Permanent Record

Guardian
, the 
New York Times
, 
Der Spiegel
, 
Le Monde
, and 
El País
to publish
the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news
organizations accomplished over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me
that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected sources with
journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity.
WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US
Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs
pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental
backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning
materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they
received them: pristine and unredacted. This switch to a policy of total
transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs.
Effectually, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I’d
already rejected as insufficient. I knew that the story the NSA documents told
about a global system of mass surveillance deployed in the deepest secrecy was
a difficult one to understand—a story so tangled and technical that I was
increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a “document
dump,” but only by the patient and careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the
best scenario I could conceive of, with the support of multiple independent press

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institutions.
Though I felt some relief once I’d resolved to disclose directly to journalists,
I still had some lingering reservations. Most of them involved my country’s most
prestigious publications—particularly America’s newspaper of record, the 
New
York Times.
Whenever I thought about contacting the 
Times
, I found myself
hesitating. While the paper had shown some willingness to displease the US
government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn’t stop reminding myself of its
earlier conduct involving an important article on the government’s warrantless
wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen.
Those two journalists, by combining information from Justice Department
whistleblowers with their own reporting, had managed to uncover one aspect of
STELLARWIND—the NSA’s original-recipe post-9/11 surveillance initiative—
and had produced a fully written, edited, and fact-checked article about it, ready
to go to press by mid-2004. It was at this point that the paper’s editor in chief,
Bill Keller, ran the article past the government, as part of a courtesy process
whose typical purpose is for a publication’s editorial staff to have a chance to
assess the government’s arguments as to why the publication of certain
information might endanger national security. In this case, as in most cases, the
government refused to provide a specific reason, but implied that one existed
and that it was classified, too. The Bush administration told Keller and the
paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, without providing any evidence, that the
Times
would be emboldening America’s enemies and enabling terror if it went
public with the information that the government was wiretapping American
citizens without a warrant. Unfortunately, the paper allowed itself to be
convinced and spiked the article. Lichtblau and Risen’s reporting finally ran, but
over a year later, in December 2005, and only after Risen pressured the paper by
announcing that the material was included in a book of his that was about to be
released. Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have
changed the course of the 2004 election.
If the 
Times
, or any paper, did something similar to me—if it took my
revelations, reported on them, submitted the reporting for review, and then
suppressed its publication—I’d be sunk. Given the likelihood of my
identification as the source, it would be tantamount to turning me in before any
revelations were brought to the public.
If I couldn’t trust a legacy newspaper, could I trust any institution? Why even
bother? I hadn’t signed up for any of this. I had just wanted to screw around with
computers and maybe do some good for my country along the way. I had a lease

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and a lover and my health was improved. Every 
STOP
sign on my commute I took
as advice to stop this voluntary madness. My head and heart were in conflict,
with the only constant being the desperate hope that somebody else, somewhere
else, would figure it out on their own. After all, wasn’t journalism about
following the bread crumbs and connecting the dots? What else did reporters do
all day, besides tweet?
I knew at least two things about the denizens of the Fourth Estate: they
competed for scoops, and they knew very little about technology. It was this lack
of expertise or even interest in tech that largely caused journalists to miss two
events that stunned me during the course of my fact-gathering about mass
surveillance.
The first was the NSA’s announcement of the construction of a vast new data
facility in Bluffdale, Utah. The agency called it the Massive Data Repository,
until somebody with a knack for PR realized the name might be tough to explain
if it ever got out, so it was renamed the Mission Data Repository—because as
long as you don’t change the acronym, you don’t have to change all the briefing
slides. The MDR was projected to contain a total of four twenty-five-thousand-
square-foot halls, filled with servers. It could hold an immense amount of data,
basically a rolling history of the entire planet’s pattern of life, insofar as life can
be understood through the connection of payments to people, people to phones,
phones to calls, calls to networks, and the synoptic array of Internet activity
moving along those networks’ lines.
The only prominent journalist who seemed to notice the announcement was
James Bamford, who wrote about it for 
Wired
in March 2012. There were a few
follow-ups in the nontech press, but none of them furthered the reporting. No
one asked what, to me at least, were the most basic questions: Why does any
government agency, let alone an intelligence agency, need that much space?
What data, and how much of it, do they really intend to store there, and for how
long? Because there was simply no reason to build something to those specs
unless you were planning on storing absolutely everything, forever. Here was, to
my mind, the corpus delicti—the plain-as-day corroboration of a crime, in a
gigantic concrete bunker surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, sucking
up a city’s worth of electricity from its own power grid in the middle of the Utah
desert. And no one was paying attention.
The second event happened one year later, in March 2013—one week after
Clapper lied to Congress and Congress gave him a pass. A few periodicals had
covered that testimony, though they merely regurgitated Clapper’s denial that the

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NSA collected bulk data on Americans. But no so-called mainstream publication
at all covered a rare public appearance by Ira “Gus” Hunt, the chief technology
officer of the CIA.
I’d known Gus slightly from my Dell stint with the CIA. He was one of our
top customers, and every vendor loved his apparent inability to be discreet: he’d
always tell you more than he was supposed to. For sales guys, he was like a bag
of money with a mouth. Now he was appearing as a special guest speaker at a
civilian tech event in New York called the GigaOM Structure: Data conference.
Anyone with $40 could go to it. The major talks, such as Gus’s, were streamed
for free live online.
The reason I’d made sure to catch his talk was that I’d just read, through
internal NSA channels, that the CIA had finally decided on the disposition of its
cloud contract. It had refused my old team at Dell, and turned down HP, too,
instead signing a ten-year, $600 million cloud development and management
deal with Amazon. I had no negative feelings about this—actually, at this
juncture, I was pleased that my work wasn’t going to be used by the agency. I
was just curious, from a professional standpoint, whether Gus might obliquely
address this announcement and offer any insight into why Amazon had been
chosen, since rumors were going around that the proposal process had been
rigged in Amazon’s favor.
I got insight, certainly, but of an unexpected kind. I had the opportunity of
witnessing the highest-ranking technical officer at the CIA stand onstage in a
rumpled suit and brief a crowd of uncleared normies—and, via the Internet, the
uncleared world—about the agency’s ambitions and capacities. As his
presentation unfolded, and he alternated bad jokes with an even worse command
of PowerPoint, I grew more and more incredulous.
“At the CIA,” he said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang
on to it forever.” As if that wasn’t clear enough, he went on: “It is nearly within
our grasp to compute on all human generated information.” The underline was
Gus’s own. He was reading from his slide deck, ugly words in an ugly font
illustrated with the government’s signature four-color clip art.
There were a few journalists in the crowd, apparently, though it seemed as if
almost all of them were from specialty tech-government publications like