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.”
The NSA described XKEYSCORE, in the documents I’d later pass on to journalists, as its “widest-ranging” tool, used to search “nearly everything a user does on the Internet.” The technical specs I studied went into more detail as to how exactly this was accomplished—by “packetizing” and “sessionizing,” or cutting up the data of a user’s online sessions into manageable packets for analysis—but nothing could prepare me for seeing it in action.
It was, simply put, the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen in science fact: an interface that allows you to type in pretty much anyone’s address, telephone number, or IP address, and then basically go through the recent history of their online activity. In some cases you could even play back recordings of their online sessions, so that the screen you’d be looking at was their screen, whatever was on their desktop. You could read their emails, their browser history, their search history, their social media postings, everything. You could set up notifications that would pop up when some person or some device you were interested in became active on the Internet for the day. And you could look through the packets of Internet data to see a person’s search queries appear letter by letter, since so many sites transmitted each character as it was typed. It was like watching an autocomplete, as letters and words flashed across the screen. But the intelligence behind that typing wasn’t artificial but human: this was a humancomplete.
My weeks at Fort Meade, and the short stint I put in at Booz back in Hawaii, were the only times I saw, firsthand, the abuses actually being committed that I’d previously read about in internal documentation. Seeing them made me realize how insulated my position at the systems level had been from the ground zero of immediate damage. I could only imagine the level of insulation of the agency’s directorship or, for that matter, of the US president.
I didn’t type the names of the agency director or the president into XKEYSCORE, but after enough time with the system I realized I could have. Everyone’s communications were in the system—everyone’s. I was initially fearful that if I searched those in the uppermost echelons of state, I’d be caught and fired, or worse. But it was surpassingly simple to disguise a query regarding even the most prominent figure by encoding my search terms in a machine format that looked like gibberish to humans but would be perfectly understandable to XKEYSCORE. If any of the auditors who were responsible for reviewing the searches ever bothered to look more closely, they would see only a snippet of obfuscated code, while I would be able to scroll through the most personal activities of a Supreme Court justice or a congressperson.
As far as I could tell, none of my new colleagues intended to abuse their powers so grandly, although if they had it’s not like they’d ever mention it. Anyway, when analysts thought about abusing the system, they were far less interested in what it could do for them professionally than in what it could do for them personally. This led to the practice known as LOVEINT, a gross joke on HUMINT and SIGINT and a travesty of intelligence, in which analysts used the agency’s programs to surveil their current and former lovers along with objects of more casual affection—reading their emails, listening in on their phone calls, and stalking them online. NSA employees knew that only the dumbest analysts were ever caught red-handed, and though the law stated that anyone engaging in any type of surveillance for personal use could be locked up for at least a decade, no one in the agency’s history had been sentenced to even a day in prison for the crime. Analysts understood that the government would never publicly prosecute them, because you can’t exactly convict someone of abusing your secret system of mass surveillance if you refuse to admit the existence of the system itself. The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.
One thing you come to understand very quickly while using XKEYSCORE is that nearly everyone in the world who’s online has at least two things in common: they have all watched porn at one time or another, and they all store photos and videos of their family. This was true for virtually everyone of every gender, ethnicity, race, and age—from the meanest terrorist to the nicest senior citizen, who might be the meanest terrorist’s grandparent, or parent, or cousin.
It’s the family stuff that got to me the most. I remember this one child in particular, a little boy in Indonesia. Technically, I shouldn’t have been interested in this little boy, but I was, because my employers were interested in his father. I had been reading through the shared targeting folders of a “persona” analyst, meaning someone who typically spent most of their day sifting through artifacts like chat logs and Gmail inboxes and Facebook messages, rather than the more obscure and difficult, typically hacker-generated traffic of the infrastructure analysts.
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.