Permanent Record(80)

One unexpected upshot of gaining a better understanding of NSA surveillance was that I’d also gained a better understanding of the dangers I faced. In other words, learning about the agency’s systems had taught me how not to get caught by them. My guides in this regard were the indictments that the government had brought against former agents—mostly real bastards who, in IC jargon, had “exfiltrated” classified information for profit. I compiled, and studied, as many of these indictments as I could. The FBI—the agency that investigates all crime within the IC—took great pride in explaining exactly how they caught their suspects, and believe me, I didn’t mind benefiting from their experience. It seemed that in almost every case, the FBI would wait to make its arrest until the suspect had finished their work and was about to go home. Sometimes they would let the suspect take the material out of a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, which is a type of building or room shielded against surveillance—and out into the public, where its very presence was a federal crime. I kept imagining a team of FBI agents lying in wait for me—there, out in the public light, just at the far end of the Tunnel.

I’d usually try to banter with the guards, and this was where my Rubik’s Cube came in most handy. I was known to the guards and to everybody else at the Tunnel as the Rubik’s Cube guy, be cause I was always working the cube as I walked down the halls. I got so adept I could even solve it one-handed. It became my totem, my spirit toy, and a distraction device as much for myself as for my coworkers. Most of them thought it was an affectation, or a nerdy conversation starter. And it was, but primarily it relieved my anxiety. It calmed me.

I bought a few cubes and handed them out. Anyone who took to it, I’d give them pointers. The more that people got used to them, the less they’d ever want a closer look at mine.

I got along with the guards, or I told myself I did, mostly because I knew where their minds were: elsewhere. I’d done something like their job before, back at CASL. I knew how mind-numbing it was to spend all night standing, feigning vigilance. Your feet hurt. After a while, all the rest of you hurts. And you can get so lonely that you’ll talk to a wall.

I aimed to be more entertaining than the wall, developing my own patter for each human obstacle. There was the one guard I talked to about insomnia and the difficulties of day-sleeping (remember, I was on nights, so this would’ve been around two in the morning). Another guy, we discussed politics. He called Democrats “Demon Rats,” so I’d read Breitbart News in preparation for the conversation. What they all had in common was a reaction to my cube: it made them smile. Over the course of my employment at the Tunnel, pretty much all the guards said some variation of, “Oh man, I used to play with that when I was a kid,” and then, invariably, “I tried to take the stickers off to solve it.” Me too, buddy. Me too.

It was only once I got home that I was able to relax, even just slightly. I was still worried about the house being wired—that was another one of those charming methods the FBI used against those it suspected of inadequate loyalty. I’d rebuff Lindsay’s concerns about my insomniac ways until she hated me and I hated myself. She’d go to bed and I’d go to the couch, hiding with my laptop under a blanket like a child because cotton beats cameras. With the threat of immediate arrest out of the way, I could focus on transferring the files to a larger external storage device via my laptop—only somebody who didn’t understand technology very well would think I’d keep them on the laptop forever—and locking them down under multiple layers of encryption algorithms using differing implementations, so that even if one failed the others would keep them safe.

I’d been careful not to leave any traces at my work, and I took care that my encryption left no traces of the documents at home. Still, I knew the documents could lead back to me once I’d sent them to the journalists and they’d been decrypted. Any investigator looking at which agency employees had accessed, or could access, all these materials would come up with a list with probably only a single name on it: mine. I could provide the journalists with fewer materials, of course, but then they wouldn’t be able to most effectively do their work. Ultimately, I had to contend with the fact that even one briefing slide or PDF left me vulnerable, because all digital files contain metadata, invisible tags that can be used to identify their origins.

I struggled with how to handle this metadata situation. I worried that if I didn’t strip the identifying information from the documents, they might incriminate me the moment the journalists decrypted and opened them. But I also worried that by thoroughly stripping the metadata, I risked altering the files—if they were changed in any way, that could cast doubt on their authenticity. Which was more important: personal safety, or the public good? It might sound like an easy choice, but it took me quite a while to bite the bullet. I owned the risk, and left the metadata intact.

Part of what convinced me was my fear that even if I had stripped away the metadata I knew about, there could be other digital watermarks I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t scan for. Another part had to do with the difficulty of scrubbing single-user documents. A single-user document is a document marked with a user-specific code, so that if any publication’s editorial staff decided to run it by the government, the government would know its source. Sometimes the unique identifier was hidden in the date and time-stamp coding, sometimes it involved the pattern of microdots in a graphic or logo. But it might also be embedded in something, in some way, I hadn’t even thought of. This phenomenon should have discouraged me, but instead it emboldened me. The technological difficulty forced me, for the first time, to confront the prospect of discarding my lifetime practice of anonymity and coming forward to identify myself as the source. I would embrace my principles by signing my name to them and let myself be condemned.