UnZZLWpg

1PART TWO
2
3
4
5In sum, during my time in the field, the field was rapidly changing. The agency was increasingly adamant that COs 
6
7enter the new millennium, and technical field officers like myself were tasked with helping them do that in addition 
8
9to all of our other duties. We put them online, and they put up with us.
10
11Geneva was regarded as ground zero for this transition because it contained the world’s richest environment of 
12
13sophisticated targets, from the global headquarters of the United Nations to the home offices of numerous specialized 
14
15UN agencies and international nongovernmental organizations. There was the International Atomic Energy Agency, which 
16
17promotes nuclear technology and safety standards worldwide, including those that relate to nuclear weaponry; the 
18
19International Telecommunication Union, which— through its influence over technical standards for everything from the 
20
21radio spectrum to satellite orbits—determines what can be communicated and how; and the World Trade Organization, 
22
23which—through its regulation of the trade of goods, services, and intellectual property among participating nations— 
24
25determines what can be sold and how. Finally, there was Geneva’s role as the capital of private finance, which 
26
27allowed great fortunes to be stashed and spent without much public scrutiny regardless of whether those fortunes were 
28
29ill-gotten or well earned.
30
31The notoriously slow and meticulous methods of traditional spycraft certainly had their successes in manipulating 
32
33these systems for America’s benefit, but ultimately too few to satisfy the ever-increasing appetite of the American 
34
35policy makers who read the IC’s reports, especially as the Swiss banking sector—along with the rest of the world—went 
36
37digital. With the world’s deepest secrets now stored on computers, which were more often than not connected to the 
38
39open Internet, it was only logical that America’s intelligence agencies would want to use those very same connections 
40
41to steal them.
42
43Before the advent of the Internet, if an agency wanted to gain access to a target’s computer it had to recruit an 
44
45asset who had physical access to it. This was obviously a dangerous proposition: the asset might be caught in the act 
46
47of downloading the  secrets, or  of  implanting the  exploitative hardware and
48software that would radio the secrets to their handlers. The global spread of digital technology simplified this 
49
50process enormously. This new world of “digital network intelligence” or “computer network operations” meant that 
51
52physical access was almost never required, which reduced the level of human risk and permanently realigned the 
53
54HUMINT/SIGINT balance. An agent now could just send the target a message, such as an email, with attachments or links 
55
56that unleashed malware that would allow the agency to surveil not just the target’s computer but its entire network. 
57
58Given this innovation, the CIA’s HUMINT would be dedicated to the identification of targets of interest, and SIGINT 
59
60would take care of the rest. Instead of a CO cultivating a target into an asset—through cash-on-the-barrel bribery, 
61
62or coercion and blackmail if the bribery failed—a few clever computer hacks would provide a similar benefit. What’s 
63
64more, with this method the target would remain unwitting, in what would inevitably be a cleaner process.
65
66That,  at  least,  was  the  hope. But  as  intelligence increasingly became “cyberintelligence” (a term used to 
67
68distinguish it from the old phone-and-fax forms of off-line SIGINT), old concerns also had to be updated to the new 
69
70medium  of  the  Internet.  For  example:  how  to  research  a  target  while remaining anonymous online.
71
72This issue would typically emerge when a CO would search the name of a person from a country like Iran or China in 
73
74the agency’s databases and come up empty-handed. For casual searches of prospective targets like these, No Results 
75
76was actually a fairly common outcome: the CIA’s databases were mostly filled with people already of interest to the 
77
78agency, or citizens of friendly countries whose records were more easily available. When faced with No Results, a CO 
79
80would have to do the same thing you do when you want to look someone up: they’d turn to the public Internet. This was 
81
82risky.
83
84Normally when you go online, your request for any website travels from your computer more or less directly to the 
85
86server that hosts your final destination—the website you’re trying to visit. At every stop along the way, however, 
87
88your request cheerfully announces exactly where on the Internet it came from, and exactly where on the Internet it’s 
89
90going, thanks to identifiers called source and destination headers, which you can think of as the address information 
91
92on a postcard. Because of these headers, your Internet browsing can easily be identified as yours by, among others, 
93
94webmasters, network administrators, and foreign intelligence services.
95
96It may be hard to believe, but the agency at the time had no good answer for  what  a  case  officer  should  do  in  
97
98this  situation,  beyond  weakly
99recommending that they ask CIA headquarters to take over the search on their behalf. Formally, the way this 
100
101ridiculous procedure was supposed to work was that someone back in McLean would go online from a specific computer 
102
103terminal and use what was called a “nonattributable research system.” This was set up to proxy—that is, fake the 
104
105origin of—a query before sending it to Google. If anyone tried to look into who had run that particular search, all 
106
107they would find would be an anodyne business located somewhere in America—one of the myriad fake executive-headhunter 
108
109or personnel-services companies the CIA used as cover.
110
111I can’t say that anyone ever definitively explained to me why the agency liked to use “job search” businesses as a 
112
113front; presumably they were the only companies that might plausibly look up a nuclear engineer in Pakistan one day 
114
115and a retired Polish general the next. I can say with absolute certainty, however, that the process was ineffective, 
116
117onerous, and expensive. To create just one of these covers, the agency had to invent the purpose and name of a 
118
119company, secure a credible physical address somewhere in America, register a credible URL, put up a credible website, 
120
121and then rent servers in the company’s name. Furthermore, the agency had to create an encrypted connection from those 
122
123servers that allowed it to communicate with the CIA network without anyone noticing the connection. Here’s the 
124
125kicker: After all of that effort and money was expended just to let us anonymously Google a name, whatever front 
126
127business was being used as a proxy would immediately be burned—by which I mean its connection to the CIA would be 
128
129revealed to our adversaries—the moment some analyst decided to take a break from their research to log in to their 
130
131personal Facebook account on that same computer. Since few of the people at headquarters were undercover, that 
132
133Facebook account would often openly declare, “I work at the CIA,” or just as tellingly, “I work at the State 
134
135Department, but in McLean.”
136
137Go ahead and laugh. Back then, it happened all the time.
138
139During my stint in Geneva, whenever a CO would ask me if there was a safer, faster, and all-around more efficient way 
140
141to do this, I introduced them to Tor.
142
143The Tor Project was a creation of the state that ended up becoming one of the few effective shields against the 
144
145state’s surveillance. Tor is free and open- source software that, if used carefully, allows its users to browse 
146
147online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity that can be practically achieved at scale. Its protocols were 
148
149developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory throughout the mid-1990s, and in 2003 it was released to the public—to 
150
151the
152worldwide civilian population on whom its functionality depends. This is because Tor operates on a cooperative 
153
154community model, relying on tech- savvy volunteers all over the globe who run their own Tor servers out of their 
155
156basements, attics, and garages. By routing its users’ Internet traffic through these servers, Tor does the same job 
157
158of protecting the origin of that traffic as the CIA’s “non-attributable research” system, with the primary difference 
159
160being that  Tor  does it  better, or  at  least more efficiently. I  was  already convinced  of  this,  but  
161
162convincing  the  gruff  COs  was  another  matter altogether.
163
164With the Tor protocol, your traffic is distributed and bounced around through randomly generated pathways from Tor 
165
166server to Tor server, with the purpose being to replace your identity as the source of a communication with that of 
167
168the last Tor server in the constantly shifting chain. Virtually none of the Tor servers, which are called “layers,” 
169
170know the identity of,  or  any identifying information about, the origin of the traffic. And in a true stroke of 
171
172genius, the one Tor server that does know the origin—the very first server in the chain—does not know where that 
173
174traffic is headed. Put more simply: the first Tor server that connects you to the Tor network, called a gateway, 
175
176knows you’re the one sending a request, but because it isn’t allowed to read that request, it has no idea whether 
177
178you’re looking for pet memes or information about a protest, and the final Tor server that your request passes 
179
180through, called an exit, knows exactly what’s being asked for, but has no idea who’s asking for it.
181
182This layering method is called onion routing, which gives Tor its name: it’s The Onion Router. The classified joke 
183
184was that trying to surveil the Tor network makes spies want to cry. Therein lies the project’s irony: here was a US 
185
186military–developed technology that made cyberintelligence simultaneously harder and easier, applying hacker know-how 
187
188to protect the anonymity of IC officers, but only at the price of granting that same anonymity to adversaries and to 
189
190average users across the globe. In this sense, Tor was even more neutral than Switzerland. For me personally, Tor was 
191
192a life changer, bringing me back to the Internet of my childhood by giving me just the slightest taste of freedom 
193
194from being observed.
195
196
197
198NONE OF THIS account of the CIA’s pivot to cyberintelligence, or SIGINT on the  Internet, is  meant  to  imply  that  
199
200the  agency  wasn’t  still  doing  some significant HUMINT, in the same manner in which it had always done so, at 
201
202least since the advent of the modern IC in the aftermath of World War II.
203Even I got involved, though my most memorable operation was a failure. Geneva was the first and only time in my 
204
205intelligence career in which I made the personal acquaintance of a target—the first and only time that I looked 
206
207directly into the eyes of a human being rather than just recording their life from afar. I have to say, I found the 
208
209whole experience unforgettably visceral and sad.
210
211Sitting around discussing how to hack a faceless UN complex was psychologically easier by a wide margin. Direct 
212
213engagement, which can be harsh and emotionally draining, simply doesn’t happen that much on the technical side of 
214
215intelligence, and almost never in computing. There is a depersonalization of experience fostered by the distance of a 
216
217screen. Peering at life through a window can ultimately abstract us from our actions and limit any meaningful 
218
219confrontation with their consequences.
220
221I met the man at an embassy function, a party. The embassy had lots of those, and the COs always went, drawn as much 
222
223by the opportunities to spot and assess potential candidates for recruitment as by the open bars and cigar salons.
224
225Sometimes the COs would bring me along. I’d lectured them on my specialty long enough, I guess, that now they were 
226
227all too happy to lecture me on  theirs,  cross-training  me  to  help  them  play  “spot  the  sap”  in  an 
228
229environment where there were always more people to meet than they could possibly handle on their own. My native 
230
231geekiness meant I could get the young researchers from CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire: European 
232
233Council for Nuclear Research) talking about their work with a voluble excitement that the MBAs and political science 
234
235majors who comprised the ranks of our COs had trouble provoking on their own.
236
237As a technologist, I found it incredibly easy to defend my cover. The moment some bespoke-suited cosmopolite asked me 
238
239what I did, and I responded with the four words “I work in IT” (or, in my improving French, je travaille dans 
240
241l’informatique), their interest in me was over. Not that this ever stopped the conversation. When you’re a fresh-
242
243faced professional in a conversation outside your field, it’s never that surprising when you ask a lot of questions, 
244
245and in my experience most people will jump at the chance to explain exactly how much more they know than you do about 
246
247something they care about deeply.
248
249The party I’m recalling took place on a warm night on the outside terrace of an upscale café on one of the side 
250
251streets alongside Lake Geneva. Some of the COs wouldn’t hesitate to abandon me at such a gathering if they had to in
252order to sit as close as possible to whatever woman happened to match their critical intelligence-value indicators of 
253
254being highly attractive and no older than a student, but I wasn’t about to complain. For me, spotting targets was a 
255
256hobby that came with a free dinner.
257
258I took my plate and sat down at a table next to a well-dressed Middle Eastern man in a cuff-linked, demonstratively 
259
260Swiss pink shirt. He seemed lonely, and totally exasperated that no one seemed interested in him, so I asked him 
261
262about himself. That’s the usual technique: just be curious and let them talk. In this case, the man did so much 
263
264talking that it was like I wasn’t even there. He was Saudi, and told me about how much he loved Geneva, the relative 
265
266beauties of the French and Arabic languages, and the absolute beauty of this one Swiss girl with whom he—yes—had a 
267
268regular date playing laser tag. With a touch of a conspiratorial tone, he said that he worked in private wealth 
269
270management. Within moments I was getting a full-on polished presentation about what, exactly, makes a private bank 
271
272private, and the challenge of investing without moving markets when your clients are the size of sovereign wealth 
273
274funds.
275
276“Your clients?” I asked.
277
278That’s when he said, “Most of my work is on Saudi accounts.”
279
280After a few minutes, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and on the way there I leaned over to tell the CO who 
281
282worked finance targets what I’d learned. After a necessarily too-long interval “fixing my hair,” or texting Lindsay 
283
284in front of the bathroom mirror, I returned to find the CO sitting in my chair. I waved to my new Saudi friend before 
285
286sitting down beside the CO’s discarded, smoky-eyed date. Rather than feeling bad, I felt like I’d really earned the 
287
288Pavés de Genève that were passed around for dessert. My job was done.
289
290The next day, the CO, whom I’ll call Cal, heaped me with praise and thanked me effusively. COs are promoted or passed 
291
292over based primarily on how effective they are at recruiting assets with access to information on matters substantial 
293
294enough to be formally reported back to headquarters, and given Saudi Arabia’s suspected involvement in financing 
295
296terror, Cal felt under tremendous pressure to cultivate a qualifying source. I was sure that in no time at all our 
297
298fellow party guest would be getting a second paycheck from the agency.
299
300That was not quite how it worked out, however. Despite Cal’s regular forays with the banker to strip clubs and bars, 
301
302the banker wasn’t warming up
303to him—at least not to the point where a pitch could be made—and Cal was getting impatient.
304
305After a month of failures, Cal was so frustrated that he took the banker out drinking and got him absolutely 
306
307plastered. Then he pressured the guy to drive home drunk instead of taking a cab. Before the guy had even left the 
308
309last bar of the night, Cal was calling the make and plate number of his car to the Geneva police, who not fifteen 
310
311minutes later arrested him for driving under the influence. The banker faced an enormous fine, since in Switzerland 
312
313fines aren’t flat sums but based on a percentage of income, and his driver’s license was suspended for three months—a 
314
315stretch of time that Cal would spend, as a truly wonderful friend with a fake-guilty conscience, driving the guy back 
316
317and forth between his home and work, daily, so that the guy could “keep his office from finding out.” When the fine 
318
319was levied, causing his friend cash-flow problems, Cal was ready with a loan. The banker had become dependent, the 
320
321dream of every CO.
322
323There was only one hitch: when Cal finally made the pitch, the banker turned him down. He was furious, having figured 
324
325out the planned crime and the engineered arrest, and felt betrayed that Cal’s generosity hadn’t been genuine. He cut 
326
327off all contact. Cal made a halfhearted attempt to follow up and do damage control, but it was too late. The banker 
328
329who’d loved Switzerland had lost his job and was returning—or being returned—to Saudi Arabia. Cal himself was rotated 
330
331back to the States.
332
333Too much had been hazarded, too little had been gained. It was a waste, which I myself had put in motion and then was 
334
335powerless to stop. After that experience, the prioritizing of SIGINT over HUMINT made all the more sense to me.
336
337In the summer of 2008, the city celebrated its annual Fêtes de Genève, a giant carnival that culminates in fireworks. 
338
339I remember sitting on the left bank of Lake Geneva with the local personnel of the SCS, or Special Collection 
340
341Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that 
342
343allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. These guys worked down the hall from my vault at the embassy, but they 
344
345were older than I was, and their work was not just way above my pay grade but way beyond my abilities—they had access 
346
347to NSA tools that I didn’t even know existed. Still, we were friendly: I looked up to them, and they looked out for 
348
349me.
350
351As the fireworks exploded overhead, I was talking about the banker’s case, lamenting the disaster it had been, when 
352
353one of the guys turned to me
354and said, “Next time you meet someone, Ed, don’t bother with the COs—just give us his email address and we’ll take 
355
356care of it.” I remember nodding somberly to this, though at the time I barely had a clue of the full implications of 
357
358what that comment meant.
359
360I steered clear of parties for the rest of the year and mostly just hung around the cafés and parks of Saint-Jean 
361
362Falaises with Lindsay, taking occasional vacations with her to Italy, France, and Spain. Still, something had soured 
363
364my mood, and it wasn’t just the banker debacle. Come to think of it, maybe it was banking in general. Geneva is an 
365
366expensive city and unabashedly posh, but as 2008 drew to a close its elegance seemed to tip over into extravagance, 
367
368with a massive influx of the superrich—most of them from the Gulf states, many of them Saudi—enjoying the profits of 
369
370peak oil prices on the cusp of the global financial crisis. These royal types were booking whole floors of five-star 
371
372grand hotels and buying out the entire inventories of the luxury stores just across the bridge. They were putting on 
373
374lavish banquets at the Michelin-starred restaurants and speeding their chrome-plated Lamborghinis down the cobbled 
375
376streets. It would be hard at any time to miss Geneva’s display of conspicuous consumption, but the profligacy now on 
377
378display was particularly galling—coming as it did during the worst economic disaster, as the American media kept 
379
380telling us, since the Great Depression, and as the European media kept telling us, since the interwar period and 
381
382Versailles.
383
384It wasn’t that Lindsay and I were hurting: after all, our rent was being paid by Uncle Sam. Rather, it’s that every 
385
386time she or I would talk to our folks back home, the situation seemed grimmer. Both of our families knew people who’d 
387
388worked their entire lives, some of them for the US government, only to have their homes taken away by banks after an 
389
390unexpected illness made a few mortgage payments impossible.
391
392To live in Geneva was to live in an alternative, even opposite, reality. As the  rest  of  the  world  became  more  
393
394and  more  impoverished,  Geneva flourished, and while the Swiss banks didn’t engage in many of the types of risky 
395
396trades that caused the crash, they gladly hid the money of those who’d profited from the pain and were never held 
397
398accountable. The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later 
399
400would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, 
401
402and often is, beneficial to the elites. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other 
403
404contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.
40516
406
407Tokyo
408
409The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World 
410
411Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web 
412
413is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage. 
414
415The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control 
416
417that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by 
418
419the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory. 
420
421Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative 
422
423systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite 
424
425constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can 
426
427turn almost anyone on and off at will.
428
429It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software 
430
431(Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to 
432
433the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking 
434
435and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud 
436
437services to the US government along with half the Internet). Though some of these companies might manufacture their 
438
439devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. The problem is, 
440
441they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil 
442
443virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.
444
445Given the American nature of the planet’s communications infrastructure, it should have been obvious that the US 
446
447government would engage in this type of mass surveillance. It should have been especially obvious to me. Yet it 
448
449wasn’t—mostly because the government kept insisting that it did nothing of the sort, and generally disclaimed the 
450
451practice in courts and in the media in a manner so adamant that the few remaining skeptics who accused it of lying 
452
453were  treated  like  wild-haired  conspiracy  junkies.  Their  suspicions  about secret  NSA  programs  seemed  
454
455hardly  different  from  paranoid  delusions
456involving alien messages being beamed to the radios in our teeth. We—me, you, all of us—were too trusting. But what 
457
458makes this all the more personally painful for me was that the last time I’d made this mistake, I’d supported the 
459
460invasion of Iraq and joined the army. When I arrived in the IC, I felt sure that I’d never be fooled again, 
461
462especially given my top secret clearance. Surely that had to count for some degree of transparency. After all, why 
463
464would the government keep secrets from its secret keepers? This is all to say that the obvious didn’t even become the 
465
466thinkable for me until some time after I moved to Japan in 2009 to work for the NSA, America’s premier signals 
467
468intelligence agency.
469
470It was a dream job, not only because it was with the most advanced intelligence agency on the planet, but also 
471
472because it was based in Japan, a place that had always fascinated Lindsay and me. It felt like a country from the 
473
474future. Though mine was officially a contractor position, its responsibilities and, especially, its location were 
475
476more than enough to lure me. It’s ironic that only by going private again was I put in a position to understand what 
477
478my government was doing.
479
480On paper, I was an employee of Perot Systems, a company founded by that diminutive hyperactive Texan who founded the 
481
482Reform Party and twice ran for the presidency. But almost immediately after my arrival in Japan, Perot Systems was 
483
484acquired by Dell, so on paper I became an employee of Dell. As in the CIA, this contractor status was all just 
485
486formality and cover, and I only ever worked in an NSA facility.
487
488The NSA’s Pacific Technical Center (PTC) occupied one-half of a building inside the enormous Yokota Air Base. As the 
489
490headquarters of US Forces Japan, the  base  was  surrounded by  high  walls, steel  gates, and  guarded checkpoints. 
491
492Yokota and the PTC were just a short bike ride from where Lindsay and I got an apartment in Fussa, a city at the 
493
494western edge of Tokyo’s vast metropolitan spread.
495
496The PTC handled the NSA’s infrastructure for the entire Pacific, and provided support for the agency’s spoke sites in 
497
498nearby countries. Most of these were focused on managing the secret relationships that let the NSA cover the Pacific 
499
500Rim with spy gear, as long as the agency promised to share some of the intelligence it gleaned with regional 
501
502governments—and so long as their citizens didn’t find out what the agency was doing. Communications interception was 
503
504the major part of the mission. The PTC would amass “cuts” from captured signals and push them back across the ocean 
505
506to Hawaii, and Hawaii, in turn, would push them back to the continental United States.
507My official job title was systems analyst, with responsibility for maintaining the local NSA systems, though much of 
508
509my initial work was that of a systems administrator, helping to connect the NSA’s systems architecture with the 
510
511CIA’s. Because I was the only one in the region who knew the CIA’s architecture, I’d also travel out to US embassies, 
512
513like the one I’d left in Geneva, establishing and maintaining the links that enabled the agencies to share 
514
515intelligence in ways that hadn’t previously been possible. This was the first time in my life that I truly realized 
516
517the power of being the only one in a room with a sense not just of how one system functioned internally, but of how 
518
519it functioned together with multiple systems—or didn’t. Later, as the chiefs of the PTC came to recognize that I had 
520
521a knack for hacking together solutions to their problems, I was given enough of a leash to propose projects of my 
522
523own.
524
525Two things about the NSA stunned me right off the bat: how technologically sophisticated it was compared with the 
526
527CIA, and how much less vigilant it was about security in its every iteration, from the compartmentalization of 
528
529information to data encryption. In Geneva, we’d had to haul the hard drives out of the computer every night and lock 
530
531them up in a safe—and what’s more, those drives were encrypted. The NSA, by contrast, hardly bothered to encrypt 
532
533anything.
534
535In fact, it was rather disconcerting to find out that the NSA was so far ahead of the game in terms of 
536
537cyberintelligence yet so far behind it in terms of cybersecurity, including the most basic: disaster recovery, or 
538
539backup. Each of the NSA’s spoke sites collected its own intel, stored the intel on its own local servers, and, 
540
541because of bandwidth restrictions—limitations on the amount of data that could be transmitted at speed—often didn’t 
542
543send copies back to the main servers at NSA headquarters. This meant that if any data were destroyed at a particular 
544
545site, the intelligence that the agency had worked hard to collect could be lost.
546
547My chiefs at the PTC understood the risks the agency was taking by not keeping copies of many of its files, so they 
548
549tasked me with engineering a solution and pitching it to the decision makers at headquarters. The result was a backup 
550
551and storage system that would act as a shadow NSA: a complete, automated,  and  constantly  updating  copy  of  all  
552
553of  the  agency’s  most important material, which would allow the agency to reboot and be up and running again, with 
554
555all its archives intact, even if Fort Meade were reduced to smoldering rubble.
556
557The major problem with creating a global disaster-recovery system—or
558really with creating any type of backup system that involves a truly staggering number of computers—is dealing with 
559
560duplicated data. In plain terms, you have to handle situations in which, say, one thousand computers all have copies 
561
562of the same single file: you have to make sure you’re not backing up that same file one thousand times, because that 
563
564would require one thousand times the amount of bandwidth and storage space. It was this wasteful duplication, in 
565
566particular, that was preventing the agency’s spoke sites from transmitting daily backups of their records to Fort 
567
568Meade: the connection would be clogged with a thousand copies of the same file containing the same intercepted phone 
569
570call, 999 of which the agency did not need.
571
572The way to avoid this was “deduplication”: a method to evaluate the uniqueness of data. The system that I designed 
573
574would constantly scan the files at every facility at which the NSA stored records, testing each “block” of data down 
575
576to the slightest fragment of a file to find out whether or not it was unique. Only if the agency lacked a copy of it 
577
578back home would the data be automatically queued for transmission—reducing the volume that flowed over the agency’s 
579
580transpacific fiber-optic connection from a waterfall to a trickle.
581
582The combination of deduplication and constant improvements in storage technology allowed the agency to store 
583
584intelligence data for progressively longer periods of time. Just over the course of my career, the agency’s goal went 
585
586from being able to store intelligence for days, to weeks, to months, to five years or more after its collection. By 
587
588the time of this book’s publication, the agency might already be able to store it for decades. The NSA’s conventional 
589
590wisdom was that there was no point in collecting anything unless they could store it until it was useful, and there 
591
592was no way to predict when exactly that would be. This rationalization was fuel for the agency’s ultimate dream, 
593
594which is permanency—to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a 
595
596perfect memory. The permanent record.
597
598The NSA has a whole protocol you’re supposed to follow when you give a program a code name. It’s basically an I 
599
600Ching–like stochastic procedure that randomly picks words from two columns. An internal website throws imaginary dice 
601
602to pick one name from column A, and throws again to pick one name from column B. This is how you end up with names 
603
604that don’t mean anything, like FOXACID and EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE. The point of a code name is that it’s not supposed to 
605
606refer to what the program does. (As has been reported, FOXACID was the code name for NSA servers that host malware 
607
608versions of  familiar websites; EGOTISTICALGIRAFFE was  an NSA program intended to exploit a vulnerability in certain 
609
610Web browsers
611running Tor, since they couldn’t break Tor itself.) But agents at the NSA were so confident of their power and the 
612
613agency’s absolute invulnerability that they rarely complied with the regulations. In short, they’d cheat and redo 
614
615their dice throws until they got the name combination they wanted, whatever they thought was cool: TRAFFICTHIEF, the 
616
617VPN Attack Orchestrator.
618
619I swear I never did that when I went about finding a name for my backup system. I swear that I just rolled the bones 
620
621and came up with EPICSHELTER.
622
623Later, once the agency adopted the system, they renamed it something like the Storage Modernization Plan or Storage 
624
625Modernization Program. Within two   years   of   the   invention  of   EPICSHELTER,  a   variant  had   been 
626
627implemented and was in standard use under yet another name.
628
629
630
631THE MATERIAL THAT I disseminated to journalists in 2013 documented such an array  of  abuses  by  the  NSA,  
632
633accomplished through  such  a  diversity  of technological capabilities, that no one agent in the daily discharge of 
634
635their responsibilities was ever in the position to know about all of them—not even a systems administrator. To find 
636
637out about even a fraction of the malfeasance,
638you had to go searching. And to go searching, you had to know that it existed.
639
640It was something as banal as a conference that first clued me in to that existence, sparking my initial suspicion 
641
642about the full scope of what the NSA was perpetrating.
643
644In the midst of my EPICSHELTER work, the PTC hosted a conference on China sponsored by the Joint Counterintelligence 
645
646Training Academy (JCITA) for  the  Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an  agency connected to  the Department of 
647
648Defense that specializes in spying on foreign militaries and foreign military–related matters. This conference 
649
650featured briefings given by experts from all the intelligence components, the NSA, CIA, FBI, and military, about how 
651
652the Chinese intelligence services were targeting the IC and what the IC could do to cause them trouble. Though China 
653
654certainly interested me, this wasn’t the kind of work I would ordinarily have been involved in, so I didn’t pay the 
655
656conference much mind until it was announced that the only technology briefer was unable to attend at the last minute. 
657
658I’m not sure what the reason was for that absence—maybe flu, maybe kismet— but the course chair for the conference 
659
660asked if there was anyone at the PTC who might be able to step in as a replacement, since it was too late to 
661
662reschedule. One of the chiefs mentioned my name, and when I was asked if I wanted to give it a shot, I said yes. I 
663
664liked my boss, and wanted to help him
665out. Also, I was curious, and relished the opportunity to do something that wasn’t about data deduplication for a 
666
667change.
668
669My boss was thrilled. Then he told me the catch: the briefing was the next day.
670
671I called Lindsay and told her I wouldn’t be home. I was going to be up all night preparing the presentation, whose 
672
673nominal topic was the intersection between a very old discipline, counterintelligence, and a very new discipline, 
674
675cyberintelligence, coming together to try to exploit and thwart the adversary’s attempts to use the Internet to 
676
677gather surveillance. I started pulling everything off the NSA network (and off the CIA network, to which I still had 
678
679access), trying to read every top secret report I could find about what the Chinese were doing online. Specifically, 
680
681I read up on so-called intrusion sets, which are bundles  of  data  about  particular  types  of  attacks,  tools,  
682
683and  targets.  IC analysts used these intrusion sets to identify specific Chinese military cyberintelligence or 
684
685hacking groups, in the same way that detectives might try to identify a suspect responsible for a string of 
686
687burglaries by a common set of characteristics or modus operandi.
688
689The point of my researching this widely dispersed material was to do more than merely report on how China was hacking 
690
691us, however. My primary task was  to  provide a  summary of  the  IC’s  assessment of  China’s ability  to 
692
693electronically track American officers and assets operating in the region.
694
695Everyone knows (or thinks they know) about the draconian Internet measures of the Chinese government, and some people 
696
697know (or think they know) the gravamen of the disclosures I gave to journalists in 2013 about my own government’s 
698
699capabilities. But listen: It’s one thing to casually say, in a science-fiction dystopic type of way, that a 
700
701government can theoretically see and hear everything that all of its citizens are doing. It’s a very different thing 
702
703for a government to actually try to implement such a system. What a science- fiction writer can describe in a 
704
705sentence might take the concerted work of thousands of technologists and millions of dollars of equipment. To read 
706
707the technical details of China’s surveillance of private communications—to read a complete and accurate accounting of 
708
709the mechanisms and machinery required for  the  constant collection, storage, and  analysis of  the  billions of  
710
711daily telephone and Internet communications of over a billion people—was utterly mind-boggling. At first I was so 
712
713impressed by the system’s sheer achievement and audacity that I almost forgot to be appalled by its totalitarian 
714
715controls.
716
717After all, China’s government was an explicitly antidemocratic single- party state. NSA agents, even more than most 
718
719Americans, just took it for
720granted that the place was an authoritarian hellhole. Chinese civil liberties weren’t my department. There wasn’t 
721
722anything I could do about them. I worked, I was sure of it, for the good guys, and that made me a good guy, too.
723
724But there were certain aspects of what I was reading that disturbed me. I was  reminded  of  what  is  perhaps  the  
725
726fundamental rule  of  technological progress: if something can be done, it probably will be done, and possibly 
727
728already has been. There was simply no way for America to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing 
729
730without having done some of the very same things itself, and I had the sneaking sense while I was looking through all 
731
732this China material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America. What China was doing publicly 
733
734to its own citizens, America might be—could be—doing secretly to the world.
735
736And although you should hate me for it, I have to say that at the time I tamped down my unease. Indeed, I did my best 
737
738to ignore it. The distinctions were still fairly clear to me. China’s Great Firewall was domestically censorious and 
739
740repressive, intended to keep its citizens in and America out in the most chilling and demonstrative way, while the 
741
742American systems were invisible and purely defensive. As I then understood US surveillance, anyone in the world could 
743
744come in through America’s Internet infrastructure and access whatever content they pleased, unblocked and unfiltered
745
746—or at least only blocked and filtered by their home countries and American businesses, which are, presumptively, not 
747
748under US government control. It was only those who’d been expressly targeted for visiting, for example, jihadist 
749
750bombing sites or malware marketplaces who would find themselves tracked and scrutinized.
751
752Understood this way, the US surveillance model was perfectly okay with me. It was more than okay, actually—I fully 
753
754supported defensive and targeted surveillance, a “firewall” that didn’t keep anybody out, but just burned the guilty.
755
756But in the sleepless days after that sleepless night, some dim suspicion still stirred in my mind. Long after I gave 
757
758my China briefing, I couldn’t help but keep digging around.
759
760
761
762AT THE START of my employment with the NSA, in 2009, I was only slightly more knowledgeable about its practices than 
763
764the rest of the world. From journalists’  reports,  I  was  aware  of  the  agency’s  myriad  surveillance 
765
766initiatives  authorized  by  President  George  W.  Bush  in  the  immediate
767aftermath of 9/11. In particular, I knew about its most publicly contested initiative, the warrantless wiretapping 
768
769component of the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), which had been disclosed by the New York Times in 2005 
770
771thanks to the courage of a few NSA and Department of Justice whistleblowers.
772
773Officially speaking, the PSP was an “executive order,” essentially a set of instructions set down by the American 
774
775president that the government has to consider the equal of public law—even if they’re just scribbled secretly on a 
776
777napkin.  The  PSP  empowered the  NSA  to  collect  telephone  and  Internet communications between the United States 
778
779and abroad. Notably, the PSP allowed the NSA to do this without having to obtain a special warrant from a Foreign 
780
781Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret federal court established in
7821978 to oversee IC requests for surveillance warrants after the agencies were caught domestically spying on the 
783
784anti–Vietnam War and civil rights movements.
785
786Following the outcry that attended the Times revelations, and American Civil Liberties Union challenges to the 
787
788constitutionality of the PSP in non- secret, regular courts, the Bush administration claimed to have let the program 
789
790expire in 2007. But the expiration turned out to be a farce. Congress spent the last two years of the Bush 
791
792administration passing legislation that retroactively legalized the PSP. It also retroactively immunized from 
793
794prosecution the telecoms and Internet service providers that had participated in it. This legislation—the Protect 
795
796America Act of 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008—employed intentionally misleading language to reassure US 
797
798citizens that  their  communications were  not  being  explicitly  targeted,  even  as  it effectively extended the 
799
800PSP’s remit. In addition to collecting inbound communications coming from foreign countries, the NSA now also had 
801
802policy approval for the warrantless collection of outbound telephone and Internet communications originating within 
803
804American borders.
805
806That, at least, was the picture I got after reading the government’s own summary of the situation, which was issued 
807
808to the public in an unclassified version in July 2009, the very same summer that I spent delving into Chinese cyber-
809
810capabilities. This summary, which bore the nondescript title Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance 
811
812Program, was compiled by the Offices of the Inspector Generals of five agencies (Department of Defense, Department of 
813
814Justice, CIA, NSA, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) and was offered to the public in lieu of 
815
816a full congressional investigation of Bush-era NSA overreach. The fact that President Obama, once in office, refused 
817
818to call for a full congressional
819investigation was the first sign, to me at least, that the new president—for whom Lindsay had enthusiastically 
820
821campaigned—intended to move forward without a proper reckoning with the past. As his administration rebranded and 
822
823recertified PSP-related programs, Lindsay’s hope in him, as well as my own, would prove more and more misplaced.
824
825While the unclassified report was mostly just old news, I found it informative in a few respects. I remember being 
826
827immediately struck by its curious, they-do-protest-too-much tone, along with more than a few twists of logic  and  
828
829language that  didn’t  compute. As  the  report  laid  out  its  legal arguments in support of various agency 
830
831programs—rarely named, and almost never described—I couldn’t help but notice the fact that hardly any of the 
832
833executive branch officials who had actually authorized these programs had agreed to be interviewed by the inspector 
834
835generals. From Vice President Dick Cheney and his counsel David Addington to Attorney General John Ashcroft and  DOJ  
836
837lawyer  John  Yoo,  nearly  every  major  player  had  refused  to cooperate with the very offices responsible for 
838
839holding the IC accountable, and the IGs couldn’t compel them to cooperate, because this wasn’t a formal investigation 
840
841 involving  testimony.  It  was  hard  for  me  to  interpret  their absence from the record as anything other than 
842
843an admission of malfeasance.
844
845Another aspect of the report that threw me was its repeated, obscure references to “Other Intelligence Activities” 
846
847(the capitalization is the report’s) for which no “viable legal rationale” or no “legal basis” could be found beyond 
848
849President Bush’s claim of executive powers during wartime—a wartime that had no end in sight. Of course, these 
850
851references gave no description whatsoever of what these Activities might actually be, but the process of deduction 
852
853pointed to warrantless domestic surveillance, as it was pretty much the only intelligence activity not provided for 
854
855under the various legal frameworks that appeared subsequent to the PSP.
856
857As I read on, I wasn’t sure that anything disclosed in the report completely justified the legal machinations 
858
859involved, let alone the threats by then deputy attorney general James Comey and then FBI director Robert Mueller to 
860
861resign if certain aspects of the PSP were reauthorized. Nor did I notice anything that fully explained the risks 
862
863taken by so many fellow agency members—agents much  senior  to  me,  with  decades of  experience—and DOJ  personnel 
864
865to contact the press and express their misgivings about how aspects of the PSP were being abused. If they were 
866
867putting their careers, their families, and their lives on the line, it had to be over something graver than the 
868
869warrantless wiretapping that had already made headlines.
870That suspicion sent me searching for the classified version of the report, and it was not in the least dispelled by 
871
872the fact that such a version appeared not to exist. I didn’t understand. If the classified version was merely a 
873
874record of the sins of the past, it should have been easily accessible. But it was nowhere to be found. I wondered 
875
876whether I was looking in the wrong places. After a while of ranging fairly widely and still finding nothing, though, 
877
878I decided to drop the issue. Life took over and I had work to do. When you get asked to give recommendations on how 
879
880to keep IC agents and assets from being uncovered and executed by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, it’s hard 
881
882to remember what you were Googling the week before.
