Atop the parking garage of a mall, secure in the knowledge that the moment I closed the lid of my laptop, my secret was safe, I’d draft manifestos explaining why I’d gone public, but then delete them. And then I’d try writing emails to Lindsay, only to delete them, too. I just couldn’t find the words.
23
Read, Write, Execute
Read, Write, Execute: in computing, these are called permissions. Functionally speaking, they determine the extent of your authority within a computer or computer network, defining what exactly you can and cannot do. The right to read a file allows you to access its contents, while the right to write a file allows you to modify it. Execution, meanwhile, means that you have the ability to run a file or program, to carry out the actions it was designed to do.
Read, Write, Execute: this was my simple three-step plan. I wanted to burrow into the heart of the world’s most secure network to find the truth, make a copy of it, and get it out into the world. And I had to do all this without getting caught—without being read, written, and executed myself.
Almost everything you do on a computer, on any device, leaves a record. Nowhere is this more true than at the NSA. Each log-in and log-out creates a log entry. Each permission I used left its own forensic trace. Every time I opened a file, every time I copied a file, that action was recorded. Every time I downloaded, moved, or deleted a file, that was recorded, too, and security logs were updated to reflect the event. There were network flow records, public key infrastructure records—people even joked about cameras hidden in the bathrooms, in the bathroom stalls. The agency had a not inconsiderable number of counterintelligence programs spying on the people who were spying on people, and if even one caught me doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing, it wouldn’t be a file that was getting deleted.
Luckily, the strength of these systems was also their weakness: their complexity meant that not even the people running them necessarily knew how they worked. Nobody actually understood where they overlapped and where their gaps were. Nobody, that is, except the systems administrators. After all, those sophisticated monitoring systems you’re imagining, the ones with scary names like MIDNIGHTRIDER—somebody’s got to install them in the first place. The NSA may have paid for the network, but sysadmins like myself were the ones who really owned it.
The Read phase would involve dancing through the digital grid of tripwires laid across the routes connecting the NSA to every other intelligence agency, domestic and foreign. (Among these was the NSA’s UK partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which was setting up dragnets like OPTICNERVE, a program that saved a snapshot every five minutes from the cameras of people video-chatting on platforms like Yahoo Messenger, and PHOTONTORPEDO, which grabbed the IP addresses of MSN Messenger users.) By using Heartbeat to bring in the documents I wanted, I could turn “bulk collection” against those who’d turned it against the public, effectively Frankensteining the IC. The agency’s security tools kept track of who read what, but it didn’t matter: anyone who bothered to check their logs was used to seeing Heartbeat by now. It would sound no alarms. It was the perfect cover.
But while Heartbeat would work as a way of collecting the files—far too many files—it only brought them to the server in Hawaii, a server that kept logs even I couldn’t get around. I needed a way to work with the files, search them, and discard the irrelevant and uninteresting, along with those containing legitimate secrets that I wouldn’t be giving to journalists. At this point, still in my Read phase, the hazards were manifold, due mainly to the fact that the protocols I was up against were no longer geared to monitoring but to prevention. If I ran my searches on the Heartbeat server, it would light a massive electronic sign blinking ARREST ME.
I thought about this for a while. I couldn’t just copy the files directly from the Heartbeat server onto a personal storage device and waltz out of the Tunnel without being caught. What I could do, though, was bring the files closer, directing them to an intermediate way station.
I couldn’t send them to one of our regular computers, because by 2012 all of the Tunnel had been upgraded to new “thin client” machines: small helpless computers with crippled drives and CPUs that couldn’t store or process data on their own, but did all of their storage and processing on the cloud. In a forgotten corner of the office, however, there was a pyramid of disused desktop computers—old, moldering legacy machines the agency had wiped clean and discarded. When I say old here, I mean young by the standards of anyone who doesn’t live on a budget the size of the NSA’s. They were Dell PCs from as recently as 2009 or 2010, large gray rectangles of comforting weight, which could store and process data on their own without being connected to the cloud. What I liked about them was that though they were still in the NSA system, they couldn’t really be closely tracked as long as I kept them off the central networks.
I could easily justify needing to use these stolid, reliable boxes by claiming that I was trying to make sure Heartbeat worked with older operating systems. After all, not everybody at every NSA site had one of the new “thin clients” just yet. And what if Dell wanted to implement a civilian version of Heartbeat? Or what if the CIA, or FBI, or some similarly backward organization wanted to use it? Under the guise of compatibility testing, I could transfer the files to these old computers, where I could search, filter, and organize them as much as I wanted, as long as I was careful. I was carrying one of the big old hulks back to my desk when I passed one of the IT directors, who stopped me and asked me what I needed it for—he’d been a major proponent of getting rid of them. “Stealing secrets,” I answered, and we laughed.
The Read phase ended with the files I wanted all neatly organized into folders. But they were still on a computer that wasn’t mine, which was still in the Tunnel underground. Enter, then, the Write phase, which for my purposes meant the agonizingly slow, boring-but-also-cripplingly-scary process of copying the files from the legacy Dells something that I could spirit out of the building.
The easiest and safest way to copy a file off any IC workstation is also the oldest: a camera. Smartphones, of course, are banned in NSA buildings, but workers accidentally bring them in all the time without anyone noticing. They leave them in their gym bags or in the pockets of their windbreakers. If they’re caught with one in a random search and they act goofily abashed instead of screaming panicked Mandarin into their wristwatch, they’re often merely warned, especially if it’s their first offense. But getting a smartphone loaded with NSA secrets out of the Tunnel is a riskier gambit. Odds are that nobody would’ve noticed—or cared—if I walked out with a smartphone, and it might have been an adequate tool for a staffer trying to copy a single torture report, but I wasn’t wild about the idea of taking thousands of pictures of my computer screen in the middle of a top secret facility. Also, the phone would have had to be configured in such a way that even the world’s foremost forensic experts could seize and search it without finding anything on it that they shouldn’t.
I’m going to refrain from publishing how exactly I went about my own writing—my own copying and encryption—so that the NSA will still be standing tomorrow. I will mention, however, what storage technology I used for the copied files. Forget thumbdrives; they’re too bulky for the relatively small amount they store. I went, instead, for SD cards—the acronym stands for Secure Digital. Actually, I went for the mini- and micro-SD cards.