have the solutions for everything, which they never hesitate to unilaterally impose. Above 
4266
4267all, they both believe that these solutions are inherently apolitical, because they’re based on data, whose 
4268
4269prerogatives are regarded as preferable to the chaotic whims of the common citizen.
4270
4271Being indoctrinated into the IC, like becoming expert at technology, has powerful psychological effects. All of a 
4272
4273sudden you have access to the story behind the story, the hidden histories of well-known, or supposedly well- known, 
4274
4275events. That can be intoxicating, at least for a teetotaler like me. Also, all of a sudden you have not just the 
4276
4277license but the obligation to lie, conceal, dissemble, and dissimulate. This creates a sense of tribalism, which can 
4278
4279lead many to believe that their primary allegiance is to the institution and not to the rule of law.
4280
4281I wasn’t thinking any of these thoughts at my Indoc session, of course. Instead, I was just trying to keep myself 
4282
4283awake as the presenters proceeded to instruct us on basic operational security practices, part of the wider body of 
4284
4285spy techniques the IC collectively describes as “tradecraft.” These are often so obvious as to be mind-numbing: Don’t 
4286
4287tell anyone who you work for. Don’t leave sensitive materials unattended. Don’t bring your highly insecure cell phone 
4288
4289into the highly secure office—or talk on it about work, ever. Don’t wear your “Hi, I work for the CIA” badge to the 
4290
4291mall.
4292
4293Finally, the litany ended, the lights came down, the PowerPoint was fired up, and faces appeared on the screen that 
4294
4295was bolted to the wall. Everyone in the room sat upright. These were the faces, we were told, of former agents and 
4296
4297contractors who, whether through greed, malice, incompetence, or negligence failed to follow the rules. They thought 
4298
4299they were above all this mundane stuff and their hubris resulted in their imprisonment and ruin. The people on the 
4300
4301screen, it was implied, were now in basements even worse than this one, and some would be there until they died.
4302
4303
4304
4305All in all, this was an effective presentation.
4306
4307I’m told that in the years since my career ended, this parade of horribles— of incompetents, moles, defectors, and 
4308
4309traitors—has been expanded to include an  additional category: people  of  principle, whistleblowers in  the  public 
4310
4311interest. I can only hope that the twenty-somethings sitting there today are struck by the government’s conflation of 
4312
4313selling secrets to the enemy and
4314disclosing them to journalists when the new faces—when my face—pop up on the screen.
4315
4316I came to work for the CIA when it was at the nadir of its morale. Following the intelligence failures of 9/11, 
4317
4318Congress and the executive had set out on an aggressive reorganization campaign. It included stripping the position 
4319
4320of director of Central Intelligence of its dual role as both head of the CIA and head of the entire American IC—a 
4321
4322dual role that the position had held since the founding of the agency in the aftermath of World War II. When George 
4323
4324Tenet was forced out in 2004, the CIA’s half-century supremacy over all of the other agencies went with him.
4325
4326The CIA’s rank and file considered Tenet’s departure and the directorship’s demotion as merely the most public 
4327
4328symbols of the agency’s betrayal by the political class it had been created to serve. The general sense of having 
4329
4330been manipulated by the Bush administration and then blamed for its worst excesses gave rise to a culture of 
4331
4332victimization and retrenchment. This was only  exacerbated by  the  appointment of  Porter Goss,  an  undistinguished 
4333
4334former  CIA  officer  turned  Republican congressman from  Florida,  as  the agency’s new director—the first to serve 
4335
4336in the reduced position. The installation of a politician was taken as a chastisement and as an attempt to weaponize 
4337
4338the CIA by putting it under partisan supervision. Director Goss immediately began a sweeping campaign of firings, 
4339
4340layoffs, and forced retirements that left the agency understaffed and more reliant than ever on contractors. 
4341
4342Meanwhile, the public at large had never had such a low opinion of the agency, or such insight into its inner 
4343
4344workings, thanks to all the leaks and disclosures about its extraordinary renditions and black site prisons.
4345
4346At the time, the CIA was broken into five directorates. There was the DO, the Directorate of Operations, which was 
4347
4348responsible for the actual spying; the DI, the Directorate of Intelligence, which was responsible for synthesizing 
4349
4350and analyzing the results of that spying; the DST, the Directorate of Science and Technology, which built and 
4351
4352supplied computers, communications devices, and weapons to the spies and showed them how to use them; the DA, the 
4353
4354Directorate of Administration, which basically meant lawyers, human resources, and all those who coordinated the 
4355
4356daily business of the agency and served as a liaison to the government; and, finally, the DS, the Directorate of 
4357
4358Support, which was a strange directorate and, back then, the largest. The DS included everyone who worked for the 
4359
4360agency in a support capacity, from the majority of the agency’s technologists and medical doctors to the personnel in 
4361
4362the cafeteria and the gym and the guards at the gate. The primary function of the DS was to manage the CIA’s global 
4363
4364communications infrastructure, the
4365platform ensuring that the spies’ reports got to the analysts and that the analysts’ reports got to the 
4366
4367administrators. The DS housed the employees who provided technical support throughout the agency, maintained the 
4368
4369servers, and kept them secure—the people who built, serviced, and protected the entire network of the CIA and 
4370
4371connected it with the networks of the other agencies and controlled their access.
4372
4373These were, in short, the people who used technology to link everything together. It should be no surprise, then, 
4374
4375that the bulk of them were young. It should also be no surprise that most of them were contractors.
4376
4377My team was attached to the Directorate of Support and our task was to manage the CIA’s Washington-Metropolitan 
4378
4379server architecture, which is to say the vast majority of the CIA servers in the continental United States—the 
4380
4381enormous  halls  of  expensive  “big  iron”  computers  that  comprised  the agency’s internal networks and 
4382
4383databases, all of its systems that transmitted, received, and stored intelligence. Though the CIA had dotted the 
4384
4385country with relay servers, many of the agency’s most important servers were situated on- site. Half of them were in 
4386
4387the NHB, where my team was located; the other half were in the nearby OHB. They were set up on opposite sides of 
4388
4389their respective buildings, so that if one side was blown up we wouldn’t lose too many machines.
4390
4391My TS/SCI security clearance reflected my having been “read into” a few different “compartments” of information. Some 
4392
4393of these compartments were SIGINT (signals intelligence, or intercepted communications), and another was HUMINT 
4394
4395(human intelligence, or the work done and reports filed by agents and analysts)—the CIA’s work routinely involves 
4396
4397both. On top of those, I was read into a COMSEC (communications security) compartment that allowed me to work with 
4398
4399cryptographic key material, the codes that have traditionally been considered the most important agency secrets 
4400
4401because they’re used to protect all the other agency secrets. This cryptographic material  was  processed  and  
4402
4403stored  on  and  around  the  servers  I  was responsible for managing. My team was one of the few at the agency 
4404
4405permitted to actually lay hands on these servers, and likely the only team with access to log in to nearly all othem.
