Permanent Record(50)

It wasn’t that Lindsay and I were hurting: after all, our rent was being paid by Uncle Sam. Rather, it’s that every time she or I would talk to our folks back home, the situation seemed grimmer. Both of our families knew people who’d worked their entire lives, some of them for the US government, only to have their homes taken away by banks after an unexpected illness made a few mortgage payments impossible.

To live in Geneva was to live in an alternative, even opposite, reality. As the rest of the world became more and more impoverished, Geneva flourished, and while the Swiss banks didn’t engage in many of the types of risky trades that caused the crash, they gladly hid the money of those who’d profited from the pain and were never held accountable. The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.





16



Tokyo





The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage. The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory. Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will.

It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software (Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud services to the US government along with half the Internet). Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. The problem is, they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.

Given the American nature of the planet’s communications infrastructure, it should have been obvious that the US government would engage in this type of mass surveillance. It should have been especially obvious to me. Yet it wasn’t—mostly because the government kept insisting that it did nothing of the sort, and generally disclaimed the practice in courts and in the media in a manner so adamant that the few remaining skeptics who accused it of lying were treated like wild-haired conspiracy junkies. Their suspicions about secret NSA programs seemed hardly different from paranoid delusions involving alien messages being beamed to the radios in our teeth. We—me, you, all of us—were too trusting. But what makes this all the more personally painful for me was that the last time I’d made this mistake, I’d supported the invasion of Iraq and joined the army. When I arrived in the IC, I felt sure that I’d never be fooled again, especially given my top secret clearance. Surely that had to count for some degree of transparency. After all, why would the government keep secrets from its secret keepers? This is all to say that the obvious didn’t even become the thinkable for me until some time after I moved to Japan in 2009 to work for the NSA, America’s premier signals intelligence agency.

It was a dream job, not only because it was with the most advanced intelligence agency on the planet, but also because it was based in Japan, a place that had always fascinated Lindsay and me. It felt like a country from the future. Though mine was officially a contractor position, its responsibilities and, especially, its location were more than enough to lure me. It’s ironic that only by going private again was I put in a position to understand what my government was doing.

On paper, I was an employee of Perot Systems, a company founded by that diminutive hyperactive Texan who founded the Reform Party and twice ran for the presidency. But almost immediately after my arrival in Japan, Perot Systems was acquired by Dell, so on paper I became an employee of Dell. As in the CIA, this contractor status was all just formality and cover, and I only ever worked in an NSA facility.

The NSA’s Pacific Technical Center (PTC) occupied one-half of a building inside the enormous Yokota Air Base. As the headquarters of US Forces Japan, the base was surrounded by high walls, steel gates, and guarded checkpoints. Yokota and the PTC were just a short bike ride from where Lindsay and I got an apartment in Fussa, a city at the western edge of Tokyo’s vast metropolitan spread.

The PTC handled the NSA’s infrastructure for the entire Pacific, and provided support for the agency’s spoke sites in nearby countries. Most of these were focused on managing the secret relationships that let the NSA cover the Pacific Rim with spy gear, as long as the agency promised to share some of the intelligence it gleaned with regional governments—and so long as their citizens didn’t find out what the agency was doing. Communications interception was the major part of the mission. The PTC would amass “cuts” from captured signals and push them back across the ocean to Hawaii, and Hawaii, in turn, would push them back to the continental United States.