Permanent Record

The Conscience of a Hacker
(aka 
The
Hacker’s Manifesto
), Neal Stephenson’s 
Snow Crash
, and reams of J. R. R.
Tolkien, falling asleep midchapter and getting the characters and action
confused, until I was dreaming that Gollum was by my bedside and whining,
“Master, Master, information wants to be free.”
While I was resigned to all the fever dreams sleep brought me, the thought of
having to catch up on my schoolwork was the true nightmare. After I’d missed
approximately four months of class, I got a letter in the mail from Arundel High
informing me that I’d have to repeat my sophomore year. I’d say I was shocked,
but the moment I read the letter, I realized that I’d known this was inevitable and
had been dreading it for weeks. The prospect of returning to school, let alone of
repeating two semesters, was unimaginable to me, and I was ready to do
whatever it took to avoid it.
Just at the point when my glandular disease had developed into a full-on
depression, receiving the school news shook me out of my slump. Suddenly I
was upright and getting dressed in something other than pajamas. Suddenly I
was online and on the phone, searching for the system’s edges, searching for a
hack. After a bit of research, and a lot of form-filling, my solution landed in the
mailbox: I’d gotten myself accepted to college. Apparently, you don’t need a
high school diploma to apply.
Anne Arundel Community College was a local institution, certainly not as
venerable as my sister’s school, but it would do the trick. All that mattered was
that it was accredited. I took the offer of admission to my high school
administrators, who, with a curious and barely concealed mixture of resignation
and glee, agreed to let me enroll. I’d attend college classes two days a week,
which was just about the most that I could manage to stay upright and
functional. By taking classes above my grade level, I wouldn’t have to suffer
through the year I’d missed. I’d just skip it.
AACC was about twenty-five minutes away, and the first few times I drove
myself were perilous—I was a newly licensed driver who could barely stay
awake at the wheel. I’d go to class and then come directly home to sleep. I was
the youngest person in all my classes, and might even have been the youngest
person at the school, alternately a mascot-like object of novelty and a
discomfiting presence. This, along with the fact that I was still recovering, meant
that I didn’t hang out much. Also, because AACC was a commuter school, it had
no active campus life. The anonymity of the school suited me fine, though, as
did my classes, most of which were distinctly more interesting than anything I’d

---

napped through at Arundel High.
B
EFORE
I 
GO
any further and leave high school forever, I should note that I still
owe that English class assignment, the one marked Incomplete. My
autobiographical statement. The older I get, the heavier it weighs on me, and yet
writing it hasn’t gotten any easier.
The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably to
autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid
identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures”
in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its workers a
baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality upon which to inscribe
secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look
and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house, you drive the most
ordinary car, you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The
difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover. This is
the perverse reward of a self-denying career that brings no public glory: the
private glory comes not during work, but after, when you can go back out among
other people again and successfully convince them that you’re one of them.
Though there are a score of more popular and surely more accurate
psychological terms for this type of identity split, I tend to think of it as human
encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material—your core
identity—still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form. The equation that
enables this ciphering is a simple proportion: the more you know about others,
the less you know about yourself. After a time, you might forget your likes and
even your dislikes. You can lose your politics, along with any and all respect for
the political process that you might have had. Everything gets subsumed by the
job, which begins with a denial of character and ends with a denial of
conscience. “Mission First.”
Some version of the above served me for years as an explanation of my
dedication to privacy, and my inability or unwillingness to get personal. It’s only
now, when I’ve been out of the IC almost as long as I was in it, that I realize: it
isn’t nearly enough. After all, I was hardly a spy—I wasn’t even shaving—when
I failed to turn in my English class assignment. Instead, I was a kid who’d been
practicing spycraft for a while already—partly through my online experiments
with game-playing identities, but more than anything through dealing with the
silence and lies that followed my parents’ divorce.

---

With that rupture, we became a family of secret-keepers, experts at
subterfuge and hiding. My parents kept secrets from each other, and from me
and my sister. My sister and I would eventually keep our own secrets, too, when
one of us was staying with our father for the weekend and the other was staying
with our mother. One of the most difficult trials that a child of divorce has to
face is being interrogated by one parent about the new life of the other.
My mother would be gone for stretches, back on the dating scene. My father
tried his best to fill the void, but, at times, he would become enraged by the
protracted and expensive divorce process. Whenever that happened, it would
seem to me as if our roles had reversed. I had to be assertive and stand up to him,
to reason with him.
It’s painful to write this, though not so much because the events of this period
are painful to recall as because they’re in no way indicative of my parents’
fundamental decency—or of how, out of love for their children, they were
eventually able to bury their differences, reconcile with respect, and flourish
separately in peace.
This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an
autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux. This
is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a
statement but a pledge—a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision
of the person they hope to become.
I’d enrolled in community college to save myself time after a setback, not
because I intended to continue with my higher education. But I made a pledge to
myself that I’d at least complete my high school degree. It was a weekend when
I finally kept that promise, driving out to a public school near Baltimore to take
the last test I’d ever take for the state of Maryland: the exam for the General
Education Development (GED) degree, which the US government recognizes as
the standard equivalent to a high school diploma.
I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied the
two years of schooling that I still owed to the state just by taking a two-day
exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying true to my
word.

---

7
9/11
From the age of sixteen, I was pretty much living on my own. With my mother
throwing herself into her work, I often had her condo to myself. I set my own
schedule, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I was responsible for
everything but paying the bills.
I had a 1992 white Honda Civic and drove it all over the state, listening to the
indie alternative 99.1 WHFS—“Now Hear This” was one of its catchphrases—
because that’s what everybody else did. I wasn’t very good at being normal, but I
was trying.
My life became a circuit, tracing a route between my home, my college, and
my friends, particularly a new group that I met in Japanese class. I’m not quite
sure how long it took us to realize that we’d become a clique, but by the second
semester we attended class as much to see each other as to learn the language.
This, by the way, is the best way to “seem normal”: surround yourself with
people just as weird, if not weirder, than you are. Most of these friends were
aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed with then controversial anime, or
Japanese animation. As our friendships deepened, so, too, did my familiarity
with anime genres, until I could rattle off relatively informed opinions about a
new library of shared experiences with titles like