devastated. I knew that if I told him what I was about to do, he would’ve called
the cops. Or else he would’ve called me crazy and had me committed to a mental
hospital. He would’ve done anything he thought he had to do to prevent me from
making the gravest of mistakes.
I could only hope that his hurt would in time be healed by pride.
Back in Hawaii between March and May 2013,
a sense of finality suffused
nearly every experience for me, and though the experiences themselves might
seem trivial, they eased my path. It was far less painful to think that this was the
last time I’d ever stop at the curry place in Mililani or drop by the art-gallery
hacker space in Honolulu or just sit on the roof of my car and scan the nighttime
sky for falling stars than to think that I only had another month left with Lindsay,
or another week left of sleeping next to her and waking up next to her and yet
trying to keep my distance from her, for fear of breaking down.
The preparations I was making were those of a man about to die. I emptied
my bank accounts, putting cash into an old steel ammo box for Lindsay to find
so that the government couldn’t seize it. I went
around the house doing oft-
procrastinated chores, like fixing windows and changing lightbulbs. I erased and
encrypted my old computers, reducing them to the silent husks of better times. In
sum, I was putting my affairs in order to try to make everything easier for
Lindsay, or just for my conscience, which periodically would switch allegiance
from a world that hadn’t earned it to the woman who had and the family I loved.
Everything was imbued with this sense of an ending, and yet there were
moments when it seemed that no end was in sight and that the plan I’d
developed was collapsing. It was difficult to get the
journalists to commit to a
meeting, mostly because I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with, or
even, for a while at least, where and when it was happening. I had to reckon with
the prospect of them never showing up, or of them showing up but then dropping
out. Ultimately I decided that if either of those happened, I’d just abandon the
plan and return to work and to Lindsay as if everything was normal, to wait for
my next chance.
In my wardrives back and forth from Kunia—a twenty-minute ride that could
become a two-hour Wi-Fi scavenger hunt—I’d
been researching various
countries, trying to find a location for my meeting with the journalists. It felt like
I was picking out my prison, or rather my grave. All of the Five Eyes countries
were obviously off-limits. In fact, all of Europe was out, because its countries
couldn’t be counted upon to uphold international law against the extradition of
those charged with political crimes in the face of what was sure to be significant
American pressure. Africa and Latin America were no-go zones too—the United
States had a history of acting there with impunity. Russia was out because it was
Russia, and China was China: both were totally out of bounds. The US
government wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at the
map. The optics would only be worse in the Middle East. It sometimes seemed
as if the most challenging hack of my life wasn’t going to be plundering the NSA
but rather trying to find a meeting venue independent
enough to hold off the
White House and free enough not to interfere with my activities.
The process of elimination left me with Hong Kong. In geopolitical terms, it
was the closest I could get to no-man’s-land, but with a vibrant media and
protest culture, not to mention largely unfiltered Internet. It was an oddity, a
reasonably liberal world city whose nominal autonomy would distance me from
China and restrain Beijing’s ability to take public action against me or the
journalists—at least immediately—but whose de facto existence in Beijing’s
sphere of influence would reduce the possibility of unilateral US intervention. In
a situation
with no promise of safety, it was enough to have the guarantee of
time. Chances were that things weren’t going to end well for me, anyway: the
best I could hope for was getting the disclosures out before I was caught.
The last morning I woke up with Lindsay, she was leaving on a camping trip
to Kauai—a brief getaway with friends that I’d encouraged. We lay in bed and I
held her too tightly, and when she asked with sleepy bewilderment why I was
suddenly being so affectionate, I apologized. I told her how sorry I was for how
busy I’d been, and that I was going to miss her—she was the best person I’d ever
met in my life. She smiled, pecked me on the cheek, and then got up to pack.
The moment she was out the door, I started crying, for the first time in years.
I felt guilty about everything except what my government would accuse me of,
and especially
guilty about my tears, because I knew that my pain would be
nothing compared to the pain I’d cause to the woman I loved, or to the hurt and
confusion I’d cause my family.
At least I had the benefit of knowing what was coming. Lindsay would return
from her camping trip to find me gone, ostensibly on a work assignment, and my
mother basically waiting on our doorstep. I’d invited my mother to visit, in a
move so uncharacteristic that she must have expected another type of surprise—
like an announcement that Lindsay and I were engaged. I felt horrible about the
false pretenses and winced at the thought of her disappointment, but I kept
telling myself I was justified. My mother would
take care of Lindsay and
Lindsay would take care of her. Each would need the other’s strength to weather
the coming storm.
The day after Lindsay left, I took an emergency medical leave of absence
from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops:
secure
communications, normal communications, a decoy, and an “airgap” (a computer
that had never gone and would never go online). I left my smartphone on the
kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I scribbled in pen:
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
