Permanent Record(66)

We’d come to start over. To start over yet again.

My doctors told me that the climate and more relaxed lifestyle in Hawaii might be beneficial for my epilepsy, since lack of sleep was thought to be the leading trigger of the seizures. Also, the move eliminated the driving problem: the Tunnel was within bicycling distance of a number of communities in Kunia, the quiet heart of the island’s dry, red interior. It was a pleasant, twenty-minute ride to work, through sugarcane fields in brilliant sunshine. With the mountains rising calm and high in the clear blue distance, the gloomy mood of the last few months lifted like the morning fog.

Lindsay and I found a decent-size bungalow-type house on Eleu Street in Waipahu’s Royal Kunia, which we furnished with our stuff from Columbia, Maryland, since Dell paid relocation expenses. The furniture didn’t get much use, though, since the sun and heat would often cause us to walk in the door, strip off our clothes, and lie naked on the carpet beneath the overworked air conditioner. Eventually, Lindsay turned the garage into a fitness studio, filling it with yoga mats and the spinning pole she’d brought from Columbia. I set up a new Tor server. Soon, traffic from around the world was reaching the Internet via the laptop sitting in our entertainment center, which had the ancillary benefit of hiding my own Internet activity in the noise.

One night during the summer I turned twenty-nine, Lindsay finally prevailed on me to go out with her to a luau. She’d been after me to go for a while, because a few of her pole-fitness friends had been involved in some hula-girl capacity, but I’d been resistant. It had seemed like such a cheesy touristy thing to do, and had felt, somehow, disrespectful. Hawaiian culture is ancient, although its traditions are very much alive; the last thing I wanted was to disturb someone’s sacred ritual.

Finally, however, I capitulated. I’m very glad I did. What impressed me the most was not the luau itself—though it was very much a fire-twirling spectacle—but the old man who was holding court nearby in a little amphitheater down by the sea. He was a native Hawaiian, an erudite man with that soft but nasal island voice, who was telling a group of people gathered around a fire the creation stories of the islands’ indigenous peoples.

The one story that stuck with me concerned the twelve sacred islands of the gods. Apparently, there had existed a dozen islands in the Pacific that were so beautiful and pure and blessed with freshwater that they had to be kept secret from humanity, who would spoil them. Three of them were especially revered: Kane-huna-moku, Kahiki, and Pali-uli. The lucky gods who inhabited these islands decided to keep them hidden, because they believed that a glimpse of their bounty would drive people mad. After considering numerous ingenious schemes by which these islands might be concealed, including dyeing them the color of the sea, or sinking them to the bottom of the ocean, they finally decided to make them float in the air.

Once the islands were airborne, they were blown from place to place, staying constantly in motion. At sunrise and sunset, especially, you might think that you’d noticed one, hovering far at the horizon. But the moment you pointed it out to anyone, it would suddenly drift away or assume another form entirely, such as a pumice raft, a hunk of rock ejected by a volcanic eruption—or a cloud.

I thought about that legend a lot while I went about my search. The revelations I was pursuing were exactly like those islands: exotic preserves that a pantheon of self-important, self-appointed rulers were convinced had to be kept secret and hidden from humanity. I wanted to know what the NSA’s surveillance capabilities were exactly; whether and how they extended beyond the agency’s actual surveillance activities; who approved them; who knew about them; and, last but surely not least, how these systems—both technical and institutional—really operated.

The moment I’d think that I spotted one of these “islands”—some capitalized code name I didn’t understand, some program referenced in a note buried at the end of a report—I’d go chasing after further mentions of it in other documents, but find none. It was as if the program I was searching for had floated away from me and was lost. Then, days later, or weeks later, it might surface again under a different designation, in a document from a different department.

Sometimes I’d find a program with a recognizable name, but without an explanation of what it did. Other times I’d just find a nameless explanation, with no indication as to whether the capability it described was an active program or an aspirational desire. I was running up against compartments within compartments, caveats within caveats, suites within suites, programs within programs. This was the nature of the NSA—by design, the left hand rarely knew what the right hand was doing.

In a way, what I was doing reminded me of a documentary I once watched about mapmaking—specifically, about the way that nautical charts were created in the days before imaging and GPS. Ship captains would keep logs and note their coordinates, which landbound mapmakers would then try to interpret. It was through the gradual accretion of this data, over hundreds of years, that the full extent of the Pacific became known, and all its islands identified.

But I didn’t have hundreds of years or hundreds of ships. I was alone, one man hunched over a blank blue ocean, trying to find where this one speck of dry land, this one data point, belonged in relation to all the others.





20



Heartbeat





Back in 2009 in Japan, when I went to that fateful China conference as a substitute briefer, I guess I’d made some friends, especially at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA) and its parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). In the three years since, JCITA had invited me a half-dozen or so times to give seminars and lectures at DIA facilities. Essentially, I was teaching classes in how the American Intelligence Community could protect itself from Chinese hackers and exploit the information gained from analyzing their hacks to hack them in return.