Permanent Record(86)

The boy’s father, like my own father, was an engineer—but unlike my father, this guy wasn’t government-or military-affiliated. He was just a regular academic who’d been caught up in a surveillance dragnet. I can’t even remember how or why he’d come to the agency’s attention, beyond sending a job application to a research university in Iran. The grounds for suspicion were often poorly documented, if they were documented at all, and the connections could be incredibly tenuous—“believed to be potentially associated with” and then the name of some international organization that could be anything from a telecommunications standards body to UNICEF to something you might actually agree is menacing.

Selections from the man’s communications had been sieved out of the stream of Internet traffic and assembled into folders—here was the fatal copy of the résumé sent to the suspect university; here were his texts; here was his Web browser history; here was the last week or so of his correspondence both sent and received, tagged to IP addresses. Here were the coordinates of a “geo-fence” the analyst had placed around him to track whether he strayed too far from home, or perhaps traveled to the university for his interview.

Then there were his pictures, and a video. He was sitting in front of his computer, as I was sitting in front of mine. Except that in his lap he had a toddler, a boy in a diaper.

The father was trying to read something, but the kid kept shifting around, smacking the keys and giggling. The computer’s internal mic picked up his giggling and there I was, listening to it on my headphones. The father held the boy tighter, and the boy straightened up, and, with his dark crescent eyes, looked directly into the computer’s camera—I couldn’t escape the feeling that he was looking directly at me. Suddenly I realized that I’d been holding my breath. I shut the session, got up from the computer, and left the office for the bathroom in the hall, head down, headphones still on with the cord trailing.

Everything about that kid, everything about his father, reminded me of my own father, whom I met for dinner one evening during my stint at Fort Meade. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but there in the midst of dinner, over bites of Caesar salad and a pink lemonade, I had the thought: I’ll never see my family again. My eyes were dry—I was exerting as much control as I could—but inside, I was devastated. I knew that if I told him what I was about to do, he would’ve called the cops. Or else he would’ve called me crazy and had me committed to a mental hospital. He would’ve done anything he thought he had to do to prevent me from making the gravest of mistakes.

I could only hope that his hurt would in time be healed by pride.

Back in Hawaii between March and May 2013, a sense of finality suffused nearly every experience for me, and though the experiences themselves might seem trivial, they eased my path. It was far less painful to think that this was the last time I’d ever stop at the curry place in Mililani or drop by the art-gallery hacker space in Honolulu or just sit on the roof of my car and scan the nighttime sky for falling stars than to think that I only had another month left with Lindsay, or another week left of sleeping next to her and waking up next to her and yet trying to keep my distance from her, for fear of breaking down.

The preparations I was making were those of a man about to die. I emptied my bank accounts, putting cash into an old steel ammo box for Lindsay to find so that the government couldn’t seize it. I went around the house doing oft-procrastinated chores, like fixing windows and changing lightbulbs. I erased and encrypted my old computers, reducing them to the silent husks of better times. In sum, I was putting my affairs in order to try to make everything easier for Lindsay, or just for my conscience, which periodically would switch allegiance from a world that hadn’t earned it to the woman who had and the family I loved.

Everything was imbued with this sense of an ending, and yet there were moments when it seemed that no end was in sight and that the plan I’d developed was collapsing. It was difficult to get the journalists to commit to a meeting, mostly because I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with, or even, for a while at least, where and when it was happening. I had to reckon with the prospect of them never showing up, or of them showing up but then dropping out. Ultimately I decided that if either of those happened, I’d just abandon the plan and return to work and to Lindsay as if everything was normal, to wait for my next chance.

In my wardrives back and forth from Kunia—a twenty-minute ride that could become a two-hour Wi-Fi scavenger hunt—I’d been researching various countries, trying to find a location for my meeting with the journalists. It felt like I was picking out my prison, or rather my grave. All of the Five Eyes countries were obviously off-limits. In fact, all of Europe was out, because its coun tries couldn’t be counted upon to uphold international law against the extradition of those charged with political crimes in the face of what was sure to be significant American pressure. Africa and Latin America were no-go zones too—the United States had a history of acting there with impunity. Russia was out because it was Russia, and China was China: both were totally out of bounds. The US government wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at the map. The optics would only be worse in the Middle East. It sometimes seemed as if the most challenging hack of my life wasn’t going to be plundering the NSA but rather trying to find a meeting venue independent enough to hold off the White House and free enough not to interfere with my activities.