Permanent Record

Mario Kart
, 
Double Dragon
, and 
Street
Fighter
. By that point, I was significantly better than him at all those games—
the first pursuit at which I proved more adept than my father—but every so often
I’d let him beat me. I didn’t want him to think that I wasn’t grateful.
I’m not a natural programmer, and I’ve never considered myself any good at
it. But I did, over the next decade or so, become good enough to be dangerous.
To this day, I still find the process magical: typing in the commands in all these
strange languages that the processor then translates into an experience that’s
available not just to me but to everyone. I was fascinated by the thought that one
individual programmer could code something universal, something bound by no
laws or rules or regulations except those essentially reducible to cause and effect.
There was an utterly logical relationship between my input and the output. If my
input was flawed, the output was flawed; if my input was flawless, the
computer’s output was, too. I’d never before experienced anything so consistent
and fair, so unequivocally unbiased. A computer would wait forever to receive
my command but would process it the very moment I hit Enter, no questions
asked. No teacher had ever been so patient, yet so responsive. Nowhere else—
certainly not at school, and not even at home—had I ever felt so in control. That
a perfectly written set of commands would perfectly execute the same operations
time and again would come to seem to me—as it did to so many smart, tech-
inclined children of the millennium—the one stable saving truth of our
generation.

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3
Beltway Boy
I was just shy of my ninth birthday when my family moved from North Carolina
to Maryland. To my surprise, I found that my name had preceded me.
“Snowden” was everywhere throughout Anne Arundel, the county we settled in,
though it was a while before I learned why.
Richard Snowden was a British major who arrived in the province of
Maryland in 1658 with the understanding that Lord Baltimore’s guarantee of
religious freedom for both Catholics and Protestants would also be extended to
Quakers. In 1674, Richard was joined by his brother John, who’d agreed to leave
Yorkshire in order to shorten his prison sentence for preaching the Quaker faith.
When William Penn’s ship, the 
Welcome
, sailed up the Delaware in 1682, John
was one of the few Europeans to greet it.
Three of John’s grandsons went on to serve in the Continental Army during
the Revolution. As the Quakers are pacifists, they came in for community
censure for deciding to join the fight for independence, but their conscience
demanded a reconsideration of their pacifism. William Snowden, my direct
paternal ancestor, served as a captain, was taken prisoner by the British in the
Battle of Fort Washington in New York, and died in custody at one of the
notorious sugar house prisons in Manhattan. (Legend has it that the British killed
their POWs by forcing them to eat gruel laced with ground glass.) His wife,
Elizabeth née Moor, was a valued adviser to General Washington, and the
mother to another John Snowden—a politician, historian, and newspaper
publisher in Pennsylvania whose descendants dispersed southward to settle amid
the Maryland holdings of their Snowden cousins.
Anne Arundel County encompasses nearly all of the 1,976 acres of woodland
that King Charles II granted to the family of Richard Snowden in 1686. The
enterprises the Snowdens established there include the Patuxent Iron Works, one
of colonial America’s most important forges and a major manufacturer of

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cannonballs and bullets, and Snowden Plantation, a farm and dairy run by
Richard Snowden’s grandsons. After serving in the heroic Maryland Line of the
Continental Army, they returned to the plantation and—most fully living the
principles of independence—abolished their family’s practice of slavery, freeing
their two hundred African slaves nearly a full century before the Civil War.
Today, the former Snowden fields are bisected by Snowden River Parkway, a
busy four-lane commercial stretch of upmarket chain restaurants and car
dealerships. Nearby, Route 32/Patuxent Freeway leads directly to Fort George G.
Meade, the second-largest army base in the country and the home of the NSA.
Fort Meade, in fact, is built atop land that was once owned by my Snowden
cousins, and that was either bought from them (in one account) or expropriated
from them (according to others) by the US government.
I knew nothing of this history at the time: my parents joked that the state of
Maryland changed the name on the signs every time somebody new moved in.
They thought that was funny but I just found it spooky. Anne Arundel County is
only a bit more than 250 miles away from Elizabeth City via I-95, yet it felt like
a different planet. We’d exchanged the leafy riverside for a concrete sidewalk,
and a school where I’d been popular and academically successful for one where
I was constantly mocked for my glasses, my disinterest in sports, and, especially,
for my accent—a strong Southern drawl that led my new classmates to call me
“retarded.”
I was so sensitive about my accent that I stopped speaking in class and
started practicing alone at home until I managed to sound “normal”—or, at least,
until I managed not to pronounce the site of my humiliation as “Anglish clay-
iss” or say that I’d gotten a paper cut on my “fanger.” Meanwhile, all that time
I’d been afraid to speak freely had caused my grades to plummet, and some of
my teachers decided to have me IQ-tested as a way of diagnosing what they
thought was a learning disability. When my score came back, I don’t remember
getting any apologies, just a bunch of extra “enrichment assignments.” Indeed,
the same teachers who’d doubted my ability to learn now began to take issue
with my newfound interest in speaking up.
My new home was on the Beltway, which traditionally referred to Interstate
495, the highway that encircles Washington, DC, but now describes the vast and
ever-expanding blast radius of bedroom communities around the nation’s capital,
stretching north to Baltimore, Maryland, and south to Quantico, Virginia. The
inhabitants of these suburbs almost invariably either serve in the US government
or work for one of the companies that do business with the US government.

