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

by Nicole Perlroth

When Moussouris pitched Steve Ballmer’s generals in 2011, they were receptive but not ready to pull the trigger. They needed more data. For the next two years she compared herself to Cassandra, “doomed to know the future but nobody believes her until she can show them the data.” By 2013 she had two years’ worth of data showing that Microsoft was now losing bug reports to third-party brokers and intermediaries. That June, correcting the trend became a matter of urgency. The Guardian dropped Snowden’s first NSA leaks that month, detailing an NSA program called Prism. One NSA slide appeared to show that Microsoft, and the other tech companies, gave the NSA direct access to their servers. Some leaks described Prism as a “team sport” between the tech companies, the NSA, the FBI, and CIA. Of all of Snowden’s leaks, those slides would end up being the most damning—and misleading. The tech companies had never heard of Prism. Yes, they complied with narrow, court-ordered requests for specific customer accounts and metadata, but the notion that they were somehow NSA collaborators, handing the agency real-time access to customers’ private communications, was flat-out wrong. Their denials, however, were complicated by the fact that, legally, they were forbidden from disclosing the full nature of their cooperation and resistance to the secret court orders.