4406
4407In the CIA, secure offices are called “vaults,” and my team’s vault was located a bit past the CIA’s help desk 
4408
4409section. During the daytime, the help desk was staffed by a busy contingent of older people, closer to my parents’ 
4410
4411age. They wore blazers and slacks and even blouses and skirts; this was one of the few places in the CIA tech world 
4412
4413at the time where I recall seeing a
4414sizable number of women. Some of them had the blue badges that identified them as government employees, or, as 
4415
4416contractors called them, “govvies.” They spent their shifts picking up banks of ringing phones and talking people in 
4417
4418the building or out in the field through their tech issues. It was a sort of IC version of call-center work: 
4419
4420resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, and going by rote through the troubleshooting checklists. “Can you log out 
4421
4422and back in?”  “Is  the  network cable plugged in?”  If  the  govvies, with  their minimal tech experience, couldn’t 
4423
4424deal with a particular issue themselves, they’d escalate it to more specialized teams, especially if the problem was 
4425
4426happening in the “Foreign Field,” meaning CIA stations overseas in places like Kabul or Baghdad or Bogotá or Paris.
4427
4428I’m a bit ashamed to admit how proud I felt when I first walked through this  gloomy array. I  was  decades younger 
4429
4430than  the  help  desk  folks  and heading past them into a vault to which they didn’t have access and never would. At 
4431
4432the time it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the extent of my access meant that the process itself might be broken, 
4433
4434that the government had simply given up on meaningfully managing and promoting its talent from within because the new 
4435
4436contracting culture meant they no longer had to care. More than any other memory I have of my career, this route of 
4437
4438mine past the CIA help desk has come to symbolize for me the generational and cultural change in the IC of which I 
4439
4440was a part—the moment when the old-school prepster clique that traditionally staffed the agencies, desperate to keep 
4441
4442pace with technologies they could not be bothered to understand, welcomed a new wave of  young  hackers  into  the  
4443
4444institutional fold  and  let  them  develop,  have complete   access   to,   and   wield   complete   power   over   
4445
4446unparalleled technological systems of state control.
4447
4448In time I came to love the help desk govvies, who were kind and generous to me, and always appreciated my willingness 
4449
4450to help even when it wasn’t my job. I, in turn, learned much from them, in bits and pieces, about how the larger  
4451
4452organization  functioned  beyond  the  Beltway.  Some  of  them  had actually worked out in the foreign field 
4453
4454themselves once upon a time, like the agents they now assisted over the phone. After a while, they’d come back home 
4455
4456to the States, not always with their families intact, and they’d been relegated to the help desk for the remaining 
4457
4458years of their careers because they lacked the computer skills required to compete in an agency increasingly focused 
4459
4460on expanding its technological capabilities.
4461
4462I was proud to have won the govvies’ respect, and I was never quite comfortable with how many of my team members 
4463
4464condescendingly pitied and even made fun of these bright and committed folks—men and women who
4465for low pay and little glory had given the agency years of their lives, often in inhospitable and even outright 
4466
4467dangerous places abroad, at the end of which their ultimate reward was a job picking up phones in a lonely hallway.
4468
4469
4470
4471AFTER A FEW weeks familiarizing myself with the systems on the day shift, I moved to nights—6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.—
4472
4473when the help desk was staffed by a discreetly snoozing skeleton crew and the rest of the agency was pretty much 
4474
4475dead.
4476
4477At night, especially between, say, 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., the CIA was empty and lifeless, a vast and haunted 
4478
4479complex with a postapocalyptic feel. All the escalators were stopped and you had to walk them like stairs. Only half 
4480
4481of the elevators were working, and the pinging sounds they made, only barely audible during the bustle of daytime, 
4482
4483now sounded alarmingly loud. Former CIA directors glared down from their portraits and the bald eagles seemed less 
4484
4485like statues than like living predators waiting patiently to swoop in for the kill. American flags billowed like 
4486
4487ghosts—spooks in red, white, and blue. The agency had recently committed to a new eco-friendly energy-saving policy 
4488
4489and installed motion-sensitive overhead lights: the corridor ahead of you would be swathed in darkness and the lights 
4490
4491would switch on when you approached, so that you felt followed, and your footsteps would echo endlessly.
4492
4493For twelve hours each night, three days on and two days off, I sat in the secure office beyond the help desk, among 
4494
4495the twenty desks each bearing two or three computer terminals reserved for the sysadmins who kept the CIA’s global 
4496
4497network online. Regardless of how fancy that might sound, the job itself was relatively banal, and can basically be 
4498
4499described as waiting for catastrophe to happen. The problems generally weren’t too difficult to solve. The moment 
4500
4501something went wrong, I had to log in to try to fix it remotely. If I couldn’t, I had to physically descend into the 
4502
4503data center hidden a floor below my own in the New Headquarters Building—or walk the eerie half mile through the 
4504
4505connecting tunnel over to the data center in the Old Headquarters Building—and tinker around with the machinery 
4506
4507itself.
4508
4509My partner in this task—the only other person responsible for the nocturnal functioning of the CIA’s entire server 
4510
4511architecture—was a guy I’m going to call Frank. He was our team’s great outlier and an exceptional personality in 
4512
4513every sense. Besides having a political consciousness (libertarian to the point of stockpiling Krugerrands) and an 
4514
4515abiding interest in subjects outside of tech (he read vintage mysteries and thrillers in paperback),
4516he was a fifty-something been-there-done-that ex-navy radio operator who’d managed to graduate from the call center’s 
4517
4518ranks thanks to being a contractor.
4519
4520I have to say, when I first met Frank, I thought: Imagine if my entire life were like the nights I spent at CASL. 
4521
4522Because, to put it frankly, Frank did hardly any work at all. At least, that was the impression he liked to project. 
4523
4524He enjoyed telling me, and everyone else, that he didn’t really know anything about computing and  didn’t understand 
4525
4526why  they’d put  him  on  such an important team. He used to say that “contracting was the third biggest scam in 
4527
4528Washington,” after the income tax and Congress. He claimed he’d advised his boss that he’d be “next to useless” when 
4529
4530they suggested moving him to the server team, but they moved him just the same. By his own account, all he’d done at 
4531
4532work for the better part of the last decade was sit around and read books, though sometimes he’d also play games of 
4533
4534solitaire—with a real deck of cards, not on the computer, of course—and reminisce about former wives (“she was a 
4535
4536keeper”) and girlfriends (“she took my car but it was worth it”). Sometimes he’d just pace all night and reload the 
4537
4538Drudge Report.
