Permanent Record(84)

The only way to discover the answer was to descend, abandoning my panoptic perch for the narrow vision of an operational role. The NSA employees with the freest access to the rawest forms of intelligence were those who sat in the operator’s chair and typed into their computers the names of the individuals who’d fallen under suspicion, foreigners and US citizens alike. For one reason or another, or for no reason at all, these individuals had become targets of the agency’s closest scrutiny, with the NSA interested in finding out everything about them and their communications. My ultimate destination, I knew, was the exact point of this interface—the exact point where the state cast its eye on the human and the human remained unaware.

The program that enabled this access was called XKEYSCORE, which is perhaps best understood as a search engine that lets an analyst search through all the records of your life. Imagine a kind of Google that instead of showing pages from the public Internet returns results from your private email, your private chats, your private files, everything. Though I’d read enough about the program to understand how it worked, I hadn’t yet used it, and I realized I ought to know more about it. By pursuing XKEYSCORE, I was looking for a personal confirmation of the depths of the NSA’s surveillance intrusions—the kind of confirmation you don’t get from documents but only from direct experience.

One of the few offices in Hawaii with truly unfettered access to XKEYSCORE was the National Threat Operations Center. NTOC worked out of the sparkling but soulless new open-plan office the NSA had formally named the Rochefort Building, after Joseph Rochefort, a legendary World War II–era Naval cryptanalyst who broke Japanese codes. Most employees had taken to calling it the Roach Fort, or simply “the Roach.” At the time I applied for a job there, parts of the Roach were still under construction, and I was immediately reminded of my first cleared job, with CASL: it was my fate to begin and end my IC career in unfinished buildings.

In addition to housing almost all of the agency’s Hawaii-based translators and analysts, the Roach also accommodated the local branch of the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division. This was the NSA unit responsible for remotely hacking into the computers of people whom analysts had selected as targets—the agency’s equivalent of the old burglary teams that once snuck into enemies’ homes to plant bugs and find compromising material. NTOC’s main job, by contrast, was to monitor and frustrate the activity of the TAO’s foreign equivalents. As luck would have it, NTOC had a position open through a contractor job at Booz Allen Hamilton, a job they euphemistically described as “infrastructure analyst.” The role involved using the complete spectrum of the NSA’s mass surveillance tools, including XKEYSCORE, to monitor activity on the “infrastructure” of interest, the Internet.

Though I’d be making slightly more money at Booz, around $120,000 a year, I considered it a demotion—the first of many as I began my final descent, jettisoning my accesses, my clearances, and my agency privileges. I was an engineer who was becoming an analyst who would ultimately become an exile, a target of the very technologies I’d once controlled. From that perspective, this particular fall in prestige seemed pretty minor. From that perspective, everything seemed pretty minor, as the arc of my life bent back toward earth, accelerating toward the point of impact that would end my career, my relationship, my freedom, and possibly my life.



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I’D DECIDED TO bring my archives out of the country and pass them to the journalists I’d contacted, but before I could even begin to contemplate the logistics of that act I had to go shake some hands. I had to fly east to DC and spend a few weeks meeting and greeting my new bosses and colleagues, who had high hopes for how they might apply my keen understanding of online anonymi zation to unmask their more clever targets. This was what brought me back home to the Beltway for the very last time, and back to the site of my first encounter with an institution that had lost control: Fort Meade. This time I was arriving as an insider.

The day that marked my coming of age, just over ten tumultuous years earlier, had profoundly changed not just the people who worked at NSA headquarters but the place itself. I first noticed this fact when I got stopped in my rental car trying to turn off Canine Road into one of the agency’s parking lots, which in my memory still howled with panic, ringtones, car horns, and sirens. Since 9/11, all the roads that led to NSA headquarters had been permanently closed to anyone who didn’t possess one of the special IC badges now hanging around my neck.

Whenever I wasn’t glad-handing NTOC leadership at headquarters, I spent my time learning everything I could—“hot-desking” with analysts who worked different programs and different types of targets, so as to be able to teach my fellow team members back in Hawaii the newest ways the agency’s tools might be used. That, at least, was the official explanation of my curiosity, which as always exceeded the requirements and earned the gratitude of the technologically inclined. They, in turn, were as eager as ever to demonstrate the power of the machinery they’d developed, without expressing a single qualm about how that power was applied. While at headquarters, I was also put through a series of tests on the proper use of the system, which were more like regulatory compliance exercises or procedural shields than meaningful instruction. The other analysts told me that since I could take these tests as many times as I had to, I shouldn’t bother learning the rules: “Just click the boxes until you pass.”