Permanent Record

particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely. The agency was
essentially making a claim that the amendment’s protections didn’t apply to
modern-day lives. The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as
your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that
data as a “search” or “seizure.” Instead, the NSA maintained that because you
had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party”—your telephone
service provider—you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you may
once have had. And it insisted that “search” and “seizure” occurred only when
its analysts, not its algorithms, actively queried what had already been
automatically collected.
Had constitutional oversight mechanisms been functioning properly, this
extremist interpretation of the Fourth Amendment—effectively holding that the
very act of using modern technologies is tantamount to a surrender of your
privacy rights—would have been rejected by Congress and the courts. America’s
Founders were skilled engineers of political power, particularly attuned to the
perils posed by legal subterfuge and the temptations of the presidency toward
exercising monarchical authority. To forestall such eventualities, they designed a
system, laid out in the Constitution’s first three articles, that established the US
government in three coequal branches, each supposed to provide checks and
balances to the others. But when it came to protecting the privacy of American
citizens in the digital age, each of these branches failed in its own way, causing

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the entire system to halt and catch fire.
The legislative branch, the two houses of Congress, willingly abandoned its
supervisory role: even as the number of IC government employees and private
contractors was exploding, the number of congresspeople who were kept
informed about the IC’s capabilities and activities kept dwindling, until only a
few special committee members were apprised in closed-door hearings. Even
then they were only informed of some, but not all, of the IC’s activities. When
rare public hearings on the IC were held, the NSA’s position was made strikingly
clear: The agency would not cooperate, it would not be honest, and, what was
worse, through classification and claims of secrecy it would force America’s
federal legislatures to collaborate in its deception. In early 2013, for instance,
James Clapper, then the director of National Intelligence, testified under oath to
the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the NSA did not engage in
bulk collection of the communications of American citizens. To the question,
“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions
of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No, sir,” and then added, “There are cases
where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.” That was a
witting, bald-faced lie, of course, not just to Congress but to the American
people. More than a few of the congresspeople to whom Clapper was testifying
knew very well that what he was saying was untrue, yet they refused, or felt
legally powerless, to call him out on it.
The failure of the judiciary was, if anything, even more disappointing. The
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which oversees intelligence
surveillance within the United States, is a specialized body that meets in secret
and hears only from the government. It was designed to grant individual
warrants for foreign intelligence collection, and has always been especially
accommodating to the NSA, approving well over 99 percent of the agency’s
requests—a rate more suggestive of a ministerial rubber stamp than a
deliberative judicial process. After 9/11, the court expanded its role from
authorizing the surveillance of specific individuals to ruling on the legality and
constitutionality of broad programmatic surveillance, without any adversarial
scrutiny. A body that previously had been tasked with approving the surveillance
of Foreign Terrorist #1 or Foreign Spy #2 was now being used to legitimize the
whole combined infrastructure of PRISM and upstream collection. Judicial
review of that infrastructure was reduced, in the words of the ACLU to a secret
court upholding secret programs by secretly reinterpreting federal law.
When civil society groups like the ACLU tried to challenge the NSA’s

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activities in ordinary, open federal courts, a curious thing happened. The
government didn’t defend itself on the ground that the surveillance activities
were legal or constitutional. It declared, instead, that the ACLU and its clients
had no right to be in court at all, because the ACLU could not prove that its
clients had in fact been surveilled. Moreover, the ACLU could not use the
litigation to seek evidence of surveillance, because the existence (or
nonexistence) of that evidence was “a state secret,” and leaks to journalists
didn’t count. In other words, the court couldn’t recognize the information that
was publicly known from having been published in the media; it could only
recognize the information that the government officially confirmed as being
publicly known. This invocation of classification meant that neither the ACLU,
nor anyone else, could ever establish standing to raise a legal challenge in open
court. To my disgust, in February 2013 the US Supreme Court decided 5 to 4 to
accept the government’s reasoning and dismissed an ACLU and Amnesty
International lawsuit challenging mass surveillance without even considering the
legality of the NSA’s activities.
Finally, there was the executive branch, the primary cause of this
constitutional breach. The president’s office, through the Justice Department,
had committed the original sin of secretly issuing directives that authorized mass
surveillance in the wake of 9/11. Executive overreach has only continued in the
decades since, with administrations of both parties seeking to act unilaterally and
establish policy directives that circumvent law—policy directives that cannot be
challenged, since their classification keeps them from being publicly known.
The constitutional system only functions as a whole if and when each of its
three branches works as intended. When all three don’t just fail, but fail
deliberately and with coordination, the result is a culture of impunity. I realized
that I was crazy to have imagined that the Supreme Court, or Congress, or
President Obama, seeking to distance his administration from President George
W. Bush’s, would ever hold the IC legally responsible—for anything. It was time
to face the fact that the IC believed themselves above the law, and given how
broken the process was, they were right. The IC had come to understand the
rules of our system better than the people who had created it, and they used that
knowledge to their advantage.
They’d hacked the Constitution.
A
MERICA WAS BORN
from an act of treason. The Declaration of Independence was

