Permanent Record

parties to produce “any tangible thing” that was “relevant” to foreign
intelligence or terrorism investigations. But as the court order I found made
clear, the NSA had secretly interpreted this authorization as a license to
collect all of the “business records,” or metadata, of telephone
communications coming through American telecoms, such as Verizon and
AT&T, on “an ongoing daily basis.” This included, of course, records of

---

telephone communications between American citizens, the practice of
which was unconstitutional.
Additionally, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows the IC to
target any foreigner outside the United States deemed likely to
communicate “foreign intelligence information”—a broad category of
potential targets that includes journalists, corporate employees, academics,
aid workers, and countless others innocent of any wrongdoing whatsoever.
This legislation was being used by the NSA to justify its two most
prominent Internet surveillance methods: the PRISM program and upstream
collection.
PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft,
Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple,
including email, photos, video and audio chats, Web-browsing content,
search engine queries, and all other data stored on their clouds,
transforming the companies into witting coconspirators. Upstream
collection, meanwhile, was arguably even more invasive. It enabled the
routine capturing of data directly from private-sector Internet infrastructure
—the switches and routers that shunt Internet traffic worldwide, via the
satellites in orbit and the high-capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the
ocean. This collection was managed by the NSA’s Special Sources
Operations unit, which built secret wiretapping equipment and embedded it
inside the corporate facilities of obliging Internet service providers around
the world. Together, PRISM (collection from the servers of service
providers) and upstream collection (direct collection from Internet
infrastructure) ensured that the world’s information, both stored and in
transit, was surveillable.
The next stage of my investigation was to figure out how this collection
was actually accomplished—that is to say, to examine the documents that
explained which tools supported this program and how they selected from
among the vast mass of dragneted communications those that were thought
worthy of closer inspection. The difficulty was that this information did not
exist in any presentation, no matter the level of classification, but only in
engineering diagrams and raw schematics. These were the most important
materials for me to find. Unlike the Five Eyes’ pitch-deck cant, they would
be concrete proof that the capacities I was reading about weren’t merely the
fantasies of an overcaffeinated project manager. As a systems guy who was

---

always being prodded to build faster and deliver more, I was all too aware
that the agencies would sometimes announce technologies before they even
existed—sometimes because a Cliff-type salesperson had made one too
many promises, and sometimes just out of unalloyed ambition.
In this case, the technologies behind upstream collection did exist. As I
came to realize, these tools are the most invasive elements of the NSA’s
mass surveillance system, if only because they’re the closest to the user—
that is, the closest to the person being surveilled. Imagine yourself sitting at
a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web browser, type in a
URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes
out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels,
however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through
TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most powerful weapons.
Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked on
top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These
are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications buildings
throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and on US military
bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL, handles “passive
collection,” making a copy of the data coming through. The second,
TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is, actively tampering
with the users.
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,