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To the whistleblowers, who listened to the voice of their conscience and spoke the truth:
My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. —Edward Snowden
The thing is, the communications infrastructure of Slovstakia was built long before the Berlin Wall fell, and it consisted of copper wires wrapped in newspaper and dipped in gutta-percha.
I had to stop and take a picture of for my collection of Soviet Brutalist Buildings That They Used to Shoot You for Taking Pictures Of—
Shoulda had a nerdier wedding, if they didn’t want to get upstaged.
fuck opsec, why not just make it easy for the secret police to round you all up somewhere far from a crowd?
Remember, opsec is a team sport. Your mistake exposes all your friends.”
“No martyrs, Kriztina. If it’s that bad, we can come back another night.” “If it’s that bad, there may not be another night.”
Thankfully, one of his first edicts on taking over the ministry had been to migrate everyone off Gmail—which was secured by 24/7 ninja hackers who’d eat me for breakfast—and onto a hosted mail server in the same data-center I’d spent sixteen hours in, which was secured by wishful thinking, bubblegum, and spit.
he wouldn’t last ten hours in a real radical uprising, because he wouldn’t be able to find artisanal coffee roasters in the melee.
Talking first would surrender the initiative, make me look weak.
Having a day job where you help repressive regimes spy on their dissidents and a hobby where you help those dissidents evade detection is self-destructive.
“You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”
they also thought you could train cats. Because when you give paranoid, grandiose authoritarians an unlimited budget and no oversight, things get fucked up.
being irritated by cutesy jargon is my superpower—“
Choosing to be an activist wasn’t choosing surveillance: choosing to make surveillance was choosing surveillance.
do you really care if the war criminals trying to take over your stuff are doing so because of a grudge?”
I’m fucked, you’re fucked, everyone we know is fucked. At least we know it and get to steer our canoes on the way over the falls.”
“Knowing things isn’t enough, Neesh. Trust me, I know. The reality is that you are outgunned and outflanked and outresourced.
There’s every reason we could fail, but no reason we can’t succeed.”
knew that the way to deal with it was to pretend it wasn’t there—to act as though everything were fine and normal, like phones were things to let you talk to your friends, not to let anonymous strangers watch and judge you.
Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.
She’d be every bit as solicitous if she was rendering me to a black site.
I had no idea how many of those disappearances I was complicit in, but that it was nonzero.
That’s how, you know, guerrillas do it. As opposed to dumbass kids.
It’s very glam to live in a Berlin squat and fuck idealistic teenyboppers and go on freegan dumpster-diving missions with dropout MIT kids who are experimenting with molecular gastronomy.
It spilled out in a tumble, all the crazy shit I’d dreamed of being able to do whenever I’d contemplated getting the whole world on God Mode, with the ability to see and manipulate all its data.
They’re what you solutionists call ‘a feature, not a bug,’ because when you’ve got a new problem, you’ve got another reason to hunt for another solution. You never have to sit back and look at the people, the systems, the politics—just the technology that can be used to distort them to suit your needs.”
I found myself on the street at the part of the Financial District that is almost the Tenderloin, equidistant between hookers and expensive Scotch.
In those dreams, it was a kind of penance that nevertheless paid well, making me rich while I saved the innocent Kriztinas of the world from the short-fingered Borises itching to zap their tender places with cattle prods.
I knew it was a stupid dream. The world wasn’t going to pay for privacy until it was way, way too late.
Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we’re putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now. It’s way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.
It didn’t help that the other analysts were all gung-ho motherfuckers from West Point who took the job so seriously they could use the term “homeland” without a hint of irony.
“I like careful analysis.” Later on, I’d realize that what she meant was, I like for other people to be careful, so I can have the room to be as reckless as I want to be.
She cocked her head. “The vendor who supplied our software built it to catch bad guys. Can it do that, or can’t it?” “It can.” I swallowed. “So long as you don’t mind catching not-bad guys at the same time.” In other words: arrest everyone and you’ll be sure to catch the criminals. “I can live with that.”
Did it work? No. Here’s the thing: it could have. Sort of. I mean, again, if you don’t care about false positives, you can arrest every terrorist by arresting everyone.
The longer I did this, the clearer it became that the goal wasn’t to put the right people in jail, just to make sure that there were some people in jail.
The trick isn’t to fight the aristocracy, it’s to find one who isn’t too terrible, who has his hands on the reins of power, and make friends.
She scolded me in Russian for being drunk, which is practically what Russian was invented for.
some of it was Highbury being a big swinging dick because Highbury was a dick and never passed on a chance to show us all how big and swinging he was.
all the time zones I’d just crossed got together and kicked my ass in unison,
always went back, no matter how fucked up it was, because America, fuck yeah: milkshakes and giant movie theaters and highways and barbecue and simple politics with only two parties that mostly agreed on mostly everything that mattered, like bombing the shit out of everywhere else.
Every one of them on this crowded battlefield, fighting for your eyeballs and earballs and your sweet, sweet insecurities and desires and shame.
turns out that companies aren’t great custodians of bad news about their products, especially around their quarterly earnings calls. Who’d a thunk it?
slowly digesting my pancakes as coffee and jetlag warred for control of my eyelids.
Security is a team sport, and your data is only as secure as the sloppiest person in your group.” It felt good to say this. It felt dirty to say this.
I’ll do it for the duration, until you’re sick of me or the world has been remade to your satisfaction.”
knew I was using code that one bro had sold to another.
will see to it that this is shared at the highest levels. I want to be clear that there will likely be no overt action based on your discoveries, but that doesn’t mean that nothing will happen.” Translation: it means that nothing will happen. Get in your compartment. Murdered kids and raped girls don’t generate procurements or help us claim oil fields. Back in your compartment. No one is paying us to save the Sunni women of northern Iraq from brutal rape. In your compartment.
Objectively, being a party to genocide was the best of a bad bunch, which was, you know, a sad commentary on our civilization, but I knew the job was dirty when I took it, right?
