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particularly young ones, set out to search not for lucre or power, but for the
limits of their talent and any opportunity to prove the impossible possible.
I was young, and while my curiosity was pure, it was also, in retrospect,
pretty psychologically revealing, in that some of my earliest hacking attempts
were directed toward allaying my neuroses. The more I came to know about the
fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of
trusting the wrong machine. As a teenager, my first hack that ever courted
trouble dealt with a fear that suddenly became all I could think about: the threat
of a full-on, scorched-earth nuclear holocaust.
I’d been reading some article about the history of the American nuclear
program, and before I knew it, with just a couple of clicks, I was at the website
of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the country’s nuclear research facility.
That’s just the way the Internet works: you get curious, and your fingers do the
thinking for you. But suddenly I was legitimately freaked out: the website of

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America’s largest and most significant scientific research and weapons
development institution, I noticed, had a glaring security hole. Its vulnerability
was basically the virtual version of an unlocked door: an open directory
structure.
I’ll explain. Imagine I sent you a link to download a .pdf file that’s kept on its
own page of a multipage website. The URL for this file would typically be
something like website.com/files/pdfs/filename.pdf. Now, as the structure of a
URL derives directly from directory structure, each part of this URL represents a
distinct “branch” of the directory “tree.” In this instance, within the directory of
website.com is a folder of files, within which is a subfolder of pdfs, within
which is the specific filename.pdf that you’re seeking to download. Today, most
websites will confine your visit to that specific file, keeping their directory
structures closed and private. But back in those dinosaur days, even major
websites were created and run by folks who were new to the technology, and
they often left their directory structures wide open, which meant that if you
truncated your file’s URL—if you simply changed it to something like
website.com/files—you’d be able to access every file on the site, pdf or
otherwise, including those that weren’t necessarily meant for visitors. This was
the case with the Los Alamos site.
In the hacking community, this is basically Baby’s First Hack—a totally
rudimentary traversal procedure known as “dirwalking,” or “directory walking.”
And that’s just what I did: I walked as fast as I could from file to subfolder to
upper-level folder and back again, a teen let loose through the parent directories.
Within a half hour of reading an article about the threat of nuclear weapons, I’d
stumbled upon a trove of files meant only for the lab’s security-cleared workers.
To be sure, the documents I accessed weren’t exactly the classified plans for
building a nuclear device in my garage. (And, anyway, it’s not as if those plans
weren’t already available on about a dozen DIY websites.) Instead, what I got
was more along the lines of confidential interoffice memoranda and other
personal employee information. Still, as someone suddenly acutely worried
about mushroom clouds on the horizon, and also—especially—as the child of
military parents, I did what I figured I was supposed to: I told an adult. I sent an
explanatory email to the laboratory’s webmaster about the vulnerability, and
waited for a response that never came.
Every day after school I visited the site to check if the directory structure had
changed, and it hadn’t—nothing had changed, except my capacity for shock and
indignation. I finally got on the phone, my house’s second line, and called the

