Permanent Record

PART TWO

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11
The System
I’m going to press Pause here, for a moment, to explain something about
my politics at age twenty-two: I didn’t have any. Instead, like most young
people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren’t truly mine
but rather a contradictory cluster of inherited principles. My mind was a
mash-up of the values I was raised with and the ideals I encountered online.
It took me until my late twenties to finally understand that so much of what
I believed, or of what I thought I believed, was just youthful imprinting. We
learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the
process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions, until
we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we’re using are our
own.
My parents were, if not dismissive of politics in general, then certainly
dismissive of politicians. To be sure, this dismissal had little in common
with the disaffection of nonvoters or partisan disdain. Rather, it was a
certain bemused detachment particular to their class, which nobler ages
have called the federal civil service or the public sector, but which our own
time tends to refer to as the deep state or the shadow government. None of
those epithets, however, really captures what it is: a class of career officials
(incidentally, perhaps one of the last functional middle classes in American
life) who—nonelected and non-appointed—serve or work in government,
either at one of the independent agencies (from the CIA and NSA to the
IRS, the FCC, and so on) or at one of the executive departments (State,
Treasury, Defense, Justice, and the like).
These were my parents, these were my people: a nearly three-million-
strong professional government workforce dedicated to assisting the

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amateurs chosen by the electorate, and appointed by the elected, in fulfilling
their political duties—or, in the words of the oath, in faithfully executing
their offices. These civil servants, who stay in their positions even as
administrations come and go, work as diligently under Republicans as
under Democrats because they ultimately work for the government itself,
providing core continuity and stability of rule.
These were also the people who, when their country went to war,
answered the call. That’s what I had done after 9/11, and I found that the
patriotism my parents had taught me was easily converted into nationalist
fervor. For a time, especially in my run-up to joining the army, my sense of
the world came to resemble the duality of the least sophisticated video
games, where good and evil are clearly defined and unquestionable.
However, once I returned from the Army and rededicated myself to
computing, I gradually came to regret my martial fantasies. The more I
developed my abilities, the more I matured and realized that the technology
of communications had a chance of succeeding where the technology of
violence had failed. Democracy could never be imposed at the point of a
gun, but perhaps it could be sown by the spread of silicon and fiber. In the
early 2000s the Internet was still just barely out of its formative period, and,
to my mind at least, it offered a more authentic and complete incarnation of
American ideals than even America itself. A place where everyone was
equal? Check. A place dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness? Check, check, check. It helped that nearly all the major
founding documents of Internet culture framed it in terms reminiscent of
American history: here was this wild, open new frontier that belonged to
anyone bold enough to settle it, swiftly becoming colonized by
governments and corporate interests that were seeking to regulate it for
power and profit. The large companies that were charging large fees—for
hardware, for software, for the long-distance phone calls that you needed
back then to get online, and for knowledge itself, which was humanity’s
common inheritance and so, by all rights, should have been freely available
—were irresistible contemporary avatars of the British, whose harsh
taxation ignited the fervor for independence.
This revolution wasn’t happening in history textbooks, but now, in my
generation, and any of us could be part of it solely by dint of our abilities.
This was thrilling—to participate in the founding of a new society, one

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based not on where we were born or how we grew up or our popularity at
school but on our knowledge and technological ability. In school, I’d had to
memorize the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: now its words were lodged
in my memory alongside John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace,” which employed the same self-evident, self-
elect plural pronoun: “We are creating a world that all may enter without
privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or
station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may
express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being
coerced into silence or conformity.”
This technological meritocracy was certainly empowering, but it could
also be humbling, as I came to understand when I first went to work in the
Intelligence Community. The decentralization of the Internet merely
emphasized the decentralization of computing expertise. I might have been
the top computer person in my family, or in my neighborhood, but to work
for the IC meant testing my skills against everyone in the country and the
world. The Internet showed me the sheer quantity and variety of talent that
existed, and made clear that in order to flourish I had to specialize.
There were a few different careers available to me as a technologist. I
could have become a software developer, or, as the job is more commonly
called, a programmer, writing the code that makes computers work.
Alternatively, I could have become a hardware or network specialist, setting
up the servers in their racks and running the wires, weaving the massive
fabric that connects every computer, every device, and every file.
Computers and computer programs were interesting to me, and so were the
networks that linked them together. But I was most intrigued by their total
functioning at a deeper level of abstraction, not as individual components
but as an overarching system.
I thought about this a lot while I was driving, to and from Lindsay’s
house and to and from AACC. Car time has always been thinking time for
me, and commutes are long on the crowded Beltway. To be a software
developer was to run the rest stops off the exits and to make sure that all the
fast-food and gas station franchises accorded with each other and with user
expectations; to be a hardware specialist was to lay the infrastructure, to
grade and pave the roads themselves; while to be a network specialist was
to be responsible for traffic control, manipulating signs and lights to safely

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route the time-crunched hordes to their proper destinations. To get into
systems, however, was to be an urban planner, to take all of the components
available and ensure their interaction to maximum effect. It was, pure and
simple, like getting paid to play God, or at least a tinpot dictator.
There are two main ways to be a systems guy. One is that you take
possession of the whole of an existing system and maintain it, gradually
making it more efficient and fixing it when it breaks. That position is called
a systems administrator, or sysadmin. The second is that you analyze a
problem, such as how to store data or how to search across databases, and
solve it by engineering a solution from a combination of existing
components or by inventing entirely new ones. This position is called a
systems engineer. I eventually would do both of these jobs, working my
way into administration and from there into engineering, oblivious
throughout about how this intense engagement with the deepest levels of
integration of computing technology was exerting an influence on my
political convictions.
I’ll try not to be too abstract here, but I want you to imagine a system. It
doesn’t matter what system: it can be a computer system, an ecosystem, a
legal system, or even a system of government. Remember, a system is just a
bunch of parts that function together as a whole, which most people are
only reminded of when something breaks. It’s one of the great chastening
facts of working with systems that the part of a system that malfunctions is
almost never the part in which you notice the malfunction. In order to find
what caused the system to collapse, you have to start from the point where
you spotted the problem, and trace the problem’s effects logically through
all of the system’s components. Because a sysadmin or engineer is
responsible for such repairs, they have to be equally fluent in software,
hardware, and networking. If the malfunction turns out to be a software
issue, the repair might involve scrolling through line after line of code in a
UN General Assembly’s worth of programming languages. If it’s a
hardware issue, it might require going over a circuit board with a flashlight
in the mouth and a soldering gun in hand, checking each connection. If
networking is implicated, it might mean tracing every twist and turn of the
cables that run above the ceiling and under the floor, connecting the distant
data centers full of servers with an office full of laptops.

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Because systems work according to instructions, or rules, such an
analysis is ultimately a search for which rules failed, how, and why—an
attempt to identify the specific points where the intention of a rule was not
adequately expressed by its formulation or application. Did the system fail
because something was not communicated, or because someone abused the
system by accessing a resource they weren’t allowed to, or by accessing a
resource they were allowed to but using it exploitatively? Was the job of
one component stopped, or impeded, by another? Did one program, or
computer, or group of people take over more than their fair share of the
system?
Over the course of my career, it became increasingly difficult for me to
ask these questions about the technologies I was responsible for and not
about my country. And it became increasingly frustrating to me that I was
able to repair the former but not the latter. I ended my time in Intelligence
convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had
decided that it functioned best when broken.

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