Permanent Record

by Edward Snowden

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

National Security Agency (NSA),

American Intelligence Community (IC)

In sum, a job managing and connecting the flow of intelligence gave way to a job figuring out how to store it forever, which in turn gave way to a job making sure it was universally available and searchable.

I was finally in a position to see how all my work fit together, meshing like the gears of a giant machine to form a system of global mass surveillance.

during the Internet Revolution is called “privacy.

1983, at the end of the world in which people set the time for themselves. That was the year that the US Department of Defense

split its internal system of interconnected computers in half, creating one network for the use of the defense establishment, called MILNET, and another network for the public, called the Internet. Before the year was out, new rules defined the boundaries of this virtual space, giving rise to the Domain Name System that we still use today—the.govs, .mils,.edus, and, of course,.coms—and the country codes assigned to the rest of the world:.uk, .de, .fr, .cn, .ru, and so on. Already, my country (and so I) had an advantage, an edge. And yet it would be another six years before the World Wide Web was invented,

Every time you check your email, you use a language like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), or POP3 (Post Office Protocol). File transfers pass through the Internet

using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). And as for the time-setting procedure on your phone that I mentioned, those updates get fetched through NTP (Network Time Protocol).

to digitize something is to record it, in a format that will last forever.

This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge—a pledge to the principles they value, and to the vision of the person they hope to become.

in order to flourish I had to specialize.

a system is just a bunch of parts that function together as a whole, which most people are only reminded of when something breaks.

I ended my time in Intelligence convinced that my country’s operating system—its government—had decided that it functioned best when broken.

This creature was not a sworn servant but a transient worker, whose patriotism was incentivized by a better paycheck and for whom the federal government was less the ultimate authority than the ultimate client.

Blackwater (which changed its name to Xe Services after its employees were convicted of killing fourteen Iraqi civilians, and then changed its name again to Academi after it was acquired by a group of private investors), or the torture-for-hire work of CACI and Titan (both of which supplied personnel who terrorized prisoners at Abu Ghraib).

the IC, which tends to focus less on deniability and more on never getting caught in the first place. Instead, the primary purpose served by IC contracting is much more mundane: it’s a workaround, a loophole, a hack

that lets agencies circumvent federal caps on hiring.

2013 Black Budget.

the work of American Intelligence is done as frequently by private employees as it is by government servants.

IC directors ask Congress for money to rent contract workers from private companies, congresspeople approve that money, and then those IC directors and congresspeople are rewarded, after they retire from office, by being given high-paying positions and consultancies with the very companies they’ve just enriched.

Technically speaking, COMSO would be my employer, but I never worked a single day at a COMSO office, or at a BAE Systems office, and few contractors ever would. I’d only work at CIA headquarters.

More than any other memory I have of my career, this route of mine past the CIA help desk has come to symbolize for me the generational and cultural change in the IC of which I was a part—the moment when the old-school prepster clique that traditionally staffed the agencies, desperate to keep pace with technologies they could not be bothered to understand, welcomed a new wave of young hackers into the institutional fold and let them develop, have complete access to, and wield complete power over unparalleled technological systems of state control.

Few realize this, but the CIA has its own Internet and Web. It has its own kind of Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia, which provides agents with information about agency teams, projects, and missions; and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network. Every CIA component has its own website on this network that discusses what it does and posts meeting minutes and presentations.

the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The higher up this employee is, and the more systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to virtually every byte of his employer’s digital existence.

My forays through the CIA’s systems were natural extensions of

my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit together into the whole.

I raised my hand to swear an oath of loyalty—not to the government or agency that now employed me directly, but to the US Constitution. I solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

BTTP, the Basic Telecommunications Training Program,

TISOs (Technical Information Security Officers)—

The worst-kept secret in modern diplomacy is that the primary function of an embassy nowadays is to serve as a platform for espionage.

SRD, the Special Requirements Division.

HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact—

of SIGINT (signals intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of intercepted communications,

Normally when you go online, your request for any website travels from your computer more or less directly to the server that hosts your final destination—the website you’re trying to visit. At every stop along the way, however, your request cheerfully announces exactly where on the Internet it came from, and exactly where on the Internet it’s going, thanks to identifiers called source and destination headers, which you can think of as the address information on a postcard. Because of these headers, your Internet browsing can easily be identified as yours by, among others, webmasters, network administrators, and foreign intelligence services.

The Tor Project was a creation of the state that ended up becoming one of the few effective shields against the state’s surveillance. Tor is free and open-source software that, if used carefully, allows its users to browse online with the closest thing to perfect anonymity that can be practically achieved at scale. Its protocols were developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory throughout the mid-1990s, and in 2003 it was released to the public—

Tor operates on a cooperative community model, relying on tech-savvy volunteers all over the globe who run their own Tor servers out of their basements, attics, and garages.

CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire: European Council for Nuclear Research)

SCS, or Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals.

Amazon, which provides cloud services to the US government

along with half the Internet).

As in the CIA, this contractor status was all just formality and cover, and I only ever worked in an NSA facility.

NSA’s Pacific Technical Center (PTC)

the agency’s ultimate dream, which is permanency—to store all of the files it has ever collected or produced for perpetuity, and so create a perfect memory. The permanent record.

Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA)

the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an agency connected to the Department of Defense that specializes in spying on foreign militaries and foreign military–related matters.

President’s Surveillance Program (PSP),

Exceptionally Controlled Information (ECI) compartment, an extremely rare classification used only to make sure that something would remain hidden even from those holding top secret clearance.

STLW, an abbreviation of STELLARWIND.