Even at the testing stage in Fort Meade a few programmers used BRISM to track their husbands, wives and lovers.
It’s not hard to guess that the octopus’ tentacles are now present almost in all bedrooms in the world. Maybe only African natives, the inhabitants of New Guinea, the Indians in the Amazon jungle and the nomads of north Russia are still truly free people. Everyone else is carefully watched by the octopus, whose ethic is dictated by the ethics of the people sitting at the computer monitors as they control the program.
I remember back when I started working for the agency, the Baseball player and I had a very long conversation on this subject, at the end of which he brought up one of the well-known parables of King Solomon:
‘Once a man came to Solomon, while he was furtively watching children play, and asked:
‘King, help me! I live in abundance, have a big house and many slaves, but I see that my thoughts are directed towards shallow and transient things rather than towards the eternal and virtuous things.
Then the king asked:
‘But what is the virtue?’
The man replied without thinking:
‘Virtue – is a way to get to the high while passing the low, to understand the most important while ignoring insignificant.
The king frowned:
‘And I ask you again, what is virtue?’
The supplicant replied:
‘Virtue is a way to reach heaven.’
The king frowned even more:
‘Answer me for a third time: what is virtue?’
The supplicant replied again:
‘Virtue – is something that makes your soul purer and lighter.’
Solomon spoke:
‘I’ve asked you three times and each time you, who spend all your days thinking about virtue, couldn’t give me a clear answer. You want to reach high while passing low, but how can one reach the top step of a staircase without walking the low ones first? You want to reach the sky but is it right to go somewhere without knowing what will await you there? You want to become lighter, but what is light without darkness? A night is replaced by day and neither darkness nor light is eternal. Would we have known what day is without knowing the night? In the same way, pure thoughts go hand in hand with impure deeds.
A person who thinks himself virtuous can do the most horrible things. So should a noble man think about virtue just for the sake of it? You should love your wives, your slaves and your neighbors, be an example for everyone, and every evening, when going to sleep, ask yourself two questions: what have I done today in order to become happier, and have I not taken too much happiness at the cost of others? Only then your life won’t be wasted and only then after your death you’ll be called virtuous.’
At the time, I was satisfied with this answer. Indeed, to find a cure for a horrid illness, one has to dissect the bodies of the deceased and study their innards. To catch a criminal one has to communicate with the lowest type of people, the dregs of society. In other words, you can’t fry an egg without breaking it first and you can’t mould a clay pot without getting your hands dirty.
Gradually I began to be convinced that systems like BRISM are far too dangerous weapons for dirty hands.
And when I got a proof of it – the situation with the helicopters in South Africa wasn’t the only one. When I realized the agency was conducting wiretapping and data gathering in Europe, Brazil, the countries of the Maghreb and the Levant, China and Russia, not to mention the United States itself – I was horrified. Because behind a virtual curtain and classifications such as ‘Top Secret’ I could see a real Overworld government, able to intervene in the internal affairs of any country, able to change not just the course of commercial deals but the course of history.
And that Overworld government was not the leadership of the Federal Reserve System, as some cryptologists like to portray it, nor the clans of Rothschilds and Rockefellers, nor a secret bunch of Zionists, nor hawk generals sitting in a secret bunker, no!
The octopus was ruling the world. The programs IT workers were ruling, without even being aware of it, through a few hundred eggheaded half-autists spending whole days behind computers. They were deciding the course of history and for now they were just carrying out the orders of their bosses, although now I’m not even sure that it’s not the other way around.
If you really know everything about a man – what will stop you from pressing a right ‘sore spot’ or activating a ‘pleasure center’ to make him to do what you want?
Who knows, maybe the whole administration of the National Security Agency and maybe even the administration in Washington has long been controlled by the operators of BRISM and other programs?
Moreover, I do not rule out that what I have done might also have been initiated from outside. But one thing comforts me: if it is indeed the truth then the octopus has taken us over and we really do live inside the Matrix like in the movies of the Wachowski brothers.
Of course at the beginning I didn’t think about fighting the octopus at all. I just wanted to get out, to go into the shadows, to step aside. I had no plan – I just tendered my resignation due to poor health. Why did I do that instead of just resigning? You need to know that you can’t just leave the agency or any intelligence structure in any country of the world really. You need a valid reason for them to leave you alone and in this situation my unsuitability for work due to poor health seemed to me the best argument.
In the depths of the internet, I found an instruction for prisoners about how to simulate an epileptic fit and during the medical check, which I started myself by complaining on constant headaches, I fainted and imitated a tonic-clonic seizure.
Epilepsy is one of the most mysterious illnesses. Nobody really knows what causes it, how to treat it or why for some it lasts for tens of years, coming back regularly, while others just have one seizure in their whole life.
Apart from everything else, it is thought that a seizure can be provoked by a combination of sounds and light flashes on TV or a computer screen. In any case, epileptics shouldn’t use these gadgets or tablets and smartphones.
It’s not hard to simulate epilepsy. You just need to approach it seriously and not to spare yourself. If you fall down, then you fall properly. And if you have convulsions go for it hog wild.
Before your ‘fit’ you drip atropine into your eyes so that the pupils don’t react to light and you have to tense the muscles around the eyes. It is also an important sign of ‘true’ epilepsy.
The hardest part was foam in the mouth. There were a few recipes given on a site for prison-malingerers but all of them were awful – soap foam, cocaine, dried belladonna… I had a much better recipe: a pinch of soda and a few crystals of citric acid. Putting this mixture in my mouth a few seconds before falling off the chair, I achieved quite natural authentic foam…
Basically, I really scared the doctors. I beat the back of my head on the floor. I smashed my knee on the chair leg. I arched, howled and wheezed, and bit through my tongue so that eerily bloody foam was oozing through my clenched teeth.
In the end, I was sent for many checks, which, of course, found all sorts of issues in various organs. That is why medics always joke that there are no healthy people, only ‘underexamined’ ones.
And that is what my tactic aimed at – not a single boss in his right mind would want to keep a man with such bouquet of illnesses in a job like mine.
So having resigned, I experienced a true euphoria for a time, maybe a month or two, I can’t remember now. I was paid quite a good bonus for the work I’d done. I visited Japan, the Philippines, Australia and Ecuador, then I visited my father, mother and Judith. In short, I had the life of a typical holidaymaker, not thinking about the future.