4539
4540When the phone rang to signal that something was broken, and bouncing a server didn’t fix it, he’d just report it to 
4541
4542the day shift. Essentially, his philosophy (if you could call it that) was that the night shift had to end sometime 
4543
4544and the day shift had a deeper bench. Apparently, however, the day shift had gotten tired of coming in to work every 
4545
4546morning to find Frank’s feet up in front of the digital equivalent of a dumpster fire, and so I’d been hired.
4547
4548For some reason, the agency had decided that it was preferable to bring me in than to let this old guy go. After a 
4549
4550couple of weeks of working together, I was convinced that his continued employment had to be the result of some 
4551
4552personal connection or favor. To test this hypothesis I tried to draw Frank out, and asked him which CIA directors or 
4553
4554other agency brass he’d been with in the navy. But my question only provoked a tirade about how basically none of the 
4555
4556navy vets high up at the agency had been enlisted men—they’d all been officers, which explained so much about the 
4557
4558agency’s dismal record. This lecture went on and on, until suddenly a panicked expression came over his face and he 
4559
4560jumped up and said, “I gotta change the tape!”
4561
4562I had no idea what he was talking about. But Frank was already heading to the gray door at the back of our vault, 
4563
4564which opened onto a dingy stairwell that gave direct access to the data center itself—the humming, freezing night- 
4565
4566black chamber that we sat directly on top of.
4567
4568Going down into a server vault—especially the CIA’s—can be a disorienting experience. You descend into darkness 
4569
4570blinking with green and
4571red LEDs like an evil Christmas, vibrating with the whir of the industrial fans cooling the precious rack-mounted 
4572
4573machinery to  prevent it  from melting down. Being there was always a bit dizzying—even without a manic older guy 
4574
4575cursing like the sailor he was as he dashed down the server hall.
4576
4577Frank stopped by a shabby corner that housed a makeshift cubicle of reclaimed equipment, marked as belonging to the 
4578
4579Directorate of Operations. Taking up almost the entirety of the sad, rickety desk was an old computer. On closer 
4580
4581inspection, it was something from the early ’90s, or even the late
4582’80s, older than anything I remembered from my father’s Coast Guard lab—a computer so ancient that it shouldn’t even 
4583
4584have been called a computer. It was more  properly a  machine, running  a  miniature tape  format  that  I  didn’t 
4585
4586recognize but was pretty sure would have been welcomed by the Smithsonian.
4587
4588Next to this machine was a massive safe, which Frank unlocked.
4589
4590He fussed with the tape that was in the machine, pried it free, and put it in the safe. Then he took another antique 
4591
4592tape out of the safe and inserted it into the  machine  as  a  replacement, threading  it  through  by  touch  alone. 
4593
4594 He carefully tapped a few times on the old keyboard—down, down, down, tab, tab, tab. He couldn’t actually see the 
4595
4596effect of those keystrokes, because the machine’s monitor no longer worked, but he struck the Enter key with 
4597
4598confidence.
4599
4600I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But the itty-bitty tape began to tick-tick-tick and then spin, and Frank 
4601
4602grinned with satisfaction.
4603
4604“This  is  the  most  important machine in  the  building,” he  said.  “The agency doesn’t trust this digital 
4605
4606technology crap. They don’t trust their own servers. You know they’re always breaking. But when the servers break 
4607
4608down they risk losing what they’re storing, so in order not to lose anything that comes in during the day, they back 
4609
4610everything up on tape at night.”
4611
4612“So you’re doing a storage backup here?”
4613
4614“A storage backup to tape. The old way. Reliable as a heart attack. Tape hardly ever crashes.”
4615
4616“But what’s on the tape? Like personnel stuff, or like the actual incoming intelligence?”
4617
4618Frank put a hand to his chin in a thinking pose and pretended to take the question seriously. Then he said, “Man, Ed, 
4619
4620I didn’t want to have to tell you. But it’s field reports from your girlfriend, and we’ve got a lot of agents filing. 
4621
4622It’s raw intelligence. Very raw.”
4623He laughed his way upstairs, leaving me speechless and blushing in the darkness of the vault.
4624
4625It was only when Frank repeated this same tape-changing ritual the next night, and the night after that, and on every 
4626
4627night we worked together thereafter, that I began to understand why the agency kept him around—and it wasn’t just for 
4628
4629his sense of humor. Frank was the only guy willing to stick around between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. who was also old 
4630
4631enough to know how to handle that proprietary tape system. All the other techs who’d come up  in  the  dark  ages  
4632
4633when  tape  was  the  medium  now  had  families  and preferred to be home with them at night. But Frank was a 
4634
4635bachelor and remembered the world before the Enlightenment.
4636
4637After I found a way to automate most of my own work—writing scripts to automatically update servers and restore lost 
4638
4639network connections, mostly—I started having what I came to call a Frank amount of time. Meaning, I had all night to 
4640
4641do pretty much whatever I wanted. I passed a fair number of hours in long  talks  with  Frank,  especially  about  
4642
4643the  more  political  stuff  he  was reading: books about how the country should return to the gold standard, or 
4644
4645about the intricacies of the flat tax. But there were always periods of every shift when Frank would disappear. He’d 
4646
4647either put his head into a whodunit novel and not lift it until morning, or he’d go strolling the halls of the 
4648
4649agency, hitting the cafeteria for a lukewarm slice of pizza or the gym to lift weights. I had my own way of keeping 
4650
4651to myself, of course. I went online.
4652
4653When you go online at the CIA, you have to check a box for a Consent to Monitoring Agreement, which basically says 
4654
4655that everything you do is being recorded and that you agree that you have no expectation of any privacy whatsoever. 
4656
4657You end up checking this box so often that it becomes second nature. These agreements become invisible to you when 
4658
4659you’re working at the agency, because they pop up constantly and you’re always trying to just click them down and get 
4660
4661back to what you were doing. This, to my mind, is a major reason  why  most  IC  workers  don’t  share  civilian  
4662
4663concerns  about  being tracked online: not because they have any insider information about how digital surveillance 
4664
4665helps to protect America, but because to those in the IC, being tracked by the boss just comes with the job.
