Permanent Record(63)
The previous ten years had been a cavalcade of American-made tragedy: the forever war in Afghanistan, catastrophic regime change in Iraq, indefinite detentions at Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary renditions, torture, targeted killings of civilians—even of American civilians—via drone strikes. Domestically, there was the Homeland Securitization of everything, which assigned a threat rating to every waking day (Red–Severe, Orange–High, Yellow–Elevated), and, from the Patriot Act on, the steady erosion of civil liberties, the very liberties we were allegedly fighting to protect. The cumulative damage—the malfeasance in aggregate—was staggering to contemplate and felt entirely irreversible, and yet we were still honking our horns and flashing our lights in jubilation.
The biggest terrorist attack on American soil happened concurrently with the development of digital technology, which made much of the earth American soil—whether we liked it or not. Terrorism, of course, was the stated reason why most of my country’s surveillance programs were implemented, at a time of great fear and opportunism. But it turned out that fear was the true terrorism, perpetrated by a political system that was increasingly willing to use practically any justification to authorize the use of force. American politicians weren’t as afraid of terror as they were of seeming weak, or of being disloyal to their party, or of being disloyal to their campaign donors, who had ample appetites for government contracts and petroleum products from the Middle East. The politics of terror became more powerful than the terror itself, resulting in “counterterror”: the panicked actions of a country unmatched in capability, unrestrained by policy, and blatantly unconcerned about upholding the rule of law. After 9/11, the IC’s orders had been “never again,” a mission that could never be accomplished. A decade later, it had become clear, to me at least, that the repeated evocations of terror by the political class were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.
After a decade of mass surveillance, the technology had proved itself to be a potent weapon less against terror and more against liberty itself. By continuing these programs, by continuing these lies, America was protecting little, winning nothing, and losing much—until there would be few distinctions left between those post-9/11 polarities of “Us” and “Them.”
* * *
THE LATTER HALF of 2011 passed in a succession of seizures, and in countless doctors’ offices and hospitals. I was imaged, tested, and prescribed medications that stabilized my body but clouded my mind, turning me depressed, lethargic, and unable to focus.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to live with what Lindsay was now calling my “condition” without losing my job. Being the top technologist for Dell’s CIA account meant I had tremendous flexibility: my office was my phone, and I could work from home. But meetings were an issue. They were always in Virginia, and I lived in Maryland, a state whose laws prevented people diagnosed with epilepsy from driving. If I were caught behind the wheel, I could lose my driver’s license, and with it my ability to attend the meetings that were the single nonnegotiable requirement of my position.
I finally gave in to the inevitable, took a short-term disability leave from Dell, and decamped to my mother’s secondhand couch. It was as blue as my mood, but comfortable. For weeks and weeks it was the center of my existence—the place where I slept and ate and read and slept some more, the place where I just generally wallowed bleakly as time mocked me.
I don’t remember what books I tried to read, but I do remember never managing much more than a page before closing my eyes and sinking back again into the cushions. I couldn’t concentrate on anything except my own weakness, the uncooperative lump that used to be me spread across the upholstery, motionless but for a lone finger atop the screen of the phone that was the only light in the room.
I’d scroll through the news, then nap, then scroll again, then nap—while protesters in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were being imprisoned and tortured or just shot in the streets by the secret state agents of thuggish regimes, many of which America had helped keep in power. The suffering of that season was immense, spiraling out of the regular news cycle. What I was witnessing was desperation, compared with which my own struggles seemed cheap. They seemed small—morally and ethically small—and privileged.
Throughout the Middle East, innocent civilians were living under the constant threat of violence, with work and school suspended, no electricity, no sewage. In many regions, they didn’t have access to even the most rudimentary medical care. But if at any moment I doubted that my anxieties about surveillance and privacy were relevant, or even appropriate, in the face of such immediate danger and privation, I only had to pay a bit more attention to the crowds on the street and the proclamations they were making—in Cairo and Sanaa, in Beirut and Damascus, in Ahvaz, Khuzestan, and in every other city of the Arab Spring and Iranian Green Movement. The crowds were calling for an end to oppression, censorship, and precarity. They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people. Although each crowd in each city, even on each day, seemed to have its own specific motivation and its own specific goals, they all had one thing in common: a rejection of authoritarianism, a recommitment to the humanitarian principle that an individual’s rights are inborn and inalienable.