883
884It was only later, long after I’d forgotten about the missing IG report, that the classified version came skimming 
885
886across my desktop, as if in proof of that old maxim that the best way to find something is to stop looking for it. 
887
888Once the classified version turned up, I realized why I hadn’t had any luck finding it previously: it couldn’t be 
889
890seen, not even by the heads of agencies. It was filed  in  an  Exceptionally Controlled  Information  (ECI)  
891
892compartment, an extremely rare classification used only to make sure that something would remain hidden even from 
893
894those holding top secret clearance. Because of my position, I was familiar with most of the ECIs at the NSA, but not 
895
896this one. The report’s full classification designation was TOP SECRET//STLW//HCS/COMINT//ORCON/NOFORN, which  
897
898translates  to: pretty much only a few dozen people in the world are allowed to read this.
899
900I was most definitely not one of them. The report came to my attention by mistake: someone in the NSA IG’s office had 
901
902left a draft copy on a system that I, as a sysadmin, had access to. Its caveat of STLW, which I didn’t recognize, 
903
904turned out to be what’s called a “dirty word” on my system: a label signifying a document that wasn’t supposed to be 
905
906stored on lower-security drives. These drives were being constantly checked for any newly appearing dirty words, and 
907
908the moment one was found I was alerted so that I could decide how best to scrub the document from the system. But 
909
910before I did, I’d have to examine the offending file myself, just to confirm that the dirty word search hadn’t 
911
912flagged anything accidentally. Usually I’d take just the briefest glance at the thing. But this time, as soon I 
913
914opened the document and read the title, I knew I’d be reading it all the way through.
915
916Here was everything that was missing from the unclassified version. Here was everything that the journalism I’d read 
917
918had lacked, and that the court proceedings I’d followed had been denied: a complete accounting of the NSA’s  most  
919
920secret  surveillance programs, and  the  agency  directives and Department of Justice policies that had been used to 
921
922subvert American law
923and contravene the US Constitution. After reading the thing, I could understand why no IC employee had ever leaked it 
924
925to journalists, and no judge would be able to force the government to produce it in open court. The document was so 
926
927deeply classified that anybody who had access to it who wasn’t a sysadmin would be immediately identifiable. And the 
928
929activities it outlined were so deeply criminal that no government would ever allow it to be released unredacted.
930
931One issue jumped out at me immediately: it was clear that the unclassified version  I  was  already  familiar  with  
932
933wasn’t  a  redaction  of  the  classified version, as would usually be the practice. Rather, it was a wholly 
934
935different document, which the classified version immediately exposed as an outright and carefully concocted lie. The 
936
937duplicity was stupefying, especially given that I’d just dedicated months of my time to deduplicating files. Most of 
938
939the time, when you’re dealing with two versions of the same document, the differences between them are trivial—a few 
940
941commas here, a few words there. But the only thing these two particular reports had in common was their title.
942
943Whereas the unclassified version merely made reference to the NSA being ordered to intensify its intelligence-
944
945gathering practices following 9/11, the classified version laid out the nature, and scale, of that intensification. 
946
947The NSA’s historic brief had been fundamentally altered from targeted collection of communications to “bulk 
948
949collection,” which is the agency’s euphemism for mass surveillance. And whereas the unclassified version obfuscated 
950
951this shift, advocating for expanded surveillance by scaring the public with the specter of terror,  the  classified 
952
953version  made  this  shift  explicit, justifying it  as  the legitimate corollary of expanded technological 
954
955capability.
956
957The NSA IG’s portion of the classified report outlined what it called “a collection gap,” noting that existing 
958
959surveillance legislation (particularly the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) dated from 1978, a time when most 
960
961communications signals traveled via radio or telephone lines, rather than fiber-optic cables and satellites. In 
962
963essence, the agency was arguing that the speed and volume of contemporary communication had outpaced, and outgrown, 
964
965American law—no court, not even a secret court, could issue enough individually targeted warrants fast enough to keep 
966
967up—and that a truly global world required a truly global intelligence agency. All of this pointed, in the NSA’s 
968
969logic, to the necessity of the bulk collection of Internet communications. The code name for this bulk collection 
970
971initiative was indicated in the very “dirty word” that got it flagged on my system: STLW, an abbreviation of 
972
973STELLARWIND. This turned out to be the single major component of the PSP that had continued, and even grown, in 
974
975secret after the
976rest of the program had been made public in the press.
977
978STELLARWIND was the classified report’s deepest secret. It was, in fact, the NSA’s deepest secret, and the one that 
979
980the report’s sensitive status had been designed to protect. The program’s very existence was an indication that the 
981
982agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to  using technology to  control it  
983
984by  redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.
985
986Such fraudulent redefinitions ran throughout the report, but perhaps the most  fundamental and  transparently 
987
988desperate  involved  the  government’s vocabulary. STELLARWIND had been collecting communications since the PSP’s 
989
990inception in 2001, but in 2004—when Justice Department officials balked  at  the  continuation  of  the  initiative—
991
992the  Bush  administration attempted to legitimize it ex post facto by changing the meanings of basic English words, 
993
994such as “acquire” and “obtain.” According to the report, it was the government’s position that the NSA could collect 
995
996whatever communications  records  it  wanted  to,  without  having  to  get  a  warrant, because it could only be 
997
998said to have acquired or obtained them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency “searched for and retrieved” them 
999
1000from its database.
1001
1002This lexical sophistry was particularly galling to me, as I was well aware that the agency’s goal was to be able to 
1003
1004retain as much data as it could for as long as it could—for perpetuity. If communications records would only be 
1005
1006considered definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but collected in storage 
1007
1008forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation. By redefining the terms “acquire” and “obtain”—from describing 
1009
1010the act of data being entered into a database, to describing the act of a person (or, more likely, an algorithm) 
1011
1012querying that database and getting a “hit” or “return” at any conceivable point in the future—the US government was 
1013
1014developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past 
1015
1016communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence 
1017
1018of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just 
1019
1020show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who 
1021
1022they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.
1023
1024
1025
1026THE TERM “MASS surveillance” is more clear to me, and I think to most people,
1027than the government’s preferred “bulk collection,” which to my mind threatens to give a falsely fuzzy impression of 
1028
1029the agency’s work. “Bulk collection” makes it sound like a particularly busy post office or sanitation department, as 
1030
1031opposed to a historic effort to achieve total access to—and clandestinely take possession of—the records of all 
1032
1033digital communications in existence.
1034
1035But even once a common ground of terminology is established, misperceptions can still abound. Most people, even 
1036
1037today, tend to think of mass surveillance in terms of content—the actual words they use when they make a phone call 
1038
1039or write an email. When they find out that the government actually cares comparatively little about that content, 
1040
1041they tend to care comparatively little about government surveillance. This relief is understandable, to a degree, due 
1042
1043to what each of us must regard as the uniquely revealing and intimate nature of our communications: the sound of our 
1044
1045voice, almost as personal as a thumbprint; the inimitable facial expression we put on in a selfie sent by text. The 
1046
1047unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is rarely as revealing as its other elements— 
1048
1049the unwritten, unspoken information that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.
1050
1051The NSA calls this “metadata.” The term’s prefix, “meta,” which traditionally is translated as “above” or “beyond,” 
1052
1053is here used in the sense of “about”: metadata is data about data. It is, more accurately, data that is made by data
1054
1055—a cluster of tags and markers that allow data to be useful. The most direct way of thinking about metadata, however, 
1056
1057is as “activity data,” all the records of all the things you do on your devices and all the things your devices do on 
1058
1059their own. Take a phone call, for example: its metadata might include the date and time of the call, the call’s 
1060
1061duration, the number from which the call was made, the number being called, and their locations. An email’s metadata 
1062
1063might include information about what type of computer it was generated on, where, and when, who the computer belonged 
1064
1065to, who sent the email, who received it, where and when it was sent and received, and who if anyone besides the 
1066
1067sender and recipient accessed it, and where and when. Metadata can tell your surveillant the address you slept at 
1068
1069last night and what time you got up this morning. It reveals every place you visited during your day and how long you 
1070
1071spent there. It shows who you were in touch with and who was in touch with you.
1072
1073It’s this fact that obliterates any government claim that metadata is somehow not a direct window into the substance 
1074
1075of a communication. With the dizzying volume of digital communications in the world, there is simply
1076no way that every phone call could be listened to or email could be read. Even if it were feasible, however, it still 
1077
1078wouldn’t be useful, and anyway, metadata makes this unnecessary by winnowing the field. This is why it’s best to 
1079
1080regard metadata not as some benign abstraction, but as the very essence of content: it is precisely the first line of 
1081
1082information that the party surveilling you requires.
1083
1084There’s another thing, too: content is usually defined as something that you knowingly produce. You know what you’re 
1085
1086saying during a phone call, or what you’re writing in an email. But you have hardly any control over the metadata you 
1087
1088 produce, because it  is  generated automatically. Just  as  it’s collected,  stored,  and  analyzed  by  machine,  
1089
1090it’s  made  by  machine,  too, without your participation or even consent. Your devices are constantly communicating 
1091
1092for you whether you want them to or not. And, unlike the humans you communicate with of your own volition, your 
1093
1094devices don’t withhold private information or use code words in an attempt to be discreet. They merely ping the 
1095
1096nearest cell phone towers with signals that never lie.
1097
1098One major irony here is that law, which always lags behind technological innovation by at least a generation, gives 
1099
1100substantially more protections to a communication’s content than to its metadata—and yet intelligence agencies are 
1101
1102far more interested in the metadata—the activity records that allow them both the “big picture” ability to analyze 
1103
1104data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an 
1105
1106individual person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior. In sum, metadata can tell 
1107
1108your surveillant virtually everything they’d ever want or need to know about you, except what’s actually going on 
1109
1110inside your head.
1111
1112After reading this classified report, I spent the next weeks, even months, in a daze. I was sad and low, trying to 
1113
1114deny everything I was thinking and feeling—that’s what was going on in my head, toward the end of my stint in Japan.
1115
1116I felt far from home, but monitored. I felt more adult than ever, but also cursed with the knowledge that all of us 
1117
1118had been reduced to something like children, who’d be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental 
1119
1120supervision. I felt like a fraud, making excuses to Lindsay to explain my sullenness. I felt like a fool, as someone 
1121
1122of supposedly serious technical skills who’d somehow helped to build an essential component of this system without 
1123
1124realizing its purpose. I felt used, as an employee of the IC who only now was realizing that all along I’d been 
1125
1126protecting not my country but the state. I felt, above all, violated. Being in Japan only accentuated the sense of
1127betrayal.
1128
1129I’ll explain.
1130
1131The Japanese that I’d managed to pick up through community college and my interests in anime and manga was enough for 
1132
1133me to speak and get through basic conversations, but reading was a different matter. In Japanese, each word can be 
1134
1135represented by its own unique character, or a combination of characters, called kanji, so there were tens of 
1136
1137thousands of them—far too many for me to memorize. Often, I was only able to decode particular kanji if they were 
1138
1139written with their phonetic gloss, the furigana, which are most commonly meant for foreigners and young readers and 
1140
1141so are typically absent from public texts like street signs. The result of all this was that I walked around 
1142
1143functionally illiterate. I’d get confused and end up going right when I should have gone left, or left when I should 
1144
1145have gone right. I’d wander down the wrong streets and misorder from menus. I was a stranger, is what I’m saying, and 
1146
1147often lost, in more ways than one. There were times when I’d accompany Lindsay out on one of her photography trips 
1148
1149into the countryside and I’d suddenly stop and realize, in the midst of a village or in the middle of a forest, that 
1150
1151I knew nothing whatsoever about my surroundings.
1152
1153And yet: everything was known about me. I now understood that I was totally transparent to my government. The phone 
1154
1155that gave me directions, and corrected me when I went the wrong way, and helped me translate the traffic signs, and 
1156
1157told me the times of the buses and trains, was also making sure that all of my doings were legible to my employers. 
1158
1159It was telling my bosses where I was and when, even if I never touched the thing and just left it in my pocket.
1160
1161I remember forcing myself to laugh about this once when Lindsay and I got   lost   on   a   hike   and   Lindsay—to   
1162
1163whom   I’d   told   nothing—just spontaneously said, “Why don’t you text Fort Meade and have them find us?” She kept 
1164
1165the joke going, and I tried to find it funny but couldn’t. “Hello,” she mimicked me, “can you help us with 
1166
1167directions?”
1168
1169Later I would live in Hawaii, near Pearl Harbor, where America was attacked and dragged into what might have been its 
1170
1171last just war. Here, in Japan, I was closer to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where that war ignominiously ended. Lindsay 
1172
1173and I had always hoped to visit those cities, but every time we planned to go we wound up having to cancel. On one of 
1174
1175my first days off, we were all set to head down Honshu to Hiroshima, but I was called in to work and told to go in 
1176
1177the opposite direction—to Misawa Air Base in the frozen north. On the day of our next scheduled attempt, Lindsay got 
1178
1179sick, and then I
1180got sick, too. Finally, the night before we intended to go to Nagasaki, Lindsay and I were woken by our first major 
1181
1182earthquake, jumped up from our futon, ran down seven flights of stairs, and spent the rest of the night out on the 
1183
1184street with our neighbors, shivering in our pajamas.
1185
1186To my true regret, we never went. Those places are holy places, whose memorials honor the two hundred thousand 
1187
1188incinerated and the countless poisoned by fallout while reminding us of technology’s amorality.
1189
1190I think often of what’s called the “atomic moment”—a phrase that in physics describes the moment when a nucleus 
1191
1192coheres the protons and neutrons spinning around it into an atom, but that’s popularly understood to mean the advent 
1193
1194of the nuclear age, whose isotopes enabled advances in energy production, agriculture, water potability, and the 
1195
1196diagnosis and treatment of deadly disease. It also created the atomic bomb.
1197
1198Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, 
1199
1200industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can 
1201
1202we,” not “should we.” And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and 
1203
1204use.
1205
1206I do not mean, of course, to compare nuclear weapons with cybersurveillance in terms of human cost. But there is a 
1207
1208commonality when it comes to the concepts of proliferation and disarmament.
1209
1210The only two countries I knew of that had previously practiced mass surveillance were those two other major 
1211
1212combatants of World War II—one America’s enemy, the other America’s ally. In both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia,   
1213
1214the   earliest   public   indications   of   that   surveillance   took   the superficially innocuous form of a 
1215
1216census, the official enumeration and statistical recording of a population. The First All-Union Census of the Soviet 
1217
1218Union, in 1926, had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count: it overtly queried Soviet citizens about their 
1219
1220nationality. Its findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were in the minority 
1221
1222when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed a Central Asian heritage, such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, 
1223
1224Tajiks, Turkmen, Georgians, and Armenians. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate 
1225
1226these cultures, by “reeducating” their populations in the deracinating ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
1227
1228The Nazi German census of 1939 took on a similar statistical project, but with the assistance of computer technology. 
1229
1230It set out to count the Reich’s
1231population in order to control it and to purge it—mainly of Jews and Roma— before exerting its murderous efforts on 
1232
1233populations beyond its borders. To effect this, the Reich partnered with Dehomag, a German subsidiary of the American 
1234
1235IBM, which owned the patent to the punch card tabulator, a sort of analog computer that counted holes punched into 
1236
1237cards. Each citizen was represented by a card, and certain holes on the cards represented certain markers of 
1238
1239identity. Column 22 addressed the religion rubric: hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, and hole 3 Jewish. Shortly 
1240
1241thereafter, this census information was used to identify and deport Europe’s Jewish population to the death camps.
1242
1243A single current-model smartphone commands more computing power than all of the wartime machinery of the Reich and 
1244
1245the Soviet Union combined. Recalling this  is  the  surest  way  to  contextualize not  just  the modern American 
1246
1247IC’s technological dominance, but also the threat it poses to democratic governance. In the century or so since those 
1248
1249census efforts, technology has made astounding progress, but the same could not be said for the law or human scruples 
1250
1251that could restrain it.
1252
1253The United States has a census, too, of course. The Constitution established the American census and enshrined it as 
1254
1255the official federal count of each state’s population in order to determine its proportional delegation to the House 
1256
1257of Representatives. That was something of a revisionist principle, in that authoritarian governments, including the 
1258
1259British monarchy that ruled the colonies, had traditionally used the census as a method of assessing taxes and 
1260
1261ascertaining the number of young men eligible for military conscription. It was the Constitution’s genius to 
1262
1263repurpose what had been a mechanism of oppression into one of democracy. The census, which is officially under the 
1264
1265jurisdiction of the Senate, was ordered to be performed every ten years, which was roughly the amount of time it took 
1266
1267to process the data of most American censuses following the first census of 1790. This decade-long lag was shortened 
1268
1269by the census of 1890, which was the world’s first census to make use of computers (the prototypes of the models that 
1270
1271IBM later sold to Nazi Germany). With computing technology, the processing time was cut in half.
1272
1273Digital technology didn’t just further streamline such accounting—it is rendering it obsolete. Mass surveillance is 
1274
1275now a never-ending census, substantially more dangerous than any questionnaire sent through the mail. All our 
1276
1277devices, from our phones to our computers, are basically miniature census-takers we carry in our backpacks and in our 
1278
1279pockets—census-takers that remember everything and forgive nothing.
1280Japan was my atomic moment. It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and that if my 
1281
1282generation didn’t intervene the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally 
1283
1284resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which 
1285
1286surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and 
1287
1288indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and 
1289
1290permanent.
1291
1292Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select 
1293
1294a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching—as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files
1295—for evidence of a suitable crime.
129617
1297
1298Home on the Cloud
1299
1300In 2011, I was back in the States, working for the same nominal employer, Dell, but now attached to my old agency, 
1301
1302the CIA. One mild spring day, I came home from my first day at the new job and was amused to notice: the house I’d 
1303
1304moved into had a mailbox. It was nothing fancy, just one of those subdivided rectangles common to town house 
1305
1306communities, but still, it made me smile. I hadn’t had a mailbox in years, and hadn’t ever checked this one. I might 
1307
1308not even have registered its existence had it not been overflowing— stuffed to bursting with heaps of junk mail 
1309
1310addressed to “Mr. Edward J. Snowden or Current Resident.” The envelopes contained coupons and ad circulars for 
1311
1312household products. Someone knew that I’d just moved in.
1313
1314A memory surfaced from my childhood, a memory of checking the mail and finding a letter to my sister. Although I 
1315
1316wanted to open it, my mother wouldn’t let me.
1317
1318I remember asking why. “Because,” she said, “it’s not addressed to you.” She explained that opening mail intended for 
1319
1320someone else, even if it was just a birthday card or a chain letter, wasn’t a very nice thing to do. In fact, it was 
1321
1322a crime.
1323
1324I wanted to know what kind of crime. “A big one, buddy,” my mother said. “A federal crime.”
1325
1326I stood in the parking lot, tore the envelopes in half, and carried them to the trash.
1327
1328I had a new iPhone in the pocket of my new Ralph Lauren suit. I had new Burberry glasses. A new haircut. Keys to this 
1329
1330new town house in Columbia, Maryland, the largest place I’d ever lived in, and the first place that really felt like 
1331
1332mine. I was rich, or at least my friends thought so. I barely recognized myself.
1333
1334I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved—after 
1335
1336all, wasn’t that what everybody else did? But it was easier said than done. The denial, I mean. The money—that came 
1337
1338easy. So easy that I felt guilty.
1339
1340Counting Geneva, and not counting periodic trips home, I’d been away for nearly four years. The America I returned to 
1341
1342felt like a changed country. I won’t go as far as to say that I felt like a foreigner, but I did find myself mired
1343in way too many conversations I didn’t understand. Every other word was the name of some TV show or movie I didn’t 
1344
1345know, or a celebrity scandal I didn’t care about, and I couldn’t respond—I had nothing to respond with.
1346
1347Contradictory thoughts rained down like Tetris blocks, and I struggled to sort them out—to make them disappear. I 
1348
1349thought, pity these poor, sweet, innocent people—they’re victims, watched by the government, watched by the very 
1350
1351screens they worship. Then I thought: Shut up, stop being so dramatic—they’re happy, they don’t care, and you don’t 
1352
1353have to, either. Grow up, do your work, pay your bills. That’s life.
1354
1355A normal life was what Lindsay and I were hoping for. We were ready for the next stage and had decided to settle 
1356
1357down. We had a nice backyard with a cherry tree that reminded me of a sweeter Japan, a spot on the Tama River where 
1358
1359Lindsay and I had laughed and rolled around atop the fragrant carpet of Tokyo blossoms as we watched the sakura fall.
1360
1361Lindsay was getting certified as a yoga instructor. I, meanwhile, was getting used to my new position—in sales.
1362
1363One of the external vendors I’d worked with on EPICSHELTER ended up working for Dell, and convinced me that I was 
1364
1365wasting my time with getting paid by the hour. I should get into the sales side of Dell’s business, he said, where I 
1366
1367could earn a fortune—for more ideas like EPICSHELTER. I’d be making an astronomical leap up the corporate ladder, and 
1368
1369he’d be getting a substantial referral bonus. I was ready to be convinced, especially since it meant distracting 
1370
1371myself from my growing sense of unease, which could only get me into trouble. The official job title was solutions 
1372
1373consultant. It meant, in essence, that I had to solve the problems created by my new partner, whom I’m going to call 
1374
1375Cliff, the account manager.
1376
1377Cliff was supposed to be the face, and I was to be the brain. When we sat down with the CIA’s technical royalty and 
1378
1379purchasing agents, his job was to sell Dell’s equipment and expertise by any means necessary. This meant reaching 
1380
1381deep into the seat of his pants for unlimited slick promises as to how we’d do things for the agency, things that 
1382
1383were definitely, definitely not possible for our competitors (and, in reality, not possible for us, either). My job 
1384
1385was to lead a team of experts in building something that reduced the degree to which Cliff had lied by just enough 
1386
1387that, when the person who signed the check pressed the Power button, we wouldn’t all be sent to jail.
1388
1389No pressure.
1390
1391Our main project was to help the CIA catch up with the bleeding edge—or
1392just with the technical standards of the NSA—by building it the buzziest of new technologies, a  “private cloud.” The 
1393
1394aim was to  unite the  agency’s processing and storage while distributing the ways by which data could be accessed. 
1395
1396In plain American, we wanted to make it so that someone in a tent in Afghanistan could do exactly the same work in 
1397
1398exactly the same way as someone at CIA headquarters. The agency—and indeed the whole IC’s technical leadership—was 
1399
1400constantly complaining about “silos”: the problem of having a billion buckets of data spread all over the world that 
1401
1402they couldn’t keep track of or access. So I was leading a team of some of the smartest people at Dell to come up with 
1403
1404a way that anyone, anywhere, could reach anything.
1405
1406During the proof of concept stage, the working name of our cloud became “Frankie.” Don’t blame me: on the tech side, 
1407
1408we just called it “The Private Cloud.” It was Cliff who named it, in the middle of a demo with the CIA, saying they 
1409
1410were going to love our little Frankenstein “because it’s a real monster.”
1411
1412The more promises Cliff made, the busier I became, leaving Lindsay and me only the weekends to catch up with our 
1413
1414parents and old friends. We tried to furnish and equip our new home. The three-story place had come empty, so we had 
1415
1416to get everything, or everything that our parents hadn’t generously handed down to us. This felt very mature, but was 
1417
1418at the same time very telling about our priorities: we bought dishes, cutlery, a desk, and a chair, but we still 
1419
1420slept on a mattress on the floor. I’d become allergic to credit cards, with all their tracking, so we bought 
1421
1422everything outright, with hard currency. When we needed a car, I bought a ’98 Acura Integra from a classified ad for
1423$3,000 cash. Earning money was one thing, but neither Lindsay nor I liked to spend it, unless it was for computer 
1424
1425equipment—or a special occasion. For Valentine’s Day, I bought Lindsay the revolver she always wanted.
1426
1427Our new condo was a twenty-minute drive from nearly a dozen malls, including the Columbia Mall, which has nearly 1.5 
1428
1429million square feet of shopping, occupied by some two hundred stores, a fourteen-screen AMC multiplex, a P.F. 
1430
1431Chang’s, and a Cheesecake Factory. As we drove the familiar roads in the beat-up Integra, I was impressed, but also 
1432
1433slightly taken aback, by all the development that had occurred in my absence. The post-9/11 government spending spree 
1434
1435had certainly put a lot of money into a lot of local pockets. It was an unsettling and even overwhelming experience 
1436
1437to come back to America after having been away for a while and to realize anew just how wealthy this part of the 
1438
1439country was, and how many consumer options it offered—how   many   big-box   retailers   and   high-end   interior   
1440
1441design
1442showrooms. And all of them had sales. For Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Independence  Day,  Labor  Day,  Columbus  
1443
1444Day,  Veterans’  Day.  Festive banners announced the latest discounts, just below all the flags.
1445
1446Our mission was pretty much appliance-based on this one afternoon I’m recalling—we were at Best Buy. Having settled 
1447
1448on a new microwave, we were checking out, on Lindsay’s healthful insistence, a display of blenders. She had her phone 
1449
1450out and was in the midst of researching which of the ten or so devices had the best reviews, when I found myself 
1451
1452wandering over to the computer department at the far end of the store.
1453
1454But along the way, I  stopped. There, at  the edge of  the kitchenware section, ensconced atop a brightly decorated 
1455
1456and lit elevated platform, was a shiny new refrigerator. Rather, it  was a  “Smartfridge,” which was being advertised 
1457
1458as “Internet-equipped.”
1459
1460This, plain and simple, blew my mind.
1461
1462A salesperson approached, interpreting my stupefaction as interest—“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”—and proceeded to 
1463
1464demonstrate a few of the features. A screen was embedded in the door of the fridge, and next to the screen was a 
1465
1466holder for a tiny stylus, which allowed you to scribble messages. If you didn’t want to scribble, you could record 
1467
1468audio and video memos. You could also use the screen as you would your regular computer, because the refrigerator had 
1469
1470Wi-Fi. You could check your email, or check your calendar. You could watch YouTube clips, or listen to MP3s. You 
1471
1472could even make phone calls. I had to restrain myself from keying in Lindsay’s number and saying, from across the 
1473
1474floor, “I’m calling from a fridge.”
1475
1476Beyond that, the salesperson continued, the fridge’s computer kept track of internal temperature, and, through 
1477
1478scanning barcodes, the freshness of your food. It also provided nutritional information and suggested recipes. I 
1479
1480think the price was over $9,000. “Delivery included,” the salesperson said.
1481
1482I remember driving home in a confused silence. This wasn’t quite the stunning moonshot tech-future we’d been 
1483
1484promised. I was convinced the only reason that thing was Internet-equipped was so that it could report back to its 
1485
1486manufacturer about its owner’s usage and about any other household data that was  obtainable. The  manufacturer, in  
1487
1488turn,  would  monetize that  data  by selling it. And we were supposed to pay for the privilege.
1489
1490I wondered what the point was of my getting so worked up over government surveillance if my friends, neighbors, and 
1491
1492fellow citizens were more than happy to invite corporate surveillance into their homes, allowing
1493themselves to be tracked while browsing in their pantries as efficiently as if they were browsing the Web. It would 
1494
1495still be another half decade before the domotics  revolution,  before  “virtual  assistants”  like  Amazon  Echo  and 
1496
1497Google  Home  were  welcomed into  the  bedroom and  placed  proudly  on nightstands to record and transmit all 
1498
1499activity within range, to log all habits and preferences (not to mention fetishes and kinks), which would then be 
1500
1501developed into advertising algorithms and converted into cash. The data we generate just by living—or just by letting 
1502
1503ourselves be surveilled while living
1504—would enrich private enterprise and impoverish our private existence in equal measure. If government surveillance 
1505
1506was having the effect of turning the citizen into a subject, at the mercy of state power, then corporate surveillance 
1507
1508was turning the consumer into a product, which corporations sold to other corporations, data brokers, and 
1509
1510advertisers.
1511
1512Meanwhile, it felt as if every major tech company, including Dell, was rolling out new civilian versions of what I 
1513
1514was working on for the CIA: a cloud. (In fact, Dell had even tried four years previously to trademark the term “cloud 
1515
1516computing” but was denied.) I was amazed at how willingly people were signing up, so excited at the prospect of their 
1517
1518photos and videos and music and e-books being universally backed up and available that they never  gave  much  
1519
1520thought  as  to  why  such  an  uber-sophisticated  and convenient storage solution was  being offered to  them  for  
1521
1522“free” or  for “cheap” in the first place.
1523
1524I don’t think I’d ever seen such a concept be so uniformly bought into, on every side. “The cloud” was as effective a 
1525
1526sales term for Dell to sell to the CIA as it was for Amazon and Apple and Google to sell to their users. I can still 
1527
1528close my eyes and hear Cliff schmoozing some CIA suit about how “with the cloud, you’ll be able to push security 
1529
1530updates across agency computers worldwide,” or “when the cloud’s up and running, the agency will be able to track who 
1531
1532has read what file worldwide.” The cloud was white and fluffy and peaceful, floating high above the fray. Though many 
1533
1534clouds make a stormy sky, a single cloud provided a benevolent bit of shade. It was protective. I think it made 
1535
1536everyone think of heaven.
1537
1538Dell—along with the largest cloud-based private companies, Amazon, Apple,  and  Google—regarded  the  rise  of  the  
1539
1540cloud  as  a  new  age  of computing. But in concept, at least, it was something of a regression to the old mainframe 
1541
1542architecture of computing’s earliest history, where many users all depended upon a single powerful central core that 
1543
1544could only be maintained by   an   elite   cadre   of   professionals.  The   world   had   abandoned   this 
1545
1546“impersonal” mainframe model only a generation before, once businesses like
1547Dell developed “personal” computers cheap enough, and simple enough, to appeal to mortals. The renaissance that 
1548
1549followed produced desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones—all devices that allowed people the freedom to make an 
1550
1551immense amount of creative work. The only issue was—how to store it?
1552
1553This was the genesis of “cloud computing.” Now it didn’t really matter what kind of personal computer you had, 
1554
1555because the real computers that you relied upon were warehoused in the enormous data centers that the cloud companies 
1556
1557built  throughout the  world.  These  were,  in  a  sense,  the  new mainframes, row after row of racked, identical 
1558
1559servers linked together in such a way that each individual machine acted together within a collective computing 
1560
1561system. The loss of a single server or even of an entire data center no longer mattered, because they were mere 
1562
1563droplets in the larger, global cloud.
1564
1565From the standpoint of a regular user, a cloud is just a storage mechanism that ensures that your data is being 
1566
1567processed or stored not on your personal device, but on a range of different servers, which can ultimately be owned 
1568
1569and operated by different companies. The result is that your data is no longer truly yours.  It’s  controlled  by  
1570
1571companies,  which  can  use  it  for  virtually  any purpose.
1572
1573Read your terms of service agreements for cloud storage, which get longer and longer by the year—current ones are 
1574
1575over six thousand words, twice the average length of one of these book chapters. When we choose to store our data 
1576
1577online, we’re often ceding our claim to it. Companies can decide what type of data they will hold for us, and can 
1578
1579willfully delete any data they object to. Unless we’ve kept a separate copy on our own machines or drives, this data 
1580
1581will be lost to us forever. If any of our data is found to be particularly objectionable or otherwise in violation of 
1582
1583the terms of service, the companies can unilaterally delete our accounts, deny us our own data, and yet retain a copy 
1584
1585for their own records, which they can turn over to the authorities without our knowledge or consent. Ultimately, the 
1586
1587privacy of our data depends on the ownership  of  our  data.  There  is  no  property  less  protected,  and  yet  no 
1588
1589property more private.
1590
1591
1592
1593THE INTERNET I’D  grown  up  with,  the  Internet  that  had  raised  me,  was disappearing. And with it, so was my 
1594
1595youth. The very act of going online, which had once seemed like a marvelous adventure, now seemed like a fraught 
1596
1597ordeal. Self-expression now required such strong self-protection as to
1598obviate its liberties and nullify its pleasures. Every communication was a matter not of creativity but of safety. 
1599
1600Every transaction was a potential danger.
1601
1602Meanwhile, the private sector was busy leveraging our reliance on technology into market consolidation. The majority 
1603
1604of American Internet users lived their entire digital lives on email, social media, and e-commerce platforms owned by 
1605
1606an imperial triumvirate of companies (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and the American IC was seeking to take 
1607
1608advantage of that fact by obtaining access to their networks—both through direct orders that were kept secret from 
1609
1610the public, and clandestine subversion efforts that were kept secret from the companies themselves. Our user data was 
1611
1612turning vast profits for the companies, and the government pilfered it for free. I don’t think I’d ever felt so 
1613
1614powerless.
1615
1616Then there was this other emotion that I felt, a curious sense of being adrift and yet, at the same time, of having 
1617
1618my privacy violated. It was as if I were dispersed—with parts of my life scattered across servers all over the globe
1619
1620—and yet intruded or imposed upon. Every morning when I left our town house, I found myself nodding at the security 
1621
1622cameras dotted throughout our development. Previously I’d never paid them any attention, but now, when a light turned 
1623
1624red on my commute, I couldn’t help but think of its leering sensor, keeping tabs on me whether I blew through the 
1625
1626intersection or stopped. License-plate readers were recording my comings and goings, even if I maintained a speed of 
1627
162835 miles per hour.
1629
1630America’s fundamental laws exist to make the job of law enforcement not easier but harder. This isn’t a bug, it’s a 
1631
1632core feature of democracy. In the American system, law enforcement is expected to protect citizens from one another. 
1633
1634In turn, the courts are expected to restrain that power when it’s abused, and to provide redress against the only 
1635
1636members of society with the domestic authority to detain, arrest, and use force—including lethal force. Among the 
1637
1638most important of these restraints are the prohibitions against law enforcement surveilling private citizens on their 
1639
1640property and taking possession of their private recordings without a warrant. There are few laws, however, that 
1641
1642restrain the surveillance of public property, which includes the vast majority of America’s streets and sidewalks.
1643
1644Law enforcement’s use of surveillance cameras on public property was originally conceived of as a crime deterrent and 
1645
1646an aid to investigators after a crime had occurred. But as the cost of these devices continued to fall, they became 
1647
1648ubiquitous, and their role became preemptive—with law enforcement using  them  to  track  people  who  had  not  
1649
1650committed,  or  were  not  even
1651suspected of, any crime. And the greatest danger still lies ahead, with the refinement of artificial intelligence 
1652
1653capabilities such as facial and pattern recognition. An AI-equipped surveillance camera would be no mere recording 
1654
1655device, but could be made into something closer to an automated police officer—a true robo-cop actively seeking out 
1656
1657“suspicious” activity, such as apparent drug deals (that is, people embracing or shaking hands) and apparent gang 
1658
1659affiliation (such as people wearing specific colors and brands of clothing). Even in 2011, it was clear to me that 
1660
1661this was where technology was leading us, without any substantive public debate.
1662
1663Potential monitoring abuses piled up in my mind to cumulatively produce a vision of an appalling future. A world in 
1664
1665which all people were totally surveilled would logically become a world in which all laws were totally enforced, 
1666
1667automatically, by computers. After all, it’s difficult to imagine an AI device that’s capable of noticing a person 
1668
1669breaking the law not holding that person accountable. No policing algorithm would ever be programmed, even if it 
1670
1671could be, toward leniency or forgiveness.
1672
1673I wondered whether this would be the final but grotesque fulfillment of the original American promise that all 
1674
1675citizens would be equal before the law: an equality of oppression through total automated law enforcement. I imagined 
1676
1677the future SmartFridge stationed in my kitchen, monitoring my conduct and habits, and using my tendency to drink 
1678
1679straight from the carton or not wash my hands to evaluate the probability of my being a felon.
1680
1681Such a world of total automated law enforcement—of, say, all pet- ownership laws, or all zoning laws regulating home 
1682
1683businesses—would be intolerable. Extreme justice can turn out to be extreme injustice, not just in terms of the 
1684
1685severity of punishment for an infraction, but also in terms of how consistently and thoroughly the law is applied and 
1686
1687prosecuted. Nearly every large and long-lived society is full of unwritten laws that everyone is expected to follow, 
1688
1689along with vast libraries of written laws that no one is expected to follow, or even know about. According to 
1690
1691Maryland Criminal Law Section
169210-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine. In North Carolina, statute 14-309.8 makes it illegal for a 
1693
1694bingo game to last more than five hours. Both of these laws come from a more prudish past and yet, for one reason or 
1695
1696another, were never repealed. Most of our lives, even if we don’t realize it, occur not in black and white but in a 
1697
1698gray area, where we jaywalk, put trash in the  recycling  bin  and  recyclables  in  the  trash,  ride  our  bicycles 
1699
1700 in  the improper lane, and borrow a stranger’s Wi-Fi to download a book that we didn’t pay for. Put simply, a world 
1701
1702in which every law is always enforced would be a world in which everyone was a criminal.
