You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass. Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny. Those selectors can be whatever the NSA chooses, whatever the NSA finds suspicious: a particular email address, credit card, or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “anonymous Internet proxy” or “protest.”
If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you requested. The end result: you get all the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely unbeknownst to you.
Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.
21
Whistleblowing
If any NSA employee who didn’t work with the SharePoint software I managed knew anything at all about SharePoint, they knew the calendars. These were pretty much the same as any normal nongovernment group calendars, just way more expensive, providing the basic when-and-where-do-I-have-to-be-at-a-meeting scheduling interface for NSA personnel in Hawaii. This was about as exciting for me to manage as you might imagine. That’s why I tried to spice it up by making sure the calendar always had reminders of all the holidays, and I mean all of them: not just the federal holidays, but Rosh Hashanah, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Diwali.
Then there was my favorite, the seventeenth of September. Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, which is the holiday’s formal name, commemorates the moment in 1787 when the delegates to the Constitutional Convention officially ratified, or signed, the document. Technically, Constitution Day is not a federal holiday, just a federal observance, meaning that Congress didn’t think our country’s founding document and the oldest national constitution still in use in the world were important enough to justify giving people a paid day off.
The Intelligence Community had always had an uncomfortable relationship with Constitution Day, which meant its involvement was typically limited to circulating a bland email drafted by its agencies’ press shops and signed by Director So-and-So, and setting up a sad little table in a forgotten corner of the cafeteria. On the table would be some free copies of the Constitution printed, bound, and donated to the government by the kind and generous rabble-rousers at places like the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation, since the IC was rarely interested in spending some of its own billions on promoting civil liberties through stapled paper.
I suppose the staff got the message, or didn’t: over the seven Constitution Days I spent in the IC, I don’t think I’d ever known anyone but myself to actually take a copy off the table. Because I love irony almost as much as I love freebies, I’d always take a few—one for myself, and the others to salt across my friends’ workstations. I kept my copy propped against the Rubik’s Cube on my desk, and for a time made a habit of reading it over lunch, trying not to drip grease on “We the People” from one of the cafeteria’s grim slices of elementary-school pizza.
I liked reading the Constitution partially because its ideas are great, partially because its prose is good, but really because it freaked out my coworkers. In an office where everything you printed had to be thrown into a shredder after you were done with it, someone would always be intrigued by the presence of hard-copy pages lying on a desk. They’d amble over to ask, “What have you got there?”
“The Constitution.”
Then they’d make a face and back away slowly.
On Constitution Day 2012, I picked up the document in earnest. I hadn’t really read the whole thing in quite a few years, though I was glad to note that I still knew the preamble by heart. Now, however, I read through it in its entirety, from the Articles to the Amendments. I was surprised to be reminded that fully 50 percent of the Bill of Rights, the document’s first ten amendments, were intended to make the job of law enforcement harder. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments were all deliberately, carefully designed to create inefficiencies and hamper the government’s ability to exercise its power and conduct surveillance.
This is especially true of the Fourth, which protects people and their property from government scrutiny: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Translation: If officers of the law want to go rooting through your life, they first have to go before a judge and show probable cause under oath. This means they have to explain to a judge why they have reason to believe that you might have committed a specific crime or that specific evidence of a specific crime might be found on or in a specific part of your property. Then they have to swear that this reason has been given honestly and in good faith. Only if the judge approves a warrant will they be allowed to go searching—and even then, only for a limited time.
The Constitution was written in the eighteenth century, back when the only computers were abacuses, gear calculators, and looms, and it could take weeks or months for a communication to cross the ocean by ship. It stands to reason that computer files, whatever their contents, are our version of the Constitution’s “papers.” We certainly use them like “papers,” particularly our word-processing documents and spreadsheets, our messages and histories of inquiry. Data, meanwhile, is our version of “effects,” a catchall term for all the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online. That includes, by default, metadata, which is the record of all the stuff that we own, produce, sell, and buy online—a perfect ledger of our private lives.
In the centuries since the original Constitution Day, our clouds, computers, and phones have become our homes, just as personal and intimate as our actual houses nowadays. If you don’t agree, then answer me this: Would you rather let your coworkers hang out at your home alone for an hour, or let them spend even just ten minutes alone with your unlocked phone?
The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely. The agency was essentially making a claim that the amendment’s protections didn’t apply to modern-day lives. The agency’s internal policies neither regarded your data as your legally protected personal property, nor regarded their collection of that data as a “search” or “seizure.” Instead, the NSA maintained that because you had already “shared” your phone records with a “third party”—your telephone service provider—you had forfeited any constitutional privacy interest you may once have had. And it insisted that “search” and “seizure” occurred only when its analysts, not its algorithms, actively queried what had already been automatically collected.