Technology doesn’t have a Hippocratic oath. So many decisions that have been made by technologists in academia, industry, the military, and government since at least the Industrial Revolution have been made on the basis of “can we,” not “should we.” And the intention driving a technology’s invention rarely, if ever, limits its application and use.
I do not mean, of course, to compare nuclear weapons with cybersurveillance in terms of human cost. But there is a commonality when it comes to the concepts of proliferation and disarmament.
The only two countries I knew of that had previously practiced mass surveillance were those two other major combatants of World War II—one America’s enemy, the other America’s ally. In both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the earliest public indications of that surveillance took the superficially innocuous form of a census, the official enumeration and statistical recording of a population. The First All-Union Census of the Soviet Union, in 1926, had a secondary agenda beyond a simple count: it overtly queried Soviet citizens about their nationality. Its findings convinced the ethnic Russians who comprised the Soviet elite that they were in the minority when compared to the aggregated masses of citizens who claimed a Central Asian heritage, such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks, Turkmen, Georgians, and Armenians. These findings significantly strengthened Stalin’s resolve to eradicate these cultures, by “reeducating” their populations in the deracinating ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
The Nazi German census of 1939 took on a similar statistical project, but with the assistance of computer technology. It set out to count the Reich’s population in order to control it and to purge it—mainly of Jews and Roma—before exerting its murderous efforts on populations beyond its borders. To effect this, the Reich partnered with Dehomag, a German subsidiary of the American IBM, which owned the patent to the punch card tabulator, a sort of analog computer that counted holes punched into cards. Each citizen was represented by a card, and certain holes on the cards represented certain markers of identity. Column 22 addressed the religion rubric: hole 1 was Protestant, hole 2 Catholic, and hole 3 Jewish. Shortly thereafter, this census information was used to identify and deport Europe’s Jewish population to the death camps.
A single current-model smartphone commands more computing power than all of the wartime machinery of the Reich and the Soviet Union combined. Recalling this is the surest way to contextualize not just the modern American IC’s technological dominance, but also the threat it poses to democratic governance. In the century or so since those census efforts, technology has made astounding progress, but the same could not be said for the law or human scruples that could restrain it.
The United States has a census, too, of course. The Constitution established the American census and enshrined it as the official federal count of each state’s population in order to determine its proportional delegation to the House of Representatives. That was something of a revisionist principle, in that authoritarian governments, including the British monarchy that ruled the colonies, had traditionally used the census as a method of assessing taxes and ascertaining the number of young men eligible for military conscription. It was the Constitution’s genius to repurpose what had been a mechanism of oppression into one of democracy. The census, which is officially under the jurisdiction of the Senate, was ordered to be performed every ten years, which was roughly the amount of time it took to process the data of most American censuses following the first census of 1790. This decade-long lag was shortened by the census of 1890, which was the world’s first census to make use of computers (the prototypes of the models that IBM later sold to Nazi Germany). With computing technology, the processing time was cut in half.
Digital technology didn’t just further streamline such accounting—it is rendering it obsolete. Mass surveillance is now a never-ending census, substantially more dangerous than any questionnaire sent through the mail. All our devices, from our phones to our computers, are basically miniature census-takers we carry in our backpacks and in our pockets—census-takers that remember everything and forgive nothing.
Japan was my atomic moment. It was then that I realized where these new technologies were headed, and that if my generation didn’t intervene the escalation would only continue. It would be a tragedy if, by the time we’d finally resolved to resist, such resistance were futile. The generations to come would have to get used to a world in which surveillance wasn’t something occasional and directed in legally justified circumstances, but a constant and indiscriminate presence: the ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent.
Once the ubiquity of collection was combined with the permanency of storage, all any government had to do was select a person or a group to scapegoat and go searching—as I’d gone searching through the agency’s files—for evidence of a suitable crime.
17
Home on the Cloud
In 2011, I was back in the States, working for the same nominal employer, Dell, but now attached to my old agency, the CIA. One mild spring day, I came home from my first day at the new job and was amused to notice: the house I’d moved into had a mailbox. It was nothing fancy, just one of those subdivided rectangles common to town house communities, but still, it made me smile. I hadn’t had a mailbox in years, and hadn’t ever checked this one. I might not even have registered its existence had it not been overflowing—stuffed to bursting with heaps of junk mail addressed to “Mr. Edward J. Snowden or Current Resident.” The envelopes contained coupons and ad circulars for household products. Someone knew that I’d just moved in.
A memory surfaced from my childhood, a memory of checking the mail and finding a letter to my sister. Although I wanted to open it, my mother wouldn’t let me.
I remember asking why. “Because,” she said, “it’s not addressed to you.” She explained that opening mail intended for someone else, even if it was just a birthday card or a chain letter, wasn’t a very nice thing to do. In fact, it was a crime.
I wanted to know what kind of crime. “A big one, buddy,” my mother said. “A federal crime.”
I stood in the parking lot, tore the envelopes in half, and carried them to the trash.
I had a new iPhone in the pocket of my new Ralph Lauren suit. I had new Burberry glasses. A new haircut. Keys to this new town house in Columbia, Maryland, the largest place I’d ever lived in, and the first place that really felt like mine. I was rich, or at least my friends thought so. I barely recognized myself.
I’d decided it was best to live in denial and just make some money, make life better for the people I loved—after all, wasn’t that what everybody else did? But it was easier said than done. The denial, I mean. The money—that came easy. So easy that I felt guilty.
Counting Geneva, and not counting periodic trips home, I’d been away for nearly four years. The America I returned to felt like a changed country. I won’t go as far as to say that I felt like a foreigner, but I did find myself mired in way too many conversations I didn’t understand. Every other word was the name of some TV show or movie I didn’t know, or a celebrity scandal I didn’t care about, and I couldn’t respond—I had nothing to respond with.
Contradictory thoughts rained down like Tetris blocks, and I struggled to sort them out—to make them disappear. I thought, pity these poor, sweet, innocent people—they’re victims, watched by the government, watched by the very screens they worship. Then I thought: Shut up, stop being so dramatic—they’re happy, they don’t care, and you don’t have to, either. Grow up, do your work, pay your bills. That’s life.