1703I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so 
1704
1705sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d 
1706
1707be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.”
1708
1709She was right. And she was right to be worried about me. She thought I was too tense, and under too much stress. I 
1710
1711was—not because of my work, but because of my desire to tell her a truth that I wasn’t allowed to. I couldn’t tell 
1712
1713her that my former coworkers at the NSA could target her for surveillance and read the love poems she texted me. I 
1714
1715couldn’t tell her that they could access all the photos she took—not just her public photos, but the intimate ones. I 
1716
1717couldn’t tell her that her information was being collected, that everyone’s information was being collected, which 
1718
1719was tantamount to a government threat: If you ever get out of line, we’ll use your private life against you.
1720
1721I tried to explain it to her, obliquely, through an analogy. I told her to imagine opening up her laptop one day and 
1722
1723finding a spreadsheet on her desktop.
1724
1725“Why?” she said. “I don’t like spreadsheets.”
1726
1727I wasn’t prepared for this response, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Nobody does, but this one’s 
1728
1729called The End.”
1730
1731“Ooh, mysterious.”
1732
1733“You don’t remember having created this spreadsheet, but once you open it up, you recognize its contents. Because 
1734
1735inside it is everything, absolutely everything, that could ruin you. Every speck of information that could destroy 
1736
1737your life.”
1738
1739Lindsay smiled. “Can I see the one for you?”
1740
1741She was joking, but I wasn’t. A spreadsheet containing every scrap of data about you would pose a mortal hazard. 
1742
1743Imagine it: all the secrets big and small that could end your marriage, end your career, poison even your closest 
1744
1745relationships, and  leave  you  broke, friendless, and  in  prison. Maybe the spreadsheet would include the joint you 
1746
1747smoked last weekend at a friend’s house, or the one line of cocaine you snorted off the screen of your phone in a bar 
1748
1749in college. Or the drunken one-night stand you had with your friend’s girlfriend, who’s now your friend’s wife, which 
1750
1751you both regret and have agreed never to mention to anyone. Or an abortion you got when you were a teenager, which 
1752
1753you kept hidden from your parents and that you’d like to keep hidden from your spouse. Or maybe it’s just information 
1754
1755about a petition you
1756signed, or a protest you attended. Everyone has something, some compromising information buried among their bytes—if 
1757
1758not in their files then in their email, if not in their email then in their browsing history. And now this 
1759
1760information was being stored by the US government.
1761
1762Some time after our exchange, Lindsay came up to me and said, “I figured out what would be on my Spreadsheet of Total 
1763
1764Destruction—the secret that would ruin me.”
1765
1766“What?”
1767
1768“I’m not going to tell you.”
1769
1770I tried to chill, but I kept having strange physical symptoms. I’d become weirdly clumsy, falling off ladders—more 
1771
1772than once—or bumping into door frames. Sometimes I’d trip, or drop spoons I was holding, or fail to gauge distances 
1773
1774accurately and miss what I was reaching for. I’d spill water over myself, or choke on it. Lindsay and I would be in 
1775
1776the middle of a conversation when I’d miss what she’d said, and she’d ask where I’d gone to—it was like I’d been 
1777
1778frozen in another world.
1779
1780One day when I went to meet Lindsay after her pole-fitness class, I started feeling dizzy. This was the most 
1781
1782disturbing of the symptoms I’d had thus far. It scared me, and scared Lindsay, too, especially when it led to a 
1783
1784gradual diminishing of my senses. I had too many explanations for these incidents: poor diet, lack of exercise, lack 
1785
1786of sleep. I had too many rationalizations: the plate was too close to the edge of the counter, the stairs were 
1787
1788slippery. I couldn’t make up my mind whether it was worse if what I was experiencing was psychosomatic or genuine. I 
1789
1790decided to go to the doctor, but the only appointment wasn’t for weeks.
1791
1792A day or so later, I was home around noon, trying my best to keep up with work remotely. I was on the phone with a 
1793
1794security officer at Dell when the dizziness hit me hard. I immediately excused myself from the call, slurring my 
1795
1796words, and as I struggled to hang up the phone, I was sure: I was going to die.
1797
1798For those who’ve experienced it, this sense of impending doom needs no description, and for those who haven’t, there 
1799
1800is no explanation. It strikes so suddenly and primally that it wipes out all other feeling, all thought besides 
1801
1802helpless resignation. My life was over. I slumped in my chair, a big black padded Aeron that tilted underneath me as 
1803
1804I fell into a void and lost consciousness.
1805
1806I came to still seated, with the clock on my desk reading just shy of 1:00
1807p.m. I’d been out less than an hour, but I was exhausted. It was as if I’d been awake since the beginning of time.
1808
1809I reached for the phone in a panic, but my hand kept missing it and grabbing the air. Once I managed to grab ahold of 
1810
1811it and get a dial tone, I found I couldn’t remember Lindsay’s number, or could only remember the digits but not their 
1812
1813order.
1814
1815Somehow I managed to get myself downstairs, taking each step deliberately, palm against the wall. I got some juice 
1816
1817out of the fridge and chugged it, keeping both hands on the carton and dribbling a fair amount on my chin. Then I lay 
1818
1819down on the floor, pressed my cheek to the cool linoleum, and fell asleep, which was how Lindsay found me.
1820
1821I’d just had an epileptic seizure.
1822
1823My mother had epilepsy, and for a time at least was prone to grand mal seizures: the foaming at the mouth, her limbs 
1824
1825thrashing, her body rolling around until it stilled into a horrible unconscious rigidity. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t 
1826
1827previously associated my symptoms with hers, though that was the very same denial she herself had been in for 
1828
1829decades, attributing her frequent falls to “clumsiness” and “lack of coordination.” She hadn’t been diagnosed until 
1830
1831her first grand mal in her late thirties, and, after a brief spell on medication, her seizures stopped. She’d always 
1832
1833told me and my sister that epilepsy wasn’t hereditary and to this day I’m still not sure if that’s what her doctor 
1834
1835had told her or if she was just trying to reassure us that her fate wouldn’t be ours.
1836
1837There is no diagnostic test for epilepsy. The clinical diagnosis is just two or more unexplained seizures—that’s it. 
1838
1839Very little is known about the condition.  Medicine  tends  to  treat  epilepsy  phenomenologically. Doctors don’t 
1840
1841talk about “epilepsy,” they talk about “seizures.” They tend to divide seizures into two types: localized and 
1842
1843generalized, the former being an electrical misfire in a certain section of your brain that doesn’t spread, the 
1844
1845latter being an electrical misfire that creates a chain reaction. Basically, a wave of misfiring synapses rolls 
1846
1847across your brain, causing you to lose motor function and, ultimately, consciousness.
1848
1849Epilepsy is such a strange syndrome. Its sufferers feel different things, depending on  which part  of  their  brain  
1850
1851has  the  initial electrical cascade failure. Those who have this failure in their auditory center famously hear 
1852
1853bells. Those who have it in their visual center either have their vision go dark or see sparkles. If the failure 
1854
1855happens in the deeper core areas of the brain—
1856which was where mine occurred—it can cause severe vertigo. In time, I came to know the warning signs, so I could 
1857
1858prepare for an oncoming seizure. These signs  are  called  “auras,” in  the  popular language of  epilepsy, though in 
1859
1860scientific fact these auras are the seizure itself. They are the proprioceptive experience of the misfire.
1861
1862I consulted with as many epilepsy specialists as I could find—the best part of working for Dell was the insurance: I 
1863
1864had CAT scans, MRIs, the works. Meanwhile, Lindsay, who was my stalwart angel throughout all this, driving me back 
1865
1866and forth from appointments, went about researching all the information that was available about the syndrome. She 
1867
1868Googled both allopathic and  homeopathic treatments so  intensely that  basically all  her Gmail ads were for 
1869
1870epilepsy pharmaceuticals.
1871
1872I felt defeated. The two great institutions of my life had been betrayed and were betraying me: my country and the 
1873
1874Internet. And now my body was following suit.
1875
1876My brain had, quite literally, short-circuited.
187718
1878
1879On the Couch
1880
1881It was late at night on May 1, 2011, when I noticed the news alert on my phone: Osama bin Laden had been tracked down 
1882
1883to Abbottabad, Pakistan, and killed by a team of Navy SEALs.
1884
1885So  there  it  was.  The  man  who’d  masterminded the  attacks  that  had propelled me into the army, and from there 
1886
1887into the Intelligence Community, was now dead, a dialysis patient shot point-blank in the embrace of his multiple 
1888
1889wives in their lavish compound just down the road from Pakistan’s major military academy. Site after site showed maps 
1890
1891indicating where the hell Abbottabad was, alternating with street scenes from cities throughout America, where people 
1892
1893were fist-pumping, chest-bumping, yelling, getting wasted. Even New York was celebrating, which almost never happens.
1894
1895I turned off the phone. I just didn’t have it in me to join in. Don’t get me wrong: I was glad the motherfucker was 
1896
1897dead. I was just having a pensive moment and felt a circle closing.
1898
1899Ten years. That’s how long it had been since those two planes flew into the Twin Towers, and what did we have to show 
1900
1901for it? What had the last decade actually accomplished? I sat on the couch I’d inherited from my mother’s condo and 
1902
1903gazed through the window into the street beyond as a neighbor honked the horn of his parked car. I couldn’t shake the 
1904
1905idea that I’d wasted the last decade of my life.
1906
1907The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic 
1908
1909regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions  at  Guantánamo Bay,  extraordinary renditions,  torture,  targeted 
1910
1911killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland 
1912
1913Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red–Severe, Orange–High, Yellow–
1914
1915Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly 
1916
1917fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt 
1918
1919entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation.
1920
1921The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened concurrently with the development of digital technology, which 
1922
1923made much of the earth American soil—whether we liked it or not. Terrorism, of course, was the
1924stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and 
1925
1926opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was 
1927
1928increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force. American politicians weren’t 
1929
1930as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their 
1931
1932campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East. The 
1933
1934politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in “counterterror”: the panicked actions of 
1935
1936a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unconcerned about upholding the rule of law. 
1937
1938After 9/11, the IC’s orders had been “never again,” a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it 
1939
1940had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response 
1941
1942to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required 
1943
1944permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.
1945
1946After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon less against terror and 
1947
1948more against liberty itself. By continuing these programs, by continuing these lies, America was protecting little, 
1949
1950winning nothing, and losing much—until there would be few distinctions left between those post-9/11 polarities of 
1951
1952“Us” and “Them.”
1953
1954
1955
1956THE LATTER HALF of 2011 passed in a succession of seizures, and in countless doctors’ offices and hospitals. I was 
1957
1958imaged, tested, and prescribed medications that stabilized my body but clouded my mind, turning me depressed, 
1959
1960lethargic, and unable to focus.
1961
1962I wasn’t sure how I was going to live with what Lindsay was now calling my “condition” without losing my job. Being 
1963
1964the top technologist for Dell’s CIA account meant I had tremendous flexibility: my office was my phone, and I could 
1965
1966work from home. But meetings were an issue. They were always in Virginia, and I lived in Maryland, a state whose laws 
1967
1968prevented people diagnosed with epilepsy from driving. If I were caught behind the wheel, I could lose my driver’s 
1969
1970license, and with it my ability to attend the meetings that were the single nonnegotiable requirement of my position.
1971
1972I finally gave in to the inevitable, took a short-term disability leave from Dell, and decamped to my mother’s 
1973
1974secondhand couch. It was as blue as my mood, but comfortable. For weeks and weeks it was the center of my existence—
1975
1976the place where I slept and ate and read and slept some more, the
1977place where I just generally wallowed bleakly as time mocked me.
1978
1979I don’t remember what books I tried to read, but I do remember never managing much more than a page before closing my 
1980
1981eyes and sinking back again into the cushions. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except my own weakness, the  
1982
1983uncooperative lump that used to  be  me  spread across the upholstery, motionless but for a lone finger atop the 
1984
1985screen of the phone that was the only light in the room.
1986
1987I’d scroll through the news, then nap, then scroll again, then nap—while protesters in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, 
1988
1989Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were being imprisoned and tortured or just shot in the streets by the 
1990
1991secret state agents of thuggish regimes, many of which America had helped keep in power. The suffering of that season 
1992
1993was immense, spiraling out of the regular news cycle. What I was witnessing was desperation, compared with which my 
1994
1995own struggles seemed cheap. They seemed small—morally and ethically small—and privileged.
1996
1997Throughout the Middle East, innocent civilians were living under the constant threat of violence, with work and 
1998
1999school suspended, no electricity, no sewage. In many regions, they didn’t have access to even the most rudimentary 
2000
2001medical care. But if at any moment I doubted that my anxieties about surveillance and privacy were relevant, or even 
2002
2003appropriate, in the face of such immediate danger and privation, I only had to pay a bit more attention to the crowds 
2004
2005on the street and the proclamations they were making—in Cairo and Sanaa, in Beirut and Damascus, in Ahvaz, Khuzestan, 
2006
2007and in every other city of the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement. The crowds were calling for an end to 
2008
2009oppression, censorship, and precarity. They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not 
2010
2011answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people. Although each crowd in  each city, even on 
2012
2013 each day, seemed to  have its  own specific motivation and its own specific goals, they all had one thing in common: 
2014
2015a rejection of authoritarianism, a recommitment to the humanitarian principle that an individual’s rights are inborn 
2016
2017and inalienable.
2018
2019In an authoritarian state, rights derive from the state and are granted to the people. In a free state, rights derive 
2020
2021from the people and are granted to the state. In the former, people are subjects, who are only allowed to own 
2022
2023property, pursue an education, work, pray, and speak because their government permits them to. In the latter, people 
2024
2025are citizens, who agree to be governed in a covenant of consent that must be periodically renewed and is 
2026
2027constitutionally revocable. It’s this clash, between the authoritarian and the
2028liberal democratic, that I believe to be the major ideological conflict of my time—not some concocted, prejudiced 
2029
2030notion of an East-West divide, or of a resurrected crusade against Christendom or Islam.
2031
2032Authoritarian states are typically not governments of laws, but governments of leaders, who demand loyalty from their 
2033
2034subjects and are hostile to dissent. Liberal-democratic states, by contrast, make no or few such demands, but depend 
2035
2036almost solely on each citizen voluntarily assuming the responsibility of  protecting  the  freedoms  of  everyone  
2037
2038else  around  them, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed, ability, sexuality, or gender. Any collective 
2039
2040guarantee, predicated not on blood but on assent, will wind up favoring egalitarianism—and though democracy has often 
2041
2042fallen far short of its ideal, I still believe it to be the one form of governance that most fully enables people of 
2043
2044different backgrounds to live together, equal before the law.
2045
2046This equality consists not only of rights but also of freedoms. In fact, many of the rights most cherished by 
2047
2048citizens of democracies aren’t even provided for in law except by implication. They exist in that open-ended empty 
2049
2050space created through the restriction of government power. For example, Americans only have a “right” to free speech 
2051
2052because the government is forbidden from making any law restricting that freedom, and a “right” to a free press 
2053
2054because the government is forbidden from making any law to abridge it. They only have a “right” to worship freely 
2055
2056because the government is forbidden from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, and a “right” to 
2057
2058peaceably assemble and protest because the government is forbidden from making any law that says they can’t.
2059
2060In contemporary life, we have a single concept that encompasses all this negative or potential space that’s off-
2061
2062limits to the government. That concept is “privacy.” It is an empty zone that lies beyond the reach of the state, a 
2063
2064void into which the law is only permitted to venture with a warrant—and not a warrant “for everybody,” such as the 
2065
2066one the US government has arrogated to itself in pursuit of mass surveillance, but a warrant for a specific person or 
2067
2068purpose supported by a specific probable cause.
2069
2070The word “privacy” itself is somewhat empty, because it is essentially indefinable, or over-definable. Each of us has 
2071
2072our own idea of what it is. “Privacy” means something to everyone. There is no one to whom it means nothing.
2073
2074It’s because of this lack of common definition that citizens of pluralistic, technologically sophisticated 
2075
2076democracies feel that they have to justify their desire for privacy and frame it as a right. But citizens of 
2077
2078democracies don’t
2079have to justify that desire—the state, instead, must justify its violation. To refuse to claim your privacy is 
2080
2081actually to cede it, either to a state trespassing its constitutional restraints or to a “private” business.
2082
2083There is, simply, no way to ignore privacy. Because a citizenry’s freedoms are  interdependent, to  surrender your  
2084
2085own  privacy is  really  to  surrender everyone’s. You might choose to give it up out of convenience, or under the 
2086
2087popular pretext that privacy is only required by those who have something to hide. But saying that you don’t need or 
2088
2089want privacy because you have nothing to hide is to assume that no one should have, or could have, to hide anything—
2090
2091including   their   immigration   status,   unemployment   history, financial history, and health records. You’re 
2092
2093assuming that no one, including yourself, might object to revealing to anyone information about their religious 
2094
2095beliefs, political affiliations, and sexual activities, as casually as some choose to reveal their movie and music 
2096
2097tastes and reading preferences.
2098
2099Ultimately, saying that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you 
2100
2101don’t care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say. Or that you don’t care about freedom of the press 
2102
2103because you don’t like to read. Or that you don’t care about freedom of religion because you don’t believe in God. Or 
2104
2105that you don’t care about the freedom to peaceably assemble because you’re a lazy, antisocial agoraphobe. Just 
2106
2107because this or that freedom might not have meaning to you today doesn’t mean that it doesn’t or won’t have meaning 
2108
2109tomorrow, to you, or to your neighbor—or to the crowds of principled dissidents I was following on my phone who were 
2110
2111protesting halfway across the planet, hoping to gain just a fraction of the freedoms that my country was busily 
2112
2113dismantling.
2114
2115I  wanted to  help, but  I  didn’t know how. I’d  had  enough of  feeling helpless, of being just an asshole in 
2116
2117flannel lying around on a shabby couch eating Cool Ranch Doritos and drinking Diet Coke while the world went up in 
2118
2119flames.
2120
2121The young people of the Middle East were agitating for higher wages, lower prices, and better pensions, but I 
2122
2123couldn’t give them any of that, and no one could give them a better shot at self-governance than the one they were 
2124
2125taking themselves. They were, however, also agitating for a freer Internet. They were decrying Iran’s Ayatollah 
2126
2127Khamenei, who had been increasingly censoring and blocking threatening Web content, tracking and hacking traffic to 
2128
2129offending platforms and services, and shutting down certain foreign ISPs entirely. They were protesting Egypt’s 
2130
2131president, Hosni Mubarak, who’d cut off Internet access for his whole country—which had merely succeeded in
2132making every young person in the country even more furious and bored, luring them out into the streets.
2133
2134Ever since I’d been introduced to the Tor Project in Geneva, I’d used its browser and run my own Tor server, wanting 
2135
2136to do my professional work from home and my personal Web browsing unmonitored. Now, I shook off my despair, propelled 
2137
2138myself off the couch, and staggered over to my home office to set up a bridge relay that would bypass the Iranian 
2139
2140Internet blockades. I then distributed its encrypted configuration identity to the Tor core developers.
2141
2142This was the least I could do. If there was just the slightest chance that even one young kid from Iran who hadn’t 
2143
2144been able to get online could now bypass the imposed filters and restrictions and connect to me—connect through me—
2145
2146protected by the Tor system and my server’s anonymity, then it was certainly worth my minimal effort.
2147
2148I imagined this person reading their email, or checking their social media accounts to make sure that their friends 
2149
2150and family had not been arrested. I had no way of knowing whether this was what they did, or whether anyone at all 
2151
2152linked to my server from Iran. And that was the point: the aid I offered was private.
2153
2154The guy who started the Arab Spring was almost exactly my age. He was a produce peddler in Tunisia, selling fruits 
2155
2156and vegetables out of a cart. In protest against repeated harassment and extortion by the authorities, he stood in 
2157
2158the square and set fire to his life, dying a martyr. If burning himself to death was the last free act he could 
2159
2160manage in defiance of an illegitimate regime, I could certainly get up off the couch and press a few buttons.
2161PART THREE
216219
2163
2164The Tunnel
2165
2166Imagine you’re entering a tunnel. Imagine the perspective: as you look down the length that stretches ahead of you, 
2167
2168notice how the walls seem to narrow to the tiny dot of light at the other end. The light at the end of the tunnel is 
2169
2170a symbol of hope, and it’s also what people say they see in near-death experiences. They have to go to it, they say. 
2171
2172They’re drawn to it. But then where else is there to go in a tunnel, except through it? Hasn’t everything led up to 
2173
2174this point?
2175
2176My tunnel was the Tunnel: an enormous Pearl Harbor–era airplane factory turned NSA facility located under a pineapple 
2177
2178field in Kunia, on the island of Oahu,  Hawaii.  The  facility  was  built  out  of  reinforced  concrete,  its 
2179
2180eponymous tunnel a kilometer-long tube in the side of a hill opening up into three cavernous floors of server vaults 
2181
2182and offices. At the time the Tunnel was built, the hill was covered over with huge amounts of sand, soil, desiccated 
2183
2184pineapple plant leaves, and patches of sun-parched grass to camouflage it from Japanese bombers. Sixty years later it 
2185
2186resembled the vast burial mound of a lost civilization, or some gigantic arid pile that a weird god had heaped up in 
2187
2188the middle of a god-size sandbox. Its official name was the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center.
2189
2190I went to work there, still on a Dell contract, but now for the NSA again, early in 2012. One day that summer—
2191
2192actually, it was my birthday—as I passed through the security checks and proceeded down the tunnel, it struck me: 
2193
2194this, in front of me, was my future.
2195
2196I’m not saying that I made any decisions at that instant. The most important decisions in life are never made that 
2197
2198way. They’re made subconsciously and only express themselves consciously once fully formed— once you’re finally 
2199
2200strong enough to admit to yourself that this is what your conscience has already chosen for you, this is the course 
2201
2202that your beliefs have decreed. That was my twenty-ninth birthday present to myself: the awareness that I had entered 
2203
2204a tunnel that would narrow my life down toward a single, still-indistinct act.
2205
2206Just as Hawaii has always been an important waystation—historically, the US military treated the island chain as 
2207
2208little more than a mid-Pacific refueling depot for boats and planes—it had also become an important switchpoint for 
2209
2210American communications. These include the intelligence that flowed between   the   contiguous   forty-eight   states 
2211
2212  and   my   former   place   of
2213employment, Japan, as well as other sites in Asia.
2214
2215The job I’d taken was a significant step down the career ladder, with duties I could at this point perform in my 
2216
2217sleep. It was supposed to mean less stress, a lighter burden. I was the sole employee of the aptly named Office of 
2218
2219Information Sharing, where I worked as a SharePoint systems administrator. SharePoint is a Microsoft product, a dopey 
2220
2221poky program, or rather a grab- bag of programs, focused on internal document management: who can read what, who can 
2222
2223edit what, who can send and receive what, and so on. By making me Hawaii’s SharePoint systems administrator, the NSA 
2224
2225had made me the manager of document management. I was, in effect, the reader in chief at one of the agency’s most 
2226
2227significant facilities. As was my typical practice in any new technical position, I spent the earliest days 
2228
2229automating my tasks— meaning writing scripts to do my work for me—so as to free up my time for something more 
2230
2231interesting.
2232
2233Before I go any further, I want to emphasize this: my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with the copying 
2234
2235of documents, but with the reading of them. My initial intention was just to confirm the suspicions that I’d first 
2236
2237had back in 2009 in Tokyo. Three years later, I was determined to find out if an  American system  of  mass  
2238
2239surveillance existed  and,  if  it  did,  how  it functioned. Though I was uncertain about how to conduct this 
2240
2241investigation, I was at least sure of this: I had to understand exactly how the system worked before I could decide 
2242
2243what, if anything, to do about it.
2244
2245
2246
2247THIS, OF COURSE, was not why Lindsay and I had come to Hawaii. We hadn’t hauled all the way out to paradise just so I 
2248
2249could throw our lives away for a principle.
2250
2251We’d come to start over. To start over yet again.
2252
2253My doctors told me that the climate and more relaxed lifestyle in Hawaii might be beneficial for my epilepsy, since 
2254
2255lack of sleep was thought to be the leading  trigger  of  the  seizures.  Also,  the  move  eliminated  the  driving 
2256
2257problem: the Tunnel was within bicycling distance of a number of communities in Kunia, the quiet heart of the 
2258
2259island’s dry, red interior. It was a pleasant, twenty-minute ride to work, through sugarcane fields in brilliant 
2260
2261sunshine. With the mountains rising calm and high in the clear blue distance, the gloomy mood of the last few months 
2262
2263lifted like the morning fog.
2264
2265Lindsay and I found a decent-size bungalow-type house on Eleu Street in
2266Waipahu’s Royal Kunia, which we furnished with our stuff from Columbia,
2267Maryland, since Dell paid relocation expenses. The furniture didn’t get much use, though, since the sun and heat 
2268
2269would often cause us to walk in the door, strip off our clothes, and lie naked on the carpet beneath the overworked 
2270
2271air conditioner. Eventually, Lindsay turned the garage into a fitness studio, filling it with yoga mats and the 
2272
2273spinning pole she’d brought from Columbia. I set up a new Tor server. Soon, traffic from around the world was 
2274
2275reaching the Internet via the laptop sitting in our entertainment center, which had the ancillary benefit of hiding 
2276
2277my own Internet activity in the noise.
2278
2279One night during the summer I turned twenty-nine, Lindsay finally prevailed on me to go out with her to a luau. She’d 
2280
2281been after me to go for a while, because a few of her pole-fitness friends had been involved in some hula-girl 
2282
2283capacity, but I’d been resistant. It had seemed like such a cheesy touristy thing to do, and had felt, somehow, 
2284
2285disrespectful. Hawaiian culture is ancient, although its traditions are very much alive; the last thing I wanted was 
2286
2287to disturb someone’s sacred ritual.
2288
2289Finally, however, I capitulated. I’m very glad I did. What impressed me the most was not the luau itself—though it 
2290
2291was very much a fire-twirling spectacle—but the old man who was holding court nearby in a little amphitheater down by 
2292
2293the sea. He was a native Hawaiian, an erudite man with that soft but nasal island voice, who was telling a group of 
2294
2295people gathered around a fire the creation stories of the islands’ indigenous peoples.
2296
2297The one story that stuck with me concerned the twelve sacred islands of the gods. Apparently, there had existed a 
2298
2299dozen islands in the Pacific that were so beautiful and pure and blessed with freshwater that they had to be kept  
2300
2301secret  from  humanity, who  would  spoil  them.  Three  of  them  were especially revered: Kane-huna-moku, Kahiki, 
2302
2303and Pali-uli. The lucky gods who inhabited these islands decided to keep them hidden, because they believed that a 
2304
2305glimpse of their bounty would drive people mad. After considering numerous ingenious schemes by which these islands 
2306
2307might be concealed, including dyeing them the color of the sea, or sinking them to the bottom of the ocean, they 
2308
2309finally decided to make them float in the air.
2310
2311Once the islands were airborne, they were blown from place to place, staying constantly in motion. At sunrise and 
2312
2313sunset, especially, you might think that you’d noticed one, hovering far at the horizon. But the moment you pointed 
2314
2315it out to anyone, it would suddenly drift away or assume another form entirely, such as a pumice raft, a hunk of rock 
2316
2317ejected by a volcanic eruption
2318—or a cloud.
2319
2320I thought about that legend a lot while I went about my search. The
2321revelations I was pursuing were exactly like those islands: exotic preserves that a pantheon of self-important, 
2322
2323self-appointed rulers were convinced had to be kept secret and hidden from humanity. I wanted to know what the NSA’s 
2324
2325surveillance  capabilities  were  exactly;  whether  and  how  they  extended beyond the agency’s actual surveillance 
2326
2327activities; who approved them; who knew about them; and, last but surely not least, how these systems—both technical 
2328
2329and institutional—really operated.
2330
2331The moment I’d think that I spotted one of these “islands”—some capitalized code name I didn’t understand, some 
2332
2333program referenced in a note buried at the end of a report—I’d go chasing after further mentions of it in other 
2334
2335documents, but find none. It was as if the program I was searching for had floated away from me and was lost. Then, 
2336
2337days later, or weeks later, it might surface again under a different designation, in a document from a different 
2338
2339department.
2340
2341Sometimes I’d find a program with a recognizable name, but without an explanation of what it did. Other times I’d 
2342
2343just find a nameless explanation, with no indication as to whether the capability it described was an active program 
2344
2345or an aspirational desire. I was running up against compartments within compartments, caveats within caveats, suites 
2346
2347within suites, programs within programs. This was the nature of the NSA—by design, the left hand rarely knew what the 
2348
2349right hand was doing.
2350
2351In a way, what I was doing reminded me of a documentary I once watched about map-making—specifically, about the  way 
2352
2353that nautical charts were created in the days before imaging and GPS. Ship captains would keep logs and note their 
2354
2355coordinates, which landbound mapmakers would then try to interpret. It was through the gradual accretion of this 
2356
2357data, over hundreds of years, that the full extent of the Pacific became known, and all its islands identified.
2358
2359But I didn’t have hundreds of years or hundreds of ships. I was alone, one man hunched over a blank blue ocean, 
2360
2361trying to find where this one speck of dry land, this one data point, belonged in relation to all the others.
236220
2363
2364Heartbeat
2365
2366Back in 2009 in Japan, when I went to that fateful China conference as a substitute briefer, I  guess I’d  made some 
2367
2368friends, especially at  the  Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA) and its parent agency, the Defense 
2369
2370Intelligence Agency (DIA). In the three years since, JCITA had invited me a half-dozen or so times to give seminars 
2371
2372and lectures at DIA facilities. Essentially, I was teaching classes in how the American Intelligence Community could 
2373
2374protect itself from Chinese hackers and exploit the information gained from analyzing their hacks to hack them in 
2375
2376return.
2377
2378I always enjoyed teaching—certainly more than I ever enjoyed being a student—and in the early days of my 
2379
2380disillusionment, toward the end of Japan and through my time at Dell, I had the sense that were I to stay in 
2381
2382intelligence work for the rest of my career, the positions in which my principles would be least compromised, and my 
2383
2384mind most challenged, would almost certainly be academic. Teaching with JCITA was a way of keeping that door open. It 
2385
2386was also a way of keeping up to date—when you’re teaching, you can’t let your students get ahead of you, especially 
2387
2388in technology.
2389
2390This put me in the regular habit of perusing what the NSA called “readboards.” These are digital bulletin boards that 
2391
2392function something like news blogs, only the “news” here is the product of classified intelligence activities. Each  
2393
2394major  NSA  site  maintains its  own,  which  its  local  staff updates daily with what they regard as the day’s most 
2395
2396important and interesting documents—everything an employee has to read to keep current.
2397
2398As  a  holdover from my JCITA lecture preparation, and also, frankly, because I was bored in Hawaii, I got into the 
2399
2400habit of checking a number of these boards every day: my own site’s readboard in Hawaii, the readboard of my former 
2401
2402posting in Tokyo, and various readboards from Fort Meade. This new low-pressure position gave me as much time to read 
2403
2404as I wanted. The scope of my curiosity might have raised a few questions at a prior stage of my career, but now I was 
2405
2406the only employee of the Office of Information Sharing
2407—I was the Office of Information Sharing—so my very job was to know what sharable information was out there. 
2408
2409Meanwhile, most of my colleagues at the Tunnel spent their breaks streaming Fox News.
2410
2411In the hopes of organizing all the documents I wanted to read from these various readboards, I put together a 
2412
2413personal best-of-the-readboards queue. The files quickly began to pile up, until the nice lady who managed the 
2414
2415digital
2416storage quotas complained to me about the folder size. I realized that my personal readboard had become less a daily 
2417
2418digest than an archive of sensitive information with relevance far beyond the day’s immediacy. Not wanting to erase 
2419
2420it or stop adding to it, which would’ve been a waste, I decided instead to share it with others. This was the best 
2421
2422justification for what I was doing that I could think of, especially because it allowed me to more or less 
2423
2424legitimately collect material from a wider range of sources. So, with my boss’s approval, I set about creating an 
2425
2426automated readboard—one that didn’t rely on anybody posting things to it, but edited itself.
2427
2428Like EPICSHELTER, my automated readboard platform was designed to perpetually scan for new and unique documents. It 
2429
2430did so in a far more comprehensive manner, however, peering beyond NSAnet, the NSA’s network, into the networks of 
2431
2432the CIA and the FBI as well as into the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), the Department of 
2433
2434Defense’s top-secret intranet. The idea was that its findings would be made available to every NSA officer by 
2435
2436comparing their digital identity badges— called PKI certificates—to the classification of the documents, generating a 
2437
2438personal readboard customized to their clearances, interests, and office affiliations. Essentially, it would be a 
2439
2440readboard of readboards, an individually tailored newsfeed aggregator, bringing each officer all the newest 
2441
2442information pertinent to their work, all the documents they had to read to stay current. It would be run from a 
2443
2444server that I alone managed, located just down the hall from me. That server would also store a copy of every 
2445
2446document it sourced, making it easy for me to perform the kind of deep interagency searches that the heads of most 
2447
2448agencies could only dream of.
2449
2450I called this system Heartbeat, because it took the pulse of the NSA and of the wider IC. The volume of information 
2451
2452that crashed through its veins was simply enormous, as it pulled documents from internal sites dedicated to every 
2453
2454specialty from updates on the latest cryptographic research projects to minutes of the meetings of the National 
2455
2456Security Council. I’d carefully configured it to ingest materials at a slow, constant pace, so as not to monopolize 
2457
2458the undersea fiber-optic cable tying Hawaii to Fort Meade, but it still pulled so many more documents than any human 
2459
2460ever could that it immediately became the NSAnet’s most comprehensive readboard.
2461
2462Early on in its operation I got an email that almost stopped Heartbeat forever. A faraway administrator—apparently 
2463
2464the only one in the entire IC who actually bothered to look at his access logs—wanted to know why a system in Hawaii 
2465
2466was copying, one by one, every record in his database. He had immediately blocked me as a precaution, which 
2467
2468effectively locked me
2469out, and was demanding an explanation. I told him what I was doing and showed him how to use the internal website 
2470
2471that would let him read Heartbeat for himself. His response reminded me of an unusual characteristic of the 
2472
2473technologists’ side of the security state: once I gave him access, his wariness instantly turned into curiosity. He 
2474
2475might have doubted a person, but he’d never doubt a machine. He could now see that Heartbeat was just doing what it’d 
2476
2477been meant to do, and was doing it perfectly. He was fascinated. He unblocked me from his repository of records, and 
2478
2479even offered to help me by circulating information about Heartbeat to his colleagues.
2480
2481Nearly all of the documents that I later disclosed to journalists came to me through Heartbeat. It showed me not just 
2482
2483the aims but the abilities of the IC’s mass surveillance system. This is something I want to emphasize: in mid-
24842012, I was just trying to get a handle on how mass surveillance actually worked. Almost every journalist who later 
2485
2486reported on the disclosures was primarily concerned with the targets of surveillance—the efforts to spy on American 
2487
2488citizens, for instance, or on the leaders of America’s allies. That is to say, they were more interested in the 
2489
2490topics of the surveillance reports than in the system that produced them. I respect that interest, of course, having 
2491
2492shared it myself, but my own primary curiosity was still technical in nature. It’s all well and good to read a 
2493
2494document or to click through the slides of a PowerPoint presentation to find out what a program is intended to do, 
2495
2496but the better you can understand a program’s mechanics, the better you can understand its potential for abuse.
2497
2498This meant that I wasn’t much interested in the briefing materials—like, for example, what has become perhaps the 
2499
2500best-known file I disclosed, a slide deck from a 2011 PowerPoint presentation that delineated the NSA’s new 
2501
2502surveillance posture as a matter of six protocols: “Sniff It All, Know It All, Collect It All, Process It All, 
2503
2504Exploit It All, Partner It All.” This was just PR speak, marketing jargon. It was intended to impress America’s 
2505
2506allies: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK, the primary countries with which the United States shares 
2507
2508intelligence. (Together with the United States, these countries are known as the Five Eyes.) “Sniff It All” meant 
2509
2510finding a data source; “Know It All” meant finding out what that data was; “Collect It All” meant capturing that 
2511
2512data; “Process It All” meant analyzing that data for usable intelligence; “Exploit It All” meant using that 
2513
2514intelligence to further the agency’s aims; and “Partner It All” meant sharing the new data source with allies. While 
2515
2516this six-pronged taxonomy was easy to remember, easy to sell, and an accurate measure of the scale of the agency’s 
2517
2518ambition and the degree of its collusion with foreign governments, it gave me no insight into
2519how exactly that ambition was realized in technological terms.
2520
2521Much more revealing was an order I found from the FISA Court, a legal demand for a private company to turn over its 
2522
2523customers’ private information to the federal government. Orders such as these were notionally issued on the 
2524
2525authority of public legislation; however, their contents, even their existence, were classified Top Secret. According 
2526
2527to Section 215 of the Patriot Act, aka the “business records” provision, the government was authorized to obtain 
2528
2529orders from the FISA Court that compelled third parties to produce “any tangible thing” that was “relevant” to 
2530
2531foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations. But  as  the  court order I  found made clear, the  NSA had 
2532
2533secretly  interpreted  this  authorization  as  a  license  to  collect  all  of  the “business records,” or 
2534
2535metadata, of telephone communications coming through American telecoms, such as Verizon and AT&T, on “an ongoing 
2536
2537daily basis.” This included, of course, records of telephone communications between American citizens, the practice 
2538
2539of which was unconstitutional.