4666
4667Anyway, it’s not like there’s a lot to be found out there on the public Internet that’s more interesting than what 
4668
4669the agency already has internally. Few realize this, but the CIA has its own Internet and Web. It has its own kind of 
4670
4671Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia,  which  provides  agents  with  
4672
4673information about  agency  teams,
4674projects, and missions; and its  own internal version of  Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to 
4675
4676search this sprawling classified network. Every CIA component has its own website on this network that discusses what 
4677
4678it does and posts meeting minutes and presentations. For hours and hours every night, this was my education.
4679
4680According to  Frank, the  first  things everyone looks up  on  the  CIA’s internal networks are aliens and 9/11, and 
4681
4682that’s why, also according to Frank, you’ll never get any meaningful search results for them. I looked them up 
4683
4684anyway.  The  CIA-flavored  Google  didn’t  return  anything  interesting  for either, but hey—maybe the truth was 
4685
4686out there on another network drive. For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at 
4687
4688least they haven’t contacted US intelligence. But al-Qaeda did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the 
4689
4690Saudis, a fact that the Bush White House worked suspiciously hard to suppress as we went to war with two other 
4691
4692countries.
4693
4694Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didn’t quite understand at the time, and that no major American employer 
4695
4696outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The  
4697
4698higher up  this  employee is,  and  the  more  systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to  virtually 
4699
4700every byte of his employer’s digital existence. Of course, not everyone is curious enough to take advantage of this 
4701
4702education, and not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity. My forays through the CIA’s systems were natural 
4703
4704extensions of my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit 
4705
4706together into the whole. And with the official title and privileges of a systems administrator, and technical prowess 
4707
4708that enabled my clearance to be used to its maximum potential, I was able to satisfy my every informational 
4709
4710deficiency and then some. In case you were wondering: Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. 
4711
4712Chemtrails are not a thing.
4713
4714On the CIA’s internal news sites I read top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still 
4715
4716unfolding. These agency accounts of events were often very similar to the accounts that would eventually show up on 
4717
4718network news, CNN, or Fox days later. The primary differences were merely in  the sourcing and the level of detail. 
4719
4720Whereas a  newspaper or magazine account of an upheaval abroad might be attributed to “a senior official speaking on 
4721
4722condition of anonymity,” the CIA version would have explicit sourcing—say, “ZBSMACKTALK/1, an  employee of  the 
4723
4724interior ministry who regularly responds to specific tasking, claims secondhand knowledge, and has proven reliable in 
4725
4726the past.” And the true name and
4727complete personal history of ZBSMACKTALK/1, called a case file, would be only a few clicks away.
4728
4729Sometimes an internal news item would never show up in the media at all, and the excitement and significance of what 
4730
4731I was reading both increased my appreciation of the importance of our work and made me feel like I was missing out by 
4732
4733just sitting at a workstation. This may come off as naive, but I was surprised to learn how truly international the 
4734
4735CIA was—and I don’t mean its operations, I mean its workforce. The number of languages I heard in the cafeteria was 
4736
4737astounding. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of my own provincialism. Working at CIA Headquarters was a thrill, but it 
4738
4739was still only a few hours away from where I’d grown up, which in many ways was a similar environment. I was in my 
4740
4741early twenties and, apart from stints in North Carolina, childhood trips to visit my grandfather at Coast Guard bases 
4742
4743where he’d held commands, and my few weeks in the army at Fort Benning, I’d never really left the Beltway.
4744
4745As I read about events happening in Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, and other exotic cities I could never have found on a 
4746
4747noncomputerized map, I realized that as long as I was still young I had to serve my country by doing something truly 
4748
4749meaningful abroad. The alternative, I thought, was just becoming a more successful Frank: sitting at progressively 
4750
4751bigger desks, making progressively more money, until eventually I, too, would be obsolesced and kept around only to 
4752
4753handle the future’s equivalent of a janky tape machine.
4754
4755It was then that I did the unthinkable. I set about going govvy.
4756
4757I think some of my supervisors were puzzled by this, but they were also flattered, because the typical route is the 
4758
4759reverse: a public servant at the end of their tenure goes private and cashes in. No tech contractor just starting out 
4760
4761goes public and takes a pay cut. To my mind, however, becoming a govvy was logical: I’d be getting paid to travel.
4762
4763I got lucky, and a position opened up. After nine months as a systems administrator, I applied for a CIA tech job 
4764
4765abroad, and in short order I was accepted.
4766
4767My last day at CIA Headquarters was just a formality. I’d already done all my paperwork and traded in my green badge 
4768
4769for a blue. All that was left to do was to sit through another indoctrination, which now that I was a govvy was held 
4770
4771in an elegant conference room next to the cafeteria’s Dunkin’ Donuts. It was here that I performed the sacred rite in 
4772
4773which contractors never participate.  I  raised  my  hand  to  swear  an  oath  of  loyalty—not  to  the
4774government or agency that now employed me directly, but to the US Constitution. I solemnly swore to support and 
4775
4776defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
4777
4778The next day, I drove my trusty old Honda Civic out into the Virginia countryside. In order to get to the foreign 
4779
4780station of my dreams, I first had to go back to school—to the first sit-in-a-classroom schooling I’d ever really 
4781
4782finish.
478314
4784
4785The Count of the Hill
4786
4787My first orders as a freshly minted officer of the government were to head for the  Comfort Inn  in  Warrenton, 
4788
4789Virginia, a  sad,  dilapidated motel  whose primary client was the “State Department,” by which I mean the CIA. It 
4790
4791was the worst motel in a town of bad motels, which was probably why the CIA chose it. The fewer other guests, the 
4792
4793lower the chances that anybody would notice that this particular Comfort Inn served as a makeshift dormitory for the 
4794
4795Warrenton Training Center—or, as folks who work there call it, the Hill.
4796
4797When I checked in, the desk clerk warned me not to use the stairs, which were blocked off by police tape. I was given 
4798
4799a room on the second floor of the main building, with a view of the inn’s auxiliary buildings and parking lot. The 
4800
4801room was barely lit, there was mold in the bathroom, the carpets were filthy  with  cigarette  burns  under  the  No  
4802
4803Smoking  sign,  and  the  flimsy mattress was stained dark purple with what I hoped was booze. Nevertheless, I liked 
4804
4805it—I was still at the age when I could find this seediness romantic— and I spent my first night lying awake in bed, 
4806
4807watching the bugs swarm the single domed overhead light fixture and counting down the hours to the free continental 
4808
4809breakfast I’d been promised.
4810
4811The next morning, I discovered that on the continent of Warrenton, breakfast  meant  individual-size  boxes  of  
4812
4813Froot  Loops  and  sour  milk. Welcome to the government.
