Permanent Record

parts of the Roach were still under construction, and I was immediately
reminded of my first cleared job, with CASL: it was my fate to begin and end
my IC career in unfinished buildings.
In addition to housing almost all of the agency’s Hawaii-based translators
and analysts, the Roach also accommodated the local branch of the Tailored
Access Operations (TAO) division. This was the NSA unit responsible for
remotely hacking into the computers of people whom analysts had selected as
targets—the agency’s equivalent of the old burglary teams that once snuck into
enemies’ homes to plant bugs and find compromising material. NTOC’s main
job, by contrast, was to monitor and frustrate the activity of the TAO’s foreign
equivalents. As luck would have it, NTOC had a position open through a
contractor job at Booz Allen Hamilton, a job they euphemistically described as
“infrastructure analyst.” The role involved using the complete spectrum of the
NSA’s mass surveillance tools, including XKEYSCORE, to monitor activity on
the “infrastructure” of interest, the Internet.
Though I’d be making slightly more money at Booz, around $120,000 a year,
I considered it a demotion—the first of many as I began my final descent,
jettisoning my accesses, my clearances, and my agency privileges. I was an
engineer who was becoming an analyst who would ultimately become an exile, a
target of the very technologies I’d once controlled. From that perspective, this

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particular fall in prestige seemed pretty minor. From that perspective, everything
seemed pretty minor, as the arc of my life bent back toward earth, accelerating
toward the point of impact that would end my career, my relationship, my
freedom, and possibly my life.
I’
D DECIDED TO
bring my archives out of the country and pass them to the
journalists I’d contacted, but before I could even begin to contemplate the
logistics of that act I had to go shake some hands. I had to fly east to DC and
spend a few weeks meeting and greeting my new bosses and colleagues, who
had high hopes for how they might apply my keen understanding of online
anonymization to unmask their more clever targets. This was what brought me
back home to the Beltway for the very last time, and back to the site of my first
encounter with an institution that had lost control: Fort Meade. This time I was
arriving as an insider.
The day that marked my coming of age, just over ten tumultuous years
earlier, had profoundly changed not just the people who worked at NSA
headquarters but the place itself. I first noticed this fact when I got stopped in my
rental car trying to turn off Canine Road into one of the agency’s parking lots,
which in my memory still howled with panic, ringtones, car horns, and sirens.
Since 9/11, all the roads that led to NSA headquarters had been permanently
closed to anyone who didn’t possess one of the special IC badges now hanging
around my neck.
Whenever I wasn’t glad-handing NTOC leadership at headquarters, I spent
my time learning everything I could—“hot-desking” with analysts who worked
different programs and different types of targets, so as to be able to teach my
fellow team members back in Hawaii the newest ways the agency’s tools might
be used. That, at least, was the official explanation of my curiosity, which as
always exceeded the requirements and earned the gratitude of the
technologically inclined. They, in turn, were as eager as ever to demonstrate the
power of the machinery they’d developed, without expressing a single qualm
about how that power was applied. While at headquarters, I was also put through
a series of tests on the proper use of the system, which were more like regulatory
compliance exercises or procedural shields than meaningful instruction. The
other analysts told me that since I could take these tests as many times as I had
to, I shouldn’t bother learning the rules: “Just click the boxes until you pass.”
The NSA described XKEYSCORE, in the documents I’d later pass on to

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journalists, as its “widest-ranging” tool, used to search “nearly everything a user
does on the Internet.” The technical specs I studied went into more detail as to
how exactly this was accomplished—by “packetizing” and “sessionizing,” or
cutting up the data of a user’s online sessions into manageable packets for
analysis—but nothing could prepare me for seeing it in action.
It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in
science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s
address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the
recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back
recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was
their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their
browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You
could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device
you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could
look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear
letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It
was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the
screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this
was a humancomplete.
My weeks at Fort Meade, and the short stint I put in at Booz back in Hawaii,
were the only times I saw, firsthand, the abuses actually being committed that I’d
previously read about in internal documentation. Seeing them made me realize
how insulated my position at the systems level had been from the ground zero of
immediate damage. I could only imagine the level of insulation of the agency’s
directorship or, for that matter, of the US president.
I didn’t type the names of the agency director or the president into
XKEYSCORE, but after enough time with the system I realized I could have.
Everyone’s communications were in the system—everyone’s. I was initially
fearful that if I searched those in the uppermost echelons of state, I’d be caught
and fired, or worse. But it was surpassingly simple to disguise a query regarding
even the most prominent figure by encoding my search terms in a machine
format that looked like gibberish to humans but would be perfectly
understandable to XKEYSCORE. If any of the auditors who were responsible
for reviewing the searches ever bothered to look more closely, they would see
only a snippet of obfuscated code, while I would be able to scroll through the
most personal activities of a Supreme Court justice or a congressperson.
As far as I could tell, none of my new colleagues intended to abuse their

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powers so grandly, although if they had it’s not like they’d ever mention it.
Anyway, when analysts thought about abusing the system, they were far less
interested in what it could do for them professionally than in what it could do for
them personally. This led to the practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on
HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used the
agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects
of more casual affection—reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls,
and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts
were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in
any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade,
no one in the agency’s history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the
crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute
them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system
of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself. The
obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back
wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented
infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall
picture of