2540
2541Additionally, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows the IC to target any foreigner outside the United States 
2542
2543deemed likely to communicate “foreign intelligence information”—a broad category of potential targets that includes 
2544
2545journalists, corporate employees, academics, aid workers, and countless others innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever. 
2546
2547This legislation was being used by the NSA to justify its two most prominent Internet surveillance methods: the PRISM 
2548
2549program and upstream collection.
2550
2551PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, 
2552
2553AOL, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content, search engine queries, and all 
2554
2555other data stored on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream collection, 
2556
2557meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private-sector 
2558
2559Internet  infrastructure—the switches  and  routers  that  shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the satellites in 
2560
2561orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean. This collection was managed by the NSA’s 
2562
2563Special Sources Operations unit, which built secret wiretapping equipment and embedded it inside the corporate 
2564
2565facilities of obliging Internet service providers around the world. Together, PRISM (collection from the servers of 
2566
2567service providers) and upstream collection (direct collection from Internet infrastructure) ensured that the world’s 
2568
2569information, both stored and in transit, was surveillable.
2570
2571The next stage of my investigation was to figure out how this collection
2572was actually accomplished—that is to say, to examine the documents that explained which tools supported this program 
2573
2574and how they selected from among the vast mass of dragneted communications those that were thought worthy of closer 
2575
2576inspection. The difficulty was that this information did not exist in any presentation, no matter the level of 
2577
2578classification, but only in engineering diagrams and raw schematics. These were the most important materials for me 
2579
2580to find. Unlike the Five Eyes’ pitch-deck cant, they would be concrete proof that the capacities I was reading about 
2581
2582weren’t merely the fantasies of an overcaffeinated project manager. As a systems guy who was always being prodded to 
2583
2584build faster and deliver more, I was all too aware that the agencies would sometimes announce technologies before 
2585
2586they even existed—sometimes because a Cliff-type salesperson had made one too many promises, and sometimes just out 
2587
2588of unalloyed ambition.
2589
2590In this case, the technologies behind upstream collection did exist. As I came to realize, these tools are the most 
2591
2592invasive elements of the NSA’s mass surveillance system, if only because they’re the closest to the user—that is, the 
2593
2594closest to the person being surveilled. Imagine yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a 
2595
2596Web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of 
2597
2598its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it 
2599
2600will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.
2601
2602Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on top of one another, together about the size 
2603
2604of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed in  special  rooms  at  major  private  telecommunications buildings 
2605
2606throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military bases, and contain two critical tools. The 
2607
2608first, TURMOIL, handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second, TURBINE, is in 
2609
2610charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering with the users.
2611
2612You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. 
2613
2614Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. 
2615
2616Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, 
2617
2618credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or  destination of  your  Internet activity; or  just  certain 
2619
2620keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.”
2621
2622If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE,
2623which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware 
2624
2625programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your 
2626
2627computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the 
2628
2629QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with 
2630
2631whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you 
2632
2633don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.
2634
2635Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire 
2636
2637digital life now belongs to them.
263821
2639
2640Whistleblowing
2641
2642If any NSA employee who didn’t work with the SharePoint software I managed knew anything at all about SharePoint, 
2643
2644they knew the calendars. These  were  pretty  much  the  same  as  any  normal  nongovernment group calendars, just 
2645
2646way more expensive, providing the basic when-and-where-do- I-have-to-be-at-a-meeting scheduling interface for NSA 
2647
2648personnel in Hawaii. This was about as exciting for me to manage as you might imagine. That’s why I tried to spice it 
2649
2650up by making sure the calendar always had reminders of all the holidays, and I mean all of them: not just the federal 
2651
2652holidays, but Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali.
2653
2654Then there was my favorite, the seventeenth of September. Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, which is the 
2655
2656holiday’s formal name, commemorates the moment in 1787 when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention officially 
2657
2658ratified, or signed, the document. Technically, Constitution Day is not a federal holiday, just a federal observance, 
2659
2660meaning that Congress didn’t think our country’s founding document and the oldest national constitution still in use 
2661
2662in the world were important enough to justify giving people a paid day off.
2663
2664The   Intelligence   Community   had   always   had   an   uncomfortable relationship  with  Constitution  Day,  
2665
2666which  meant  its  involvement  was typically limited to circulating a bland email drafted by its agencies’ press 
2667
2668shops and signed by Director So-and-So, and setting up a sad little table in a forgotten corner of the cafeteria. On 
2669
2670the table would be some free copies of the Constitution printed, bound, and donated to the government by the kind and 
2671
2672generous rabble-rousers at places like the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation, since the IC was rarely 
2673
2674interested in spending some of its own billions on promoting civil liberties through stapled paper.
2675
2676I suppose the staff got the message, or didn’t: over the seven Constitution Days I spent in the IC, I don’t think I’d 
2677
2678ever known anyone but myself to actually take a copy off the table. Because I love irony almost as much as I love 
2679
2680freebies, I’d always take a few—one for myself, and the others to salt across my friends’ workstations. I kept my 
2681
2682copy propped against the Rubik’s Cube on my desk, and for a time made a habit of reading it over lunch, trying not to 
2683
2684drip grease on “We the People” from one of the cafeteria’s grim slices of elementary-school pizza.
2685
2686I  liked  reading  the  Constitution partially  because  its  ideas  are  great,
2687partially because its prose is good, but really because it freaked out my coworkers. In an office where everything 
2688
2689you printed had to be thrown into a shredder after you were done with it, someone would always be intrigued by the 
2690
2691presence of hard-copy pages lying on a desk. They’d amble over to ask, “What have you got there?”
2692
2693“The Constitution.”
2694
2695Then they’d make a face and back away slowly.
2696
2697On Constitution Day 2012, I picked up the document in earnest. I hadn’t really read the whole thing in quite a few 
2698
2699years, though I was glad to note that I still knew the preamble by heart. Now, however, I read through it in its 
2700
2701entirety, from the Articles to the Amendments. I was surprised to be reminded that fully 50 percent of the Bill of 
2702
2703Rights, the document’s first ten amendments, were intended to make the job of law enforcement harder. The Fourth, 
2704
2705Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments were all deliberately, carefully  designed  to  create  inefficiencies  
2706
2707and  hamper  the  government’s ability to exercise its power and conduct surveillance.
2708
2709This is especially true of the Fourth, which protects people and their property from government scrutiny: The right 
2710
2711of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, 
2712
2713shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and 
2714
2715particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
2716
2717Translation: If officers of the law want to go rooting through your life, they first have to go before a judge and 
2718
2719show probable cause under oath. This means they have to explain to a judge why they have reason to believe that you 
2720
2721might have committed a specific crime or that specific evidence of a specific crime might be found on or in a 
2722
2723specific part of your property. Then they have to swear that this reason has been given honestly and in good faith. 
2724
2725Only if the judge approves a warrant will they be allowed to go searching— and even then, only for a limited time.
2726
2727The Constitution was written in the eighteenth century, back when the only computers were abacuses, gear calculators, 
2728
2729and looms, and it could take weeks or months for a communication to cross the ocean by ship. It stands to reason that 
2730
2731computer files, whatever their contents, are our version of the Constitution’s “papers.” We certainly use them like 
2732
2733“papers,” particularly our word-processing documents and spreadsheets, our messages and histories of inquiry. Data, 
2734
2735meanwhile, is our version of “effects,” a catchall term for all
2736the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online. That includes, by default, metadata, which is the record of all 
2737
2738the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online—a perfect ledger of our private lives.
2739
2740In the centuries since the original Constitution Day, our clouds, computers, and phones have become our homes, just 
2741
2742as personal and intimate as our actual houses nowadays. If you don’t agree, then answer me this: Would you rather let 
2743
2744your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your 
2745
2746unlocked phone?
2747
2748The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment 
2749
2750completely. The agency was essentially making a claim that the amendment’s protections didn’t apply to modern-day 
2751
2752lives. The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor 
2753
2754regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure.” Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had  
2755
2756already  “shared”  your  phone  records  with  a  “third  party”—your telephone service provider—you had forfeited 
2757
2758any constitutional privacy interest you may once have had. And it insisted that “search” and “seizure” occurred only 
2759
2760when its analysts, not its algorithms, actively queried what had already been automatically collected.
2761
2762Had constitutional oversight mechanisms been functioning properly, this extremist interpretation of the Fourth 
2763
2764Amendment—effectively holding that the very act of using modern technologies is tantamount to a surrender of your 
2765
2766privacy rights—would have been rejected by Congress and the courts. America’s Founders were skilled engineers of 
2767
2768political power, particularly attuned to the perils posed by legal subterfuge and the temptations of the presidency 
2769
2770toward exercising monarchical authority. To forestall such eventualities, they designed a system, laid out in the 
2771
2772Constitution’s first three articles, that established the US government in three coequal branches, each supposed to 
2773
2774provide checks and balances to the others. But when it came to protecting the privacy of American citizens in the 
2775
2776digital age, each of these branches failed in its own way, causing the entire system to halt and catch fire.
2777
2778The legislative branch, the two houses of Congress, willingly abandoned its supervisory role: even as the number of 
2779
2780IC government employees and private contractors was exploding, the number of congresspeople who were kept informed 
2781
2782about the IC’s capabilities and activities kept dwindling, until only a few special committee members were apprised 
2783
2784in closed-door hearings. Even then they were only informed of some, but not all, of the IC’s activities.
2785When rare public hearings on the IC were held, the NSA’s position was made strikingly clear: The agency would not 
2786
2787cooperate, it would not be honest, and, what was worse, through classification and claims of secrecy it would force 
2788
2789America’s federal legislatures to collaborate in its deception. In early 2013, for  instance,  James  Clapper,  then  
2790
2791the  director  of  National  Intelligence, testified under oath to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 
2792
2793that the  NSA  did  not  engage  in  bulk  collection  of  the  communications  of American citizens. To the 
2794
2795question, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper 
2796
2797replied, “No, sir,” and then added, “There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not 
2798
2799wittingly.” That was a witting, bald-faced lie, of course, not just to Congress but to the American people. More than 
2800
2801a few of the congresspeople to whom Clapper was testifying knew very well that what he was saying was untrue, yet 
2802
2803they refused, or felt legally powerless, to call him out on it.
2804
2805The failure of the judiciary was, if anything, even more disappointing. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 
2806
2807(FISC), which oversees intelligence surveillance within the United States, is a specialized body that meets in secret 
2808
2809 and  hears  only  from  the  government.  It  was  designed  to  grant individual warrants for foreign intelligence 
2810
2811collection, and has always been especially accommodating to the NSA, approving well over 99 percent of the agency’s 
2812
2813requests—a rate more suggestive of a ministerial rubber stamp than a deliberative judicial process. After 9/11, the 
2814
2815court expanded its role from authorizing the surveillance of specific individuals to ruling on the legality and 
2816
2817constitutionality of broad programmatic surveillance, without any adversarial scrutiny. A body that previously had 
2818
2819been tasked with approving the surveillance of Foreign Terrorist #1 or Foreign Spy #2 was now being used to 
2820
2821legitimize the whole combined infrastructure of PRISM and upstream collection. Judicial review of that infrastructure 
2822
2823was reduced, in the words of the ACLU to a secret court upholding secret programs by secretly reinterpreting federal 
2824
2825law.
2826
2827When civil society groups like the ACLU tried to challenge the NSA’s activities in ordinary, open federal courts, a 
2828
2829curious thing happened. The government didn’t defend itself on the ground that the surveillance activities were legal 
2830
2831or constitutional. It declared, instead, that the ACLU and its clients had no right to be in court at all, because 
2832
2833the ACLU could not prove that its clients had in fact been surveilled. Moreover, the ACLU could not use the 
2834
2835litigation to seek evidence of surveillance, because the existence (or nonexistence) of that evidence was “a state 
2836
2837secret,” and leaks to journalists
2838didn’t count. In other words, the court couldn’t recognize the information that was publicly known from having been 
2839
2840published in the media; it could only recognize the information that the government officially confirmed as being 
2841
2842publicly known. This invocation of classification meant that neither the ACLU, nor anyone else, could ever establish 
2843
2844standing to raise a legal challenge in open court. To my disgust, in February 2013 the US Supreme Court decided 5 to 
2845
28464 to accept the government’s reasoning and dismissed an ACLU and Amnesty International lawsuit challenging mass 
2847
2848surveillance without even considering the legality of the NSA’s activities.
2849
2850Finally, there was the executive branch, the primary cause of this constitutional breach. The president’s office, 
2851
2852through the Justice Department, had committed the original sin of secretly issuing directives that authorized mass  
2853
2854surveillance  in  the  wake  of  9/11.  Executive  overreach  has  only continued in the decades since, with 
2855
2856administrations of both parties seeking to act unilaterally and establish policy directives that circumvent law—
2857
2858policy directives that cannot be challenged, since their classification keeps them from being publicly known.
2859
2860The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its three branches works as intended. When 
2861
2862all three don’t just fail, but fail deliberately and  with  coordination, the  result is  a  culture of  impunity. I 
2863
2864realized that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or President Obama, seeking to 
2865
2866distance his administration from President George W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible—for anything. 
2867
2868It was time to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how broken the process was, 
2869
2870they were right. The IC had come to understand the rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and 
2871
2872they used that knowledge to their advantage.
2873
2874They’d hacked the Constitution.
2875
2876
2877
2878AMERICA WAS BORN from an act of treason. The Declaration of Independence was  an  outrageous violation of  the  laws  
2879
2880of  England and  yet  the  fullest expression of what the Founders called the “Laws of Nature,” among which was the 
2881
2882right to defy the powers of the day and rebel on point of principle, according to the dictates of one’s conscience. 
2883
2884The first Americans to exercise
2885this right, the first “whistleblowers” in American history, appeared one year
2886later—in 1777.
2887
2888These men, like so many of the men in my family, were sailors, officers of
2889the Continental Navy who, in defense of their new land, had taken to the sea. During the Revolution, they served on 
2890
2891the USS Warren, a thirty-two-gun frigate under the command of Commodore Esek Hopkins, the commander in chief of the 
2892
2893Continental Navy. Hopkins was a lazy and intractable leader who refused to bring his vessel into combat. His officers 
2894
2895also claimed to have witnessed him  beating and  starving British prisoners of  war.  Ten  of  the Warren’s officers
2896
2897—after consulting their consciences, and with barely a thought for their careers—reported all of this up the chain of 
2898
2899command, writing to the Marine Committee:
2900
2901Much Respected Gentlemen,
2902
2903We who present this petition are engaged on board the ship Warren with an earnest desire and fixed expectation of 
2904
2905doing our country some service. We are still anxious for the Weal of America & wish nothing more earnestly than to 
2906
2907see her in peace & prosperity. We are ready to hazard every thing that is dear & if necessary sacrifice our lives for 
2908
2909the welfare of our country. We are desirous of being active in the defence  of our constitutional  liberties  and 
2910
2911privileges against the unjust cruel claims of tyranny & oppression; but as things are now circumstanced on board this 
2912
2913frigate, there seems to be no prospect of our being serviceable in our present station. We  have  been  in  this  
2914
2915situation  for  a  considerable  space  of  time.  We  are  personally  well acquainted with the real character & 
2916
2917conduct of our commander, Commodore Hopkins, & we take this method not having a more convenient opportunity of 
2918
2919sincerely & humbly petitioning the honorable Marine Committee that they would inquire into his character & conduct, 
2920
2921for we suppose that his character is such & that he has been guilty of such crimes as render him quite unfit  for  
2922
2923the  public  department  he  now  occupies,  which  crimes,  we  the  subscribers  can sufficiently attest.
2924
2925After receiving this letter, the Marine Committee investigated Commodore Hopkins. He reacted by dismissing his 
2926
2927officers and crew, and in a fit of rage filed a criminal libel suit against Midshipman Samuel Shaw and Third 
2928
2929Lieutenant Richard Marven, the two officers who admitted to having authored the petition. The suit was filed in the 
2930
2931courts of Rhode Island, whose last colonial governor had been Stephen Hopkins, a signatory to the Declaration of 
2932
2933Independence and the commodore’s brother.
2934
2935The case was assigned to a judge appointed by Governor Hopkins, but before the trial commenced Shaw and Marven were 
2936
2937saved by a fellow naval officer, John Grannis, who broke ranks and presented their case directly to the Continental 
2938
2939Congress. The  Continental Congress was  so  alarmed  by  the precedent being set by allowing military complaints 
2940
2941regarding dereliction of duty to be subject to the criminal charge of libel that it intervened. On July 30,
29421778, it terminated the command of Commodore Hopkins, ordered the Treasury Office to pay Shaw and Marven’s legal 
2943
2944fees, and by unanimous consent enacted America’s first whistleblower protection law. This law declared it “the duty 
2945
2946of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest 
2947
2948information to Congress or
2949any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the 
2950
2951service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”
2952
2953The law gave me hope—and it still does. Even at the darkest hour of the Revolution, with the very existence of the 
2954
2955country at stake, Congress didn’t just welcome an act of principled dissent, it enshrined such acts as duties. By the 
2956
2957latter half of 2012, I was resolved to perform this duty myself, though I knew I’d be making my disclosures at a very 
2958
2959different time—a time both more comfortable and more cynical. Few if any of my IC superiors would have sacrificed 
2960
2961their careers for the same American principles for which military personnel regularly sacrifice their lives. And in 
2962
2963my case, going up “the chain of command,” which the IC prefers to call “the proper channels,” wasn’t an option as it 
2964
2965was for the ten men who crewed on the Warren. My superiors were not only aware of what the agency was doing, they 
2966
2967were actively directing it—they were complicit.
2968
2969In organizations like the NSA—in which malfeasance has become so structural as to be a matter not of any particular 
2970
2971initiative, but of an ideology
2972—proper channels can only become a trap, to catch the heretics and disfavorables. I’d already experienced the failure 
2973
2974of command back in Warrenton, and then again in Geneva, where in the regular course of my duties I had discovered a 
2975
2976security vulnerability in a critical program. I’d reported the vulnerability, and when nothing was done about it I 
2977
2978reported that, too. My supervisors weren’t happy that I’d done so, because their supervisors weren’t happy, either. 
2979
2980The chain of command is truly a chain that binds, and the lower links can only be lifted by the higher.
2981
2982Coming from a Coast Guard family, I’ve always been fascinated by how much of the English language vocabulary of 
2983
2984disclosure has a nautical undercurrent. Even before the days of the USS Warren, organizations, like ships, sprang 
2985
2986leaks. When steam replaced wind for propulsion, whistles were blown at sea to signal intentions and emergencies: one 
2987
2988whistle to pass by port, two whistles to pass by starboard, five for a warning.
2989
2990The same terms in European languages, meanwhile, often have fraught political valences conditioned by historical 
2991
2992context. French used dénonciateur throughout much of the twentieth century, until the word’s WWII-era association 
2993
2994with being a “denouncer” or “informant” for the Germans led to a preference for lanceur d’alerte (“one who launches a 
2995
2996warning”). German, a language that has struggled with its culture’s Nazi and Stasi past, evolved beyond its own 
2997
2998Denunziant and Informant to settle on the unsatisfactory
2999Hinweisgeber (a “hint- or tip-giver”), Enthueller (“revealer”), Skandalaufdecker  (“scandal-uncoverer”), and  even  
3000
3001the  pointedly  political ethische Dissidenten (“ethical dissident”). German uses few of these words online, however; 
3002
3003with respect to today’s Internet-based disclosures, it has simply borrowed the noun Whistleblower and the verb 
3004
3005leaken. The languages of regimes like Russia and China, for their part, employ terms that bear the pejorative sense 
3006
3007of “snitch” and “traitor.” It would take the existence of a strong free press in those societies to imbue those words 
3008
3009with a more positive coloration, or to coin new ones that would frame disclosure not as a betrayal but as an 
3010
3011honorable duty.
3012
3013Ultimately, every language, including English, demonstrates its culture’s relationship to power by how it chooses to 
3014
3015define the act of disclosure. Even the nautically derived English words that seem neutral and benign frame the act 
3016
3017from the perspective of the institution that perceives itself wronged, not of the public that the institution has 
3018
3019failed. When an institution decries “a leak,” it is implying that the “leaker” damaged or sabotaged something.
3020
3021Today, “leaking” and “whistleblowing” are often treated as interchangeable. But to my mind, the term “leaking” should 
3022
3023be used differently  than  it  commonly  is.  It  should  be  used  to  describe  acts  of disclosure done not out of 
3024
3025public interest but out of self-interest, or in pursuit of institutional or political aims. To be more precise, I 
3026
3027understand a leak as something closer to a “plant,” or an incidence of “propaganda-seeding”: the selective release of 
3028
3029protected information in order to sway popular opinion or affect the course of decision making. It is rare for even a 
3030
3031day to go by in which some “unnamed” or “anonymous” senior government official does not leak, by way of a hint or tip 
3032
3033to a journalist, some classified item that advances their own agenda or the efforts of their agency or party.
3034
3035This dynamic is perhaps most brazenly exemplified by a 2013 incident in which IC officials, likely seeking to inflate 
3036
3037the threat of terrorism and deflect criticism of mass surveillance, leaked to a few news websites extraordinarily 
3038
3039detailed accounts of a conference call between al-Qaeda leader Ayman al- Zawahiri and his global affiliates. In this 
3040
3041so-called conference call of doom, al-Zawahiri purportedly discussed organizational cooperation with Nasser al- 
3042
3043Wuhayshi,  the  leader  of  al-Qaeda  in  Yemen,  and  representatives of  the Taliban  and  Boko  Haram.  By  
3044
3045disclosing  the  ability  to  intercept  this conference call—that is, if we’re to believe this leak, which consisted 
3046
3047of a description of the call, not a recording—the IC irrevocably burned an extraordinary means of apprising itself of 
3048
3049the plans and intentions of the highest ranks of terrorist leadership, purely for the sake of a momentary
3050political advantage in the news cycle. Not a single person was prosecuted as a result of this stunt, though it was 
3051
3052most certainly illegal, and cost America the ability to keep wiretapping the alleged al-Qaeda hotline.
3053
3054Time and again, America’s political class has proven itself willing to tolerate, even generate leaks that serve its 
3055
3056own ends. The IC often announces its “successes,” regardless of their classification and regardless of the 
3057
3058consequences. Nowhere in recent memory has that been more apparent than in the leaks relating to the extrajudicial 
3059
3060killing of the American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in Yemen. By breathlessly publicizing its drone attack 
3061
3062on al-Aulaqi to the Washington Post and the New York Times, the Obama administration was tacitly admitting the 
3063
3064existence of the CIA’s drone program and its “disposition matrix,” or kill list, both of which are officially top 
3065
3066secret. Additionally, the government was implicitly confirming that it engaged not just in targeted assassinations, 
3067
3068but in targeted assassinations of American citizens. These leaks, accomplished in the coordinated fashion of a media 
3069
3070campaign, were shocking demonstrations of the state’s situational approach to secrecy: a  seal  that  must  be  
3071
3072maintained for  the  government to  act  with impunity, but that can be broken whenever the government seeks to claim 
3073
3074credit.
3075
3076It’s only in this context that the US government’s latitudinal relationship to leaking can be fully understood. It 
3077
3078has forgiven “unauthorized” leaks when they’ve resulted in  unexpected benefits, and  forgotten “authorized” leaks 
3079
3080when they’ve caused harm. But if a leak’s harmfulness and lack of authorization, not to mention its essential 
3081
3082illegality, make scant difference to the government’s reaction, what does? What makes one disclosure permissible, and 
3083
3084another not?
3085
3086The answer is power. The answer is control. A disclosure is deemed acceptable only if it doesn’t challenge the 
3087
3088fundamental prerogatives of an institution. If all the disparate components of an organization, from its mailroom to 
3089
3090its executive suite, can be assumed to have the same power to discuss   internal   matters,   then   its   executives 
3091
3092  have   surrendered   their information control, and the organization’s continued functioning is put in jeopardy. 
3093
3094Seizing this equality of voice, independent of an organization’s managerial or decision-making hierarchy, is what is 
3095
3096properly meant by the term “whistleblowing”—an act that’s particularly threatening to the IC, which operates  by  
3097
3098strict  compartmentalization under  a  legally  codified  veil  of secrecy.
3099
3100A  “whistleblower,”  in  my  definition,  is  a  person  who  through  hard
3101experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed 
3102
3103in—and the loyalty owed to—the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable. This 
3104
3105person knows that they can’t remain inside the institution, and knows that the institution can’t or won’t be 
3106
3107dismantled. Reforming the institution might be possible, however, so they blow the whistle and disclose the 
3108
3109information to bring public pressure to bear.
3110
3111This is an adequate description of my situation, with one crucial addition: all the information I intended to 
3112
3113disclose was classified top secret. To blow the whistle on secret programs, I’d also have to blow the whistle on the 
3114
3115larger system of secrecy, to expose it not as the absolute prerogative of state that the IC claimed it was but rather 
3116
3117as an occasional privilege that the IC abused to subvert democratic oversight. Without bringing to light the full 
3118
3119scope of this systemic secrecy, there would be no hope of restoring a balance of power between citizens and their 
3120
3121governance. This motive of restoration I take to be essential to whistleblowing: it marks the disclosure not as a 
3122
3123radical act of dissent or resistance, but a conventional act of return—signaling the ship to return back to port, 
3124
3125where it’ll be stripped, refitted, and patched of its leaks before being given the chance to start over.
3126
3127A total exposure of the total apparatus of mass surveillance—not by me, but by the media, the de facto fourth branch 
3128
3129of the US government, protected by the Bill of Rights: that was the only response appropriate to the scale of the 
3130
3131crime. It wouldn’t be enough, after all, to merely reveal a particular abuse or set of abuses, which the agency could 
3132
3133stop (or pretend to stop) while preserving the rest of the shadowy apparatus intact. Instead, I was resolved to bring 
3134
3135 to  light  a  single,  all-encompassing fact:  that  my  government  had developed and deployed a global system of 
3136
3137mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of its citizenry.
3138
3139Whistleblowers can be elected by circumstance at any working level of an institution. But digital technology has 
3140
3141brought us to an age in which, for the first time in  recorded history, the most effective will come up  from the 
3142
3143bottom, from the ranks traditionally least incentivized to maintain the status quo. In the IC, as in virtually every 
3144
3145other outsize decentralized institution that relies on computers, these lower ranks are rife with technologists like 
3146
3147myself, whose legitimate access to vital infrastructure is grossly out of proportion to their formal authority to 
3148
3149influence institutional decisions. In other words, there is usually an imbalance that obtains between what people 
3150
3151like me are intended to know and what we are able to know, and between the slight power we have to change the 
3152
3153institutional culture and the vast power we have to
3154address  our  concerns to  the  culture  at  large.  Though  such  technological privileges can certainly be abused—
3155
3156after all, most systems-level technologists have access to everything—the highest exercise of that privilege is in 
3157
3158cases involving the technology itself. Specialist abilities incur weightier responsibilities. Technologists seeking 
3159
3160to report on the systemic misuse of technology must do more than just bring their findings to the public, if the 
3161
3162significance of  those findings is  to  be  understood. They have a  duty  to contextualize and explain—to demystify.
3163
3164A few dozen or so of the people best positioned to do this in the whole entire world were here—they were sitting all 
3165
3166around me in the Tunnel. My fellow technologists came in every day and sat at their terminals and furthered the  work 
3167
3168 of  the  state.  They  weren’t merely  oblivious to  its  abuses, but incurious about them, and that lack of 
3169
3170curiosity made them not evil but tragic. It didn’t matter whether they’d come to the IC out of patriotism or 
3171
3172opportunism: once they’d gotten inside the machine, they became machines themselves.
317322
3174
3175Fourth Estate
3176
3177Nothing is harder than living with a secret that can’t be spoken. Lying to strangers about a cover identity or 
3178
3179concealing the fact that your office is under the world’s most top-secret pineapple field might sound like it 
3180
3181qualifies, but at least you’re part of a team: though your work may be secret, it’s a shared secret, and therefore a 
3182
3183shared burden. There is misery but also laughter.
3184
3185When you have a real secret, though, that you can’t share with anyone, even the laughter is a lie. I could talk about 
3186
3187my concerns, but never about where they were leading me. To the day I die I’ll remember explaining to my colleagues 
3188
3189how our work was being applied to violate the oaths we had sworn to uphold and their verbal shrug in response: “What 
3190
3191can you do about it?” I hated that question, its sense of resignation, its sense of defeat, but it still felt valid 
3192
3193enough that I had to ask myself, “Well, what?”
3194
3195When the answer presented itself, I decided to become a whistleblower. Yet to breathe to Lindsay, the love of my 
3196
3197life, even a word about that decision would have put our relationship to an even crueler test than saying nothing. 
3198
3199Not wishing to cause her any more harm than I was already resigned to causing, I kept silent, and in my silence I was 
3200
3201alone.
3202
3203I thought that solitude and isolation would be easy for me, or at least easier than it had been for my predecessors 
3204
3205in the whistleblowing world. Hadn’t each step of my life served as a kind of preparation? Hadn’t I gotten used to 
3206
3207being alone, after all those years spent hushed and spellbound in front of a screen? I’d been the solo hacker, the 
3208
3209night-shift harbormaster, the keeper of the keys in an empty office. But I  was human, too, and the lack of 
3210
3211companionship was hard. Each day was haunted by struggle, as I tried and failed to reconcile the moral and the legal, 
3212
3213my duties and my desires. I had everything I’d ever wanted—love, family, and success far beyond what I ever deserved
3214
3215—and I lived in Eden amid plentiful trees, only one of which was forbidden to me. The easiest thing should have been 
3216
3217to follow the rules.
3218
3219And even if I was already reconciled to the dangers of my decision, I wasn’t yet adjusted to the role. After all, who 
3220
3221was I to put this information in front of the American public? Who’d elected me the president of secrets?
3222
3223The information I intended to disclose about my country’s secret regime of mass surveillance was so explosive, and 
3224
3225yet so technical, that I was as scared of being doubted as I was of being misunderstood. That was why my first
3226decision, after resolving to go public, was to go public with documentation. The way to reveal a secret program might 
3227
3228have been merely to describe its existence, but the way to reveal programmatic secrecy was to describe its workings. 
3229
3230This required documents, the agency’s actual files—as many as necessary to expose the scope of the abuse though I 
3231
3232knew that disclosing even one PDF would be enough to earn me prison.
3233
3234The threat of government retribution against any entity or platform to which I made the disclosure led me to briefly 
3235
3236consider self-publishing. That would’ve been the most convenient and safest method: just collecting the documents 
3237
3238that best communicated my concerns and posting them online, as they were, then circulating a link. Ultimately, one of 
3239
3240my reasons for not pursuing this course had to do with authentication. Scores of people post “classified secrets” to 
3241
3242the Internet every day—many of them about time-travel technologies and aliens. I didn’t want my own revelations, 
3243
3244which were fairly incredible already, to get lumped in with the outlandish and lost among the crazy.
3245
3246It was clear to me then, from the earliest stage of the process, that I required, and that the public deserved, some 
3247
3248person or institution to vouch for the veracity of the documents. I also wanted a partner to vet the potential 
3249
3250hazards posed by the revelation of classified information, and to help explain that information by putting it in 
3251
3252technological and legal context. I trusted myself to present the problems with surveillance, and even to analyze 
3253
3254them, but  I’d  have  to  trust  others  to  solve  them.  Regardless of  how  wary  of institutions I might have 
3255
3256been by this point, I was far warier of trying to act like one myself. Cooperating with some type of media 
3257
3258organization would defend me against the worst accusations of rogue activity, and correct for whatever biases I had, 
3259
3260whether they were conscious or unconscious, personal or professional. I  didn’t want any political opinion of mine to 
3261
3262prejudice anything with regard to the presentation, or reception, of the disclosures. After all, in a country in 
3263
3264which everyone was being surveilled, no issue was less partisan than surveillance.
3265
3266In retrospect, I have to credit at least some of my desire to find ideological filters to Lindsay’s improving 
3267
3268influence. Lindsay had spent years patiently instilling in me the lesson that my interests and concerns weren’t 
3269
3270always hers, and certainly weren’t always the world’s, and that just because I shared my knowledge didn’t mean that 
3271
3272anyone had to share my opinion. Not everybody who was opposed to invasions of privacy might be ready to adopt 256-bit 
3273
3274encryption standards or drop off the Internet entirely. An illegal act that disturbed one person as a violation of 
3275
3276the Constitution might upset another
3277person as a violation of their privacy, or of that of their spouse or children. Lindsay was my key to unlocking this 
3278
3279truth—that diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving common goals. She, without even 
3280
3281knowing it, gave me the confidence to conquer my qualms and reach out to other people.
3282
3283But  which  people? Who?  It  might  be  hard  to  remember, or  even  to imagine, but at the time when I first 
3284
3285considered coming forward, the whistleblower’s forum of choice was WikiLeaks. Back then, it operated in many respects 
3286
3287like a traditional publisher, albeit one that was radically skeptical of state power. WikiLeaks regularly joined up 
3288
3289with leading international  publications  like  the  Guardian,  the  New  York  Times,  Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El 
3290
3291País to publish the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news organizations accomplished 
3292
3293over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected 
3294
3295sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity.
3296
3297WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches 
3298
3299of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, 
3300
3301along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s 
3302
3303redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received 
3304
3305them: pristine and unredacted. This switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks 
3306
3307would not meet my needs. Effectually, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I’d already 
3308
3309rejected as insufficient. I knew that the story the NSA documents told about a global system of mass surveillance 
3310
3311deployed in the deepest secrecy was a difficult one to understand—a story so tangled and technical that I was 
3312
3313increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a “document dump,” but only by the patient and 
3314
3315careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the best scenario I could conceive of, with the support of multiple 
3316
3317independent press institutions.
3318
3319Though I felt some relief once I’d resolved to disclose directly to journalists, I still had some lingering 
3320
3321reservations. Most of them involved my country’s most prestigious publications—particularly America’s newspaper of 
3322
3323record, the New York Times. Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper 
3324
3325had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn’t stop reminding 
3326
3327myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the
3328government’s warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James
3329Risen.
3330
3331Those two journalists, by combining information from Justice Department whistleblowers with their own reporting, had 
3332
3333managed to uncover one aspect of STELLARWIND—the NSA’s original-recipe post-9/11 surveillance initiative—and had 
3334
3335produced a fully written, edited, and fact-checked article about it, ready to go to press by mid-2004. It was at this 
3336
3337point that the paper’s editor in chief, Bill Keller, ran the article past the government, as part of a courtesy 
3338
3339process whose typical purpose is for a publication’s editorial staff to have a chance to assess the government’s 
3340
3341arguments as to why the publication of certain information might endanger national security. In this case, as in most 
3342
3343cases, the government refused to provide a specific reason, but implied that one existed and that it was classified, 
3344
3345too. The Bush administration told Keller and the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, without providing any 
3346
3347evidence, that the Times would be emboldening America’s enemies and enabling terror if it went public with the 
3348
3349information that the government was wiretapping American citizens without a warrant. Unfortunately, the paper allowed 
3350
3351itself to be convinced and spiked the article. Lichtblau and Risen’s reporting finally ran, but over a year later, in 
3352
3353December 2005, and only after Risen pressured the paper by announcing that the material was included in a book of his 
3354
3355that was about to be released. Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have changed the 
3356
3357course of the 2004 election.
3358
3359If the Times, or any paper, did something similar to me—if it took my revelations, reported on them, submitted the 
3360
3361reporting for review, and then suppressed its publication—I’d be sunk. Given the likelihood of my identification as 
3362
3363the source, it would be tantamount to turning me in before any revelations were brought to the public.
3364
3365If I couldn’t trust a legacy newspaper, could I trust any institution? Why even bother? I hadn’t signed up for any of 
3366
3367this. I had just wanted to screw around with computers and maybe do some good for my country along the way. I had a 
3368
3369lease and a lover and my health was improved. Every STOP sign on my commute I took as advice to stop this voluntary 
3370
3371madness. My head and
3372heart were in conflict, with the only constant being the desperate hope that
3373somebody else, somewhere else, would figure it out on their own. After all, wasn’t journalism about following the 
3374
3375bread crumbs and connecting the dots? What else did reporters do all day, besides tweet?
3376
3377I knew at least two things about the denizens of the Fourth Estate: they competed for scoops, and they knew very 
3378
3379little about technology. It was this
3380lack of expertise or even interest in tech that largely caused journalists to miss two events that stunned me during 
3381
3382the course of my fact-gathering about mass surveillance.