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general information phone number listed at the bottom of the laboratory’s site.
An operator picked up, and the moment she did I started stammering. I don’t
even think I got to the end of the phrase “directory structure” before my voice
broke. The operator interrupted with a curt “please hold for IT,” and before I
could thank her she’d transferred me to a voice mail.
By the time the beep came, I’d regained some modicum of confidence and,
with a steadier larynx, I left a message. All I recall now of that message was how
I ended it—with relief, and by repeating my name and phone number. I think I
even spelled out my name, like my father sometimes did, using the military
phonetic alphabet: “Sierra November Oscar Whiskey Delta Echo November.”
Then I hung up and went on with my life, which for a week consisted pretty
much exclusively of checking the Los Alamos website.
Nowadays, given the government’s cyberintelligence capabilities, anyone
who was pinging the Los Alamos servers a few dozen times a day would almost
certainly become a person of interest. Back then, however, I was merely an
interested person. I couldn’t understand—didn’t anybody care?
Weeks passed—and weeks can feel like months to a teenager—until one
evening, just before dinner, the phone rang. My mother, who was in the kitchen
making dinner, picked up.
I was at the computer in the dining room when I heard it was for me: “Yes,
uh-huh, he’s here.” Then, “May I ask who’s calling?”
I turned around in my seat and she was standing over me, holding the phone
against her chest. All the color had left her face. She was trembling.
Her whisper had a mournful urgency I’d never heard before, and it terrified
me: “What did you do?”
Had I known, I would have told her. Instead, I asked, “Who is it?”
“Los Alamos, the nuclear laboratory.”
“Oh, thank God.”
I gently pried the phone away from her and sat her down. “Hello?”
On the line was a friendly representative from Los Alamos IT, who kept
calling me Mr. Snowden. He thanked me for reporting the problem and informed
me that they’d just fixed it. I restrained myself from asking what had taken so
long—I restrained myself from reaching over to the computer and immediately
checking the site.
My mother hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She was trying to piece together the
conversation, but could only hear one side. I gave her a thumbs-up, and then, to
further reassure her, I affected an older, serious, and unconvincingly deep voice

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and stiffly explained to the IT rep what he already knew: how I’d found the
directory traversal problem, how I’d reported it, how I hadn’t received any
response until now. I finished up with, “I really appreciate you telling me. I hope
I didn’t cause any problems.”
“Not at all,” the IT rep said, and then asked what I did for a living.
“Nothing really,” I said.
He asked whether I was looking for a job and I said, “During the school year,
I’m pretty busy, but I’ve got a lot of vacation and the summers are free.”
That’s when the lightbulb went off, and he realized that he was dealing with a
teenager. “Well, kid,” he said, “you’ve got my contact. Be sure and get in touch
when you turn eighteen. Now pass me along to that nice lady I spoke to.”
I handed the phone to my anxious mother and she took it back with her into
the kitchen, which was filling up with smoke. Dinner was burnt, but I’m
guessing the IT rep said enough complimentary things about me that any
punishment I was imagining went out the window.

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6
Incomplete
I don’t remember high school very well, because I spent so much of it asleep,
compensating for all my insomniac nights on the computer. At Arundel High
most of my teachers didn’t mind my little napping habit, and left me alone so
long as I wasn’t snoring, though there were still a cruel, joyless few who
considered it their duty to always wake me—with the screech of chalk or the
clap of erasers—and ambush me with a question: “And what do 
you
think, Mr.
Snowden?”
I’d lift my head off my desk, sit up in my chair, yawn, and—as my
classmates tried to stifle their laughter—I’d have to answer.
The truth is, I loved these moments, which were among the greatest
challenges high school had to offer. I loved being put on the spot, groggy and
dazed, with thirty pairs of eyes and ears trained on me and expecting my failure,
while I searched for a clue on the half-empty blackboard. If I could think quickly
enough to come up with a good answer, I’d be a legend. But if I was too slow, I
could always crack a joke—it’s never too late for a joke. In the absolute worst
case, I’d sputter, and my classmates would think I was stupid. Let them. You
should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise
your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own
vulnerabilities—the gaping holes in their judgment that need to stay open if you
want to cartwheel through later on a flaming horse, correcting the record with
your sword of justice.
When I was a teen, I think I was a touch too enamored of the idea that life’s
most important questions are binary, meaning that one answer is always Right,
and all the rest of the answers are Wrong. I think I was enchanted by the model
of computer programming, whose questions can only be answered in one of two
ways: 1 or 0, the machine-code version of Yes or No, True or False. Even the
multiple-choice questions of my quizzes and tests could be approached through

