From 2007 to 2009, I was stationed at the US Embassy in Geneva as one of the rare technologists deployed under diplomatic cover, tasked with bringing the CIA into the future by bringing its European stations online, digitizing and automating the network by which the US government spied.
They were declaring that in a truly just society the people were not answerable to the government, the government was answerable to the people.
My parents would call my name to tell me to get ready for school, but I wouldn’t hear them.
When I was a child, “the unforgettable experience” was not yet a threateningly literal technological description, but a passionate metaphorical prescription of significance: my first words, my first steps, my first lost tooth, my first time riding a bicycle.
To grow up is to realize the extent to which your existence has been governed by systems of rules, vague guidelines, and increasingly unsupportable norms that have been imposed on you without your consent and are subject to change at a moment’s notice. There were even some rules that you’d only find out about after you’d violated them.
Some time later, I was afraid that my budding math skills had failed me, when my mental totals didn’t match those on the cash register’s display. But once again, my mother explained. “They raised the sales tax. Now you have to add four percent.” “So now the library will get even more books?” I asked. “Let’s hope,” my mother said.
After having had more blood taken from me than I’d ever imagined was in my body, I was eventually diagnosed with infectious mononucleosis. It was both a seriously debilitating and seriously humiliating illness for me to have, not least because it’s usually contracted through what my classmates called “hooking up,” and at age fifteen the only “hooking up” I’d ever done involved a modem.
I tend to think of it as human encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material – your core identity – still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form.
The more I came to know about the fragility of computer security, the more I worried over the consequences of trusting the wrong machine.
Other days, I just pick up some Burger King – I know where my loyalties lie – and play games I have to pirate because I can no longer use credit cards.
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.
A “whistleblower,” in my definition, is a person who through hard experience has concluded that their life inside an institution has become incompatible with the principles developed in – and the loyalty owed to – the greater society outside it, to which that institution should be accountable.
The NSA’s surveillance programs, its domestic surveillance programs in particular, flouted the Fourth Amendment completely.
What makes a life? More than what we say; more, even, than what we do. A life is also what we love, and what we believe in.
According to Maryland Criminal Law Section 10-501, adultery is illegal and punishable by a $10 fine.
No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.
America must have a greater commitment to justice than it does simply to the law.
That’s the incomparable beauty of the cryptological art. A little bit of math can accomplish what all the guns and barbed wire can’t: a little bit of math can keep a secret.
I’ve had friends tell me that you aren’t really an adult until you bury a parent or become one yourself.
Today, I’m taking the long way around this vast strange city, trying to find some roses. Red roses, white roses, even blue violets. Any flowers I can find. I don’t know the Russian names of any of them. I just grunt and point.