3383
3384The first was the NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data facility in Bluffdale, Utah. The agency 
3385
3386called it the Massive Data Repository, until somebody with a knack for PR realized the name might be tough to explain 
3387
3388if it ever got out, so it was renamed the Mission Data Repository—because as long as you don’t change the acronym, 
3389
3390you don’t have to change all the briefing slides. The MDR was projected to contain a total of four twenty-five-
3391
3392thousand-square-foot halls, filled with servers. It could hold an immense amount of data, basically a rolling history 
3393
3394of the entire planet’s pattern of life, insofar as life can be understood through the connection of payments to 
3395
3396people, people to phones, phones to calls, calls to networks, and the synoptic array of Internet activity moving 
3397
3398along those networks’ lines.
3399
3400The only prominent journalist who seemed to notice the announcement was James Bamford, who wrote about it for Wired 
3401
3402in March 2012. There were a few follow-ups in the nontech press, but none of them furthered the reporting. No one 
3403
3404asked what, to me at least, were the most basic questions: Why does any government agency, let alone an intelligence 
3405
3406agency, need that much space? What data, and how much of it, do they really intend to store there, and for how long? 
3407
3408Because there was simply no reason to build something to those specs unless you were planning on storing absolutely 
3409
3410everything, forever. Here was, to my mind, the corpus delicti—the plain-as- day corroboration of a crime, in a 
3411
3412gigantic concrete bunker surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, sucking up a city’s worth of electricity from 
3413
3414its own power grid in the middle of the Utah desert. And no one was paying attention.
3415
3416The second event happened one year later, in March 2013—one week after Clapper lied to Congress and Congress gave him 
3417
3418a pass. A few periodicals had covered that testimony, though they merely regurgitated Clapper’s denial that the NSA 
3419
3420collected bulk data on Americans. But no so- called mainstream publication at all covered a rare public appearance by 
3421
3422Ira “Gus” Hunt, the chief technology officer of the CIA.
3423
3424I’d known Gus slightly from my Dell stint with the CIA. He was one of our top customers, and every vendor loved his 
3425
3426apparent inability to be discreet: he’d always tell you more than he was supposed to. For sales guys, he was like a 
3427
3428bag of money with a mouth. Now he was appearing as a special
3429guest  speaker at  a  civilian tech  event  in  New  York  called  the  GigaOM Structure: Data conference. Anyone 
3430
3431with $40 could go to it. The major talks, such as Gus’s, were streamed for free live online.
3432
3433The reason I’d made sure to catch his talk was that I’d just read, through internal NSA channels, that the CIA had 
3434
3435finally decided on the disposition of its cloud contract. It had refused my old team at Dell, and turned down HP, 
3436
3437too, instead signing a ten-year, $600 million cloud development and management deal with Amazon. I  had no  negative 
3438
3439feelings about this— actually, at this juncture, I was pleased that my work wasn’t going to be used by the agency. I 
3440
3441was just curious, from a professional standpoint, whether Gus might obliquely address this announcement and offer any 
3442
3443insight into why Amazon had been chosen, since rumors were going around that the proposal process had been rigged in 
3444
3445Amazon’s favor.
3446
3447I got insight, certainly, but of an unexpected kind. I had the opportunity of witnessing the highest-ranking 
3448
3449technical officer at the CIA stand onstage in a rumpled suit and brief a crowd of uncleared normies—and, via the 
3450
3451Internet, the uncleared world—about the agency’s ambitions and capacities. As his presentation unfolded, and he 
3452
3453alternated bad jokes with an even worse command of PowerPoint, I grew more and more incredulous.
3454
3455“At the CIA,” he said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.” As if that wasn’t 
3456
3457clear enough, he went on: “It is nearly within  our  grasp  to  compute  on  all  human  generated  information.” The 
3458
3459underline was Gus’s own. He was reading from his slide deck, ugly words in an ugly font illustrated with the 
3460
3461government’s signature four-color clip art.
3462
3463There were a few journalists in the crowd, apparently, though it seemed as if almost all of them were from specialty 
3464
3465tech-government publications like Federal Computer Week. It was telling that Gus stuck around for a Q & A toward the 
3466
3467conclusion of his presentation. Rather, it wasn’t quite a Q & A, but more like an auxiliary presentation, offered 
3468
3469directly to the journalists. He must have been trying to get something off his chest, and it wasn’t just his clown 
3470
3471tie.
3472
3473Gus told the journalists that the agency could track their smartphones, even when they were turned off—that the 
3474
3475agency could surveil every single one  of  their  communications. Remember: this  was  a  crowd  of  domestic 
3476
3477journalists. American journalists. And the way that Gus said “could” came off as “has,” “does,” and “will.” He 
3478
3479perorated in a distinctly disturbed, and disturbing, manner, at least for a CIA high priest: “Technology is moving 
3480
3481faster than government or law can keep up. It’s moving faster … than you can
3482keep up: you should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.” I was floored—anybody 
3483
3484more junior than Gus who had given a presentation like this would’ve been wearing orange by the end of the day.
3485
3486Coverage of Gus’s confession ran only in the Huffington Post. But the performance itself lived on at YouTube, where 
3487
3488it still remains, at least at the time of this writing six years later. The last time I checked, it had 313 views— a 
3489
3490dozen of them mine.
3491
3492The lesson I took from this was that for my disclosures to be effective, I had to do more than just hand some 
3493
3494journalists some documents—more, even, than help them interpret the documents. I had to become their partner, to 
3495
3496provide the technological training and tools to help them do their reporting accurately and safely. Taking this 
3497
3498course of action would mean giving myself over totally to one of the capital crimes of intelligence work: whereas 
3499
3500other spies have committed espionage, sedition, and treason, I would be aiding and abetting an act of journalism. The 
3501
3502perverse fact is that legally, those crimes are virtually synonymous. American law makes no distinction between 
3503
3504providing classified information to the press in the public interest and providing it, even selling it, to the enemy. 
3505
3506The only opinion I’ve ever found to contradict this came from my first indoctrination into the IC: there, I was told 
3507
3508that it was in fact slightly better to offer secrets for sale to the enemy than to offer them for free to a domestic 
3509
3510reporter. A reporter will tell the public, whereas an enemy is unlikely to share its prize even with its allies.
3511
3512Given the risks I was taking, I needed to identify people I could trust who were also trusted by the public. I needed 
3513
3514reporters who were diligent yet discreet, independent yet reliable. They would need to be strong enough to challenge 
3515
3516me on the distinctions between what I suspected and what the evidence proved, and to challenge the government when it 
3517
3518falsely accused their work of endangering lives. Above all, I had to be sure that whoever I picked wouldn’t 
3519
3520ultimately cave to power when put under pressure that was certain to be like nothing they, or I, had ever experienced 
3521
3522before.
3523
3524I cast my net not so widely as to imperil the mission, but widely enough to avoid a single point of failure—the New 
3525
3526York Times problem. One journalist, one publication, even one country of publication wouldn’t be enough, because the 
3527
3528US government had already demonstrated its willingness to stifle such reporting. Ideally, I’d give each journalist 
3529
3530their own set of documents simultaneously, leaving me with none. This would shift the focus of scrutiny to them, and 
3531
3532ensure that even if I were arrested the truth would still get out.
3533As I narrowed down my list of potential partners, I realized I’d been going about this all wrong, or just wastefully. 
3534
3535Instead of trying to select the journalists on my own, I should have been letting the system that I was trying to  
3536
3537expose  select  them  for  me.  My  best  partners,  I  decided,  would  be journalists whom the national security 
3538
3539state had already targeted.
3540
3541Laura Poitras I knew as a documentarian, primarily concerned with America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Her film My 
3542
3543Country, My Country depicted the 2005 Iraqi national elections that were conducted under (and frustrated by) the US 
3544
3545occupation. She had also made The Program, about the NSA cryptanalyst William Binney—who had raised objections 
3546
3547through proper channels about TRAILBLAZER, the predecessor of STELLARWIND, only to be accused of leaking classified 
3548
3549information, subjected to repeated harassment, and arrested at gunpoint in his home, though never charged. Laura 
3550
3551herself had been frequently harassed by the government because of her work, repeatedly detained and interrogated by 
3552
3553border agents whenever she traveled in or out of the country.
3554
3555Glenn Greenwald I knew as a civil liberties lawyer turned columnist, initially for  Salon—where he  was  one  of  the 
3556
3557 few  who  wrote  about  the unclassified version of the NSA IG’s Report back in 2009—and later for the US edition of 
3558
3559the Guardian. I liked him because he was skeptical and argumentative, the kind of man who’d fight with the devil, and 
3560
3561when the devil wasn’t around fight with himself. Though Ewen MacAskill, of the British edition of the Guardian, and 
3562
3563Bart Gellman of the Washington Post would later prove stalwart partners (and patient guides to the journalistic 
3564
3565wilderness), I found  my  earliest  affinity  with  Laura  and  Glenn,  perhaps  because  they weren’t merely 
3566
3567interested in reporting on the IC but had personal stakes in understanding the institution.
3568
3569The only hitch was getting in touch.
3570
3571Unable to reveal my true name, I contacted the journalists under a variety of identities, disposable masks worn for a 
3572
3573time and then discarded. The first of these was “Cincinnatus,” after the legendary farmer who became a Roman consul 
3574
3575and then voluntarily relinquished his power. That was followed by “Citizenfour,” a handle that some journalists took 
3576
3577to mean that I considered myself the fourth dissident-employee in the NSA’s recent history, after Binney and his 
3578
3579fellow TRAILBLAZER whistleblowers J. Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis
3580—though the triumvirate I actually had in mind consisted of Thomas Drake, who disclosed the existence of TRAILBLAZER 
3581
3582to journalists, and Daniel Ellsberg and  Anthony Russo, whose disclosure of  The  Pentagon Papers
3583helped expose the deceptions of the Vietnam War and bring it to an end. The final name I chose for my correspondence 
3584
3585was “Verax,” Latin for “speaker of truth,” in the hopes of proposing an alternative to the model of a hacker called 
3586
3587“Mendax” (“speaker of lies”)—the pseudonym of the young man who’d grow up to become WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.
3588
3589You can’t really appreciate how hard it is to stay anonymous online until you’ve tried to operate as if your life 
3590
3591depended on it. Most of the communications systems set up in the IC have a single basic aim: the observer of  a  
3592
3593communication must  not  be  able  to  discern  the  identities of  those involved, or in any way attribute them to 
3594
3595an agency. This is why the IC calls these exchanges “non-attributable.” The pre-Internet spycraft of anonymity is 
3596
3597famous, mostly from TV and the movies: a safe-house address coded in bathroom-stall graffiti, for instance, or 
3598
3599scrambled into the abbreviations of a classified ad. Or think of the Cold War’s “dead drops,” the chalk marks on 
3600
3601mailboxes signaling that a secret package was waiting inside a particular hollowed-out tree in a public park. The 
3602
3603modern version might be fake profiles trading fake chats on a dating site, or, more commonly, just a superficially 
3604
3605innocuous app that leaves superficially innocuous messages on a superficially innocuous Amazon server secretly 
3606
3607controlled by the CIA. What I wanted, however, was something even better than that—something that required none of 
3608
3609that exposure, and none of that budget.
3610
3611I decided to use somebody else’s Internet connection. I wish that were simply a matter of going to a McDonald’s or 
3612
3613Starbucks and signing on to their Wi-Fi. But those places have CCTV, and receipts, and other people— memories with 
3614
3615legs. Moreover, every wireless device, from a phone to a laptop, has a globally unique identifier called a MAC 
3616
3617(Machine Address Code), which it leaves on record with every access point it connects to—a forensic marker of its 
3618
3619user’s movements.
3620
3621So I didn’t go to McDonald’s or Starbucks—I went driving. Specifically, I went war-driving, which is when you convert 
3622
3623your car into a roving Wi-Fi sensor. For this you need a laptop, a high-powered antenna, and a magnetic GPS sensor, 
3624
3625which can be slapped atop the roof. Power is provided by the car or by a portable battery, or else by the laptop 
3626
3627itself. Everything you need can fit into a backpack.
3628
3629I  took along a  cheap laptop running TAILS, which is  a  Linux-based “amnesiac” operating system—meaning it forgets 
3630
3631everything when you turn it off, and starts fresh when you boot it up again, with no logs or memory traces of 
3632
3633anything ever done on it. TAILS allowed me to easily “spoof,” or disguise,
3634the laptop’s MAC: whenever it connected to a network it left behind the record of some other machine, in no way 
3635
3636associable with mine. Usefully enough, TAILS also had built-in support for connecting to the anonymizing Tor network.
3637
3638At nights and on weekends, I drove around what seemed like the entire island of Oahu, letting my antenna pick up the 
3639
3640pulses of each Wi-Fi network. My GPS sensor tagged each access point with the location at which it was noticed, 
3641
3642thanks to a mapping program I used called Kismet. What resulted was a map of the invisible networks we pass by every 
3643
3644day without even noticing, a scandalously high percentage of which had either no security at all or security I could 
3645
3646trivially bypass. Some of the networks required more sophisticated hacking. I’d briefly jam a network, causing its 
3647
3648legitimate users to be booted off-line; in their attempt to reconnect, they’d automatically rebroadcast their 
3649
3650“authentication packets,” which I could intercept and effectively decipher into passwords that would let me log on 
3651
3652just like any other “authorized” user.
3653
3654With this network map in hand, I’d drive around Oahu like a madman, trying to check my email to see which of the 
3655
3656journalists had replied to me. Having made contact with Laura Poitras, I’d spend much of the evening writing to her—
3657
3658sitting behind the wheel of my car at the beach, filching the Wi-Fi from a nearby resort. Some of the journalists I’d 
3659
3660chosen needed convincing to use encrypted email, which back in 2012 was a pain. In some cases, I had to show them 
3661
3662how, so I’d upload tutorials—sitting in my idling car in a parking lot, availing myself of the network of a library. 
3663
3664Or of a school. Or of a gas station. Or of a bank—which had horrifyingly poor protections. The point was to not 
3665
3666create any patterns.
3667
3668Atop the parking garage of a mall, secure in the knowledge that the moment I closed the lid of my laptop, my secret 
3669
3670was safe, I’d draft manifestos explaining why I’d gone public, but then delete them. And then I’d try writing emails 
3671
3672to Lindsay, only to delete them, too. I just couldn’t find the words.
367323
3674
3675Read, Write, Execute
3676
3677Read, Write, Execute: in computing, these are called permissions. Functionally speaking, they determine the extent of 
3678
3679your authority within a computer or computer network, defining what exactly you can and cannot do. The right to read 
3680
3681a file allows you to access its contents, while the right to write a file allows you to modify it. Execution, 
3682
3683meanwhile, means that you have the ability to run a file or program, to carry out the actions it was designed to do.
3684
3685Read, Write, Execute: this was my simple three-step plan. I wanted to burrow into the heart of the world’s most 
3686
3687secure network to find the truth, make a copy of it, and get it out into the world. And I had to do all this without 
3688
3689getting caught—without being read, written, and executed myself.
3690
3691Almost everything you do on a computer, on any device, leaves a record. Nowhere is this more true than at the NSA. 
3692
3693Each log-in and log-out creates a log entry. Each permission I used left its own forensic trace. Every time I opened 
3694
3695a file, every time I copied a file, that action was recorded. Every time I downloaded, moved, or deleted a file, that 
3696
3697was recorded, too, and security logs were updated to reflect the event. There were network flow records, public key 
3698
3699infrastructure records—people even joked about cameras hidden in the bathrooms, in the bathroom stalls. The agency 
3700
3701had a not inconsiderable number of  counterintelligence programs spying  on  the  people  who  were spying on people, 
3702
3703and if even one caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, it wouldn’t be a file that was getting 
3704
3705deleted.
3706
3707Luckily, the  strength of  these  systems was  also  their  weakness: their complexity meant that not even the people 
3708
3709running them necessarily knew how they worked. Nobody actually understood where they overlapped and where their gaps 
3710
3711were. Nobody, that is, except the systems administrators. After all, those sophisticated monitoring systems you’re 
3712
3713imagining, the ones with scary names like MIDNIGHTRIDER—somebody’s got to install them in the first place. The NSA 
3714
3715may have paid for the network, but sysadmins like myself were the ones who really owned it.
3716
3717The  Read  phase  would  involve  dancing  through  the  digital  grid  of tripwires laid across the routes 
3718
3719connecting the NSA to every other intelligence agency, domestic and foreign. (Among these was the NSA’s UK partner, 
3720
3721the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which was setting up dragnets like OPTICNERVE, a program that 
3722
3723saved a snapshot every five
3724minutes from the cameras of people video-chatting on platforms like Yahoo Messenger, and PHOTONTORPEDO, which grabbed 
3725
3726the IP addresses of MSN Messenger users.) By using Heartbeat to bring in the documents I wanted, I could turn “bulk 
3727
3728collection” against those who’d turned it against the public, effectively Frankensteining the IC. The agency’s 
3729
3730security tools kept track of who read what, but it didn’t matter: anyone who bothered to check their logs was used to 
3731
3732seeing Heartbeat by now. It would sound no alarms. It was the perfect cover.
3733
3734But while Heartbeat would work as a way of collecting the files—far too many files—it only brought them to the server 
3735
3736in Hawaii, a server that kept logs even I couldn’t get around. I needed a way to work with the files, search them,  
3737
3738and  discard  the  irrelevant  and  uninteresting,  along  with  those containing legitimate secrets that I wouldn’t 
3739
3740be giving to journalists. At this point, still in my Read phase, the hazards were manifold, due mainly to the fact 
3741
3742that the protocols I was up against were no longer geared to monitoring but to prevention. If I ran my searches on 
3743
3744the Heartbeat server, it would light a massive electronic sign blinking ARREST ME.
3745
3746I thought about this for a while. I couldn’t just copy the files directly from the Heartbeat server onto a personal 
3747
3748storage device and waltz out of the Tunnel without being caught. What I could do, though, was bring the files closer, 
3749
3750directing them to an intermediate way station.
3751
3752I couldn’t send them to one of our regular computers, because by 2012 all of  the  Tunnel  had  been  upgraded  to  
3753
3754new  “thin  client”  machines:  small helpless computers with crippled drives and CPUs that couldn’t store or process 
3755
3756data on their own, but did all of their storage and processing on the cloud. In a forgotten corner of the office, 
3757
3758however, there was a pyramid of disused desktop computers—old, moldering legacy machines the agency had wiped clean 
3759
3760and  discarded. When I  say  old  here, I  mean young by  the standards of anyone who doesn’t live on a budget the 
3761
3762size of the NSA’s. They were Dell PCs from as recently as 2009 or 2010, large gray rectangles of comforting weight, 
3763
3764which could store and process data on their own without being connected to the cloud. What I liked about them was 
3765
3766that though they were still in the NSA system, they couldn’t really be closely tracked as long as I kept them off the 
3767
3768central networks.
3769
3770I  could  easily  justify  needing  to  use  these  stolid,  reliable  boxes  by claiming  that  I  was  trying  to  
3771
3772make  sure  Heartbeat  worked  with  older operating systems. After all, not everybody at every NSA site had one of 
3773
3774the new “thin clients” just yet. And what if Dell wanted to implement a civilian
3775version of Heartbeat? Or what if the CIA, or FBI, or some similarly backward organization wanted to use it? Under the 
3776
3777guise of compatibility testing, I could transfer the files to these old computers, where I could search, filter, and 
3778
3779organize them as much as I wanted, as long as I was careful. I was carrying one of the big old hulks back to my desk 
3780
3781when I passed one of the IT directors, who stopped me and asked me what I needed it for—he’d been a major proponent 
3782
3783of getting rid of them. “Stealing secrets,” I answered, and we laughed.
3784
3785The Read phase ended with the files I wanted all neatly organized into folders. But they were still on a computer 
3786
3787that wasn’t mine, which was still in the Tunnel underground. Enter, then, the Write phase, which for my purposes 
3788
3789meant  the  agonizingly  slow,  boring-but-also-cripplingly-scary process  of copying the files from the legacy Dells 
3790
3791something that I could spirit out of the building.
3792
3793The easiest and safest way to copy a file off any IC workstation is also the oldest: a camera. Smartphones, of 
3794
3795course, are banned in NSA buildings, but workers accidentally bring them in all the time without anyone noticing. 
3796
3797They leave them in their gym bags or in the pockets of their windbreakers. If they’re caught with one in a random 
3798
3799search and they act goofily abashed instead of screaming panicked Mandarin into their wristwatch, they’re often 
3800
3801merely warned, especially if it’s their first offense. But getting a smartphone loaded with NSA secrets out of the 
3802
3803Tunnel is a riskier gambit. Odds are that nobody would’ve noticed—or cared—if I walked out with a smartphone, and it 
3804
3805might have been an adequate tool for a staffer trying to copy a single torture report, but I wasn’t wild about the 
3806
3807idea of taking thousands of pictures of my computer screen in the middle of a top secret facility. Also, the phone 
3808
3809would have had to be configured in such a way that even the world’s foremost forensic experts could seize and search 
3810
3811it without finding anything on it that they shouldn’t.
3812
3813I’m going to refrain from publishing how exactly I went about my own writing—my own copying and encryption—so that 
3814
3815the NSA will still be standing tomorrow. I will mention, however, what storage technology I used for the copied 
3816
3817files. Forget thumbdrives; they’re too bulky for the relatively small amount they store. I went, instead, for SD 
3818
3819cards—the acronym stands for Secure Digital. Actually, I went for the mini- and micro-SD cards.
3820
3821You’ll recognize SD cards if you’ve ever used a digital camera or video camera, or  needed more storage on  a  
3822
3823tablet. They’re tiny little buggers, miracles of nonvolatile flash storage, and—at 20 x 21.5 mm for the mini, 15 x
382411 mm for the micro, basically the size of your pinkie fingernail—eminently concealable. You can fit one inside the 
3825
3826pried-off square of a Rubik’s Cube, then stick the square back on, and nobody will notice. In other attempts I 
3827
3828carried a card in my sock, or, at my most paranoid, in my cheek, so I could swallow it if I had to. Eventually, as I 
3829
3830gained confidence, and certainty in my methods of encryption, I’d just keep a card at the bottom of my pocket. They 
3831
3832hardly ever triggered metal detectors, and who wouldn’t believe I’d simply forgotten something so small?
3833
3834The size of SD cards, however, has one downside: they’re extremely slow to write. Copying times for massive volumes 
3835
3836of data are always long—at least always longer than you want—but the duration tends to stretch even more when you’re 
3837
3838copying not to a speedy hard drive but to a minuscule silicon wafer embedded in plastic. Also, I wasn’t just copying. 
3839
3840I was deduplicating, compressing, encrypting, none of which processes could be accomplished simultaneously with any 
3841
3842other. I was using all the skills I’d ever acquired in my storage work, because that’s what I was doing, essentially. 
3843
3844I was storing the NSA’s storage, making an off-site backup of evidence of the IC’s abuses.
3845
3846It could take eight hours or more—entire shifts—to fill a card. And though I switched to working nights again, those 
3847
3848hours were terrifying. There was the old computer chugging, monitor off, with all but one fluorescent ceiling panel 
3849
3850dimmed to  save energy in  the after-hours. And there I  was, turning the monitor back on every once in a while to 
3851
3852check the rate of progress and cringing. You know the feeling—the sheer hell of following the completion bar as it 
3853
3854indicates 84 percent completed, 85 percent completed … 1:58:53 left … As it filled toward the sweet relief of 100 
3855
3856percent, all files copied, I’d be sweating, seeing shadows and hearing footsteps around every corner.
3857
3858
3859
3860EXECUTE: THAT  WAS  the final step. As each card filled, I had to run my getaway routine. I had to get that vital 
3861
3862archive out of the building, past the bosses and military uniforms, down the stairs and out the empty hall, past the 
3863
3864badge scans and  armed guards and  mantraps—those two-doored security zones in which the next door doesn’t open until 
3865
3866the previous door shuts and
3867your badge scan is approved, and if it isn’t, or if anything else goes awry, the
3868guards draw their weapons and the doors lock you in and you say, “Well, isn’t this embarrassing?” This—per all the 
3869
3870reports I’d been studying, and all the nightmares I’d been having—was where they’d catch me, I was sure of it. Each 
3871
3872time I left, I was petrified. I’d have to force myself not to think about the SD card. When you think about it, you 
3873
3874act differently, suspiciously.
3875One unexpected upshot of gaining a better understanding of NSA surveillance was that I’d also gained a better 
3876
3877understanding of the dangers I faced. In other words, learning about the agency’s systems had taught me how not to 
3878
3879get caught by them. My guides in this regard were the indictments that the  government had  brought against former 
3880
3881agents—mostly real  bastards who, in IC jargon, had “exfiltrated” classified information for profit. I compiled, and 
3882
3883studied, as many of these indictments as I could. The FBI—the agency that investigates all crime within the IC—took 
3884
3885great pride in explaining exactly how they caught their suspects, and believe me, I didn’t mind benefiting from their 
3886
3887experience. It seemed that in almost every case, the FBI would wait to make its arrest until the suspect had finished 
3888
3889their work and was about to go home. Sometimes they would let the suspect take the material out of a SCIF—a Sensitive 
3890
3891Compartmented Information Facility, which is a type of building or room shielded against surveillance—and out into 
3892
3893the public, where its very presence was a federal crime. I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me—
3894
3895there, out in the public light, just at the far end of the Tunnel.
3896
3897I’d usually try to banter with the guards, and this was where my Rubik’s Cube came in most handy. I was known to the 
3898
3899guards and to everybody else at the Tunnel as the Rubik’s Cube guy, because I was always working the cube as I walked 
3900
3901down the halls. I got so adept I could even solve it one-handed. It became my totem, my spirit toy, and a distraction 
3902
3903device as much for myself as for my coworkers. Most of them thought it was an affectation, or a nerdy conversation 
3904
3905starter. And it  was, but primarily it  relieved my anxiety. It calmed me.
3906
3907I bought a few cubes and handed them out. Anyone who took to it, I’d give them pointers. The more that people got 
3908
3909used to them, the less they’d ever want a closer look at mine.
3910
3911I got along with the guards, or I told myself I did, mostly because I knew where their minds were: elsewhere. I’d 
3912
3913done something like their job before, back at CASL. I knew how mind-numbing it was to spend all night standing, 
3914
3915feigning vigilance. Your feet hurt. After a while, all the rest of you hurts. And you can get so lonely that you’ll 
3916
3917talk to a wall.
3918
3919I aimed to be more entertaining than the wall, developing my own patter for each human obstacle. There was the one 
3920
3921guard I talked to about insomnia and  the  difficulties of  day-sleeping (remember, I  was  on  nights,  so  this 
3922
3923would’ve been around two in the morning). Another guy, we discussed politics. He called Democrats “Demon Rats,” so 
3924
3925I’d read Breitbart News in
3926preparation for the conversation. What they all had in common was a reaction to my cube: it made them smile. Over the 
3927
3928course of my employment at the Tunnel, pretty much all the guards said some variation of, “Oh man, I used to play 
3929
3930with that when I was a kid,” and then, invariably, “I tried to take the stickers off to solve it.” Me too, buddy. Me 
3931
3932too.
3933
3934It was only once I got home that I was able to relax, even just slightly. I was still worried about the house being 
3935
3936wired—that was another one of those charming methods the FBI used against those it suspected of inadequate loyalty. 
3937
3938I’d rebuff Lindsay’s concerns about my insomniac ways until she hated me and I hated myself. She’d go to bed and I’d 
3939
3940go to the couch, hiding with my laptop under a blanket like a child because cotton beats cameras. With the threat of 
3941
3942immediate arrest out of the way, I could focus on transferring the files to a larger external storage device via my 
3943
3944laptop—only somebody who didn’t understand technology very well would think I’d keep them on the laptop forever—and 
3945
3946locking them down under multiple layers of encryption algorithms using differing implementations, so that even if one 
3947
3948failed the others would keep them safe.
3949
3950I’d been careful not to leave any traces at my work, and I took care that my encryption left no traces of the 
3951
3952documents at home. Still, I knew the documents could lead back to me once I’d sent them to the journalists and they’d 
3953
3954been decrypted. Any investigator looking at which agency employees had accessed, or could access, all these materials 
3955
3956would come up with a list with probably only a single name on it: mine. I could provide the journalists with fewer 
3957
3958materials, of course, but then they wouldn’t be able to most effectively do their work. Ultimately, I had to contend 
3959
3960with the fact that even one briefing slide or PDF left me vulnerable, because all digital files contain metadata, 
3961
3962invisible tags that can be used to identify their origins.
3963
3964I struggled with how to handle this metadata situation. I worried that if I didn’t strip the identifying information 
3965
3966from the documents, they might incriminate me the moment the journalists decrypted and opened them. But I also 
3967
3968worried that by thoroughly stripping the metadata, I risked altering the files—if they were changed in any way, that 
3969
3970could cast doubt on their authenticity. Which was more important: personal safety, or the public good? It might sound 
3971
3972like an easy choice, but it took me quite a while to bite the bullet. I owned the risk, and left the metadata intact.
3973
3974Part of what convinced me was my fear that even if I had stripped away the metadata I knew about, there could be 
3975
3976other digital watermarks I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t scan for. Another part had to do with the difficulty of
3977scrubbing single-user documents. A  single-user document is  a  document marked with a user-specific code, so that if 
3978
3979any publication’s editorial staff decided to run it by the government, the government would know its source. 
3980
3981Sometimes the  unique  identifier was  hidden  in  the  date  and  time-stamp coding, sometimes it involved the 
3982
3983pattern of microdots in a graphic or logo. But it might also be embedded in something, in some way, I hadn’t even 
3984
3985thought of. This phenomenon should have discouraged me, but instead it emboldened me. The technological difficulty 
3986
3987forced me, for the first time, to confront the prospect of discarding my lifetime practice of anonymity and coming 
3988
3989forward to identify myself as the source. I would embrace my principles by signing my name to them and let myself be 
3990
3991condemned.
3992
3993Altogether, the documents I selected fit on a single drive, which I left out in the open on my desk at home. I knew 
3994
3995that the materials were just as secure now as they had ever been at the office. Actually, they were more secure, 
3996
3997thanks to multiple levels and methods of encryption. That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A 
3998
3999little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.
400024
4001
4002Encrypt
4003
4004Most people who use computers, and that includes members of the Fourth Estate,  think  there’s  a  fourth  basic  
4005
4006permission besides  Read,  Write,  and Execute, called “Delete.”
4007
4008Delete is everywhere on the user side of computing. It’s in the hardware as a key on the keyboard, and it’s in the 
4009
4010software as an option that can be chosen from a drop-down menu. There’s a certain finality that comes with choosing 
4011
4012Delete, and a certain sense of responsibility. Sometimes a box even pops up to double-check: “Are you sure?” If the 
4013
4014computer is second-guessing you by requiring confirmation—click “Yes”—it makes sense that Delete would be a 
4015
4016consequential, perhaps even the ultimate decision.
4017
4018Undoubtedly, that’s true in the world outside of computing, where the powers of deletion have historically been vast. 
4019
4020Even so, as countless despots have been reminded, to truly get rid of a document you can’t just destroy every copy of 
4021
4022it. You also have to destroy every memory of it, which is to say you have to destroy all the people who remember it, 
4023
4024along with every copy of all the other documents that mention it and all the people who remember all those other 
4025
4026documents. And then, maybe, just maybe, it’s gone.
4027
4028Delete functions appeared from the very start of digital computing. Engineers understood that in a world of 
4029
4030effectively unlimited options, some choices would inevitably turn out to be mistakes. Users, regardless of whether or 
4031
4032not they were really in control at the technical level, had to feel in control, especially with regard to anything 
4033
4034that they themselves had created. If they made a file, they should be able to unmake it at will. The ability to 
4035
4036destroy what they created and start over afresh was a primary function that imparted a sense of agency to the user, 
4037
4038despite the fact that they might be dependent on proprietary hardware they couldn’t repair and software they couldn’t 
4039
4040modify, and bound by the rules of third-party platforms.
4041
4042Think about the reasons that you yourself press Delete. On your personal computer, you might want to get rid of some 
4043
4044document you screwed up, or some file you downloaded but no longer need—or some file you don’t want anyone to know 
4045
4046you ever needed. On your email, you might delete an email from a former lover that you don’t want to remember or 
4047
4048don’t want your spouse to find, or an RSVP for that protest you went to. On your phone, you might delete the history 
4049
4050of everywhere that phone has traveled, or some of the pictures, videos, and private records it automatically uploaded 
4051
4052to the cloud. In
4053every instance, you delete, and the thing—the file—appears to be gone.
4054
4055The truth, though, is that deletion has never existed technologically in the way that we conceive of it. Deletion is 
4056
4057just a ruse, a figment, a public fiction, a not-quite-noble lie that computing tells you to reassure you and give you 
4058
4059comfort. Although the deleted file disappears from view, it is rarely gone. In technical terms, deletion is really 
4060
4061just a form of the middle permission, a kind of Write. Normally, when you press Delete for one of your files, its 
4062
4063data— which has been stashed deep down on a disk somewhere—is not actually touched. Efficient modern operating 
4064
4065systems are not designed to go all the way into the bowels of a disk purely for the purposes of erasure. Instead, 
4066
4067only the computer’s map of where each file is stored—a map called the “file table”—is rewritten to say “I’m no longer 
4068
4069using this space for anything important.” What this means is that, like a neglected book in a vast library, the 
4070
4071supposedly erased file can still be read by anyone who looks hard enough for it. If you only erase the reference to 
4072
4073it, the book itself still remains.
4074
4075This can be confirmed through experience, actually. Next time you copy a file, ask yourself why it takes so long when 
4076
4077compared with the instantaneous act of deletion. The answer is that deletion doesn’t really do anything to a file 
4078
4079besides conceal it. Put simply, computers were not designed to correct mistakes, but to hide them—and to hide them 
4080
4081only from those parties who don’t know where to look.
4082
4083
4084
4085THE  WANING  DAYS  of  2012  brought  grim  news:  the  few  remaining legal protections that prohibited mass 
4086
4087surveillance by some of the most prominent members of the Five Eyes network were being dismantled. The governments of 
4088
4089both Australia and the UK were proposing legislation for the mandatory recording of telephony and Internet metadata. 
4090
4091This was the first time that
4092notionally democratic governments publicly avowed the ambition to establish
4093a sort of surveillance time machine, which would enable them to technologically rewind the events of any person’s 
4094
4095life for a period going back months and even years. These attempts definitively marked, to my mind at least,  the  
4096
4097so-called  Western  world’s  transformation from  the  creator  and defender  of  the  free  Internet  to  its  
4098
4099opponent  and  prospective  destroyer. Though these laws were justified as public safety measures, they represented 
4100
4101such a breathtaking intrusion into the daily lives of the innocent that they terrified—quite rightly—even the 
4102
4103citizens of other countries who didn’t think themselves affected (perhaps because their own governments chose to 
4104
4105surveil them in secret).
4106These public initiatives of mass surveillance proved, once and for all, that there could be no natural alliance 
4107
4108between technology and government. The rift between my two strangely interrelated communities, the American IC and 
4109
4110the global online tribe of technologists, became pretty much definitive. In my earliest years in the IC, I could 
4111
4112still reconcile the two cultures, transitioning smoothly between my spy work and my relationships with civilian 
4113
4114Internet privacy folks—everyone from the anarchist hackers to the more sober academic Tor  types  who  kept  me  
4115
4116current about  computing research and inspired me politically. For years, I was able to fool myself that we were all, 
4117
4118ultimately, on the same side of history: we were all trying to protect the Internet, to keep it free for speech and 
4119
4120free of fear. But my ability to sustain that delusion was gone. Now the government, my employer, was definitively the 
4121
4122adversary. What my technologist peers had always suspected, I’d only recently confirmed, and I couldn’t tell them. Or 
4123
4124I couldn’t tell them yet.
4125
4126What I could do, however, was help them out, so long as that didn’t imperil my plans. This was how I found myself in 
4127
4128Honolulu, a beautiful city in which I’d never had much interest, as one of the hosts and teachers of a CryptoParty. 
4129
4130This was a new type of gathering invented by an international grassroots cryptological movement, at which 
4131
4132technologists volunteered their time to teach free classes to the public on the topic of digital self-defense— 
4133
4134essentially, showing anyone who was interested how to protect the security of their communications. In many ways, 
4135
4136this was the same topic I taught for JCITA, so I jumped at the chance to participate.
4137
4138Though this might strike you as a dangerous thing for me to have done, given the other activities I was involved with 
4139
4140at the time, it should instead just reaffirm how much faith I had in the encryption methods I taught—the very methods 
4141
4142that protected that drive full of IC abuses sitting back at my house, with locks that couldn’t be cracked even by the 
4143
4144NSA. I knew that no number of documents, and no amount of journalism, would ever be enough to address the threat the 
4145
4146world was facing. People needed tools to protect themselves, and they needed to know how to use them. Given that I 
4147
4148was also trying to provide these tools to journalists, I was worried that my approach had become too technical. After 
4149
4150so many sessions spent lecturing colleagues, this opportunity to simplify my treatment of the subject for a general 
4151
4152audience would benefit me as much as anyone. Also, I honestly missed teaching: it had been a year since I’d stood at 
4153
4154the front of a class, and the moment I was back in that position I realized I’d been teaching the right things to the 
4155
4156wrong people all along.