4814
4815The Comfort Inn was to be my home for the next six months. My fellow Innmates and I, as we called ourselves, were 
4816
4817discouraged from telling our loved ones where we were staying and what we were doing. I leaned hard into those 
4818
4819protocols, rarely heading back to Maryland or even talking to Lindsay on the phone. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to 
4820
4821take our phones to school, since class was classified, and we had classes all the time. Warrenton kept most of us too 
4822
4823busy to be lonely.
4824
4825If the Farm, down by Camp Peary, is the CIA’s most famous training institution, chiefly because it’s the only one 
4826
4827that the agency’s PR staff is allowed to talk to Hollywood about, the Hill is without a doubt the most mysterious. 
4828
4829Connected via microwave and fiber optics to the satellite relay facility at Brandy Station—part of the Warrenton 
4830
4831Training Center’s constellation of sister sites—the Hill serves as the heart of the CIA’s field communications 
4832
4833network, carefully located just out of nuke range from DC. The salty old techs who worked there liked to say that the 
4834
4835CIA could survive
4836losing its headquarters to a catastrophic attack, but it would die if it ever lost Warrenton, and now that the top of 
4837
4838the Hill holds two enormous top secret data centers—one of which I later helped to construct—I’m inclined to agree.
4839
4840The Hill earned its name because of its location, which is atop, yes, a massive steepness. When I arrived, there was 
4841
4842just one road that led in, past a purposely under-marked perimeter fence, and then up a grade so severe that whenever 
4843
4844the temperature dropped and the road iced over, vehicles would lose traction and slide backward downhill.
4845
4846Just beyond the guarded checkpoint lies the State Department’s decaying diplomatic communications training facility, 
4847
4848whose prominent location was meant to reinforce its role as cover: making the Hill appear as if it’s merely a place 
4849
4850where the American foreign service trains technologists. Beyond it, amid the back territory, were the various low, 
4851
4852unlabeled buildings I studied in, and even farther on was the shooting range that the IC’s trigger pullers used for 
4853
4854special training. Shots would ring out, in a style of firing I wasn’t familiar with: pop-pop, pop; pop-pop, pop. A 
4855
4856double-tap meant to incapacitate, followed by an aimed shot meant to execute.
4857
4858I was there as a member of class 6-06 of the BTTP, the Basic Telecommunications Training Program, whose intentionally 
4859
4860beige name disguises one of the most classified and unusual curricula in existence. The purpose of the program is to 
4861
4862train TISOs (Technical Information Security Officers)—the CIA’s cadre of elite “communicators,” or, less formally, 
4863
4864“commo guys.” A TISO is trained to be a jack-of-all-trades, a one-person replacement for previous generations’ 
4865
4866specialized roles of code clerk, radioman, electrician, mechanic, physical and digital security adviser, and computer 
4867
4868technician. The main job of this undercover officer is to manage the technical infrastructure for CIA operations, 
4869
4870most commonly overseas at stations hidden inside American missions, consulates, and embassies—hence the  State 
4871
4872Department connection. The  idea  is,  if  you’re in  an  American embassy, which is to say if you’re far from home 
4873
4874and surrounded by untrustworthy foreigners—whether hostiles or allies, they’re still untrustworthy foreigners to the 
4875
4876CIA—you’re going to have to handle all of your technical needs internally. If you ask a local repairman to fix your 
4877
4878secret spy base, he’ll definitely do it, even for cheap, but he’s also going to install hard-to-find bugs on behalf 
4879
4880of a foreign power.
4881
4882As a result, TISOs are responsible for knowing how to fix basically every machine in the building, from individual 
4883
4884computers and computer networks to CCTV and HVAC systems, solar panels, heaters and coolers, emergency
4885generators, satellite hookups, military encryption devices, alarms, locks, and so on. The rule is that if it plugs in 
4886
4887or gets plugged into, it’s the TISO’s problem.
4888
4889TISOs also have to know how to build some of these systems themselves, just as they have to know how to destroy them
4890
4891—when an embassy is under siege, say, after all the diplomats and most of their fellow CIA officers have been 
4892
4893evacuated. The TISOs are always the last guys out. It’s their job to send the final “off the air” message to 
4894
4895headquarters after they’ve shredded, burned, wiped, degaussed, and disintegrated anything that has the CIA’s 
4896
4897fingerprints on it, from operational documents in safes to disks with cipher material, to ensure that nothing of 
4898
4899value remains for an enemy to capture.
4900
4901Why this was a job for the CIA and not for the State Department—the entity  that  actually  owns  the  embassy  
4902
4903building—is more  than  the  sheer difference in competence and trust: the real reason is plausible deniability. The 
4904
4905worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform 
4906
4907for espionage. The old explanations for why a country might try to maintain a notionally sovereign physical presence 
4908
4909on another country’s soil faded into obsolescence with the rise of electronic communications and jet-powered 
4910
4911aircraft. Today, the most meaningful diplomacy happens directly between ministries and ministers. Sure, embassies do 
4912
4913still send the occasional démarche and help support their citizens abroad, and then there are the consular sections 
4914
4915that issue visas and renew passports. But those are often in a completely different building, and anyway, none of 
4916
4917those activities can even remotely justify the expense of maintaining all that infrastructure. Instead, what 
4918
4919justifies the expense is the ability for a country to use the cover of its foreign service to conduct and legitimize 
4920
4921its spying.
4922
4923TISOs work under diplomatic cover with credentials that hide them among these foreign service officers, usually under 
4924
4925the identity of “attachés.” The largest  embassies  would  have  maybe  five  of  these  people,  the  larger 
4926
4927embassies would have maybe three, but most just have one. They’re called “singletons,” and I remember being told that 
4928
4929of all the posts the CIA offers, these have the highest rates of divorce. To be a singleton is to be the lone 
4930
4931technical officer, far  from home, in  a  world where everything is  always broken.
4932
4933My class in Warrenton began with around eight members and lost only one before graduation—which I was told was fairly 
4934
4935uncommon. And this motley crew was uncommon, too, though pretty well representative of the
4936kind of malcontents who voluntarily sign up for a career track that all but guarantees they’ll spend the majority of 
4937
4938their service undercover in a foreign country. For the first time in my IC career, I wasn’t the youngest in the room. 
4939
4940At age twenty-four, I’d say I was around the mean, though my experience doing systems work at headquarters certainly 
4941
4942gave me a boost in terms of familiarity with the agency’s operations. Most of the others were just tech- inclined 
4943
4944kids straight out of college, or straight off the street, who’d applied online.
