Permanent Record

partner and the love of my life.
Looking at the photos now, I’m amused to find that nineteen-year-old
Lindsay was gawky, awkward, and endearingly shy. To me at the time, though,
she was a smoldering blonde, absolutely volcanic. What’s more, the photos
themselves were beautiful: they had a serious artistic quality, self-portraits more
than selfies. They caught the eye and held it. They played coyly with light and
shade. They even had a hint of meta fun: there was one taken inside the photo
lab where she worked, and another where she wasn’t even facing the camera.
I rated her Hot, a perfect ten. To my surprise, we matched (she rated me an
eight, the angel), and in no time we were chatting. Lindsay was studying fine art
photography. She had her own website, where she kept a journal and posted
more shots: forests, flowers, abandoned factories, and—my favorite—more of
her.
I scoured the Web and used each new fact I found about her to create a fuller
picture: the town she was born in (Laurel, Maryland), her school’s name (MICA,
the Maryland Institute College of Art). Eventually, I admitted to cyberstalking
her. I felt like a creep, but Lindsay cut me off. “I’ve been searching about you,
too, mister,” she said, and rattled off a list of facts about me.
These were among the sweetest words I’d ever heard, yet I was reluctant to
see her in person. We scheduled a date, and as the days ticked down my
nervousness grew. It’s a scary proposition, to take an online relationship off-line.
It would be scary even in a world without ax murderers and scammers. In my
experience, the more you’ve communicated with someone online, the more
disappointed you’ll be by meeting them in person. Things that are the easiest to
say on-screen become the most difficult to say face-to-face. Distance favors
intimacy: no one talks more openly than when they’re alone in a room, chatting
with an unseen someone alone in a different room. Meet that person, however,
and you lose your latitude. Your talk becomes safer and tamer, a common

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conversation on neutral ground.
Online, Lindsay and I had become total confidants, and I was afraid of losing
our connection in person. In other words, I was afraid of being rejected.
I shouldn’t have been.
Lindsay—who’d insisted on driving—told me that she’d pick me up at my
mother’s condo. The appointed hour found me standing outside in the twilight
cold, guiding her by phone through the similarly named, identical-looking streets
of my mother’s development. I was keeping an eye out for a gold ’98 Chevy
Cavalier, when suddenly I was blinded, struck in the face by a beam of light
from the curb. Lindsay was flashing her brights at me across the snow.
“Buckle up.” Those were the first words that Lindsay said to me in person, as
I got into her car. Then she said, “What’s the plan?”
It’s then that I realized that despite all the thinking I had been doing about
her, I’d done no thinking whatsoever about our destination.
If I’d been in this situation with any other woman, I’d have improvised,
covering for myself. But with Lindsay it was different. With Lindsay, it didn’t
matter. She drove us down her favorite road—she had a favorite road—and we
talked until we ran out of miles on Guilford and ended up in the parking lot of
the Laurel Mall. We just sat in her car and talked.
It was perfection. Talking face-to-face turned out to be just an extension of
all our phone calls, emails, and chats. Our first date was a continuation of our
first contact online and the start of a conversation that will last as long as we
will. We talked about our families, or what was left of them. Lindsay’s parents
were also divorced: her mother and father lived twenty minutes apart, and as a
kid Lindsay had been shuttled back and forth between them. She’d lived out of a
bag. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays she slept in her room at her mother’s
house. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays she slept in her room at her father’s
house. Sundays were the dramatic day, because she had to choose.
She told me how bad my taste was, and criticized my date apparel: a button-
down shirt decorated with metallic flames over a wifebeater and jeans (I’m
sorry). She told me about the two other guys she was dating, whom she’d
already mentioned online, and Machiavelli would’ve blushed at the ways in
which I set about undermining them (I’m not sorry). I told her everything, too,
including the fact that I wouldn’t be able to talk to her about my work—the work
I hadn’t even started. This was ludicrously pretentious, which she made obvious
to me by nodding gravely.
I told her I was worried about the upcoming polygraph required for my

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clearance and she offered to practice with me—a goofy kind of foreplay. The
philosophy she lived by was the perfect training: say what you want, say who
you are, never be ashamed. If they reject you, it’s their problem. I’d never been
so comfortable around someone, and I’d never been so willing to be called out
for my faults. I even let her take my photo.
I had her voice in my head on my drive to the NSA’s oddly named Friendship
Annex complex for the final interview for my security clearance. I found myself
in a windowless room, bound like a hostage to a cheap office chair. Around my
chest and stomach were pneumographic tubes that measured my breathing.
Finger cuffs on my fingertips measured my electrodermal activity, a blood
pressure cuff around my arm measured my heart rate, and a sensor pad on the
chair detected my every fidget and shift. All of these devices—wrapped,
clamped, cuffed, and belted tightly around me—were connected to the large
black polygraph machine placed on the table in front of me.
Behind the table, in a nicer chair, sat the polygrapher. She reminded me of a
teacher I once had—and I spent much of the test trying to remember the
teacher’s name, or trying not to. She, the polygrapher, began asking questions.
The first ones were no-brainers: Was my name Edward Snowden? Was 6/21/83
my date of birth? Then: Had I ever committed a serious crime? Had I ever had a
problem with gambling? Had I ever had a problem with alcohol or taken illegal
drugs? Had I ever been an agent of a foreign power? Had I ever advocated the
violent overthrow of the United States government? The only admissible
answers were binary: “Yes” and “No.” I answered “No” a lot, and kept waiting
for the questions I’d been dreading. “Have you ever impugned the competence
and character of the medical staff at Fort Benning online?” “What were you
searching for on the network of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory?” But those
questions never came and, before I knew it, the test was over.
I’d passed with flying colors.
As required, I had to answer the series of questions three times in total, and
all three times I passed, which meant that not only had I qualified for the
TS/SCI, I’d also cleared the “full scope polygraph”—the highest clearance in the
land.
I had a girlfriend I loved and I was on top of the world.
I was twenty-two years old.

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