I was still trying to convince myself that there was a big difference, which is, the
Chinese government applied it to everyone, and our surveillance was just being applied
to terrorists.
Then, once I discovered the Stellar Wind inspector general’s report, and once I see more and
more and more programs that are indiscriminate and broadly based, I realized that our surveillance
programs operate on the basis of the same principles as the worst governments on Earth,
because they are not controlled most strongly by law or by policy, as by possibility.
And this is what drove me forward.
Eventually, I realized the U.S. government had stopped caring about what they should
do, and instead were pursuing, as aggressively as possible, what they could do.
And this meant every time you made a phone call, the NSA literally got a copy of it delivered
to them the next day — a record of that call, not what you said on it, but that you
made it, who you made it to, when it happened, where you were, when it was made.
They were tracking the locations of people around the world.
Just it happened across the wire, and they happened to see it, because they were creating
collection platforms that meant anything that passed by their systems was, as they called,
ingested, right?
It was brought into our databases.
And then, all you had to do — think about it.
You have every text message.
You have every email.
You have every web request.
You know where every cellphone in the world is, because you have access to the records
of where they’re located, because every cellphone, in order to function on the network,
has to be paired with these cellphone towers, right?
When you look at your signal bars, what is that saying?
That’s just saying how far you are from the nearest cellphone tower.
And all of those towers are saying, “Oh, I see this person, at this time.
They’ve got this phone number.
We know their billing address.
They live at this location.”
And when you take all of this in aggregate, what we were building and what we were trying
to store, to a greater and greater distance every year, was history’s first permanent
record of everyone’s life.
I think everybody wants to imagine there is this cinematic moment where you discover the
golden document, and it just changes everything about who you are, and you run out of the
building, and you deliver it to journalists, and then there’s the happy ending — or,
in the case of whistleblowing today, often an unhappy ending.
But, of course, life is so much more complicated than that.
The reality is, the change in a person’s fundamental beliefs can only happen over a
very long period of time.
And what I realized, first in Japan, and then, finally, in Hawaii, was that the systems that
I had been building throughout my career as a technologist — right? — you don’t
have to work on the policy level to have an extraordinary influence in an organization
today, as Juan said.
I realized that all of these different components that I had been working on, in isolation — I
had been working at the CIA, connecting and routing the flow of intelligence.
Then I had been working in Japan, creating a backup system that made sure all of these
things we were moving around, all of these secrets we were stealing, would be saved and
stored and backed up, so even if a building was blown up, nothing would ever be lost.
And then, finally, working at the CIA — or, rather, working at Dell for the CIA, at a
very senior technical level, where I’m sitting down with the CTOs and the CIOs of the Central
Intelligence Agency, trying to solve their technology problems, I am proposing to build
a new private cloud system.
And what this means is, all of the information that we moved around, all of the information
that we saved and stored forever, can now be reached by anyone everywhere who works
at this agency.
And this is where I begin to realize that each of these cogs were actually part of a
larger machine, and this machine was not for the targeted surveillance that I had always
believed was the purpose of the intelligence community, right?
When you think about what the CIA does, when you think about what the NSA does, you are
at least supposed to think that they spy on bad guys, right?
Define them how you will, but they are looking at particularized people that they have a
suspicion they’re engaged in some kind of wrongdoing.
Well, the systems that I had built, the systems that my generation had built, had produced
a system that instead spied on everyone.