4945
4946In a nod to the paramilitary aspirations of the CIA’s foreign field branches, we called each other by nicknames—
4947
4948quickly assigned based on eccentricities
4949—more often than by our true names. Taco Bell was a suburb: wide, likable, and blank. At twenty years old, the only 
4950
4951job he’d had prior to the CIA was as the night-shift manager at a branch of the eponymous restaurant in Pennsylvania. 
4952
4953Rainman was in his late twenties and spent the term bouncing around the autism spectrum between catatonic detachment 
4954
4955and shivering fury. He  wore  the  name  we  gave  him  proudly  and  claimed  it  was  a  Native American honorific. 
4956
4957Flute earned his name because his career in the Marines was far less interesting to us than his degree in panpipes 
4958
4959from a music conservatory. Spo was one of the older guys, at thirty-five or so. He was called what he was called 
4960
4961because he’d been an SPO—a Special Police Officer—at the CIA’s headquarters, where he got so bored out of his mind 
4962
4963guarding the gate at McLean that he was determined to escape overseas even if it meant cramming his entire family 
4964
4965into a single motel room (a situation that lasted until the management found his kids’ pet snake living in a dresser 
4966
4967drawer). Our  elder  was  the  Colonel, a  midforties former  Special  Forces commo sergeant who, after numerous 
4968
4969tours in the sandbox, was trying out for his second act. We called him the Colonel, even though he was just an 
4970
4971enlisted guy, not an officer, mostly out of his resemblance to that friendly Kentuckian whose  fried  chicken  we  
4972
4973preferred to  the  regular  fare  of  the Warrenton cafeteria.
4974
4975My nickname—I guess I can’t avoid it—was the Count. Not because of my aristocratic bearing or dandyish fashion sense, 
4976
4977but because, like the felt vampire puppet of Sesame Street, I had a tendency to signal my intention to interrupt 
4978
4979class by raising my forefinger, as if to say: “One, two, three, ah, ha, ha, three things you forgot!”
4980
4981These were the folks with whom I’d cycle through some twenty different classes, each in its own specialty, but most 
4982
4983having to do with how to make the technology available in any given environment serve the government of the United 
4984
4985States, whether in an embassy or on the run.
4986One drill involved lugging the “off-site package,” which was an eighty- pound suitcase of communications equipment 
4987
4988that was older than I was, up onto a building’s roof. With just a compass and a laminated sheet of coordinates, I’d 
4989
4990have to find in all that vast sky of twinkling stars one of the CIA’s stealth satellites, which would connect me to 
4991
4992the agency’s mothership, its Crisis Communications Center in McLean—call sign “Central”—and then I’d use the Cold 
4993
4994War–era kit inside the package to establish an encrypted radio channel. This drill was a practical reminder of why 
4995
4996the commo officer is always the first in and last out: the chief of station can steal the deepest secret in the 
4997
4998world, but it doesn’t mean squat until somebody gets it home.
4999
5000That night I stayed on base after dark, and drove my car up to the very top of the Hill, parking outside the 
5001
5002converted barn where we studied electrical concepts meant to prevent adversaries from monitoring our activities. The 
5003
5004methods we learned about at times seemed close to voodoo—such as the ability to reproduce what’s being displayed on 
5005
5006any computer monitor by using only the tiny electromagnetic emissions caused by the oscillating currents in its 
5007
5008internal components, which can be captured using a special antenna, a method  called  Van  Eck  phreaking.  If  this  
5009
5010sounds  hard  to  understand,  I promise we all felt the same way. The instructor himself readily admitted he never 
5011
5012fully comprehended the details and couldn’t demonstrate it for us, but he knew the threat was real: the CIA was doing 
5013
5014it to others, which meant others could do it to us.
5015
5016I sat on the roof of my car, that same old white Civic, and, as I gazed out over what felt like all of Virginia, I 
5017
5018called Lindsay for the first time in weeks, or even a month. We talked until my phone’s battery died, my breath 
5019
5020becoming visible as the night got colder. There was nothing I wanted more than to share the scene with her—the dark 
5021
5022fields, the undulating hills, the high astral shimmer—but describing it to her was the best I could do. I was already 
5023
5024breaking the rules by using my phone; I would’ve been breaking the law by taking a picture.
5025
5026One of Warrenton’s major subjects of study involved how to service the terminals and cables, the basic—in many ways, 
5027
5028the primitive—components of any  CIA  station’s  communications  infrastructure.  A  “terminal,”  in  this context, 
5029
5030is just a computer used to send and receive messages over a single secure network. In the CIA, the word “cables” 
5031
5032tends to refer to the messages themselves, but technical officers know that “cables” are also far more tangible: 
5033
5034they’re the cords or wires that for the last half century or so have linked the agency’s terminals—specifically its 
5035
5036ancient Post Communications Terminals—all  over  the  world,  tunneling  underground  across  national
5037borders, buried at the bottom of the ocean.
5038
5039Ours was the last year that TISOs had to be fluent in all of this: the terminal hardware, the multiple software 
5040
5041packages, and the cables, too, of course. For some of my classmates, it felt a bit crazy to have to deal with issues 
5042
5043of insulation and sheathing in what was supposed to be the age of wireless. But if any of them voiced doubts about 
5044
5045the relevance of any of the seemingly antiquated tech that we were being taught, our instructors would remind us that 
5046
5047ours was also the first year in the history of the Hill that TISOs weren’t required to learn Morse code.
5048
5049Closing in on graduation, we had to fill out what were called dream sheets. We were given a list of the CIA stations 
5050
5051worldwide that needed personnel, and were told to rank them in the order of our preferences. These dream sheets then 
5052
5053went to the Requirements Division, which promptly crumpled them up and tossed them in the trash—at least according to 
5054
5055rumor.
5056
5057My dream sheet started with what was called the SRD, the Special Requirements Division. This was technically a 
5058
5059posting not at any embassy but here in Virginia, from which I would be sent out on periodic tours of all the uglier 
5060
5061spots in the sandbox, places where the agency judged a permanent posting too harsh or too dangerous—tiny, isolated 
5062
5063forward operating bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the border regions of Pakistan, for example. By choosing SRD, I was 
5064
5065opting for challenge and variety over being stuck in just one city for the entire duration of what was supposed to be 
5066
5067an up-to-three- years stint. My instructors were all pretty confident that SRD would jump at the chance to bring me 
5068
5069on, and I was pretty confident in my newly honed abilities. But things didn’t quite go as expected.