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There is, to put it plainly, no other reason to be there.
We lived in Crofton, Maryland, halfway between Annapolis and Washington,
DC, at the western edge of Anne Arundel County, where the residential
developments are all in the vinyl-sided Federalist style and have quaint ye-olde
names like Crofton Towne, Crofton Mews, The Preserve, The Ridings. Crofton
itself is a planned community fitted around the curves of the Crofton Country
Club. On a map, it resembles nothing so much as the human brain, with the
streets coiling and kinking and folding around one another like the ridges and
furrows of the cerebral cortex. Our street was Knights Bridge Turn, a broad, lazy
loop of split-level housing, wide driveways, and two-car garages. The house we
lived in was seven down from one end of the loop, seven down from the other—
the house in the middle. I got a Huffy ten-speed bike and with it, a paper route,
delivering the 
Capital
, a venerable newspaper published in Annapolis, whose
daily distribution became distressingly erratic, especially in the winter,
especially between Crofton Parkway and Route 450, which, as it passed by our
neighborhood, acquired a different name: Defense Highway.
For my parents this was an exciting time. Crofton was a step up for them,
both economically and socially. The streets were tree-lined and pretty much
crime-free, and the multicultural, multiracial, multilingual population, which
reflected the diversity of the Beltway’s diplomatic corps and intelligence
community, was well-to-do and well educated. Our backyard was basically a
golf course, with tennis courts just around the corner, and beyond those an
Olympic-size pool. Commuting-wise, too, Crofton was ideal. It took my father
just forty minutes to get to his new posting as a chief warrant officer in the
Aeronautical Engineering Division at Coast Guard Headquarters, which at the
time was located at Buzzard Point in southern Washington, DC, adjacent to Fort
Lesley J. McNair. And it took my mother just twenty or so minutes to get to her
new job at the NSA, whose boxy futuristic headquarters, topped with radomes
and sheathed in copper to seal in the communications signals, forms the heart of
Fort Meade.
I can’t stress this enough, for outsiders: this type of employment was normal.
Neighbors to our left worked for the Defense Department; neighbors to the right
worked in the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce. For a
while, nearly every girl at school on whom I had a crush had a father in the FBI.
Fort Meade was just the place where my mother worked, along with about
125,000 other employees, approximately 40,000 of whom resided on-site, many
with their families. The base was home to over 115 government agencies, in

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addition to forces from all five branches of the military. To put it in perspective,
in Anne Arundel County, population just over half a million, every eight
hundredth person works for the post office, every thirtieth person works for the
public school system, and every fourth person works for, or serves in, a business,
agency, or branch connected to Fort Meade. The base has its own post offices,
schools, police, and fire departments. Area children, military brats and civilians
alike, would flock to the base daily to take golf, tennis, and swimming lessons.
Though we lived off base, my mother still used its commissary as our grocery
store, to stock up on items in bulk. She also took advantage of the base’s PX, or
Post Exchange, as a one-stop shop for the sensible and, most important, tax-free
clothing that my sister and I were constantly outgrowing. Perhaps it’s best, then,
for readers not raised in this milieu to imagine Fort Meade and its environs, if
not the entire Beltway, as one enormous boom-or-bust company town. It is a
place whose monoculture has much in common with, say, Silicon Valley’s,
except that the Beltway’s product isn’t technology but government itself.
I should add that both my parents had top secret clearances, but my mother
also had a full-scope polygraph—a higher-level security check that members of
the military aren’t subject to. The funny thing is, my mother was the farthest
thing from a spy. She was a clerk at an independent insurance and benefits
association that serviced employees of the NSA—essentially, providing spies
with retirement plans. But still, to process pension forms she had to be vetted as
if she were about to parachute into a jungle to stage a coup.
My father’s career remains fairly opaque to me to this day, and the fact is that
my ignorance here isn’t anomalous. In the world I grew up in, nobody really
talked about their jobs—not just to children, but to each other. It is true that
many of the adults around me were legally prohibited from discussing their
work, even with their families, but to my mind a more accurate explanation lies
in the technical nature of their labor and the government’s insistence on
compartmentalization. Tech people rarely, if ever, have a sense of the broader
applications and policy implications of the projects to which they’re assigned.
And the work that consumes them tends to require such specialized knowledge
that to bring it up at a barbecue would get them disinvited from the next one,
because nobody cared.
In retrospect, maybe that’s what got us here.