4157
4158When I say class, I don’t mean anything like the IC’s schools or briefing
4159rooms. The CryptoParty was held in a one-room art gallery behind a furniture store and coworking space. While I was 
4160
4161setting up the projector so I could share slides showing how easy it was to run a Tor server to help, for example, 
4162
4163the citizens of Iran—but also the citizens of Australia, the UK, and the States
4164—my students drifted in, a diverse crew of strangers and a few new friends I’d only met online. All in all, I’d say 
4165
4166about twenty people showed up that December night to learn from me and my co-lecturer, Runa Sandvik, a bright young 
4167
4168Norwegian woman from the Tor Project. (Runa would go on to work as the senior director of information security for 
4169
4170the New York Times, which would sponsor her later CryptoParties.) What united our audience wasn’t an interest in Tor, 
4171
4172or even a fear of being spied on as much as a desire to re- establish a sense of control over the private spaces in 
4173
4174their lives. There were some grandparent types who’d wandered in off the street, a local journalist covering the  
4175
4176Hawaiian “Occupy!” movement, and  a  woman who’d been victimized by revenge porn. I’d also invited some of my NSA 
4177
4178colleagues, hoping to interest them in the movement and wanting to show that I wasn’t concealing my involvement from 
4179
4180the agency. Only one of them showed up, though, and sat in the back, legs spread, arms crossed, smirking throughout.
4181
4182I began my presentation by discussing the illusory nature of deletion, whose objective of total erasure could never 
4183
4184be accomplished. The crowd understood this instantly. I went on to explain that, at best, the data they wanted no one 
4185
4186to see couldn’t be unwritten so much as overwritten: scribbled over, in a sense, with random or pseudo-random data 
4187
4188until the original was rendered unreadable. But, I cautioned, even this approach had its drawbacks. There was always 
4189
4190a chance that their operating system had silently hidden away a copy of the file they were hoping to delete in some 
4191
4192temporary storage nook they weren’t privy to.
4193
4194That’s when I pivoted to encryption.
4195
4196Deletion is a dream for the surveillant and a nightmare for the surveilled, but encryption is, or should be, a 
4197
4198reality for all. It is the only true protection against surveillance. If the whole of your storage drive is encrypted 
4199
4200to begin with, your adversaries can’t rummage through it for deleted files, or for anything else—unless they have the 
4201
4202encryption key. If all the emails in your inbox are encrypted, Google can’t read them to profile you—unless they have 
4203
4204the encryption key. If all your communications that pass through hostile Australian or British or American or Chinese 
4205
4206or Russian networks are encrypted, spies can’t read them—unless they have the encryption key. This is the ordering 
4207
4208principle of encryption: all power to the key holder.
4209Encryption works,  I  explained, by  way  of  algorithms. An  encryption algorithm sounds intimidating, and certainly 
4210
4211looks intimidating when written out, but its concept is quite elementary. It’s a mathematical method of reversibly 
4212
4213transforming information—such as your emails, phone calls, photos, videos, and files—in such a way that it becomes 
4214
4215incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have a copy of the encryption key. You can think of a modern encryption 
4216
4217algorithm as a magic wand that you can wave over a document to change each letter into a language that only you and 
4218
4219those you trust can read, and the encryption key as the unique magic words that complete the incantation and put the 
4220
4221wand to work. It doesn’t matter how many people know that you used the wand, so long as you can keep your personal 
4222
4223magic words from the people you don’t trust.
4224
4225Encryption algorithms are basically just sets of math problems designed to be incredibly difficult even for computers 
4226
4227to solve. The encryption key is the one clue that allows a computer to solve the particular set of math problems 
4228
4229being used. You push your readable data, called plaintext, into one end of an encryption algorithm, and 
4230
4231incomprehensible gibberish, called ciphertext, comes out the other end. When somebody wants to read the ciphertext, 
4232
4233they feed it back into the algorithm along with—crucially—the correct key, and out comes the plaintext again. While 
4234
4235different algorithms provide different degrees of protection, the security of an encryption key is often based on its 
4236
4237length, which indicates the level of difficulty involved in solving a specific algorithm’s underlying math problem. 
4238
4239In algorithms that correlate longer keys with better security, the improvement is exponential. If we presume that an 
4240
4241attacker takes one day to crack a 64-bit key—which scrambles your data in one of 264 possible ways 
4242
4243(18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique permutations)
4244—then it would take double that amount of time, two days, to break a 65-bit key, and four days to break a 66-bit key. 
4245
4246Breaking a 128-bit key would take
4247264 times longer than a day, or fifty million billion years. By that time, I might even be pardoned.
4248
4249In my communications with journalists, I used 4096- and 8192-bit keys. This  meant  that  absent major  innovations 
4250
4251in  computing technology or  a fundamental redefining of the principles by which numbers are factored, not even all 
4252
4253of the NSA’s cryptanalysts using all of the world’s computing power put together would be able to get into my drive. 
4254
4255For this reason, encryption is the single best hope for fighting surveillance of any kind. If all of our data, 
4256
4257including our communications, were enciphered in this fashion, from end to end (from the sender end to the recipient 
4258
4259end), then no government—no entity conceivable under our current knowledge of physics, for that matter—would
4260be able to understand them. A government could still intercept and collect the signals, but it would be intercepting 
4261
4262and collecting pure noise. Encrypting our communications would essentially delete them from the memories of every 
4263
4264entity we deal with. It would effectively withdraw permission from those to whom it was never granted to begin with.
4265
4266Any government hoping to access encrypted communications has only two options: it can either go after the keymasters 
4267
4268or go after the keys. For the former,  they  can  pressure  device  manufacturers into  intentionally selling 
4269
4270products that perform faulty encryption, or mislead international standards organizations into accepting flawed 
4271
4272encryption algorithms that contain secret access points known as “back doors.” For the latter, they can launch 
4273
4274targeted attacks against the endpoints of the communications, the hardware and software that perform the process of 
4275
4276encryption. Often, that means exploiting a vulnerability that they weren’t responsible for creating but merely found, 
4277
4278and using it to hack you and steal your keys—a technique pioneered by criminals but today embraced by major state 
4279
4280powers, even though it means knowingly preserving devastating holes in the cybersecurity of critical international 
4281
4282infrastructure.
4283
4284The best means we have for keeping our keys safe is called “zero knowledge,” a method that ensures that any data you 
4285
4286try to store externally— say, for instance, on a company’s cloud platform—is encrypted by an algorithm running on 
4287
4288your device before it is uploaded, and the key is never shared. In the zero knowledge scheme, the keys are in the 
4289
4290users’ hands—and only in the users’ hands. No company, no agency, no enemy can touch them.
4291
4292My key to the NSA’s secrets went beyond zero knowledge: it was a zero- knowledge key consisting of multiple zero-
4293
4294knowledge keys.
4295
4296Imagine it like this: Let’s say that at the conclusion of my CryptoParty lecture, I stood by the exit as each of the 
4297
4298twenty audience members shuffled out. Now, imagine that as each of them passed through the door and into the Honolulu 
4299
4300night, I whispered a word into their ear—a single word that no one else could hear, and that they were only allowed 
4301
4302to repeat if they were all together, once again, in the same room. Only by bringing back all twenty of these folks 
4303
4304and having them repeat their words in the same order in which I’d originally distributed them could anyone reassemble 
4305
4306the complete twenty- word incantation. If just one person forgot their word, or if the order of recitation was in any 
4307
4308way different from the order of distribution, no spell would be cast, no magic would happen.
4309
4310My   keys   to   the   drive   containing   the   disclosures   resembled   this
4311arrangement, with  a  twist: while I  distributed most of  the  pieces of  the incantation, I retained one for 
4312
4313myself. Pieces of my magic spell were hidden everywhere, but if I destroyed just the single lone piece that I kept on 
4314
4315my person, I would destroy all access to the NSA’s secrets forever.
431625
4317
4318The Boy
4319
4320It’s only in hindsight that I’m able to appreciate just how high my star had risen. I’d gone from being the student 
4321
4322who couldn’t speak in class to being the teacher of the language of a new age, from the child of modest, middle-class 
4323
4324Beltway parents to the man living the island life and making so much money that it had lost its meaning. In just the 
4325
4326seven short years of my career, I’d climbed from maintaining local servers to crafting and implementing globally 
4327
4328deployed systems—from graveyard-shift security guard to key master of the puzzle palace.
4329
4330But there’s always a danger in letting even the most qualified person rise too far, too fast, before they’ve had 
4331
4332enough time to get cynical and abandon their idealism. I occupied one of the most unexpectedly omniscient positions 
4333
4334in the Intelligence Community—toward the bottom rung of the managerial ladder, but high atop heaven in terms of 
4335
4336access. And while this gave me the phenomenal, and frankly undeserved, ability to observe the IC in its grim 
4337
4338fullness, it also left me more curious than ever about the one fact I was still finding elusive: the absolute limit 
4339
4340of who the agency could turn its gaze against. It was a limit set less in policy or law than in the ruthless, 
4341
4342unyielding capabilities of what I now knew to be a world-spanning machine. Was there anyone this machine could not 
4343
4344surveil? Was there anywhere this machine could not go?
4345
4346The only way to discover the answer was to descend, abandoning my panoptic perch for the narrow vision of an 
4347
4348operational role. The NSA employees with the freest access to the rawest forms of intelligence were those who sat in 
4349
4350the operator’s chair and typed into their computers the names of the individuals who’d fallen under suspicion, 
4351
4352foreigners and US citizens alike. For one reason or another, or for no reason at all, these individuals had become 
4353
4354targets of the agency’s closest scrutiny, with the NSA interested in finding out everything about them and their 
4355
4356communications. My ultimate destination, I knew, was the exact point of this interface—the exact point where the 
4357
4358state cast its eye on the human and the human remained unaware.
4359
4360The program that enabled this access was called XKEYSCORE, which is perhaps best understood as a search engine that 
4361
4362lets an analyst search through all the records of your life. Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages 
4363
4364from the public Internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything. 
4365
4366Though I’d read enough about the
4367program to understand how it worked, I hadn’t yet used it, and I realized I ought to know more about it. By pursuing 
4368
4369XKEYSCORE, I was looking for a personal confirmation of the depths of the NSA’s surveillance intrusions—the kind of 
4370
4371confirmation you don’t get from documents but only from direct experience.
4372
4373One of the few offices in Hawaii with truly unfettered access to XKEYSCORE was the National Threat Operations Center. 
4374
4375NTOC worked out of the sparkling but soulless new open-plan office the NSA had formally named the Rochefort Building, 
4376
4377after Joseph Rochefort, a legendary World War II–era Naval cryptanalyst who broke Japanese codes. Most employees had 
4378
4379taken to calling it the Roach Fort, or simply “the Roach.” At the time I applied for a job there, parts of the Roach 
4380
4381were still under construction, and I was immediately reminded of my first cleared job, with CASL: it was my fate to 
4382
4383begin and end my IC career in unfinished buildings.
4384
4385In addition to housing almost all of the agency’s Hawaii-based translators and analysts, the Roach also accommodated 
4386
4387the local branch of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division. This was the NSA unit responsible for remotely 
4388
4389hacking into the computers of people whom analysts had selected as targets—the agency’s equivalent of the old 
4390
4391burglary teams that once snuck into enemies’ homes to plant bugs and find compromising material. NTOC’s main job, by 
4392
4393contrast, was to monitor and frustrate the activity of the TAO’s foreign equivalents. As  luck  would  have  it,  
4394
4395NTOC had  a  position open through a contractor job at Booz Allen Hamilton, a job they euphemistically described as 
4396
4397“infrastructure analyst.” The role involved using the complete spectrum of the NSA’s mass surveillance tools, 
4398
4399including XKEYSCORE, to monitor activity on the “infrastructure” of interest, the Internet.
4400
4401Though I’d be making slightly more money at Booz, around $120,000 a year, I considered it a demotion—the first of 
4402
4403many as I began my final descent, jettisoning my accesses, my clearances, and my agency privileges. I was an engineer 
4404
4405who was becoming an analyst who would ultimately become an exile, a target of the very technologies I’d once 
4406
4407controlled. From that perspective, this particular fall in prestige seemed pretty minor. From that perspective, 
4408
4409everything seemed pretty minor, as the arc of my life bent back toward earth, accelerating toward the point of impact 
4410
4411that would end my career, my relationship, my freedom, and possibly my life.
4412
4413
4414
4415I’D DECIDED  TO bring my archives out of the country and pass them to the journalists I’d contacted, but before I 
4416
4417could even begin to contemplate the
4418logistics of that act I had to go shake some hands. I had to fly east to DC and spend a few weeks meeting and 
4419
4420greeting my new bosses and colleagues, who had high hopes for how they might apply my keen understanding of online 
4421
4422anonymization to unmask their more clever targets. This was what brought me back home to the Beltway for the very 
4423
4424last time, and back to the site of my first encounter with an institution that had lost control: Fort Meade. This 
4425
4426time I was arriving as an insider.
4427
4428The day that marked my coming of age, just over ten tumultuous years earlier, had profoundly changed not just the 
4429
4430people who worked at NSA headquarters but the place itself. I first noticed this fact when I got stopped in my rental 
4431
4432car trying to turn off Canine Road into one of the agency’s parking lots, which in my memory still howled with panic, 
4433
4434ringtones, car horns, and sirens. Since 9/11, all  the  roads that led  to  NSA headquarters had  been permanently 
4435
4436closed to  anyone who  didn’t possess one  of  the  special IC badges now hanging around my neck.
4437
4438Whenever I wasn’t glad-handing NTOC leadership at headquarters, I spent my time learning everything I could—“hot-
4439
4440desking” with analysts who worked different programs and different types of targets, so as to be able to teach my 
4441
4442fellow team members back in Hawaii the newest ways the agency’s tools  might  be  used.  That,  at  least,  was  the  
4443
4444official  explanation  of  my curiosity, which as always exceeded the requirements and earned the gratitude of  the  
4445
4446technologically inclined.  They,  in  turn,  were  as  eager  as  ever  to demonstrate   the   power   of   the   
4447
4448machinery   they’d   developed,   without expressing a  single  qualm  about  how  that  power  was  applied. While  
4449
4450at headquarters, I was also put through a series of tests on the proper use of the system, which were more like 
4451
4452regulatory compliance exercises or procedural shields than meaningful instruction. The other analysts told me that 
4453
4454since I could take these tests as many times as I had to, I shouldn’t bother learning the rules: “Just click the 
4455
4456boxes until you pass.”
4457
4458The NSA described XKEYSCORE, in the documents I’d later pass on to journalists, as its “widest-ranging” tool, used to 
4459
4460search “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.” The technical specs I studied went into more detail as to how 
4461
4462exactly this was accomplished—by “packetizing” and “sessionizing,” or cutting up the data of a user’s online sessions 
4463
4464into manageable packets for analysis—but nothing could prepare me for seeing it in action.
4465
4466It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you 
4467
4468to type in pretty much anyone’s
4469address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. 
4470
4471In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at 
4472
4473was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search 
4474
4475history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person 
4476
4477or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the 
4478
4479packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted 
4480
4481each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the screen. 
4482
4483But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.
4484
4485My weeks at Fort Meade, and the short stint I put in at Booz back in Hawaii,  were  the  only  times  I  saw,  
4486
4487firsthand, the  abuses  actually  being committed that I’d previously read about in internal documentation. Seeing 
4488
4489them made me realize how insulated my position at the systems level had been from the ground zero of immediate 
4490
4491damage. I could only imagine the level of insulation of the agency’s directorship or, for that matter, of the US 
4492
4493president.
4494
4495I didn’t type the names of the agency director or the president into XKEYSCORE, but after enough time with the system 
4496
4497I realized I could have. Everyone’s communications were in the system—everyone’s. I was initially fearful that if I 
4498
4499searched those in the uppermost echelons of state, I’d be caught and fired, or worse. But it was surpassingly simple 
4500
4501to disguise a query regarding even the most prominent figure by encoding my search terms in a machine format that 
4502
4503looked like gibberish to humans but would be perfectly understandable to XKEYSCORE. If any of the auditors who were 
4504
4505responsible for reviewing the searches ever bothered to look more closely, they would see only a snippet of 
4506
4507obfuscated code, while I would be able to scroll through the most personal activities of a Supreme Court justice or a 
4508
4509congressperson.
4510
4511As far as I could tell, none of my new colleagues intended to abuse their powers so grandly, although if they had 
4512
4513it’s not like they’d ever mention it. Anyway, when analysts thought about abusing the system, they were far less 
4514
4515interested in what it could do for them professionally than in what it could do for them personally. This led to the 
4516
4517practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used 
4518
4519the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection—reading 
4520
4521their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only
4522the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of 
4523
4524surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, no one in the agency’s history had been 
4525
4526sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly 
4527
4528prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you 
4529
4530refuse to admit the existence of the system itself. The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat 
4531
4532along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA  headquarters with  two  of  the  more  talented  infrastructure analysts, 
4533
4534whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as 
4535
4536one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of 
4537
4538informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check 
4539
4540her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to 
4541
4542be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target— or someone in communication with a target—you 
4543
4544had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could 
4545
4546trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.
4547
4548One thing you come to understand very quickly while using XKEYSCORE is that nearly everyone in the world who’s online 
4549
4550has at least two things in common: they have all watched porn at one time or another, and they all store photos and 
4551
4552videos of their family. This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race, and age—from the 
4553
4554meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or 
4555
4556cousin.
4557
4558It’s the family stuff that got to me the most. I remember this one child in particular, a little boy in Indonesia. 
4559
4560Technically, I shouldn’t have been interested in this little boy, but I was, because my employers were interested in 
4561
4562his father. I had been reading through the shared targeting folders of a “persona” analyst, meaning someone who 
4563
4564typically spent most of their day sifting through artifacts like  chat  logs  and  Gmail inboxes and  Facebook 
4565
4566messages, rather than the more obscure and difficult, typically hacker- generated traffic of the infrastructure 
4567
4568analysts.
4569
4570The boy’s father, like my own father, was an engineer—but unlike my father, this  guy  wasn’t government- or  
4571
4572military-affiliated. He  was  just  a regular academic who’d been caught up in a surveillance dragnet. I can’t even 
4573
4574remember how or why he’d come to the agency’s attention, beyond sending a job application to a research university in 
4575
4576Iran. The grounds for suspicion
4577were  often  poorly documented, if  they  were  documented at  all,  and  the connections could be incredibly 
4578
4579tenuous—“believed to be potentially associated with” and then the name of some international organization that could 
4580
4581be anything from a telecommunications standards body to UNICEF to something you might actually agree is menacing.
4582
4583Selections from the man’s communications had been sieved out of the stream of Internet traffic and assembled into 
4584
4585folders—here was the fatal copy of the résumé sent to the suspect university; here were his texts; here was his Web 
4586
4587browser history; here was the last week or so of his correspondence both sent and received, tagged to IP addresses. 
4588
4589Here were the coordinates of a “geo-fence” the analyst had placed around him to track whether he strayed too far from 
4590
4591home, or perhaps traveled to the university for his interview.
4592
4593Then there were his pictures, and a video. He was sitting in front of his computer, as I was sitting in front of 
4594
4595mine. Except that in his lap he had a toddler, a boy in a diaper.
4596
4597The father was trying to read something, but the kid kept shifting around, smacking the keys and giggling. The 
4598
4599computer’s internal mic picked up his giggling and there I was, listening to it on my headphones. The father held the 
4600
4601boy tighter, and the boy straightened up, and, with his dark crescent eyes, looked directly into the computer’s 
4602
4603camera—I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was looking directly at me. Suddenly I realized that I’d been holding my 
4604
4605breath. I shut the session, got up from the computer, and left the office for the bathroom in the hall, head down, 
4606
4607headphones still on with the cord trailing.
4608
4609Everything about that kid, everything about his father, reminded me of my own father, whom I met for dinner one 
4610
4611evening during my stint at Fort Meade. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but there in the midst of dinner, over bites of 
4612
4613Caesar salad and a pink lemonade, I had the thought: I’ll never see my family again. My eyes were dry—I was exerting 
4614
4615as much control as I could— but inside, I was devastated. I knew that if I told him what I was about to do, he 
4616
4617would’ve called the cops. Or else he would’ve called me crazy and had me committed to a mental hospital. He would’ve 
4618
4619done anything he thought he had to do to prevent me from making the gravest of mistakes.
4620
4621I could only hope that his hurt would in time be healed by pride.
4622
4623Back in Hawaii between March and May 2013, a sense of finality suffused nearly every experience for me, and though 
4624
4625the experiences themselves might seem trivial, they eased my path. It was far less painful to think that this was the 
4626
4627last time I’d ever stop at the curry place in Mililani or drop by the art-
4628gallery hacker space in Honolulu or just sit on the roof of my car and scan the nighttime sky for falling stars than 
4629
4630to think that I only had another month left with Lindsay, or another week left of sleeping next to her and waking up 
4631
4632next to her and yet trying to keep my distance from her, for fear of breaking down.
4633
4634The preparations I was making were those of a man about to die. I emptied my bank accounts, putting cash into an old 
4635
4636steel ammo box for Lindsay to find so that the government couldn’t seize it. I went around the house doing oft-
4637
4638procrastinated chores, like  fixing windows and  changing lightbulbs. I erased and encrypted my old computers, 
4639
4640reducing them to the silent husks of better times. In sum, I was putting my affairs in order to try to make 
4641
4642everything easier for Lindsay, or just for my conscience, which periodically would switch allegiance from a world 
4643
4644that hadn’t earned it to the woman who had and the family I loved.
4645
4646Everything was imbued with this sense of an ending, and yet there were moments when it seemed that no end was in 
4647
4648sight and that the plan I’d developed was collapsing. It was difficult to get the journalists to commit to a meeting, 
4649
4650mostly because I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with, or even, for a while at least, where and when it was 
4651
4652happening. I had to reckon with the prospect of them never showing up, or of them showing up but then dropping out. 
4653
4654Ultimately I decided that if either of those happened, I’d just abandon the plan and return to work and to Lindsay as 
4655
4656if everything was normal, to wait for my next chance.
4657
4658In my wardrives back and forth from Kunia—a twenty-minute ride that could  become  a  two-hour  Wi-Fi  scavenger  
4659
4660hunt—I’d  been  researching various  countries,  trying  to  find  a  location  for  my  meeting  with  the 
4661
4662journalists. It felt like I was picking out my prison, or rather my grave. All of the Five Eyes countries were 
4663
4664obviously off-limits. In fact, all of Europe was out, because its countries couldn’t be counted upon to uphold 
4665
4666international law against the extradition of those charged with political crimes in the face of  what was  sure  to  
4667
4668be  significant American pressure. Africa and  Latin America were no-go zones too—the United States had a history of 
4669
4670acting there with impunity. Russia was out because it was Russia, and China was China: both were totally out of 
4671
4672bounds. The US government wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at the map. The optics would 
4673
4674only  be  worse in  the  Middle East.  It  sometimes seemed as  if  the  most challenging hack of my life wasn’t 
4675
4676going to be plundering the NSA but rather trying to find a meeting venue independent enough to hold off the White 
4677
4678House and free enough not to interfere with my activities.
4679The process of elimination left me with Hong Kong. In geopolitical terms, it was the closest I could get to no-
4680
4681man’s-land, but with a vibrant media and protest culture, not to mention largely unfiltered Internet. It was an 
4682
4683oddity, a reasonably liberal world city whose nominal autonomy would distance me from China and restrain Beijing’s 
4684
4685ability to take public action against me or the journalists—at least immediately—but whose de facto existence in 
4686
4687Beijing’s sphere of influence would reduce the possibility of unilateral US intervention. In a situation with no 
4688
4689promise of safety, it was enough to have the guarantee of time. Chances were that things weren’t going to end well 
4690
4691for me, anyway: the best I could hope for was getting the disclosures out before I was caught.
4692
4693The last morning I woke up with Lindsay, she was leaving on a camping trip to Kauai—a brief getaway with friends that 
4694
4695I’d encouraged. We lay in bed and I held her too tightly, and when she asked with sleepy bewilderment why I was 
4696
4697suddenly being so affectionate, I apologized. I told her how sorry I was for how busy I’d been, and that I was going 
4698
4699to miss her—she was the best person I’d ever met in my life. She smiled, pecked me on the cheek, and then got up to 
4700
4701pack.
4702
4703The moment she was out the door, I started crying, for the first time in years.  I  felt  guilty  about  everything 
4704
4705except  what  my  government would accuse me of, and especially guilty about my tears, because I knew that my pain 
4706
4707would be nothing compared to the pain I’d cause to the woman I loved, or to the hurt and confusion I’d cause my 
4708
4709family.
4710
4711At least I had the benefit of knowing what was coming. Lindsay would return from her camping trip to find me gone, 
4712
4713ostensibly on a work assignment, and my mother basically waiting on our doorstep. I’d invited my mother to visit, in 
4714
4715a move so uncharacteristic that she must have expected another type of surprise—like an announcement that Lindsay and 
4716
4717I were engaged. I felt horrible about the false pretenses and winced at the thought of her disappointment, but I kept 
4718
4719telling myself I was justified. My mother would take care of Lindsay and Lindsay would take care of her. Each would 
4720
4721need the other’s strength to weather the coming storm.
4722
4723The day after Lindsay left, I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant 
4724
4725luggage and four laptops: secure communications, normal communications, a decoy, and an “airgap” (a computer that had 
4726
4727never gone and would never go online). I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I 
4728
4729scribbled in pen: Got called away for work. I love you. I signed it with my call-letter
4730nickname, Echo. Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In Tokyo, I 
4731
4732bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20 arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me.
473326
4734
4735Hong Kong
4736
4737The deep psychological appeal of games, which are really just a series of increasingly difficult challenges, is the 
4738
4739belief that they can be won. Nowhere is this more clear to me than in the case of the Rubik’s Cube, which satisfies a 
4740
4741universal  fantasy:  that  if  you  just  work  hard  enough  and  twist  yourself through all of the possibilities, 
4742
4743everything in the world that appears scrambled and incoherent will finally click into position and become perfectly 
4744
4745aligned; that human ingenuity is enough to transform the most broken and chaotic system into something logical and 
4746
4747orderly where every face of three- dimensional space shines with perfect uniformity.
4748
4749I’d had a plan—I’d had multiple plans—in which a single mistake would have meant getting caught, and yet I hadn’t 
4750
4751been: I’d made it out of the NSA, I’d made it out of the country. I had beaten the game. By every standard I could 
4752
4753imagine, the hard part was over. But my imagination hadn’t been good enough, because the journalists I’d asked to 
4754
4755come meet me weren’t showing up. They kept postponing, giving excuses, apologizing.
4756
4757I knew that Laura Poitras—to whom I’d already sent a few documents and the promise of many more—was ready to fly 
4758
4759anywhere from New York City at a moment’s notice, but she wasn’t going to come alone. She was busy trying to get 
4760
4761Glenn Greenwald to commit, trying to get him to buy a new laptop that he wouldn’t put online. Trying to get him to 
4762
4763install encryption programs so we could better communicate. And there I was, in Hong Kong, watching the clock tick 
4764
4765away the hours, watching the calendar tick off the days, beseeching, begging: please come before the NSA realizes 
4766
4767I’ve been gone from work too long. It was tough to think about all the lengths I’d gone to only to face the prospect 
4768
4769of being left in Hong Kong high and dry. I tried to work up some sympathy for these journalists who seemed too busy 
4770
4771or too nervous to lock down their travel plans, but then I’d recall just how little of the material for which I was 
4772
4773risking everything would actually make it to the public if the police arrived first. I thought about my family and 
4774
4775Lindsay and how foolish it was to have put my life in the hands of people who didn’t even know my name.
4776
4777I barricaded myself in my room at the Mira Hotel, which I chose because of its central location in a crowded shopping 
4778
4779and business district. I put the “Privacy Please—Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle to keep housekeeping out. 
4780
4781For ten days, I didn’t leave the room for fear of giving a
4782foreign spy the chance to sneak in and bug the place. With the stakes so high, the only move I had was to wait. I 
4783
4784converted the room into a poor man’s operations center, the invisible heart of the network of encrypted Internet 
4785
4786tunnels from which I’d send increasingly shrill pleas to the absent emissaries of our free press. Then I’d stand at 
4787
4788the window hoping for a reply, looking out onto the beautiful park I’d never visit. By the time Laura and Glenn 
4789
4790finally arrived, I’d eaten every item on the room service menu.
4791
4792That isn’t to say that I just sat around during that week and a half writing wheedling messages. I also tried to 
4793
4794organize the last briefing I’d ever give— going through the archive, figuring out how best to explain its contents to 
4795
4796the journalists in the surely limited time we’d have together. It was an interesting problem: how to most cogently 
4797
4798express to nontechnical people who were almost  certainly  inclined  to  be  skeptical  of  me  the  fact  that  the  
4799
4800US government was surveilling the world and the methods by which it was doing so. I put together dictionaries of 
4801
4802terms of art like “metadata” and “communications bearer.” I put together glossaries of acronyms and abbreviations: 
4803
4804CCE, CSS, DNI, NOFORN. I made the decision to explain not through  technologies, or  systems,  but  through  
4805
4806surveillance  programs—in essence, through stories—in an attempt to speak their language. But I couldn’t decide which 
4807
4808stories to give them first, and I kept shuffling them around, trying to put the worst crimes in the best order.
4809
4810I had to find a way to help at least Laura and Glenn understand something in the span of a few days that it had taken 
4811
4812me years to puzzle out. Then there was another thing: I had to help them understand who I was and why I’d decided to 
4813
4814do this.
4815
4816
4817
4818AT LONG LAST, Glenn and Laura showed up in Hong Kong on June 2. When they came to meet me at the Mira, I think I 
4819
4820disappointed them, at least initially. They even told me as much, or Glenn did: He’d been expecting someone older, 
4821
4822some chain-smoking, tipsy depressive with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience. He didn’t understand how a person 
4823
4824as young as I was
4825—he  kept  asking  me  my  age—not  only  had  access  to  such  sensitive
4826documents, but was also so willing to throw his life away. For my part, I didn’t know how they could have expected 
4827
4828some graybeard, given my instructions to them about how to meet: Go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel 
4829
4830restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s 
4831
4832Cube. The funny thing was that I’d originally been wary of using that bit of tradecraft, but the cube was the only
4833thing I’d brought with me that was likely to be unique and identifiable from a distance. It also helped me hide the 
4834
4835stress of waiting for what I feared might be the surprise of handcuffs.
4836
4837That stress would reach its visible peak just ten or so minutes later, when I’d brought Laura and Glenn up to my 
4838
4839room—#1014, on the tenth floor. Glenn had barely had the chance to stow his smartphone in my minibar fridge at my 
4840
4841request when Laura started rearranging and adjusting the lights in the room. Then she unpacked her digital video 
4842
4843camera. Though we’d agreed, over encrypted email, that she could film our encounter, I wasn’t ready for the reality.
4844
4845Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when she pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a 
4846
4847cramped, messy room that I hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of experience: the 
4848
4849more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self- conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or 
4850
4851might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that 
4852
4853somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all of my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which 
4854
4855experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the 
4856
4857latter is now difficult for everyone.
4858
4859In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight, 
4860
4861kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I 
4862
4863wasn’t having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look when it was played back in 
4864
4865court. I realized there were so many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-
4866
4867service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers, 
4868
4869piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor.
4870
4871It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I had never met any 
4872
4873journalists before serving as their source.  The  first  time  I  ever  spoke  aloud  to  anyone  about  the  US 
4874
4875government’s system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. In the 
4876
4877end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it 
4878
4879showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never could. The footage she shot 
4880
4881over the course of our days together in Hong Kong can’t be distorted. Its existence is a tribute not
4882just to her professionalism as a documentarian but to her foresight.
4883
4884I spent the week between June 3 and June 9 cloistered in that room with Glenn and his colleague from the Guardian, 
4885
4886Ewen MacAskill, who joined us a bit later that first day. We talked and talked, going through the NSA’s programs, 
4887
4888while Laura hovered and filmed. In contrast to the frenetic days, the nights were empty and desolate. Glenn and Ewen 
4889
4890would retreat to their own hotel, the nearby W, to write up their findings into articles. Laura would disappear to 
4891
4892edit her footage and do her own reporting with Bart Gellman of the Washington Post, who never made it to Hong Kong 
4893
4894but worked remotely with the documents he received from her.
4895
4896I’d sleep, or try to—or else I’d put on the TV, find an English-language channel like the BBC or CNN, and watch the 
4897
4898international reaction. On June
48995, the Guardian broke Glenn’s first story, the FISA court order that authorized the NSA to collect information from 
4900
4901the American telecom Verizon about every phone call it handled. On June 6, it ran Glenn’s PRISM story, pretty much 
4902
4903simultaneously with a similar account in the Washington Post by Laura and Bart. I knew, and I think we all knew, that 
4904
4905the more pieces came out the more likely it was that I’d be identified, particularly because my office had begun 
4906
4907emailing me asking for status updates and I wasn’t answering. But though  Glenn  and  Ewen  and  Laura  were  
4908
4909unfailingly sympathetic to  my ticking time-bomb situation, they never let their desire to serve the truth be 
4910
4911tempered by that knowledge. And following their example, neither did I.
4912
4913Journalism, like documentary film, can only reveal so much. It’s interesting  to  think  about  what  a  medium  is  
4914
4915forced  to  omit,  both  by convention and technology. In Glenn’s prose, especially in the Guardian, you got a 
4916
4917laser-focused statement of fact, stripped of the dogged passion that defines his personality. Ewen’s prose more fully 
4918
4919reflected his character: sincere, gracious, patient, and fair. Meanwhile, Laura, who saw all but was rarely seen, had 
4920
4921an omniscient reserve and a sardonic wit—half master spy, half master artist.
4922
4923As the revelations ran wall to wall on every TV channel and website, it became clear that the US government had 
4924
4925thrown the whole of its machinery into identifying the source. It was also clear that when they did, they would use 
4926
4927the face they found—my face—to evade accountability: instead of addressing the revelations, they’d impugn the 
4928
4929credibility and motives of “the leaker.” Given the stakes, I had to seize the initiative before it was too late. If I 
4930
4931didn’t explain my actions and intentions, the government would, in a way that would swing the focus away from its 
4932
4933misdeeds.
4934The only hope I had of fighting back was to come forward first and identify myself. I’d give the media just enough 
4935
4936personal detail to satisfy their mounting curiosity, with a clear statement that what mattered wasn’t me, but rather 
4937
4938the subversion of American democracy. Then I’d vanish just as quickly as I’d appeared. That, at least, was the plan.
4939
4940Ewen and I decided that he’d write a story about my IC career and Laura suggested filming a video statement to appear 
4941
4942alongside it in the Guardian. In it, I’d claim direct and sole responsibility as the source behind the reporting on 
4943
4944global mass surveillance. But even though Laura had been filming all week (a lot of that footage would make it into 
4945
4946her feature documentary, Citizenfour), we just didn’t have the time for her to go through everything she’d shot in 
4947
4948search of snippets of me speaking coherently and making eye contact. What she proposed, instead, was my first 
4949
4950recorded statement, which she started filming right there and then—the one that begins, “Uh, my name is Ed Snowden. 
4951
4952I’m, ah, twenty-nine years old.”
4953
4954Hello, world.
4955
4956
4957
4958WHILE I’VE NEVER once regretted tugging aside the curtain and revealing my identity, I do wish I had done it with 
4959
4960better diction and a better plan in mind for what was next. In truth, I had no plan at all. I hadn’t given much 
4961
4962thought to answering the question of what to do once the game was over, mainly because a winning conclusion was 
4963
4964always so unlikely. All I’d cared about was
4965getting the facts out into the world: I figured that by putting the documents
4966into the public record, I was essentially putting myself at the public’s mercy. No exit strategy could be the only 
4967
4968exit strategy, because any next step I might have premeditated taking would have run the risk of undermining the 
4969
4970disclosures.
4971
4972If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek asylum, for example, I would’ve been 
4973
4974called a foreign agent of that country. Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to 
4975
4976be  arrested  upon  landing  and  charged  under  the  Espionage  Act.  That would’ve entitled me to a show trial 
4977
4978deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.
4979
4980The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in 
4981
4982my position would not even be allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically 
4983
4984beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to
4985argue that the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain laws regarding surveillance, 
4986
4987or convinced the courts to strike down  a  certain  mass  surveillance  program  as  illegal,  or  influenced  the 
4988
4989attorney general and the president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance was a crucial 
4990
4991one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the country. All these claims would be deemed not 
4992
4993just irrelevant but inadmissible in the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing my 
4994
4995government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified information to journalists, a fact that is not 
4996
4997in dispute. This is why anyone who says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to 
4998
4999come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then, surely be a cruel one. The penalty for  
5000
5001disclosing top  secret documents, whether to  foreign spies  or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per 
5002
5003document.