5070
5071As was evident from the condition of the Comfort Inn, the school had been cutting some corners. Some of my classmates 
5072
5073had begun to suspect that the administration was actually, believe it or not, violating federal labor laws. As a 
5074
5075work-obsessed recluse, I  initially wasn’t bothered by this, nor was anyone around my age. For us, this was the sort 
5076
5077of low-level exploitation we’d experienced so often that we already mistook it for normal. But unpaid overtime, 
5078
5079denied leave, and refusals to honor family benefits made a difference to the older classmates. The Colonel had 
5080
5081alimony payments, and Spo had a family: every dollar counted, every minute mattered.
5082
5083These grievances came to a head when the decrepit stairs at the Comfort Inn finally collapsed. Luckily no one was 
5084
5085injured, but everyone was spooked, and my classmates started grumbling that if the building had been bankrolled by 
5086
5087any entity other than the CIA, it would’ve been condemned for fire-code
5088violations years  ago.  The  discontent spread, and  soon  enough what  was basically a school for saboteurs was 
5089
5090close to unionizing. Management, in response,  dug  in  its  heels  and  decided  to  wait  us  out,  since  
5091
5092everybody involved eventually had to either graduate or be fired.
5093
5094A few of my classmates approached me. They knew that I was well liked by the instructors, since my skills put me near 
5095
5096the top of my class. They were also aware, because I’d worked at headquarters, that I knew my way around the 
5097
5098bureaucracy. Plus I could write pretty well—at least by tech standards. They wanted me to act as a sort of class 
5099
5100representative, or class martyr, by formally bringing their complaints to the head of the school.
5101
5102I’d like to say that I was motivated to take on this cause solely by my aggrieved  sense  of  justice.  But  while  
5103
5104that  certainly  did  factor  into  the decision, I can’t deny that for a young man who was suddenly excelling at 
5105
5106nearly everything he attempted, challenging the school’s crooked administration just sounded like fun. Within an hour 
5107
5108I was compiling policies to cite from the internal network, and before the day was done my email was sent.
5109
5110The next morning the head of the school had me come into his office. He admitted the school had gone off the rails, 
5111
5112but said the problems weren’t anything he could solve. “You’re only here for twelve more weeks—do me a favor and just 
5113
5114tell your classmates to suck it up. Assignments are coming up soon, and then you’ll have better things to worry 
5115
5116about. All you’ll remember from your time here is who had the best performance review.”
5117
5118What he said had been worded in such a way that it might’ve been a threat, and it might’ve been a bribe. Either way, 
5119
5120it bothered me. By the time I left his office the fun was over, and it was justice I was after.
5121
5122I walked back into a class that had expected to lose. I remember Spo noticing my frown and saying, “Don’t feel bad, 
5123
5124man. At least you tried.”
5125
5126He’d been at the agency longer than any of my other classmates; he knew how  it  worked,  and  how  ludicrous  it  
5127
5128was  to  trust  management  to  fix something that management itself had broken. I was a bureaucratic innocent by 
5129
5130comparison, disturbed by the loss and by the ease with which Spo and the others accepted it. I hated the feeling that 
5131
5132the mere fiction of process was enough to dispel a genuine demand for results. It wasn’t that my classmates didn’t 
5133
5134care enough to fight, it was that they couldn’t afford to: the system was designed so  that  the  perceived cost  of  
5135
5136escalation exceeded the  expected benefit of resolution. At age twenty-four, though, I thought as little of the
5137costs as I did of the benefits; I just cared about the system. I wasn’t finished.
5138
5139I rewrote and re-sent the email—not to the head of the school now, but to his boss, the director of Field Service 
5140
5141Group. Though he was higher up the totem pole than the head of the school, the D/FSG was pretty much equivalent in 
5142
5143rank and seniority to a few of the personnel I’d dealt with at headquarters. Then I copied the email to his boss, who 
5144
5145definitely was not.
5146
5147A few days later, we were in a class on something like false subtraction as a form of field-expedient encryption, 
5148
5149when a front-office secretary came in and declared that the old regime had fallen. Unpaid overtime would no longer be 
5150
5151required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer  hotel.  I  remember the  giddy  pride 
5152
5153 with  which  she  announced, “A Hampton Inn!”
5154
5155I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was 
5156
5157at the door, summoning me back to his office. Spo immediately leaped from his seat, enveloped me in a hug, mimed 
5158
5159wiping away a tear, and declared that he’d never forget me. The head of the school rolled his eyes.
5160
5161There, waiting in the school head’s office was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the 
5162
5163boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed. He was exceptionally cordial, and 
5164
5165didn’t project any of the school head’s clenched-jaw irritation. This unnerved me.
5166
5167I tried to keep a calm exterior, but inside I was sweating. The head of the school began our chat by reiterating how 
5168
5169the issues the class had brought to light were in the process of being resolved. His superior cut him off. “But why 
5170
5171we’re here is not to talk about that. Why we’re here is to talk about insubordination and the chain of command.”
5172
5173If he’d slapped me, I would’ve been less shocked.
5174
5175I had no idea what the director meant by insubordination, but before I had the opportunity to ask, he continued. The 
5176
5177CIA was quite different from the other civilian agencies, he said, even if, on paper, the regulations insisted it 
5178
5179wasn’t. And in an agency that did such important work, there was nothing more important than the chain of command.
5180
5181Raising a forefinger, automatically but politely, I pointed out that before I emailed above my station, I’d tried the 
5182
5183chain of command and been failed by it. Which was precisely the last thing I should have been explaining to the chain 
5184
5185of command itself, personified just across a desk from me.
5186The head of the school just stared at his shoes and occasionally glanced out the window.
5187
5188“Listen,” his boss said. “Ed, I’m not here to file a ‘hurt feelings report.’ Relax. I recognize that you’re a 
5189
5190talented guy, and we’ve gone around and talked to all of your instructors and they say you’re talented and sharp. 
5191
5192Even volunteered for the war zone. That’s something we appreciate. We want you here,  but  we  need  to  know  that  
5193
5194we  can  count  on  you.  You’ve  got  to understand that there’s a system here. Sometimes we’ve all got to put up 
5195
5196with things we don’t like, because the mission comes first, and we can’t complete that mission if every guy on the 
5197
5198team is second-guessing.” He took a pause, swallowed, and said, “Nowhere is this more true than in the desert. A lot 
5199
5200of things happen out in the desert, and I’m not sure that we’re at a stage yet where I’m comfortable you’ll know how 
5201
5202to handle them.”
