By 2008 the NSA feverishly began removing human decision-making—and with it any complicated moral calculus—from their work. A highly classified NSA software program code-named Genie began aggressively embedding implants not just in foreign adversaries’ systems but in nearly every major make and model of internet router, switch, firewall, encryption device, and computer on the market. By 2013 Genie was managing 85,000 implants—four times the number of implants it had managed five years earlier—according to U.S. intelligence budgets, with plans to push that number into the millions. While
...more
