This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

By 2013, Turbine was fully operational and began buffering TAO analysts from their operations. The robot was designed, in the words of one internal NSA memo, to “relieve the user from needing to know/care about the details.” By the end of the year, the NSA anticipated that Turbine would manage “millions of implants” for intelligence gathering and “active attack.” So fixated was the NSA on its new offensive cyber tools that year that offense trumped defense at the agency by a factor of two. The agency’s breaking-and-entering budget had swelled to $652 million, twice what it budgeted to defend the government’s networks from foreign attack. Its critics began to argue that NSA had abandoned its defensive mission entirely.