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the oppositional logic of the binary. If I didn’t immediately recognize one of the
possible answers as correct, I could always try to reduce my choices by a process
of elimination, looking for terms such as “always” or “never” and seeking out
invalidating exceptions.
Toward the end of my freshman year, however, I was faced with a very
different kind of assignment—a question that couldn’t be answered by filling in
bubbles with a #2 pencil, but only by rhetoric: full sentences in full paragraphs.
In plain terms, it was an English class assignment, a writing prompt: “Please
produce an autobiographical statement of no fewer than 1,000 words.” I was
being ordered by strangers to divulge my thoughts on perhaps the only subject
on which I didn’t have any thoughts: the subject of me, whoever he was. I just
couldn’t do it. I was blocked. I didn’t turn anything in and received an
Incomplete.
My problem, like the prompt itself, was personal. I couldn’t “produce an
autobiographical statement” because my life at the time was too confusing. This
was because my family was falling apart. My parents were getting a divorce. It
all happened so fast. My father moved out and my mother put the house in
Crofton on the market, and then moved with my sister and me into an apartment,
and then into a condominium in a development in nearby Ellicott City. I’ve had
friends tell me that you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become
one yourself. But what no one ever mentions is that for kids of a certain age,
divorce is like both of those happening simultaneously. Suddenly, the
invulnerable icons of your childhood are gone. In their stead, if there’s anyone at
all, is a person even more lost than you are, full of tears and rage, who craves
your reassurance that everything will turn out okay. It won’t, though, at least not
for a while.
As the custody and visitation rights were being sorted by the courts, my sister
threw herself into college applications, was accepted, and started counting down
the days until she’d leave for the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
Losing her meant losing my closest tie to what our family had been.
I reacted by turning inward. I buckled down and willed myself into becoming
another person, a shape-shifter putting on the mask of whoever the people I
cared about needed at the time. Among family, I was dependable and sincere.
Among friends, mirthful and unconcerned. But when I was alone, I was subdued,
even morose, and constantly worried about being a burden. I was haunted by all
the road trips to North Carolina I’d complained through, all the Christmases I’d
ruined by bringing home bad report cards, all the times I’d refused to get off-line

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and do my chores. Every childhood fuss I’d ever made flickered in my mind like
crime-scene footage, evidence that I was responsible for what had happened.
I tried to throw off the guilt by ignoring my emotions and feigning self-
sufficiency, until I projected a sort of premature adulthood. I stopped saying that
I was “playing” with the computer, and started saying that I was “working” on it.
Just changing those words, without remotely changing what I was doing, made a
difference in how I was perceived, by others and even by myself.
I stopped calling myself “Eddie.” From now on, I was “Ed.” I got my first
cell phone, which I wore clipped to my belt like a grown-ass man.
The unexpected blessing of trauma—the opportunity for reinvention—taught
me to appreciate the world beyond the four walls of home. I was surprised to
find that as I put more and more distance between myself and the two adults who
loved me the most, I came closer to others, who treated me like a peer. Mentors
who taught me to sail, trained me to fight, coached me in public speaking, and
gave me the confidence to stand onstage—all of them helped to raise me.
At the beginning of my sophomore year, though, I started getting tired a lot
and falling asleep more than usual—not just at school anymore, but now even at
the computer. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a more or less upright
position, the screen in front of me full of gibberish because I’d passed out atop
the keys. Soon enough my joints were aching, my nodes were swollen, the
whites of my eyes turned yellow, and I was too exhausted to get out of bed, even
after sleeping for twelve hours or more at a stretch.
After having had more blood taken from me than I’d ever imagined was in
my body, I was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. It was both
a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not least
because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,”
and at age fifteen the only “hooking up” I’d ever done involved a modem.
School was totally forgotten, my absences piled up, and not even that made me
happy. Not even an all-ice-cream diet made me happy. I barely had the energy to
do anything but play the games my parents gave me—each of them trying to
bring the cooler game, the newer game, as if they were in a competition to perk
me up or mitigate their guilt about the divorce. When I no longer had it in me to
even work a joystick, I wondered why I was alive. Sometimes I’d wake up
unable to recognize my surroundings. It would take me a while to figure out
whether the dimness meant that I was at my mother’s condo or my father’s one-
bedroom, and I’d have no recollection of having been driven between them.
Every day became the same.

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It was a haze. I remember reading