Permanent Record

acquired
or 
obtained
them, in the legal sense, if and when the agency “searched
for and retrieved” them from its database.
This lexical sophistry was particularly galling to me, as I was well aware that
the agency’s goal was to be able to retain as much data as it could for as long as
it could—for perpetuity. If communications records would only be considered
definitively “obtained” once they were used, they could remain “unobtained” but
collected in storage forever, raw data awaiting its future manipulation. By
redefining the terms “acquire” and “obtain”—from describing the act of data

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being entered into a database, to describing the act of a person (or, more likely,
an algorithm) querying that database and getting a “hit” or “return” at any
conceivable point in the future—the US government was developing the
capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government
could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in
search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of
something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future
rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a
switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they
were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had
ever done in the past.
T
HE TERM
“
MASS
surveillance” is more clear to me, and I think to most people,
than the government’s preferred “bulk collection,” which to my mind threatens
to give a falsely fuzzy impression of the agency’s work. “Bulk collection” makes
it sound like a particularly busy post office or sanitation department, as opposed
to a historic effort to achieve total access to—and clandestinely take possession
of—the records of all digital communications in existence.
But even once a common ground of terminology is established,
misperceptions can still abound. Most people, even today, tend to think of mass
surveillance in terms of content—the actual words they use when they make a
phone call or write an email. When they find out that the government actually
cares comparatively little about that content, they tend to care comparatively
little about government surveillance. This relief is understandable, to a degree,
due to what each of us must regard as the uniquely revealing and intimate nature
of our communications: the sound of our voice, almost as personal as a
thumbprint; the inimitable facial expression we put on in a selfie sent by text.
The unfortunate truth, however, is that the content of our communications is
rarely as revealing as its other elements—the unwritten, unspoken information
that can expose the broader context and patterns of behavior.
The NSA calls this “metadata.” The term’s prefix, “meta,” which
traditionally is translated as “above” or “beyond,” is here used in the sense of
“about”: metadata is data about data. It is, more accurately, data that is made by
data—a cluster of tags and markers that allow data to be useful. The most direct
way of thinking about metadata, however, is as “activity data,” all the records of
all the things you do on your devices and all the things your devices do on their

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own. Take a phone call, for example: its metadata might include the date and
time of the call, the call’s duration, the number from which the call was made,
the number being called, and their locations. An email’s metadata might include
information about what type of computer it was generated on, where, and when,
who the computer belonged to, who sent the email, who received it, where and
when it was sent and received, and who if anyone besides the sender and
recipient accessed it, and where and when. Metadata can tell your surveillant the
address you slept at last night and what time you got up this morning. It reveals
every place you visited during your day and how long you spent there. It shows
who you were in touch with and who was in touch with you.
It’s this fact that obliterates any government claim that metadata is somehow
not a direct window into the substance of a communication. With the dizzying
volume of digital communications in the world, there is simply no way that
every phone call could be listened to or email could be read. Even if it were
feasible, however, it still wouldn’t be useful, and anyway, metadata makes this
unnecessary by winnowing the field. This is why it’s best to regard metadata not
as some benign abstraction, but as the very essence of content: it is precisely the
first line of information that the party surveilling you requires.
There’s another thing, too: content is usually defined as something that you
knowingly produce. You know what you’re saying during a phone call, or what
you’re writing in an email. But you have hardly any control over the metadata
you produce, because it is generated automatically. Just as it’s collected, stored,
and analyzed by machine, it’s made by machine, too, without your participation
or even consent. Your devices are constantly communicating for you whether
you want them to or not. And, unlike the humans you communicate with of your
own volition, your devices don’t withhold private information or use code words
in an attempt to be discreet. They merely ping the nearest cell phone towers with
signals that never lie.
One major irony here is that law, which always lags behind technological
innovation by at least a generation, gives substantially more protections to a
communication’s content than to its metadata—and yet intelligence agencies are
far more interested in the metadata—the activity records that allow them both
the “big picture” ability to analyze data at scale, and the “little picture” ability to
make perfect maps, chronologies, and associative synopses of an individual
person’s life, from which they presume to extrapolate predictions of behavior. In
sum, metadata can tell your surveillant virtually everything they’d ever want or
need to know about you, except what’s actually going on inside your head.

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After reading this classified report, I spent the next weeks, even months, in a
daze. I was sad and low, trying to deny everything I was thinking and feeling—
that’s what was going on in my head, toward the end of my stint in Japan.
I felt far from home, but monitored. I felt more adult than ever, but also
cursed with the knowledge that all of us had been reduced to something like
children, who’d be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental
supervision. I felt like a fraud, making excuses to Lindsay to explain my
sullenness. I felt like a fool, as someone of supposedly serious technical skills
who’d somehow helped to build an essential component of this system without
realizing its purpose. I felt used, as an employee of the IC who only now was
realizing that all along I’d been protecting not my country but the state. I felt,
above all, violated. Being in Japan only accentuated the sense of betrayal.
I’ll explain.
The Japanese that I’d managed to pick up through community college and
my interests in anime and manga was enough for me to speak and get through
basic conversations, but reading was a different matter. In Japanese, each word
can be represented by its own unique character, or a combination of characters,
called kanji, so there were tens of thousands of them—far too many for me to
memorize. Often, I was only able to decode particular kanji if they were written
with their phonetic gloss, the