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

by Nicole Perlroth

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 three-quarters of those implants still prioritized targets in Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea, TAO had become far less discriminate. In a secret post to an internal NSA message board, leaked by Snowden, an NSA operative described the new high-priority target: foreign IT systems administrators whose administrative credentials gave them broad access to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of more potential targets still. Each NSA implant began pulling back huge volumes of foreign secrets in the form of text messages, emails, and voice recordings, previously unimaginable to digital exploitation pioneers like Gosler.