5004
5005From the moment that Laura’s video of me was posted on the Guardian website on June 9, I was marked. There was a 
5006
5007target on my back. I knew that the institutions I’d shamed would not relent until my head was bagged and my limbs 
5008
5009were shackled. And until then—and perhaps even after then—they would harass my loved ones and disparage my character, 
5010
5011prying into every aspect of my life and career, seeking information (or opportunities for disinformation) with which 
5012
5013to smear me. I was familiar enough with how this process went, both from having read classified examples of it within 
5014
5015the IC and from having studied the cases of other whistleblowers and leakers. I knew the stories of heroes like 
5016
5017Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, and more recent opponents of government secrecy like Thomas Tamm, an attorney with 
5018
5019the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review who served as a source for much of the warrantless 
5020
5021wiretapping reporting of the mid-2000s. There  were  also  Drake,  Binney,  Wiebe,  and  Loomis,  the  digital-age 
5022
5023successors to Perry Fellwock, who back in 1971 had revealed the existence of the  then-unacknowledged NSA  in  the  
5024
5025press,  which  caused  the  Senate’s Church Committee (the forerunner of today’s Senate Select Committee on 
5026
5027Intelligence) to  try  to  ensure  that  the  agency’s brief  was  limited  to  the gathering of foreign rather than 
5028
5029domestic signals intelligence. And then there was US Army Private Chelsea Manning, who for the crime of exposing 
5030
5031America’s war crimes was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, of which she served seven, her 
5032
5033sentence commuted only after an international outcry arose over the treatment she received during solitary 
5034
5035confinement.
5036
5037All of these people, whether they faced prison or not, encountered some
5038sort of backlash, most often severe and derived from the very abuse that I’d just helped expose: surveillance. If 
5039
5040ever they’d expressed anger in a private communication, they were “disgruntled.” If they’d ever visited a 
5041
5042psychiatrist or a psychologist, or just checked out books on related subjects from a library, they were “mentally 
5043
5044unsound.” If they’d been drunk even once, they were said to be alcoholics. If they’d had even one extramarital 
5045
5046affair, they were said to be sexual deviants. Not a few lost their homes and were bankrupted. It’s easier for an 
5047
5048institution to tarnish a reputation than to substantively engage with principled dissent—for the IC, it’s just a 
5049
5050matter of consulting the files, amplifying the available evidence, and, where no evidence exists, simply fabricating 
5051
5052it.
5053
5054As sure as I was of my government’s indignation, I was just as sure of the support of my family, and of Lindsay, who 
5055
5056I was certain would understand— perhaps not forgive, but understand—the context of my recent behavior. I took comfort 
5057
5058from recalling their love: it helped me cope with the fact that there was nothing left for me to do, no further plans 
5059
5060in play. I could only extend the belief I had in my family and Lindsay into a perhaps idealistic belief in my fellow 
5061
5062citizens, a hope that once they’d been made aware of the full scope of American mass surveillance they’d mobilize and 
5063
5064call for justice. They’d be empowered to seek that justice for themselves, and, in the process, my own destiny would 
5065
5066be decided. This was the ultimate leap of faith, in a way: I could hardly trust anyone, so I had to trust everyone.
5067
5068
5069
5070WITHIN HOURS AFTER my Guardian video ran, one of Glenn’s regular readers in Hong Kong contacted him and offered to 
5071
5072put me in touch with Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Man, two local attorneys who then volunteered to take on my case. 
5073
5074These were the men who helped get me out of the Mira when the press finally located me and besieged the hotel. As a 
5075
5076diversion, Glenn went
5077out the front lobby door, where he was immediately thronged by the cameras
5078and mics. Meanwhile, I was bundled out of one of the Mira’s myriad other exits, which connected via a skybridge to a 
5079
5080mall.
5081
5082I like Robert—to have been his client is to be his friend for life. He’s an idealist and a crusader, a tireless 
5083
5084champion of lost causes. Even more impressive than his lawyering, however, was his creativity in finding safe houses. 
5085
5086While journalists were scouring every five-star hotel in Hong Kong, he took me to one of the poorest neighborhoods of 
5087
5088the city and introduced me to some of his other clients, a few of the nearly twelve thousand forgotten refugees in 
5089
5090Hong Kong—under Chinese pressure, the city has maintained a
5091dismal 1 percent approval rate for permanent residency status. I wouldn’t usually name them, but since they have 
5092
5093bravely identified themselves to the press, I will: Vanessa Mae Bondalian Rodel from the Philippines, and Ajith 
5094
5095Pushpakumara, Supun Thilina Kellapatha, and Nadeeka Dilrukshi Nonis, all from Sri Lanka.
5096
5097These unfailingly kind and generous people came through with charitable grace. The solidarity they showed me was not 
5098
5099political. It was human, and I will be forever in their debt. They didn’t care who I was, or what dangers they might 
5100
5101face by helping me, only that there was a person in need. They knew all too well what it meant to be forced into a 
5102
5103mad escape from mortal threat, having survived ordeals far in excess of anything I’d dealt with and hopefully ever  
5104
5105will:  torture  by  the  military,  rape,  and  sexual  abuse.  They  let  an exhausted stranger into their homes—and 
5106
5107when they saw my face on TV, they didn’t falter. Instead, they smiled, and took the opportunity to reassure me of 
5108
5109their hospitality.
5110
5111Though their resources were limited—Supun, Nadeeka, Vanessa, and two little girls lived in a crumbling, cramped 
5112
5113apartment smaller than my room at the  Mira—they shared everything they  had  with  me,  and  they  shared it 
5114
5115unstintingly, refusing my offers to reimburse them for the cost of taking me in so vociferously that I had to hide 
5116
5117money in the room to get them to accept it. They fed me, they let me bathe, they let me sleep, and they protected me. 
5118
5119I will never be able to explain what it meant to be given so much by those with so little, to be accepted by them 
5120
5121without judgment as I perched in corners like a stray street cat, skimming the Wi-Fi of distant hotels with a special 
5122
5123antenna that delighted the children.
5124
5125Their welcome and friendship was a gift, for the world to even have such people is a gift, and so it pains me that, 
5126
5127all these years later, the cases of Ajith, Supun, Nadeeka, and Nadeeka’s daughter are still pending. The admiration I 
5128
5129feel for these folks is matched only by the resentment I feel toward the bureaucrats in Hong Kong, who continue to 
5130
5131deny them the basic dignity of asylum. If folks as fundamentally decent and selfless as these aren’t deemed worthy of 
5132
5133the protection of the state, it’s because the state itself is unworthy. What gives me hope, however, is that just as 
5134
5135this book was going to press, Vanessa and her daughter received asylum in Canada. I look forward to the day when I 
5136
5137can visit all of my old Hong Kong friends in their new homes, wherever those may be, and we can make happier memories 
5138
5139together in freedom.
5140
5141On June 14, the US government charged me under the Espionage Act in a
5142sealed complaint, and on June 21 they formally requested my extradition. I
5143knew it was time to go. It was also my thirtieth birthday.
5144
5145Just as the US State Department sent its request, my lawyers received a reply  to  my  appeal  for  assistance  from  
5146
5147the  UN  High  Commissioner on Refugees: there was nothing that could be done for me. The Hong Kong government,  
5148
5149under  Chinese  pressure  or  not,  resisted  any  UN  effort  at affording me international protection on its 
5150
5151territory, and furthermore asserted that it would first have to consider the claims of my country of citizenship. In 
5152
5153other words, Hong Kong was telling me to go home and deal with the UN from prison. I wasn’t just on my own—I was 
5154
5155unwelcome. If I was going to leave freely, I had to leave now. I wiped my four laptops completely clean and destroyed 
5156
5157the cryptographic key, which meant that I could no longer access any of the documents even if compelled. Then I 
5158
5159packed the few clothes I had and headed out. There was no safety to be found in the “fragrant harbor.”
516027
5161
5162Moscow
5163
5164For a coastal country at the northwestern edge of South America, half a globe away from Hong Kong, Ecuador is in the 
5165
5166middle of everything: not for nothing does its name translate to “The Republic of the Equator.” Most of my fellow 
5167
5168North Americans would correctly say that it’s a small country, and some might even know enough to call it 
5169
5170historically oppressed. But they are ignorant if they think it’s a backwater. When Rafael Correa became president in 
5171
51722007, as part of a tide of so-called democratic socialist leaders who swept elections in the late 1990s and early 
5173
51742000s in Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Venezuela, he initiated a spate of policies intended to oppose and 
5175
5176reverse the effects of US imperialism in the region. One of these measures, reflecting President Correa’s previous 
5177
5178career as an economist, was an announcement that Ecuador would consider its national debt illegitimate— technically, 
5179
5180it would be classified as “odious debt,” which is national debt incurred by a despotic regime or through despotic 
5181
5182imperialist trade policies. Repayment of odious debt is not enforceable. With this announcement, Correa freed his 
5183
5184people from decades of economic serfdom, though he made not a few enemies among the class of financiers who direct 
5185
5186much of US foreign policy.
5187
5188Ecuador, at least in 2013, had a hard-earned belief in the institution of political asylum. Most famously, the 
5189
5190Ecuadorean embassy in London had become, under Correa, the  safe haven and  redoubt of  WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange. I 
5191
5192had no desire to live in an embassy, perhaps because I’d already worked in one. Still, my Hong Kong lawyers agreed 
5193
5194that, given the circumstances, Ecuador seemed to be the most likely country to defend my right to political asylum 
5195
5196and the least likely to be cowed by the ire of the hegemon that ruled its hemisphere. My growing but ad hoc team of 
5197
5198lawyers, journalists, technologists, and activists concurred. My hope was to make it to Ecuador proper.
5199
5200With my government having decided to charge me under the Espionage Act, I stood accused of a political crime, meaning 
5201
5202a crime whose victim is the state itself rather than a person. Under international humanitarian law, those accused in 
5203
5204this way are generally exempt from extradition, because the charge of political criminality is more often than not an 
5205
5206authoritarian attempt at quashing legitimate dissent. In theory, this means that government whistleblowers should be 
5207
5208protected against extradition almost everywhere. In practice, of course, this is rarely the case, especially when the 
5209
5210government
5211that perceives itself wronged is America’s—which claims to foster democracy abroad yet secretly maintains fleets of 
5212
5213privately contracted aircraft dedicated to that form of unlawful extradition known as rendition, or, as everyone else 
5214
5215calls it, kidnapping.
5216
5217The team supporting me had reached out to officials everywhere from Iceland to India, asking if they would respect 
5218
5219the prohibition against extradition of those accused of political crimes and commit to noninterference in my 
5220
5221potential travel. It soon became evident that even the most advanced democracies were afraid of incurring the wrath 
5222
5223of the US government. They were happy to privately express their sympathies, but reluctant to offer even unofficial 
5224
5225guarantees. The common denominator of the advice that filtered back to me was to land only in non-extradition 
5226
5227countries, and avoid any route that crossed the airspace of any countries with a record of cooperation with or 
5228
5229deference to the US military. One official, I think from France, suggested that the odds of my successful transit 
5230
5231might be significantly increased if I were issued a laissez-passer, a UN-recognized one-way travel document typically 
5232
5233issued to grant safe passage to refugees crossing borders—but obtaining one of those was easier said than done.
5234
5235Enter Sarah Harrison, a journalist and an editor for WikiLeaks. The moment the news broke that an American had 
5236
5237unmasked a global system of mass surveillance, she had immediately flown to Hong Kong. Through her experience with 
5238
5239the website and particularly with the fate of Assange, she was poised to offer me the world’s best asylum advice. It 
5240
5241didn’t hurt that she also had family connections with the legal community in Hong Kong.
5242
5243People have long ascribed selfish motives to Assange’s desire to give me aid, but I believe he was genuinely invested 
5244
5245in one thing above all—helping me evade capture. That doing so involved tweaking the US government was just a bonus 
5246
5247for him, an ancillary benefit, not the goal. It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even 
5248
5249bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with 
5250
5251him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to 
5252
5253know, a battle he will do anything to win. It’s for this reason that I regard it as too reductive to interpret his 
5254
5255assistance as merely an instance of scheming or self-promotion. More important to him, I believe, was the opportunity 
5256
5257to establish a counterexample to  the  case of  the  organization’s most famous source, US  Army Private Chelsea 
5258
5259Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was  historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to 
5260
5261whistleblowers everywhere. Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation
5262gave him a chance to right a wrong. There was nothing he could have done to save Manning, but he seemed, through 
5263
5264Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me.
5265
5266That said, I was initially wary of Sarah’s involvement. But Laura told me that she was serious, competent, and, most 
5267
5268important, independent: one of the few at WikiLeaks who dared to openly disagree with Assange. Despite my caution, I 
5269
5270was in a difficult position, and as Hemingway once wrote, the way to make people trustworthy is to trust them.
5271
5272Laura informed me of Sarah’s presence in Hong Kong only a day or so before she communicated with me on an encrypted 
5273
5274channel, which itself was only a day or two before I actually met her in person—and if I’m somewhat loose on my dates 
5275
5276here, you’ll have to forgive me: one frenetic day bled into the next. Sarah had been a whirlwind, apparently, since 
5277
5278the moment of her landing in Hong Kong. Though she wasn’t a lawyer, she had deep expertise when it came to what I’ll 
5279
5280call the interpersonal or subofficial nuances of avoiding extradition. She met with local Hong Kong human rights 
5281
5282attorneys to seek independent opinions, and I was deeply impressed by both her pace and her circumspection. Her 
5283
5284connections through WikiLeaks and the extraordinary courage of the Ecuadorean consul in London, Fidel Narváez, 
5285
5286together produced a laissez-passer in my name. This laissez-passer, which was meant to  get me to  Ecuador, had been 
5287
5288issued by  the consul on  an emergency basis, since we didn’t have time for his home government to formally approve 
5289
5290it. The moment it was in hand, Sarah hired a van to take us to the airport.
5291
5292That’s how I met her—in motion. I’d like to say that I started off our acquaintance by offering my thanks, but 
5293
5294instead the first thing I said was: “When was the last time you slept?” Sarah looked just as ragged and disheveled as 
5295
5296I did. She stared out the window, as if trying to recall the answer, but then just shook her head: “I don’t know.”
5297
5298We were both developing colds and our careful conversation was punctuated by sneezes and coughs. By her own account, 
5299
5300she was motivated to support me out of loyalty to her conscience more than to the ideological demands of her 
5301
5302employer. Certainly her politics seemed shaped less by Assange’s feral opposition to central power than by her own 
5303
5304conviction that too much of what passed for contemporary journalism served government interests rather than 
5305
5306challenged them. As we hurtled to the airport, as we checked in, as we cleared passport control for the first of what 
5307
5308should have been three flights, I kept waiting for her to ask me for something—anything,
5309even just for me to make a statement on Assange’s, or the organization’s, behalf. But she never did, although she did 
5310
5311cheerfully share her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the 
5312
5313public and the truth. For that instance of straight talk, and for many others, I’ll always admire Sarah’s honesty.
5314
5315We were traveling to Quito, Ecuador, via Moscow via Havana via Caracas for a simple reason: it was the only safe 
5316
5317route available. There were no direct flights to Quito from Hong Kong, and all of the other connecting flights 
5318
5319traveled through US airspace. While I  was concerned about the massive layover in Russia—we’d have almost twenty 
5320
5321hours before the Havana flight departed—my primary fear was actually the next leg of the journey, because traveling 
5322
5323from Russia to Cuba meant passing through NATO airspace. I didn’t particularly relish flying over a country like 
5324
5325Poland, which during my lifetime has done everything to please the US government, including hosting CIA black sites 
5326
5327where my former IC colleagues subjected prisoners to “enhanced interrogations,” another Bush-era euphemism for 
5328
5329“torture.”
5330
5331I wore my hat down over my eyes to avoid being recognized, and Sarah did the seeing for me. She took my arm and led 
5332
5333me to the gate, where we waited until boarding. This was the last moment for her to back out, and I told her so. “You 
5334
5335don’t have to do this,” I said.
5336
5337“Do what?”
5338
5339“Protect me like this.”
5340
5341Sarah stiffened. “Let’s get one thing clear,” she said as we boarded, “I’m not protecting you. No one can protect 
5342
5343you. What I’m here for is to make it harder for anyone to interfere. To make sure everyone’s on their best behavior.”
5344
5345“So you’re my witness,” I said.
5346
5347She gave a slight wry smile. “Someone has to be the last person to ever see you alive. It might as well be me.”
5348
5349Though the three points where I’d thought we were most likely to get stopped were now behind us (check-in, passport 
5350
5351control, and the gate), I didn’t feel safe on the plane. I didn’t want to get complacent. I took the window seat and 
5352
5353Sarah sat next to me, to screen me from the other passengers across the row. After what felt like an eternity, the 
5354
5355cabin doors were shut, the skybridge pulled away, and finally, we were moving. But just before the plane rolled from 
5356
5357the tarmac onto the runway, it halted sharply. I was nervous. Pressing the brim of my hat up against the glass, I 
5358
5359strained to catch the sound
5360of sirens or the flashing of blue lights. It felt like I was playing the waiting game all over again—it was a wait 
5361
5362that wouldn’t end. Until, suddenly, the plane rolled into motion again and took a turn, and I realized that we were 
5363
5364just far back in the line for takeoff.
5365
5366My spirits rose with the wheels, but it was hard to believe I was out of the fire. Once we were airborne, I loosened 
5367
5368my grip from my thighs and felt an urge to take my lucky Rubik’s Cube out of my bag. But I knew I couldn’t, because 
5369
5370nothing would make me more conspicuous. Instead, I sat back, pulled my hat down again, and kept my half-open eyes on 
5371
5372the map on the seatback screen  just  in  front  of  me,  tracking  the  pixelated  route  across  China, Mongolia, 
5373
5374and Russia—none of which would be especially amenable to doing any favors for the US State Department. However, there 
5375
5376was no predicting what the Russian government would do once we landed, beyond hauling us into an inspection so they 
5377
5378could search through my blank laptops and empty bag. What I hoped might spare us any more invasive treatment was that 
5379
5380the world was watching and my lawyers and WikiLeaks’ lawyers were aware of our itinerary.
5381
5382It was only once we’d entered Chinese airspace that I realized I wouldn’t be able to get any rest until I asked Sarah 
5383
5384this question explicitly: “Why are you helping me?”
5385
5386She flattened out her voice, as if trying to tamp down her passions, and told me that she wanted me to have a better 
5387
5388outcome. She never said better than what outcome or whose, and I could only take that answer as a sign of her 
5389
5390discretion and respect.
5391
5392I was reassured, enough at least to finally get some sleep.
5393
5394
5395
5396WE LANDED  AT Sheremetyevo on June 23 for what we assumed would be a twenty-hour layover. It has now dragged on for 
5397
5398over six years. Exile is an endless layover.
5399
5400In the IC, and in the CIA in particular, you get a lot of training on how not to get into trouble at customs. You 
5401
5402have to think about how you dress, how you act. You have to think about the things in your bag and the things in your 
5403
5404pockets and the tales they tell about you. Your goal is to be the most boring person in line, with the most perfectly 
5405
5406forgettable face. But none of that really matters when the name on your passport is all over the news.
5407
5408I handed my little blue book to the bearish guy in the passport control
5409booth, who scanned it and rifled through its pages. Sarah stood stalwart behind me. I’d made sure to take note of the 
5410
5411time it took for the people ahead of us in line to clear the booth, and our turn was taking too long. Then the guy 
5412
5413picked up his phone, grumbled some words in Russian, and almost immediately—far too  quickly—two security  officers  
5414
5415in  suits  approached. They must have been waiting. The officer in front took my little blue book from the guy in the 
5416
5417booth and leaned in close to me. “There is problem with passport,” he said. “Please, come with.”
5418
5419Sarah immediately stepped to my side and unleashed a fast flurry of English: “I’m his legal adviser. Wherever he 
5420
5421goes, I go. I’m coming with you. According to the—”
5422
5423But before she could cite the relevant UN covenants and Genevan codicils, the officer held up his hand and glanced at 
5424
5425the line. He said, “Okay, sure, okay. You come.”
5426
5427I don’t know whether the officer had even understood what she said. He just clearly didn’t want to make a scene.
5428
5429The two security officers marched us briskly toward what I assumed was going to be a special room for secondary 
5430
5431inspection, but instead turned out to be one of Sheremetyevo’s plush business lounges—like a business-class or 
5432
5433first-class area, with just a few passengers basking obliviously in their luxury seats. Sarah and I were directed 
5434
5435past them and down a hall into a conference room of sorts, filled with men in gray sitting around a table. There were 
5436
5437a half-dozen of them or so, with military haircuts. One guy sat separately, holding a pen. He was a notetaker, a kind 
5438
5439of secretary, I guessed. He had a folder in front of him containing a pad of paper. On the cover of the folder was a 
5440
5441monocolor insignia that I didn’t need Russian in order to understand: it was a sword and shield, the symbol of 
5442
5443Russia’s foremost intelligence service, the Federal Security Service (FSB). Like the FBI in the United States, the 
5444
5445FSB exists not only to spy and investigate but also to make arrests.
5446
5447At the center of the table sat an older man in a finer suit than the others, the white of his hair shining like a 
5448
5449halo of authority. He gestured for Sarah and me to sit opposite him, with an authoritative sweep of the hand and a 
5450
5451smile that marked him as a seasoned case officer, or whatever the term is for a CO’s Russian equivalent. Intelligence 
5452
5453services the world over are full of such figures—dedicated actors who will try on different emotions until they get 
5454
5455the response they want.
5456
5457He cleared his throat and gave me, in decent English, what the CIA calls a
5458cold pitch, which is basically an offer by a foreign intelligence service that can be summarized as “come and work 
5459
5460for us.” In return for cooperation, the foreigners dangle favors, which can be anything from stacks of cash to a get- 
5461
5462out-of-jail-free card for pretty much anything from fraud to murder. The catch, of course, is that the foreigners 
5463
5464always expect something of equal or better value in exchange. That clear and unambiguous transaction, however, is 
5465
5466never how it starts. Come to think of it, it’s funny that it’s called a cold pitch, because the person making it 
5467
5468always starts warm, with grins, levity, and words of sympathy.
5469
5470I knew I had to cut him off. If you don’t cut off a foreign intelligence officer right away, it might not matter 
5471
5472whether you ultimately reject their offer, because they can destroy your reputation simply by leaking a recording of 
5473
5474you considering it. So as the man apologized for inconveniencing us, I imagined the hidden devices recording us, and 
5475
5476tried to choose my words carefully.
5477
5478“Listen, I understand who you are, and what this is,” I said. “Please let me be clear that I have no intention to 
5479
5480cooperate with you. I’m not going to cooperate with any intelligence service. I mean no disrespect, but this isn’t 
5481
5482going to be that kind of meeting. If you want to search my bag, it’s right here,” and I pointed to it under my chair. 
5483
5484“But I promise you, there’s nothing in it that can help you.”
5485
5486As I was speaking, the man’s face changed. He started to act wounded. “No, we would never do that,” he said. “Please 
5487
5488believe me, we only want to help you.”
5489
5490Sarah cleared her throat and jumped in. “That’s quite kind of you, but I
5491hope you can understand that all we’d like is to make our connecting flight.”
5492
5493For the briefest instant, the man’s feigned sorrow became irritation. “You are his lawyer?”
5494
5495“I’m his legal adviser,” Sarah answered.
5496
5497The man asked me, “So you are not coming to Russia to be in Russia?” “No.”
5498“And so  may I  ask  where you are trying to  go?  What is  your final destination?”
5499
5500I said, “Quito, Ecuador, via Caracas, via Havana,” even though I knew that he already knew the answer. He certainly 
5501
5502had a copy of our itinerary, since Sarah and I had traveled from Hong Kong on Aeroflot, the Russian flagship
5503airline.
5504
5505Up until this point, he and I had been reading from the same intelligence script, but now the conversation swerved. 
5506
5507“You haven’t heard?” he said. He stood and looked at me like he was delivering the news of a death in the family. “I 
5508
5509am afraid to inform you that your passport is invalid.”
5510I was so surprised, I just stuttered. “I’m sorry, but I—I don’t believe that.” The man leaned over the table and 
5511
5512said, “No, it is true. Believe me. It is
5513the decision of your minister, John Kerry. Your passport has been canceled by
5514your government, and the air services have been instructed not to allow you to travel.”
5515
5516I was sure it was a trick, but I wasn’t quite sure to what purpose. “Give us a minute,” I said, but even before I 
5517
5518could ask, Sarah had snatched her laptop out of her bag and was getting onto the airport Wi-Fi.
5519
5520“Of course, you will check,” the man said, and he turned to his colleagues and chatted amiably to them in Russian, as 
5521
5522if he had all the time in the world.
5523
5524It was reported on every site Sarah looked at. After the news had broken that I’d left Hong Kong, the US State 
5525
5526Department announced that it had canceled my passport. It had revoked my travel document while I was still in midair.
5527
5528I was incredulous: my own government had trapped me in Russia. The State Department’s move might merely have been the 
5529
5530result of bureaucratic proceduralism—when you’re trying to catch a fugitive, putting out an Interpol alert and 
5531
5532canceling their passport is just standard operating procedure. But in the final accounting it was self-defeating, as 
5533
5534it handed Russia a massive propaganda victory.
5535
5536“It’s true,” said Sarah, with a shake of her head.
5537
5538“So what will you do?” the man asked, and he walked around to our side of the table.
5539
5540Before I could take the Ecuadorean safe conduct pass out of my pocket, Sarah said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m going to 
5541
5542have to advise Mr. Snowden not to answer any more questions.”
5543
5544The man pointed at me, and said, “You will come.”
5545
5546He gestured me to follow him to the far end of the conference room, where there was a window. I went and stood next 
5547
5548to him and looked. About three or four floors below was street level and the largest media scrum I’ve
5549ever seen, scads of reporters wielding cameras and mics.
5550
5551It was an impressive show, perhaps choreographed by the FSB, perhaps not, most likely half and half. Almost 
5552
5553everything in Russia is half and half. But at least now I knew why Sarah and I had been brought to this conference 
5554
5555room in this lounge.
5556
5557I went back to my chair but didn’t sit down again.
5558
5559The man turned from the window to face me and said, “Life for a person in your situation can be very difficult 
5560
5561without friends who can help.” He let the words linger.
5562
5563Here it comes, I thought—the direct solicitation.
5564
5565He said, “If there is some information, perhaps, some small thing you could share with us?”
5566
5567“We’ll be okay on our own,” I said. Sarah stood up next to me.
5568
5569The man sighed. He turned to mumble in Russian, and his comrades rose and filed out. “I hope you will not regret your 
5570
5571decision,” he said to me. Then he gave a slight bow and made his own exit, just as a pair of officials from the 
5572
5573airport administration entered.
5574
5575I demanded to be allowed to go to the gate for the flight to Havana, but they ignored me. I finally reached into my 
5576
5577pocket and brandished the Ecuadorean safe conduct pass, but they ignored that, too.
5578
5579All told, we were trapped in the airport for a biblical forty days and forty nights. Over the course of those days, I 
5580
5581applied to a total of twenty-seven countries for political asylum. Not a single one of them was willing to stand up 
5582
5583to American pressure, with some countries refusing outright, and others declaring that they were unable to even 
5584
5585consider my request until I arrived in their territory—a feat that was impossible. Ultimately, the only head of state 
5586
5587that proved sympathetic to my cause was Burger King, who never denied me a Whopper (hold the tomato and onion).
5588
5589Soon, my presence in the airport became a global spectacle. Eventually the Russians found it a nuisance. On July 1, 
5590
5591the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, left another airport in Moscow, Vnukovo, in his Bolivian state plane after 
5592
5593attending the annual GECF, or Gas Exporting Countries Forum. The US government, suspecting that I was onboard due to 
5594
5595President Morales’s expressions of solidarity, pressured the governments of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal to 
5596
5597deny the plane access to their airspace, and succeeded in diverting it to Vienna, Austria. There it was grounded, 
5598
5599searched, and only
5600allowed to continue on its journey once no traces of me were found. This was a startling violation of sovereignty, 
5601
5602which occasioned UN censure. The incident was an affront to Russia, which couldn’t guarantee a visiting head of state 
5603
5604safe passage home. And it confirmed to Russia and to me that any flight that America suspected me of stowing away on 
5605
5606ran the same risk of being diverted and grounded.
5607
5608The Russian government must have decided that it would be better off without me and the media swarm clogging up the 
5609
5610country’s major airport. On August 1 it granted me temporary asylum. Sarah and I were allowed to leave Sheremetyevo, 
5611
5612but eventually only one of us would be heading home. Our time together served to bind us as friends for life. I will 
5613
5614always be grateful for the weeks she spent by my side, for her integrity and her fortitude.
561528
5616
5617From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills
5618
5619As far away from home as I was, my thoughts were consumed with Lindsay. I’ve been wary of telling her story—the story 
5620
5621of what happened to her once I was gone: the FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the press attention, the online 
5622
5623harassment, the confusion and pain, the anger and sadness. Finally, I realized that only Lindsay herself should be 
5624
5625the person to recount that period. No one else has the experience, but more than that: no one else has the right. 
5626
5627Luckily, Lindsay has kept a diary since adolescence, using it to record her life and draft her art. She has 
5628
5629graciously agreed to let me include a few pages here. In the entries that follow, all names have been changed (except 
5630
5631those of family), some typos fixed, and a few redactions made. Otherwise, this is how it was, from the moment that I 
5632
5633left Hawaii.
5634
56355.22.2013
5636
5637Stopped in at K-Mart to get a lei. Trying to welcome Wendy with proper aloha spirit, but I’m pissed. Ed’s been 
5638
5639planning his mother’s visit for weeks. He’s the one who invited her. I was hoping he’d be there when I woke up this 
5640
5641morning. On the drive back to Waipahu from the airport Wendy was worried. She’s not used to him having to go away on 
5642
5643a moment’s notice. I tried to tell her this was usual. But it was usual when we lived overseas, not in Hawaii, and I 
5644
5645can’t remember any other time that Ed was away and wasn’t in touch. We went to a nice dinner to distract ourselves 
5646
5647and Wendy talked about how she thought Ed was on medical leave. It didn’t make any sense to her that he’d be called 
5648
5649away for work while on medical leave. The moment we got home Wendy went to bed. I checked my phone and found I had 
5650
5651three missed calls from an unknown number, and one missed call from a long foreign number, no voicemails. I Googled 
5652
5653the long foreign number. Ed must be in Hong Kong.
5654
56555.24.2013
5656
5657Wendy was home all day alone, thoughts just running circles in her brain. I feel bad for her and can only console 
5658
5659myself by thinking how Ed would handle  having  to  entertain  my  own  mother  by  himself.  Over  dinner, Wendy 
5660
5661kept asking me about Ed’s health, which I guess is understandable, given her own history of epilepsy. She said she’s 
5662
5663worried that he had another seizure, and then she started crying, and then I started crying. I’m just realizing that 
5664
5665I’m worried too. But instead of epilepsy, I’m thinking, What if he’s off having an affair? Who is she? Just try and 
5666
5667get through this
5668visit and have a good time. Take a puddle jumper to the Big Island. To
5669Kilauea, the volcano, as planned. Once Wendy goes back, reassess things.
5670
56716.3.2013
5672
5673Brought Wendy to the airport, to fly back to MD. She didn’t want to go back, but she has work. I took her as far as I 
5674
5675could go and hugged her. I didn’t want to let go of the hug. Then she got in line for security. Came home to find 
5676
5677Ed’s Skype status has changed to: “Sorry but it had to be done.” I don’t know when he changed it. Could’ve been 
5678
5679today, could’ve been last month. I just checked on Skype and happened to notice it, and I’m crazy enough to think 
5680
5681he’s sending me a message.
5682
56836.7.2013
5684
5685Woke up to a call from NSA Special Agent Megan Smith asking me to call her back about Ed. Still feeling sick with 
5686
5687fever. I had to drop off my car at the autobody shop and Tod gave me a ride back on his Ducati. When we pulled onto 
5688
5689the street I saw a white gov vehicle in the driveway and gov agents talking to our neighbors. I’ve never even met the 
5690
5691neighbors. I don’t know why but my first instinct was to tell Tod to keep driving. I ducked my head down to pretend 
5692
5693to look for something in my purse. We went to Starbucks, where Tod pointed out a newspaper, something about the NSA. 
5694
5695I tried to read the headlines but my paranoia just ran wild. Is that why the white SUV was in my driveway? Is that 
5696
5697the same SUV in the parking lot outside this Starbucks? Should I even be writing this stuff down? Went home again and 
5698
5699the SUV was gone. Took some meds and realized I hadn’t eaten. In the middle of lunch, cops showed up at the kitchen 
5700
5701window. Through the window, I could hear them radioing that someone was inside the residence. By someone they meant 
5702
5703me. I opened the front door to two agents and an HPD1 officer. They were frightening. The HPD officer searched 
5704
5705through the house as Agent Smith asked me about Ed, who’d been due back at work on May 31. The HPD officer said it 
5706
5707was suspicious when a workplace reported someone missing before the person’s spouse or girlfriend did. He was looking 
5708
5709at me like I killed Ed. He was looking around the house for his body. Agent Smith asked if she could see all the 
5710
5711computers in the house and that made me angry. I told her she could get a warrant. They left the house but camped out 
5712
5713on the corner.
5714
5715San Diego, 6.8.2013
5716
5717I got a little afraid that TSA wouldn’t let me leave the island. The TVs in the airport were all full of news about 
5718
5719the NSA. Once onboard the plane, I
5720emailed Agent Smith and the HPD Missing Persons’ detective that my grandma was having open heart surgery, requiring 
5721
5722me to be off-island for a few weeks. The surgery isn’t scheduled until the end of the month and it’s in Florida, not 
5723
5724San Diego, but this was the only excuse I could think of for getting to the mainland. It was a better excuse than 
5725
5726saying, I just need to be with my best friend Sandra and also it’s her bday. When the wheels left the ground I fell 
5727
5728into a momentary coma of relief. When I landed, I had a raging fever. Sandra picked me up. I hadn’t told her anything 
5729
5730because my paranoia was off the charts, but she could tell that something was up, that I wasn’t just visiting her for 
5731
5732her bday. She asked me if Ed and I had broken up. I answered maybe.
5733
57346.9.2013
5735
5736I got a phone call from Tiffany. She asked how I was doing and said she was worried about me. I didn’t understand. 
5737
5738She got quiet. Then she asked if I’d seen the news. She told me Ed had made a video and was on the homepage of the 
5739
5740Huffington Post. Sandra hooked up her laptop to the flatscreen. I calmly waited for the 12-minute YouTube video to 
5741
5742load. And then there he was. Real. Alive. I was shocked. He looked thin, but he sounded like his old self. The old 
5743
5744Ed, confident and strong. Like how he was before this last tough year. This was the man I loved, not the cold distant 
5745
5746ghost I’d recently been living with. Sandra hugged me and I didn’t know what to say. We stood in silence. We drove 
5747
5748out to Sandra’s bday bbq, at her cousins’ house on this pretty hill south of the city, right on the Mexican border. 
5749
5750Gorgeous place and I could barely see any of it. I was shutting down. Not knowing how to even begin to parse the 
5751
5752situation. We arrived to friendly faces that had no clue what I was going through on the inside. Ed, what have you 
5753
5754done? How can you come back from this? I was barely present for all the party small talk. My phone was blowing up 
5755
5756with calls and texts. Dad. Mom. Wendy. Driving back up to San Diego from the bbq I drove Sandra’s cousin’s Durango, 
5757
5758which Sandra needs this week to move. As we drove, a black gov SUV followed us and a police car pulled Sandra’s car 
5759
5760over, which was the car I’d come in. I just kept driving the Durango, hoping  I  knew  where  I  was  going  because 
5761
5762my  phone  was already dead from all the calls.
5763
57646.10.2013
5765
5766I knew Eileen2 was important in local politics, but I didn’t know she was also a fucking gangster. She’s been taking 
5767
5768care of everything. While we were waiting for her contacts to recommend a lawyer, I got a call from the
5769FBI. An agent named Chuck Landowski, who asked me what I was doing in San Diego. Eileen told me to hang up. The agent 
5770
5771called back and I picked up, even though Eileen said I shouldn’t. Agent Chuck said he didn’t want to show up at the 
5772
5773house unannounced, so he was just calling “out of courtesy” to tell us that agents were coming. This sent Eileen into 
5774
5775overdrive. She’s so goddamned tough, it’s amazing. She had me leave my phone at the house and we took her car and 
5776
5777drove around to think. Eileen got a text from a friend of hers recommending a lawyer, a guy named Jerry Farber, and 
5778
5779she handed me her phone and had me call him. A secretary picked up and I told her that my name was Lindsay Mills and 
5780
5781I was the girlfriend of Edward Snowden and needed representation. The secretary said, “Oh, let me put you right 
5782
5783through.” It was funny to hear the recognition in her voice.