5203
5204This was their gotcha, their retaliation. And though it was entirely self- defeating, the head of the school was now 
5205
5206smiling at the parking lot. No one besides me—and I mean no one—had put down SRD, or any other active combat 
5207
5208situation for that matter, as their first or second or even third choice on their dream sheets. Everyone else had 
5209
5210prioritized all the stops on the European champagne circuit, all the neat sweet vacation-station burgs with windmills 
5211
5212and bicycles, where you rarely hear explosions.
5213
5214Almost perversely, they now gave me one of these assignments. They gave me Geneva. They punished me by giving me what 
5215
5216I’d never asked for, but what everybody else had wanted.
5217
5218As if he were reading my mind, the director said, “This isn’t a punishment, Ed. It’s an opportunity—really. Someone 
5219
5220with your level of expertise would be wasted in the war zone. You need a bigger station, that pilots the newest 
5221
5222projects, to really keep you busy and stretch your skills.”
5223
5224Everybody in class who’d been congratulating me would later turn jealous and think that I’d been bought off with a 
5225
5226luxury position to avoid further complaints. My reaction, in the moment, was the opposite: I thought that the head of 
5227
5228the school must have had an informant in the class, who’d told him exactly the type of station I’d hoped to avoid.
5229
5230The director got up with a smile, which signaled that the meeting was over. “All right, I think we’ve got a plan. 
5231
5232Before I leave, I just want to make sure we’re clear here: I’m not going to have another Ed Snowden moment, am I?”
523315
5234
5235Geneva
5236
5237Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is largely set in Geneva, the bustling, neat, clean, clockwork-
5238
5239organized Swiss city where I now made my home. Like many Americans, I’d  grown up  watching the  various movie 
5240
5241versions and TV cartoons, but I’d never actually read the book. In the days before I left the States, however, I’d 
5242
5243been searching for what to read about Geneva, and in nearly all the lists I found online, Frankenstein stood out from 
5244
5245among the tourist guides and histories. In fact, I  think the only PDFs I downloaded for the flight over were 
5246
5247Frankenstein and the Geneva Conventions, and I only finished the former. I did my reading at night over the long, 
5248
5249lonely months I spent by myself before Lindsay moved over to join me, stretched out on a bare mattress in the living 
5250
5251room of the comically fancy, comically vast, but still almost entirely unfurnished apartment that the embassy was 
5252
5253paying for on the Quai du Seujet, in the Saint-Jean Falaises district, with the Rhône out one window and the Jura 
5254
5255Mountains out the other.
5256
5257Suffice it to say, the book wasn’t what I expected. Frankenstein is an epistolary novel that reads like a thread of 
5258
5259overwritten emails, alternating scenes of madness and gory murder with a cautionary account of the way technological 
5260
5261innovation tends to outpace all moral, ethical, and legal restraints. The result is the creation of an uncontrollable 
5262
5263monster.
5264
5265In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited, though the more popular military term for 
5266
5267it is “blowback”: situations in which policy decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them 
5268
5269irreparably. Prominent examples of the “Frankenstein effect” cited by after-the-fact civilian, governmental, 
5270
5271military, and even IC assessments have included America’s funding and training of the mujahideen to fight the 
5272
5273Soviets, which resulted in the radicalization of Osama bin Laden and the founding of al-Qaeda, as well as the de-
5274
5275Baathification of the Saddam Hussein–era Iraqi military, which resulted in the rise of the Islamic state. Without a 
5276
5277doubt, however, the major instance of the Frankenstein effect over the  course  of  my  brief  career  can  be  found 
5278
5279 in  the  US  government’s clandestine drive to restructure the world’s communications. In Geneva, in the same 
5280
5281landscape where Mary Shelley’s creature ran amok, America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a 
5282
5283life and mission of its own and wreak havoc on the lives of its creators—mine very much included.
5284
5285The CIA station in the American embassy in Geneva was one of the prime
5286European laboratories of this decades-long experiment. This city, the refined Old World capital of family banking and 
5287
5288an immemorial tradition of financial secrecy, also lay at the intersection of EU and international fiber-optic 
5289
5290networks, and happened to fall just within the shadow of key communications satellites circling overhead.
5291
5292The CIA is the primary American intelligence agency dedicated to HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence 
5293
5294gathering by means of interpersonal  contact—person  to  person,  face-to-face,  unmediated  by  a screen. The COs 
5295
5296(case officers) who specialized in this were terminal cynics, charming liars who smoked, drank, and harbored deep 
5297
5298resentment toward the rise of  SIGINT (signals intelligence), or  covert intelligence gathering by means of 
5299
5300intercepted communications, which with each passing year reduced their privilege and prestige. But though the COs had 
5301
5302a general distrust of digital technology reminiscent of Frank’s back at headquarters, they certainly understood how 
5303
5304useful it could be, which produced a productive camaraderie and a healthy rivalry. Even the most cunning and 
5305
5306charismatic CO will, over the course of their career, come across at least a few zealous idealists whose loyalties 
5307
5308they can’t purchase with envelopes stuffed with cash. That was typically the moment when they’d turn to technical 
5309
5310field officers like myself
5311—with questions, compliments, and party invitations.
5312
5313To serve as a technical field officer among these people was to be as much a cultural ambassador as an expert 
5314
5315adviser, introducing the case officers to the folkways and customs of a new territory no less foreign to most 
5316
5317Americans than Switzerland’s twenty-six cantons and four official languages. On Monday, a  CO  might  ask  my  advice 
5318
5319on  how  to  set  up  a  covert  online communications channel with a potential turncoat they were afraid to spook. 
5320
5321On Tuesday, another CO might introduce me to someone they’d say was a “specialist” in from Washington—though this was 
5322
5323in fact the same CO from the day before, now testing out a disguise that I’m still embarrassed to say I didn’t  
5324
5325suspect  in  the  least,  though  I  suppose  that  was  the  point.  On Wednesday, I  might be  asked how  best  to  
5326
5327destroy-after-transmitting (the technological version of burn-after-reading) a disc of customer records that a CO had 
5328
5329managed to purchase from a crooked Swisscom employee. On Thursday, I might have to write up and transmit security 
5330
5331violation reports on COs, documenting minor infractions like forgetting to lock the door to a vault when they’d gone 
5332
5333to the bathroom—a duty I’d perform with considerable compassion, since I once had had to write up myself for exactly 
5334
5335the same mistake. Come Friday, the chief of operations might call me into his office and ask me if, “hypothetically 
5336
5337speaking,” headquarters could send over an
5338infected thumb drive that could be used by “someone” to hack the computers used by delegates to the United Nations, 
5339
5340whose main building was just up the street—did I think there was much of a chance of this “someone” being caught?
5341
5342I didn’t and they weren’t.
5343
5344END PART ONE