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an outrageous violation of the laws of England and yet the fullest expression of
what the Founders called the “Laws of Nature,” among which was the right to
defy the powers of the day and rebel on point of principle, according to the
dictates of one’s conscience. The first Americans to exercise this right, the first
“whistleblowers” in American history, appeared one year later—in 1777.
These men, like so many of the men in my family, were sailors, officers of
the Continental Navy who, in defense of their new land, had taken to the sea.
During the Revolution, they served on the USS 
Warren,
a thirty-two-gun frigate
under the command of Commodore Esek Hopkins, the commander in chief of
the Continental Navy. Hopkins was a lazy and intractable leader who refused to
bring his vessel into combat. His officers also claimed to have witnessed him
beating and starving British prisoners of war. Ten of the 
Warren
’s officers—after
consulting their consciences, and with barely a thought for their careers—
reported all of this up the chain of command, writing to the Marine Committee:
Much Respected Gentlemen,
We who present this petition are engaged on board the ship Warren with an earnest desire and
fixed expectation of doing our country some service. We are still anxious for the Weal of America
& wish nothing more earnestly than to see her in peace & prosperity. We are ready to hazard every
thing that is dear & if necessary sacrifice our lives for the welfare of our country. We are desirous
of being active in the defence of our constitutional liberties and privileges against the unjust cruel
claims of tyranny & oppression; but as things are now circumstanced on board this frigate, there
seems to be no prospect of our being serviceable in our present station. We have been in this
situation for a considerable space of time. We are personally well acquainted with the real character
& conduct of our commander, Commodore Hopkins, & we take this method not having a more
convenient opportunity of sincerely & humbly petitioning the honorable Marine Committee that
they would inquire into his character & conduct, for we suppose that his character is such & that he
has been guilty of such crimes as render him quite unfit for the public department he now occupies,
which crimes, we the subscribers can sufficiently attest.
After receiving this letter, the Marine Committee investigated Commodore
Hopkins. He reacted by dismissing his officers and crew, and in a fit of rage filed
a criminal libel suit against Midshipman Samuel Shaw and Third Lieutenant
Richard Marven, the two officers who admitted to having authored the petition.
The suit was filed in the courts of Rhode Island, whose last colonial governor
had been Stephen Hopkins, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence and
the commodore’s brother.
The case was assigned to a judge appointed by Governor Hopkins, but before
the trial commenced Shaw and Marven were saved by a fellow naval officer,
John Grannis, who broke ranks and presented their case directly to the

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Continental Congress. The Continental Congress was so alarmed by the
precedent being set by allowing military complaints regarding dereliction of duty
to be subject to the criminal charge of libel that it intervened. On July 30, 1778,
it terminated the command of Commodore Hopkins, ordered the Treasury Office
to pay Shaw and Marven’s legal fees, and by unanimous consent enacted
America’s first whistleblower protection law. This law declared it “the duty of all
persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants
thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority
of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or
persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.”
The law gave me hope—and it still does. Even at the darkest hour of the
Revolution, with the very existence of the country at stake, Congress didn’t just
welcome an act of principled dissent, it enshrined such acts as duties. By the
latter half of 2012, I was resolved to perform this duty myself, though I knew I’d
be making my disclosures at a very different time—a time both more
comfortable and more cynical. Few if any of my IC superiors would have
sacrificed their careers for the same American principles for which military
personnel regularly sacrifice their lives. And in my case, going up “the chain of
command,” which the IC prefers to call “the proper channels,” wasn’t an option
as it was for the ten men who crewed on the 
Warren
. My superiors were not only
aware of what the agency was doing, they were actively directing it—they were
complicit.
In organizations like the NSA—in which malfeasance has become so
structural as to be a matter not of any particular initiative, but of an ideology—
proper channels can only become a trap, to catch the heretics and disfavorables.
I’d already experienced the failure of command back in Warrenton, and then
again in Geneva, where in the regular course of my duties I had discovered a
security vulnerability in a critical program. I’d reported the vulnerability, and
when nothing was done about it I reported that, too. My supervisors weren’t
happy that I’d done so, because their supervisors weren’t happy, either. The
chain of command is truly a chain that binds, and the lower links can only be
lifted by the higher.
Coming from a Coast Guard family, I’ve always been fascinated by how
much of the English language vocabulary of disclosure has a nautical
undercurrent. Even before the days of the USS 
Warren
, organizations, like ships,
sprang leaks. When steam replaced wind for propulsion, whistles were blown at
sea to signal intentions and emergencies: one whistle to pass by port, two

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whistles to pass by starboard, five for a warning.
The same terms in European languages, meanwhile, often have fraught
political valences conditioned by historical context. French used