5784
5785Jerry picked up the phone and asked how he could help. I told him about the FBI calls and he asked for the agent’s 
5786
5787name, so he could talk to the feds. While we waited to hear back from Jerry, Eileen suggested we go get burner 
5788
5789phones, one to use with family and friends, one to use with Jerry. After the phones, Eileen asked which bank I kept 
5790
5791my money at. We drove to the nearest branch and she had me withdraw all of my money immediately in case the feds 
5792
5793froze my accounts. I went and took out all my life savings, split between cashier’s checks and cash. Eileen insisted 
5794
5795I split the money like that and I just followed her instructions. The bank manager asked me what I needed all that 
5796
5797cash for and I said, “Life.” I really wanted to say STFU, but I decided if I was polite I’d be forgettable. I was 
5798
5799concerned that people were going to recognize me since they were showing my face alongside Ed’s on the news. When we 
5800
5801got out of the bank I asked Eileen how she’d become such an expert at what to do when you’re in trouble. She told me, 
5802
5803very chill, “You get to know these things, as a woman. Like, you always take the money out of the bank, when you’re 
5804
5805getting a divorce.” We got some Vietnamese takeout and took it back to Eileen’s house and ate it on the floor in the 
5806
5807upstairs hallway. Eileen and Sandra plugged in their hairdryers and kept them blowing to make noise, as we whispered 
5808
5809to each other, just in case they were listening in on us.
5810
5811Lawyer Jerry called and said we had to meet with the FBI today. Eileen drove us to his office, and on the way she 
5812
5813noticed we were being followed. It made no sense. We were going to a meeting to talk to the feds but also the feds 
5814
5815were behind us, two SUVs and a Honda Accord without plates. Eileen got the idea that maybe they weren’t the FBI. She 
5816
5817thought that
5818maybe they were some other agency or even a foreign government, trying to kidnap me. She started driving fast and 
5819
5820erratically, trying to lose them, but every traffic light was turning red just when we approached it. I told her that 
5821
5822she was being crazy, she had to slow down. There was a plainclothes agent by the door of Jerry’s building, he had gov 
5823
5824written all over his face. We went up in the elevator and when the door opened, three men were waiting: two of them 
5825
5826were agents, one of them was Jerry. He was the only man who shook hands with me. Jerry told Eileen that she couldn’t 
5827
5828come with us to the conference room. He’d call her when we were finished. Eileen insisted that she’d wait. She sat in 
5829
5830the lobby with an expression on her face like she was ready to wait for a million years. On the way to the conference 
5831
5832room Jerry took me aside and said he’d negotiated “limited immunity,” which I said was pretty meaningless, and he 
5833
5834didn’t disagree. He told me never to lie, and that when I didn’t know what to say, I should say IDK and let him talk. 
5835
5836Agent Mike had a grin that was a bit too kind, while Agent Leland kept looking at me like I was an experiment and he 
5837
5838was studying my reactions. Both of them creeped me out. They started with questions about me that were so basic, it 
5839
5840was like they were just trying to show me that they already knew everything about me. Of course they did. That was 
5841
5842Ed’s point. The gov always knows everything. They had me talk about the last two months, twice, and then when I was 
5843
5844finished with the “timeline,” Agent Mike asked me to start all over again from the beginning. I said, “The beginning 
5845
5846of what?” He said, “Tell me how you met.”
5847
58486.11.2013
5849
5850Coming out of the interrogation exhausted, late at night, with days of interrogations ahead of me. They wouldn’t tell 
5851
5852me how many exactly. Eileen drove us to meet Sandra for dinner at some diner, and as we left Downtown we noticed we 
5853
5854still had our tails. Eileen tried to lose them by speeding and making illegal U-turns again, and I begged her to 
5855
5856stop. I thought her driving like that just made me look worse. It made me look suspicious. But Eileen is a stubborn 
5857
5858mama bear. In the parking lot of the diner, Eileen banged on the windows of the surveillance vehicles and yelled that 
5859
5860I was cooperating, so there was no reason for them to be following. It was a little embarrassing, like when your 
5861
5862mother sticks up for you in school, but mostly I was just in awe. The nerve to go up to a vehicle with federal agents 
5863
5864and tell them off. Sandra was at a table in the back and we ordered and talked about “media exposure.” I was all over 
5865
5866the news.
5867Halfway through dinner, two men walked up to our table. One tall guy in a baseball hat, who had braces, and his 
5868
5869partner who was dressed like a guy going clubbing. The tall guy identified himself as Agent Chuck, the agent who’d 
5870
5871called me before. He asked to speak with me about “the driving behavior” once we’d finished eating. The moment he 
5872
5873said that we decided we were finished. The agents were out in front of the diner. Agent Chuck showed his badge and 
5874
5875told me that his main goal was my protection. He said there could be threats against my life. He tapped his jacket 
5876
5877and said if there was any danger he would take care of it, because he was on “the armed team.” It was all such macho 
5878
5879posturing or an attempt to get me to trust him, by putting me in a vulnerable position. He went on to say I was going 
5880
5881to be surveilled/followed by the FBI 24/7, for the foreseeable future, and the reckless driving Eileen was doing 
5882
5883would not be tolerated. He said agents are never supposed to talk to their assignments but he felt that, given the 
5884
5885circumstances, he had to “take the team in this direction for everyone’s safety.” He handed me a business card with 
5886
5887his contact info and said he’d be parked just outside Eileen’s house all night, and I should call him if I needed 
5888
5889him, or needed anything, for any reason. He told me I was free to go anywhere (you’re damn right, I thought), but 
5890
5891that whenever I planned to go anywhere, I should text him. He said, “Open communication will make everything easier.” 
5892
5893He said, “If you give us a heads-up, you’ll be that much safer, I promise.”
5894
58956.16.2013–6.18.2013
5896
5897Haven’t written for days. I’m so angry that I have to take a deep breath and figure out who and what exactly I’m 
5898
5899angry at, because it all just blurs together. Fucking Feds! Exhausting interrogations where they treat me like I’m 
5900
5901guilty and follow me everywhere, but what’s worse is that they’ve broken my routine. Usually I’d tear off into the 
5902
5903woods and shoot or write, but now I have a surveillance team audience wherever I go. It’s like by taking away my 
5904
5905energy and time and desire to write, they took away the last  little  bit  of  privacy I  had.  I  need  to  remember 
5906
5907everything that’s happened. First they had me bring in my laptop and copied the hard drive. They probably put a bunch 
5908
5909of bugs on it, too. Then they had copies of all my emails and chats printed out, and they were reading me things I 
5910
5911wrote to Ed and things Ed wrote to me and demanding I explain them. The FBI thinks that everything’s a code. And 
5912
5913sure, in a vacuum anyone’s messages look strange. But this is just how people who’ve been together for eight years 
5914
5915communicate! They act like they’ve never been in a relationship! They were asking questions to try to emotionally 
5916
5917exhaust me so that when
5918we returned to “the timeline,” my answers would change. They won’t accept I know nothing. But still, we keep 
5919
5920returning to “the timeline,” now with transcripts of all my emails and chats and my online calendar printed out in 
5921
5922front of us.
5923
5924I would expect that gov guys would understand that Ed was always secretive about his work and I had to accept this 
5925
5926secrecy to be with him, but they don’t. They refuse to. After a while, I just broke down in tears, so the session 
5927
5928ended early. Agent Mike and Agent Leland offered to give me a ride back to Eileen’s, and before I left, Jerry took me 
5929
5930aside and said that the FBI seemed sympathetic. “They seem to have taken a liking to you, especially Mike.” He told 
5931
5932me to be careful, though, about being too casual on the ride home. “Don’t answer any of their questions.” The moment 
5933
5934we drove away Mike chimed in with, “I’m sure Jerry said not to answer any questions, but I only have a couple.” Once 
5935
5936Mike got talking, he told me that the FBI office in San Diego had a bet. Apparently, the agents had a pool going to 
5937
5938bet how long it would be before the media figured out my location. The winner would get a free martini. Later, Sandra 
5939
5940said she had her doubts. “Knowing men,” she said, “the bet’s about something else.”
5941
59426.19.2013–6.20.2013
5943
5944While the rest of the country is coming to grips with the fact that their privacy is being violated, mine’s being 
5945
5946stripped from me on a whole new level. Both things thanks to Ed. I hate sending Chuck “departure updates,” and then I 
5947
5948hate myself that I don’t have the nerve not to send them. The worst was this one night sending a “departure update” 
5949
5950that I’m leaving to meet Sandra and then getting lost on the way but not wanting to stop and ask the agents following 
5951
5952me for help, so I was just leading them around in circles. I got to thinking maybe they’d bugged Eileen’s car, so I 
5953
5954began talking aloud in the car, thinking maybe they could hear me. I wasn’t talking, I was cursing them out. I had to 
5955
5956pay Jerry, and after I did all I could think about was all the tax money being wasted on just following me to my 
5957
5958lawyer’s office and the gym. After the first two days of meetings I’d already run out of the only decent clothes I 
5959
5960had, so I went to Macy’s. Agents followed me around the women’s department. I wondered if they’d come into the 
5961
5962fitting room, too, and tell me that looks good, that doesn’t, green’s not your color. At the fitting room’s entrance 
5963
5964was a TV blaring the news and I froze when the announcer said “Edward Snowden’s girlfriend.” I fled the stall, and 
5965
5966stood in front of the screen. Watching as my photos flicked by. I whipped out my phone and made the mistake of 
5967
5968Googling myself. So many comments labeling me a stripper or whore. None of this
5969is me. Just like the feds, they had already decided who I was.
5970
59716.22.2013–6.24.2013
5972
5973Interrogations over, for now. But a tail still following. I left the house, happy to get back in the air at this 
5974
5975local aerial silks studio. Made it to the studio and couldn’t find street parking, but my tail did. He had to leave 
5976
5977his spot when I drove out of range, so I doubled back and stole his spot. Had a phone call with Wendy, where we both 
5978
5979said that however badly Ed hurt us, he did the right thing by trying to ensure that when he was gone, Wendy and I 
5980
5981were together. That’s why he’d invited her and been so insistent about her coming. He’d wanted us to be together in 
5982
5983Hawaii when he went public, so that we could keep each other company and give each other strength and comfort. It’s 
5984
5985so hard to be angry at someone you love. And even harder to be angry at someone you love and respect for doing the 
5986
5987right thing. Wendy and I were both in tears and then we both went quiet. I think we had the same thought, at the same 
5988
5989time. How can we talk like normal people when they’re eavesdropping on all our calls?
5990
59916.25.2013
5992
5993LAX  to  HNL.  Wore  the  copper-colored  wig  to  the  airport,  through security, and throughout the flight. Sandra 
5994
5995came with. We grabbed a gross preflight lunch in the food court. More TVs tuned to CNN, still showing Ed, and still 
5996
5997surreal, which is the new real for everyone, I think. Got a text from Agent Mike, telling me and Sandra to come see 
5998
5999him at Gate 73. Really? He came up to LA from San Diego? Gate 73 was roped off and empty. Mike was sitting waiting 
6000
6001for us on a row of chairs. He crossed his legs and showed us he was wearing an ankle pistol. More macho bullshit 
6002
6003intimidation. He had paperwork for me to sign in order for the FBI to release Ed’s car keys to me in Hawaii. He said 
6004
6005two agents would be waiting for us in Honolulu with the key. Other agents would be with us on the flight. He 
6006
6007apologized that he wasn’t coming personally. Ugh.
6008
60096.29.2013
6010
6011Been packing the house for days now with only minor interruptions from the FBI, coming by with more forms to sign. 
6012
6013It’s torture, going through everything. Finding all these little things that remind me of him. I’m like a crazy 
6014
6015woman, cleaning up, and then just gazing at his side of the bed. More  often,  though,  I  find  what’s  missing.  
6016
6017What  the  FBI  took. Technology, yes, but also books. What they left behind were footprints, scuff marks on the 
6018
6019walls, and dust.
60206.30.2013
6021
6022Waipahu yard sale. Three men responded to Sandra’s “take it all, best offer” Craigslisting. They showed up to rummage 
6023
6024through Ed’s life, his piano, guitar, and weight set. Anything I couldn’t bear to live with or afford to ship to the 
6025
6026mainland. The men filled their pickup with as much as they could, and then came back for a second load. To my 
6027
6028surprise, and I think to Sandra’s, too, I wasn’t too bothered by their scavenging. But the moment they were gone, the 
6029
6030second time, I lost it.
6031
60327.2.2013
6033
6034Everything got shipped today, except the futons and couch, which I’m just ditching. All that was left of Ed’s stuff 
6035
6036after the FBI raided the house fit into one small cardboard box. Some photos and his clothes, lots of mismatched 
6037
6038socks. Nothing that could be used as evidence in court, just evidence of our life together. Sandra brought some 
6039
6040lighter fluid and brought the metal trash can back around to the lanai. I dumped all of Ed’s stuff, the photos and 
6041
6042clothes, inside, and lit a book of matches on fire and tossed it in. Sandra and I sat around while it burned and the 
6043
6044smoke rose into the sky. The glow and the smoke reminded me of the trip I took with Wendy to Kilauea, the volcano on 
6045
6046the Big Island. That was just over a month ago, but it feels like years in the past. How could we have known that our 
6047
6048own lives were about to erupt? That Volcano Ed was going to destroy everything? But I remember the guide at Kilauea 
6049
6050saying that volcanoes are only destructive in the short term. In the long term, they move the world. They create 
6051
6052islands, cool the planet, and enrich the soil. Their lava flows uncontrolled and then cools and hardens. The ash they 
6053
6054shoot into the air sprinkles down as minerals, which fertilize the earth and make new life grow.
605529
6056
6057Love and Exile
6058
6059If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or 
6060
6061investigate further and typed it into  a  search  engine—and  if  that  term  happened  to  be  in  some  way 
6062
6063suspicious, a term like XKEYSCORE, for example—then congrats: you’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
6064
6065But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out 
6066
6067that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether 
6068
6069you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit 
6070
6071card.
6072
6073All you wanted to do was to read—to take part in that most intensely intimate human act, the joining of minds through 
6074
6075language. But that was more than enough. Your natural desire to connect with the world was all the world needed to 
6076
6077connect your living, breathing self to a series of globally unique identifiers, such  as  your  email,  your  phone, 
6078
6079and  the  IP  address of  your computer. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked these identifiers across 
6080
6081every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to 
6082
6083record and store for perpetuity the data of your life.
6084
6085And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to 
6086
6087passively collect all of your communications,  they  started  actively  tampering  with  them,  too.  By poisoning 
6088
6089the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, or “exploits,” they developed the ability to 
6090
6091gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, 
6092
6093including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern 
6094
6095machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you 
6096
6097turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. And they’ll gladly endure looking up 
6098
6099your nostrils and watching you move your lips as you read, so long as it gets them the data they want and lets them 
6100
6101positively identify you.
6102
6103This is  the result of  two decades of  unchecked innovation—the final product of a political and professional class 
6104
6105that dreams itself your master. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has
6106now become an open book.
6107
6108
6109
6110IF MASS  SURVEILLANCE  was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life, then I wanted the dangers it posed, and 
6111
6112the damage it had already done, to be a constant presence too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to make 
6113
6114this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world, could not ignore.In the years since 2013, 
6115
6116awareness has grown, both in scope
6117and  subtlety.  But  in  this  social  media  age,  we  have  always  to  remind
6118ourselves: awareness alone is not enough.
6119
6120In America, the initial press reports on the disclosures started a “national conversation,” as President Obama 
6121
6122himself conceded. While I appreciated the sentiment, I remember wishing that he had noted that what made it 
6123
6124“national,” what made it a “conversation,” was that for the first time the American public was informed enough to 
6125
6126have a voice.
6127
6128The revelations of  2013 particularly roused Congress, both houses of which launched multiple investigations into NSA 
6129
6130abuses. Those investigations concluded that the agency had repeatedly lied regarding the nature and efficacy of its 
6131
6132mass surveillance programs, even to the most highly cleared Intelligence Committee legislators.
6133
6134In 2015, a federal court of appeals ruled in the matter of ACLU v. Clapper, a suit challenging the legality of the 
6135
6136NSA’s phone records collection program. The court ruled that the NSA’s program had violated even the loose standards 
6137
6138of the Patriot Act and, moreover, was most probably unconstitutional. The ruling focused on the NSA’s interpretation 
6139
6140of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allowed the government to demand from third parties “any tangible thing” 
6141
6142that it deemed “relevant” to foreign intelligence and terror investigations. In the court’s opinion, the government’s 
6143
6144definition of “relevant” was so expansive as to be virtually meaningless. To call some collected data “relevant” 
6145
6146merely because it might become relevant at some amorphous point in the future was “unprecedented and unwarranted.” 
6147
6148The court’s refusal to accept the government’s definition caused not a few legal scholars to interpret the ruling as 
6149
6150casting doubt on the legitimacy of all government bulk-collection programs predicated on this doctrine of future 
6151
6152relevance. In the wake of this opinion, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which amended Section 215 to explicitly 
6153
6154prohibit the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Going forward, those records would remain where they 
6155
6156originally had been, in the private control of the telecoms, and the government would have to formally request 
6157
6158specific ones with a FISC warrant
6159in hand if it wanted to access them.
6160
6161ACLU v. Clapper was a notable victory, to be sure. A crucial precedent was set. The court declared that the American 
6162
6163public had standing: American citizens  had  the  right  to  stand  in  a  court  of  law  and  challenge  the 
6164
6165government’s officially secret system of mass surveillance. But as the numerous other cases that resulted from the 
6166
6167disclosures continue to wend their slow and deliberate ways through the courts, it becomes ever clearer to me that 
6168
6169the American legal resistance to mass surveillance was just the beta phase of what has to be an international 
6170
6171opposition movement, fully implemented across both governments and private sector.
6172
6173The reaction of technocapitalists to the disclosures was immediate and forceful, proving once again that with extreme 
6174
6175hazards come unlikely allies. The documents revealed an NSA so determined to pursue any and all information it 
6176
6177perceived as being deliberately kept from it that it had undermined the basic encryption protocols of the Internet—
6178
6179making citizens’ financial and  medical records, for  example, more  vulnerable, and  in  the process harming 
6180
6181businesses that relied on their customers entrusting them with such sensitive data. In response, Apple adopted strong 
6182
6183default encryption for its iPhones and iPads, and Google followed suit for its Android products and Chromebooks. But 
6184
6185perhaps the most important private-sector change occurred when businesses throughout the world set about switching 
6186
6187their website platforms, replacing http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) with the encrypted https (the S signifies 
6188
6189security), which helps prevent third-party interception of Web traffic. The year 2016 was a landmark in tech history, 
6190
6191the first  year  since  the  invention of  the  Internet  that  more  Web  traffic  was encrypted than unencrypted.
6192
6193The Internet is certainly more secure now than it was in 2013, especially given the sudden global recognition of the 
6194
6195need for encrypted tools and apps. I’ve been involved with the design and creation of a few of these myself, through 
6196
6197my work heading the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering 
6198
6199public-interest journalism in the new millennium. A major part of the organization’s brief is to preserve and 
6200
6201strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights through the development of encryption technologies. To that end, the FPF 
6202
6203financially supports Signal, an encrypted texting and calling platform created by Open Whisper Systems, and develops 
6204
6205SecureDrop (originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz), an open-source submission system that allows media 
6206
6207organizations to securely accept documents from anonymous whistleblowers and other sources. Today, SecureDrop is 
6208
6209available in ten languages and used
6210by more than seventy media organizations around the world, including the
6211New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the New Yorker.
6212
6213In a perfect world, which is to say in a world that doesn’t exist, just laws would make these tools obsolete. But in 
6214
6215the only world we have, they have never been more necessary. A change in the law is infinitely more difficult to 
6216
6217achieve than a  change in  a  technological standard, and as  long as  legal innovation lags behind technological 
6218
6219innovation institutions will seek to abuse that disparity in the furtherance of their interests. It falls to 
6220
6221independent, open- source hardware and software developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties 
6222
6223protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.
6224
6225In my current situation, I’m constantly reminded of the fact that the law is country-specific, whereas technology is 
6226
6227not. Every nation has its own legal code but the same computer code. Technology crosses borders and carries almost  
6228
6229every  passport.  As  the  years  go  by,  it  has  become  increasingly apparent to me that legislatively reforming 
6230
6231the surveillance regime of the country of my birth won’t necessarily help a journalist or dissident in the country of 
6232
6233my exile, but an encrypted smartphone might.
6234
6235
6236
6237INTERNATIONALLY,  THE  DISCLOSURES helped to revive debates about surveillance in places with long histories of 
6238
6239abuses. The countries whose citizenries were most opposed to American mass surveillance were those whose governments 
6240
6241had most cooperated with it, from the Five Eyes nations (especially the UK, whose GCHQ remains the NSA’s primary 
6242
6243partner) to
6244nations of the European Union. Germany, which has done much to reckon
6245with its Nazi and Communist past, provides the primary example of this disjunction. Its citizens and legislators were 
6246
6247appalled to learn that the NSA was surveilling German communications and had even targeted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s 
6248
6249smartphone. At the same time, the BND, Germany’s premier intelligence agency, had collaborated with the NSA in 
6250
6251numerous operations, even carrying out certain proxy surveillance initiatives that the NSA was unable or unwilling to 
6252
6253undertake on its own.
6254
6255Nearly every country in the world found itself in a similar bind: its citizens outraged, its government complicit. 
6256
6257Any elected government that relies on surveillance to maintain control of a citizenry that regards surveillance as 
6258
6259anathema to  democracy has  effectively ceased  to  be  a  democracy. Such cognitive dissonance on a geopolitical 
6260
6261scale has helped to bring individual privacy concerns back into the international dialogue within the context of
6262human rights.
6263
6264For the first time since the end of World War II, liberal democratic governments throughout the world were discussing 
6265
6266privacy as the natural, inborn right of every man, woman, and child. In doing so they were harking back to the 1948 
6267
6268UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose Article
626912 states: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor 
6270
6271to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such 
6272
6273interference or attacks.” Like all  UN  declarations, this  aspirational document was  never enforceable, but it had 
6274
6275been intended to inculcate a new basis for transnational civil  liberties  in  a  world  that  had  just  survived  
6276
6277nuclear  atrocities  and attempted genocides and was facing an unprecedented surfeit of refugees and the stateless.
6278
6279The EU, still under the sway of this postwar universalist idealism, now became the  first  transnational body  to  
6280
6281put  these  principles into  practice, establishing a new directive that seeks to standardize whistleblower 
6282
6283protections across its member states, along with a standardized legal framework for privacy protection. In 2016, the 
6284
6285EU Parliament passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the most significant effort yet made to forestall 
6286
6287the incursions of technological hegemony—which the EU tends to regard, not unfairly, as an extension of American 
6288
6289hegemony.
6290
6291The  GDPR treats the  citizens of  the  European Union, whom it  calls “natural persons,” as also being “data 
6292
6293subjects”—that is, people who generate personally  identifiable  data.  In  the  US,  data  is  usually  regarded  as 
6294
6295 the property of whoever collects it. But the EU posits data as the property of the person it represents, which 
6296
6297allows it to treat our data subjecthood as deserving of civil liberties protections.
6298
6299The GDPR is undoubtedly a major legal advance, but even its transnationalism is too parochial: the Internet is 
6300
6301global. Our natural personhood will never be legally synonymous with our data subjecthood, not least because the 
6302
6303former lives in one place at a time while the latter lives in many places simultaneously.
6304
6305Today, no matter who you are, or where you are, bodily, physically, you are also elsewhere, abroad—multiple selves 
6306
6307wandering along the signal paths, with no country to call your own, and yet beholden to the laws of every country 
6308
6309through which you pass. The records of a life lived in Geneva dwell in the Beltway. The photos of a wedding in Tokyo 
6310
6311are on a honeymoon in Sydney. The videos of a funeral in Varanasi are up on Apple’s iCloud, which
6312is partially located in my home state of North Carolina and partially scattered across the partner servers of Amazon, 
6313
6314Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, throughout the EU, UK, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and China.
6315
6316Our data wanders far and wide. Our data wanders endlessly.
6317
6318We start generating this data before we are born, when technologies detect us in utero, and our data will continue to 
6319
6320proliferate even after we die. Of course, our consciously created memories, the records that we choose to keep, 
6321
6322comprise just a sliver of the information that has been wrung out of our lives
6323—most of it unconsciously, or without our consent—by business and government surveillance. We are the first people in 
6324
6325the history of the planet for whom this is true, the first people to be burdened with data immortality, the fact that 
6326
6327our collected records might have an eternal existence. This is why we have a special duty. We must ensure that these 
6328
6329records of our pasts can’t be turned against us, or turned against our children.
6330
6331Today, the liberty that we call privacy is being championed by a new generation. Not yet born on 9/11, they have 
6332
6333spent their entire lives under the omnipresent  specter  of  this  surveillance.  These  young  people  who  have 
6334
6335known no other world have dedicated themselves to imagining one, and it’s their political creativity and 
6336
6337technological ingenuity that give me hope.
6338
6339Still, if we don’t act to reclaim our data now, our children might not be able  to  do  so.  Then  they,  and  their  
6340
6341children, will  be  trapped too—each successive generation forced to live under the data specter of the previous one, 
6342
6343subject to a mass aggregation of information whose potential for societal control and human manipulation exceeds not 
6344
6345just the restraints of the law but the limits of the imagination.
6346
6347Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the 
6348
6349answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of 
6350
6351ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behavior in order to extrapolate behaviors to 
6352
6353come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate than analog methods like palm reading. Once you 
6354
6355go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that 
6356
6357its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation. A website 
6358
6359that tells you that because you liked this book you might also like books by James Clapper or Michael Hayden isn’t 
6360
6361offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion.
6362We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used 
6363
6364to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. If we do, the journalism we get will be merely 
6365
6366the journalism we want, or the journalism that the powerful want us to have, not  the  honest  collective  
6367
6368conversation that’s  necessary.  We  can’t  let  the godlike surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our 
6369
6370citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what 
6371
6372kind of job we can have, or whether we can have an education or a job at all; to discriminate against us based on our 
6373
6374financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often 
6375
6376assumes or imposes. And as for our most intimate data, our genetic information: if we allow it to be used to identify 
6377
6378us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us—to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image 
6379
6380of the technology that seeks its control.
6381
6382Of course, all of the above has already happened.
6383
6384
6385
6386EXILE: NOT A day has passed since August 1, 2013, in which I don’t recall that “exile” was what my teenage self used 
6387
6388to call getting booted off-line. The Wi- Fi died? Exile. I’m out of signal range? Exile. The self who used to say 
6389
6390that now seems so young to me. He seems so distant.
6391
6392When people ask me what my life is like now, I tend to answer that it’s a lot like theirs in that I spend a lot of 
6393
6394time in front of the computer—reading, writing, interacting. From what the press likes to describe as an “undisclosed 
6395
6396location”—which is really just whatever two-bedroom apartment in Moscow I happen to be renting—I beam myself onto 
6397
6398stages around the world, speaking about  the  protection of  civil  liberties  in  the  digital  age  to  audiences 
6399
6400of students, scholars, lawmakers, and technologists.
6401
6402Some days I take virtual meetings with my fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, or talk with 
6403
6404my European legal team, led by Wolfgang Kaleck, at  the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Other 
6405
6406days, I just pick up some Burger King—I know where my loyalties lie—and play games I have to pirate because I can no 
6407
6408longer use credit cards. One fixture of my existence is my daily check-in with my American lawyer, confidant, and 
6409
6410all-around consigliere Ben Wizner at the ACLU, who has been my guide to the world as it is and puts up with my 
6411
6412musings about the world as it should be.
6413
6414That’s my life. It got significantly brighter during the freezing winter of
64152014, when Lindsay came to visit—the first time I’d seen her since Hawaii. I tried not to expect too much, because I 
6416
6417knew I didn’t deserve the chance; the only thing I deserved was a slap in the face. But when I opened the door, she 
6418
6419placed her hand on my cheek and I told her I loved her.
6420
6421“Hush,” she said, “I know.”
6422
6423We held each other in silence, each breath like a pledge to make up for lost time.
6424
6425From that moment, my world was hers. Previously, I’d been content to hang around indoors—indeed, that was my 
6426
6427preference before I was in Russia
6428—but Lindsay was insistent: she’d never been to Russia and now we were going to be tourists together.
6429
6430My Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who helped me get asylum in the country—he was the only lawyer who had the 
6431
6432foresight to show up at the airport with a translator—is a cultured and resourceful man, and he proved as adept at 
6433
6434obtaining last-minute tickets to the opera as he is at navigating my legal issues. He helped arrange two box seats at 
6435
6436the Bolshoi Theater, so Lindsay and I got dressed and went, though I have to admit I was wary. There were so many 
6437
6438people, all packed so tightly into a hall. Lindsay could sense my growing unease. As the lights dimmed and the 
6439
6440curtain rose, she leaned over, nudged me in the ribs, and whispered, “None of these people are here for you. They’re 
6441
6442here for this.”
6443
6444Lindsay and I also spent time at some of Moscow’s museums. The Tretyakov Gallery contains one of the world’s richest 
6445
6446collection of Russian Orthodox icon paintings. The artists who made these paintings for the Church were essentially 
6447
6448contractors, I thought, and so were typically not allowed to sign  their  names  to  their  handiwork, or  preferred  
6449
6450not  to.  The  time  and tradition that fostered these works was not given much to recognizing individual 
6451
6452achievement. As Lindsay and I stood in front of one of the icons, a young tourist, a teenage girl, suddenly stepped 
6453
6454between us. This wasn’t the first  time  I  was  recognized  in  public,  but  given  Lindsay’s  presence,  it 
6455
6456certainly threatened to  be  the  most headline-worthy. In  German-accented English, the girl asked whether she could 
6457
6458take a selfie with us. I’m not sure what explains my reaction—maybe it was this German girl’s shy and polite way of 
6459
6460asking, or maybe it was Lindsay’s always mood-improving, live-and- let-live presence—but without hesitation, for 
6461
6462once, I agreed. Lindsay smiled as the girl posed between us and took a photo. Then, after a few sweet words of 
6463
6464support, she departed.
6465I dragged Lindsay out of the museum a moment later. I was afraid that if the girl posted the photo to social media we 
6466
6467could be just minutes away from unwanted attention. I feel foolish now for thinking that. I kept nervously checking 
6468
6469online, but the photo didn’t appear. Not that day, and not the day after. As far as I can tell, it was never shared—
6470
6471just kept as a private memory of a personal moment.
6472
6473
6474
6475WHENEVER I GO outside, I try to change my appearance a bit. Maybe I get rid of my beard, maybe I wear different 
6476
6477glasses. I never liked the cold until I realized that a hat and scarf provide the world’s most convenient and 
6478
6479inconspicuous anonymity. I change the rhythm and pace of my walk, and, contrary to the sage advice of my mother, I 
6480
6481look away from traffic when
6482crossing the street, which is why I’ve never been caught on any of the car
6483dashcams that are ubiquitous here. Passing buildings equipped with CCTV I keep my head down, so that no one will see 
6484
6485me as I’m usually seen online— head-on. I used to worry about the bus and metro, but nowadays everybody’s too busy 
6486
6487staring at their phones to give me a second glance. If I take a cab, I’ll have it pick me up at a bus or metro stop a 
6488
6489few blocks away from where I live and drop me off at an address a few blocks away from where I’m going.
6490
6491Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even 
6492
6493blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.
6494
6495Lindsay’s Russian is better than mine. She also laughs more easily and is more patient and generous and kind.
6496
6497Tonight, we’re celebrating our anniversary. Lindsay moved out here three years ago, and two years ago today, we 
6498
6499married.
6500NOTES
6501
65021. Hawaii Police Department
6503
65042. Sandra’s mother
6505ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
6506
6507In May 2013, as I sat in that hotel room in Hong Kong wondering whether any journalists would show up to meet me, I’d 
6508
6509never felt more alone. Six years  later,  I  find  myself  in  quite  the  opposite  situation,  having  been 
6510
6511welcomed   into   an   extraordinary   and   ever-expanding   global   tribe   of journalists, lawyers, 
6512
6513technologists, and human rights advocates to whom I owe an incalculable debt. At the conclusion of a book, it’s 
6514
6515traditional for an author to thank the people who helped make the book possible, and I certainly intend to do that 
6516
6517here, but given the circumstances I’d be remiss if I didn’t also thank the people who have helped make my life 
6518
6519possible—by advocating for my freedom and, especially, by working ceaselessly and selflessly to protect our open 
6520
6521societies as well as the technologies that have brought us, and that bring everyone, together.
6522
6523Over the last nine months, Joshua Cohen has taken me to writing school, helping to transform my rambling 
6524
6525reminiscences and capsule manifestos into a book that I hope he can be proud of.
6526
6527Chris Parris-Lamb proved himself a shrewd and patient agent, while Sam Nicholson provided astute and clarifying edits 
6528
6529and support, as did the entire team at Metropolitan, from Gillian Blake to Sara Bershtel, Riva Hocherman, and Grigory 
6530
6531Tovbis.
6532
6533The success of this team is a testament to its members’ talents, and to the talents of the man who assembled it—Ben 
6534
6535Wizner, my lawyer, and, I am honored to say, my friend.
6536
6537In the same vein, I’d like to thank my international team of lawyers who have worked tirelessly to keep me free. I 
6538
6539would also like to thank Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s director, who embraced my cause at a time of considerable 
6540
6541political risk for the organization, along with the other ACLU staff who have helped me throughout the years, 
6542
6543including Bennett Stein, Nicola Morrow, Noa Yachot, and Daniel Kahn Gillmor.
6544
6545Additionally, I’d like to acknowledge the work of Bob Walker, Jan Tavitian, and their team at the American Program 
6546
6547Bureau, who have allowed me to make a living by spreading my message to new audiences around the world.
6548
6549Trevor Timm and my fellow board members at the Freedom of the Press Foundation have provided the space and resources 
6550
6551for me to return to my true passion, engineering for social good. I am especially grateful to our CTO
6552Micah Lee, former FPF operations manager Emmanuel Morales, and current FPF board member Daniel Ellsberg, who has 
6553
6554given the world the model of his rectitude, and given me the warmth and candor of his friendship.
6555
6556This book was written using free and open-source software. I would like to  thank  the  Qubes  Project,  the  Tor  
6557
6558Project,  and  the  Free  Software Foundation.
6559
6560My earliest intimations of what it was like to write against deadline came from the masters, Glenn Greenwald, Laura 
6561
6562Poitras, Ewen Macaskill, and Bart Gellman, whose professionalism is informed by a passionate integrity. Having been 
6563
6564edited now myself, I have gained a new appreciation of their editors, who refused to be intimidated and took the 
6565
6566risks that gave meaning to their principles.
6567
6568My deepest gratitude is reserved for Sarah Harrison.
6569
6570And my heart belongs to my family, extended and immediate—to my father, Lon, to my mother, Wendy, and to my brilliant 
6571
6572sister, Jessica.
6573
6574The only way I can end this book is the way I began it: with a dedication to Lindsay, whose love makes life out of 
6575
6576exile.
6577ABOUT THE AUTHOR
6578
6579
6580Edward Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and grew up in the shadow of Fort Meade.  A systems  
6581
6582engineer  by training,  he served  as an officer  of the Central Intelligence Agency and worked as a contractor for 
6583
6584the National Security Agency. He has received numerous awards for his public service, including the Right Livelihood 
6585
6586Award, the German Whistleblower Prize, the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, and the Carl von Ossietzky Medal from 
6587
6588the International League of Human Rights. Currently, he serves as president of the board of directors of the Freedom 
6589
6590of the Press Foundation.
6591
6592    
6593
6594
6595
6596Title Page Dedication Preface
6597PART ONE
6598CONTENTS
6599
66001. Looking Through the Window
6601
66022. The Invisible Wall
6603
66043. Beltway Boy
6605
66064. American Online
6607
66085. Hacking
6609
66106. Incomplete
6611
66127. 9/11
6613
66148. 9/12
6615
66169. X-Rays
6617
661810. Cleared and in Love
6619
6620PART TWO
6621
662211. The System
6623
662412. Homo contractus
6625
662613. Indoc
6627
662814. The Count of the Hill
6629
663015. Geneva
6631
663216. Tokyo
6633
663417. Home on the Cloud
6635
663618. On the Couch
6637
6638PART THREE
6639
664019. The Tunnel
6641
664220. Heartbeat
664321. Whistleblowing
6644
664522. Fourth Estate
6646
664723. Read, Write, Execute
6648
664924. Encrypt
6650
665125. The Boy
6652
665326. Hong Kong
6654
665527. Moscow
6656
665728. From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills
6658
665929. Love and Exile Notes Acknowledgments About the Author Copyright
6660First published 2019 by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, LLC First published in the UK 2019 by Macmillan
6661This electronic edition first published in the UK 2019 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan 20 New Wharf Road, 
6662
6663London N1 9RR Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com
6664ISBN 978-1-5290-3567-4
6665
6666Copyright © Edward Snowden 2019. Jacket design by Rodrigo Corral Jacket photograph © Platon
6667The right of Edward Snowden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with 
6668
6669the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
6670
6671You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of 
6672
6673it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), 
6674
6675without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this 
6676
6677publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
6678
6679A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
6680
6681Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author 
6682
6683interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear 
6684
6685about our new releases.