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4
American Online
It was soon after we moved to Crofton that my father brought home our first
desktop computer, a Compaq Presario 425, list price $1,399 but purchased at his
military discount, and initially set up—much to my mother’s chagrin—smack in
the middle of the dining-room table. From the moment it appeared, the computer
and I were inseparable. If previously I’d been loath to go outside and kick
around a ball, now the very idea seemed ludicrous. There was no outside greater
than what I could find inside this drab clunky PC clone, with what felt at the
time like an impossibly fast 25-megahertz Intel 486 CPU and an inexhaustible
200-megabyte hard disk. Also, get this, it had a color monitor—an 8-bit color
monitor, to be precise, which means that it could display up to 256 different
colors. (Your current device can probably display in the millions.)
This Compaq became my constant companion—my second sibling, and first
love. It came into my life just at the age when I was first discovering an
independent self and the multiple worlds that can simultaneously exist within
this world. That process of exploration was so exciting that it made me take for
granted and even neglect, for a while at least, the family and life that I already
had. Another way of saying this is, I was just experiencing the early throes of
puberty. But this was a technologized puberty, and the tremendous changes that
it wrought in me were, in a way, being wrought everywhere, in everyone.
My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I
wouldn’t hear them. They’d call my name to tell me to wash up for dinner, but
I’d pretend not to hear them. And whenever I was reminded that the computer
was a shared computer and not my personal machine, I’d relinquish my seat with
such reluctance that as my father, or mother, or sister took their turn, they’d have
to order me out of the room entirely lest I hover moodily over their shoulders
and offer advice—showing my sister word-processing macros and shortcuts
when she was writing a research paper, or giving my parents spreadsheet tips

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when they tried to do their taxes.
I’d try to rush them through their tasks, so I could get back to mine, which
were so much more important—like playing 
Loom
. As technology had
advanced, games involving Pong paddles and helicopters—the kind my father
had played on that by now superannuated Commodore—had lost ground to ones
that realized that at the heart of every computer user was a book reader, a being
with the desire not just for sensation but for story. The crude Nintendo, Atari,
and Sega games of my childhood, with plots along the lines of (and this is a real
example) rescuing the president of the United States from ninjas, now gave way
to detailed reimaginings of the ancient tales that I’d paged through while lying
on the carpet of my grandmother’s house.
Loom
was about a society of Weavers whose elders (named after the Greek
Fates Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) create a secret loom that controls the
world, or, according to the script of the game, that weaves “subtle patterns of
influence into the very fabric of reality.” When a young boy discovers the loom’s
power, he’s forced into exile, and everything spirals into chaos until the world
decides that a secret fate machine might not be such a great idea, after all.
Unbelievable, sure. But then again, it’s just a game.
Still, it wasn’t lost on me, even at that young age, that the titular machine of
the game was a symbol of sorts for the computer on which I was playing it. The
loom’s rainbow-colored threads were like the computer’s rainbow-colored
internal wires, and the lone gray thread that foretold an uncertain future was like
the long gray phone cord that came out of the back of the computer and
connected it to the great wide world beyond. There, for me, was the true magic:
with just this cord, the Compaq’s expansion card and modem, and a working
phone, I could dial up and connect to something new called the Internet.
Readers who were born postmillennium might not understand the fuss, but
trust me, this was a goddamned miracle. Nowadays, connectivity is just
presumed. Smartphones, laptops, desktops, everything’s connected, always.
Connected to what exactly? How? It doesn’t matter. You just tap the icon your
older relatives call “the Internet button” and boom, you’ve got it: the news, pizza
delivery, streaming music, and streaming video that we used to call TV and
movies. Back then, however, we walked uphill both ways, to and from school,
and plugged our modems directly into the wall, with manly twelve-year-old
hands.
I’m not saying that I knew much about what the Internet was, or how exactly
I was connecting to it, but I did understand the miraculousness of it all. Because

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in those days, when you told the computer to connect, you were setting off an
entire process wherein the computer would beep and hiss like a traffic jam of
snakes, after which—and it could take lifetimes, or at least whole minutes—you
could pick up any other phone in the house on an extension line and actually