Permanent Record(41)

When you go online at the CIA, you have to check a box for a Consent to Monitoring Agreement, which basically says that everything you do is being recorded and that you agree that you have no expectation of any privacy whatsoever. You end up checking this box so often that it becomes second nature. These agreements become invisible to you when you’re working at the agency, because they pop up constantly and you’re always trying to just click them down and get back to what you were doing. This, to my mind, is a major reason why most IC workers don’t share civilian concerns about being tracked online: not because they have any insider information about how digital surveillance helps to protect America, but because to those in the IC, being tracked by the boss just comes with the job.

Anyway, it’s not like there’s a lot to be found out there on the public Internet that’s more interesting than what the agency already has internally. Few realize this, but the CIA has its own Internet and Web. It has its own kind of Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia, which provides agents with information about agency teams, projects, and missions; and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network. Every CIA component has its own website on this network that discusses what it does and posts meeting minutes and presentations. For hours and hours every night, this was my education.

According to Frank, the first things everyone looks up on the CIA’s internal networks are aliens and 9/11, and that’s why, also according to Frank, you’ll never get any meaningful search results for them. I looked them up anyway. The CIA-flavored Google didn’t return anything interesting for either, but hey—maybe the truth was out there on another network drive. For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence. But al-Qaeda did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the Saudis, a fact that the Bush White House worked suspiciously hard to suppress as we went to war with two other countries.

Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didn’t quite understand at the time, and that no major American employer outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The higher up this employee is, and the more systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to virtually every byte of his employer’s digital existence. Of course, not everyone is curious enough to take advantage of this education, and not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity. My forays through the CIA’s systems were natural extensions of my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit together into the whole. And with the official title and privileges of a systems administrator, and technical prowess that enabled my clearance to be used to its maximum potential, I was able to satisfy my every informational deficiency and then some. In case you were wondering: Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails are not a thing.

On the CIA’s internal news sites I read top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still unfolding. These agency accounts of events were often very similar to the accounts that would eventually show up on network news, CNN, or Fox days later. The primary differences were merely in the sourcing and the level of detail. Whereas a newspaper or magazine account of an upheaval abroad might be attributed to “a senior official speaking on condition of anonymity,” the CIA version would have explicit sourcing—say, “ZBSMACKTALK/1, an employee of the interior ministry who regularly responds to specific tasking, claims secondhand knowledge, and has proven reliable in the past.” And the true name and complete personal history of ZBSMACKTALK/1, called a case file, would be only a few clicks away.

Sometimes an internal news item would never show up in the media at all, and the excitement and significance of what I was reading both increased my appreciation of the importance of our work and made me feel like I was missing out by just sitting at a workstation. This may come off as naive, but I was surprised to learn how truly international the CIA was—and I don’t mean its operations, I mean its workforce. The number of languages I heard in the cafeteria was astounding. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of my own provincialism. Working at CIA Headquarters was a thrill, but it was still only a few hours away from where I’d grown up, which in many ways was a similar environment. I was in my early twenties and, apart from stints in North Carolina, childhood trips to visit my grandfather at Coast Guard bases where he’d held commands, and my few weeks in the army at Fort Benning, I’d never really left the Beltway.

As I read about events happening in Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, and other exotic cities I could never have found on a noncomputerized map, I realized that as long as I was still young I had to serve my country by doing something truly meaningful abroad. The alternative, I thought, was just becoming a more successful Frank: sitting at progressively bigger desks, making progressively more money, until eventually I, too, would be obsolesced and kept around only to handle the future’s equivalent of a janky tape machine.

It was then that I did the unthinkable. I set about going govvy.

I think some of my supervisors were puzzled by this, but they were also flattered, because the typical route is the reverse: a public servant at the end of their tenure goes private and cashes in. No tech contractor just starting out goes public and takes a pay cut. To my mind, however, becoming a govvy was logical: I’d be getting paid to travel.