I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that
week, and I wanted to add some to my
oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her
where she’d put them. She was washing her
face in the bathroom, running the faucet,
and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her
help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My
phone was charging on the counter. Bored,
I picked it up to check the app that
wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band
I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night
before but had gotten a mere two hours of
“deep sleep.†I saw that I’d reached exactly
30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps.
And then I noticed a message in a small
window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,†it read. It told me to eat
more walnuts.
It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it
caused me to glance down at my wristband
and then at my phone, a brand-new model
with many unknown, untested capabilities.
Had my phone picked up my words through
its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?
The devices spoke to each other behind my
back—I’d known they would when I “pairedâ€
them—but suddenly I was wary of their
relationship. Who else did they talk to, and
about what? And what happened to their
conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever
incorporated into the “cloud,†that ghostly
entity with the too-disarming name?
“I think it’s scanning us,†Dalton said, and
something told me he was right.
It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut
moments†had been multiplying—jarring little
nudges from beyond that occurred
whenever I went online. One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend
at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit
to a gallery in years. The next morning, in
my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to
invest in art. That was an easy one to figure
out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace
was the stream of invitations to drug and
alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting
ever since I’d consulted an online calendar
of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous
meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these e-mails
irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart
tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my
misery and hopelessness? Hadn’t I caused
my loved ones enough pain?
Some of these disconcerting prompts were
harder to explain. For example, the
appearance on my Facebook page, under
the heading “People You May Know,†of a
California musician whom I’d bumped into
six or seven times at AA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA
custom, he had never told me his last name
nor inquired about mine. And as far as I
knew, we had just one friend in common, a
notably solitary older novelist who avoided
computers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum and learned
that by entering my number into his
smartphone’s address book (compiling
phone lists to use in times of trouble is an
AA ritual), the musician had probably
triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page.
Then there was this peculiar psychic
incursion. One night, about a year before my
phone suggested I eat more walnuts, I was
researching modern spycraft for a book I
was thinking about writing when I happened
across a creepy YouTube video. It consisted of surveillance footage from a Middle
Eastern hotel where agents thought to be
acting on behalf of Israel had allegedly
assassinated a senior Hamas official. I
watched as the agents stalked their target,
whom they apparently murdered in his room, offscreen, before reappearing in a
hallway and nonchalantly summoning an
elevator. Because one of the agents was a
woman, I typed these words into my
browser’s search bar: Mossad seduction
techniques. Minutes later, a banner ad appeared for Ashley Madison, the dating
site for adulterous married people that
would eventually be hacked, exposing tens
of millions of trusting cheaters who’d
emptied their ids onto the Web. When I tried
to watch the surveillance footage again, a video ad appeared. It promoted a slick
divorce attorney based in Santa Monica, just
a few miles from the Malibu apartment
where I escaped my cold Montana home
during the winter months.
Paranoia, Half a Century Ago Adultery, divorce. I saw a pattern here, one that I found especially unwelcome because at the time I was recently engaged.
Evidently, some callous algorithm was betting against my pending marriage and offering me an early exit. Had merely typing seduction into a search engine marked me as a rascal? Or was the formula more sophisticated? Could it be that my online choices in recent weeks—the travel guide to Berlin that I’d perused, the Porsche convertible I’d priced, the old girlfriend to whom I’d sent a virtual birthday card—indicated longings and frustrations that I was too deep in denial to acknowledge?
When I later read that Facebook, through
clever computerized detective work, could
tell when two of its users were falling in love, I wondered whether Google might have
similar powers. It struck me that the search
engine might know more about my
unconscious than I do—a possibility that
would put it in a position not only to predict
my behavior, but to manipulate it. Lose your privacy, lose your free will—a chilling thought.
Around the same time, I looked into changing my car-insurance policy. I learned that Progressive offered discounts to some drivers who agreed to fit their cars with a tracking device called Snapshot. That people ever took this deal astonished me. Time alone in my car, unobserved and unmolested, was sacred to me, an act of self-communion, and spoiling it for money felt heretical. I shared this opinion with a friend. “I don’t quite see the problem,†he replied. “Is there something you do in your car that you’re not proud of? Frankly, you sound a little paranoid.â€
My friend was right on both counts. Yes, I did things in my car I wasn’t proud of (wasn’t that my birthright as an American?), and yes, I’d become a little paranoid. I would have to be crazy not to be.
The night i saw my first black helicopter—or
heard it, because black helicopters are
invisible at night—I was already growing
certain that we, the sensible majority, owe
plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.
The Mormon elder who told me when I was a teenager back in 1975 that people soon would have to carry “chips†around or “be banished from the marketplace.â€
The ex–Army ranger in the 1980s who said
an “eye in the sky†could read my license
plate.
The girlfriend in 1993 who forbade me to rent a dirty video on the grounds that “they keep lists of everything.â€
The Hollywood actor in 2011 who declined to
join me on his sundeck because he’d put on
weight and a security expert had advised him that the paparazzi were flying drones.
The tattooed grad student who, about a year before Edward Snowden gave the world the lowdown on code-named snooping programs such as PRISM and XKeyscore, told me about a childhood friend of his who worked in military intelligence and refused to go to wild parties unless the guests agreed to leave their phones locked outside in a car trunk or a cooler, preferably with the battery removed, and who also confessed to snooping on a girlfriend through the camera in her laptop.
The night I vowed never again to mock such
people, in January 2014, I was standing
knee-deep in a field of crusty snow at the edge of a National Guard base near Saratoga Springs, Utah, a fresh-from-the-factory all-American settlement, densely flagpoled and lavishly front-porched, just south of Salt Lake City. Above its rooftops the moon was a pale sliver, and filling the sky were the sort of ragged clouds in which one might discern the face of Jesus.
I had on a dark jacket, a dark wool cap, and a black nylon mask to keep my cheeks from
freezing.
The key would be surviving those first days
after the ATMs stopped working and the
grocery stores were looted bare.
I’d gone there for purposes of counterespionage. I wanted to behold up
close, in person, one of the citadels of modern surveillance: the National Security Agency’s recently constructed Utah Data Center. I wasn’t sure what I was after, exactly—perhaps just a concrete impression of a process that seemed elusive and phantasmagoric, even after Snowden disclosed its workings.
The records that the NSA blandly rendered as mere “data†and invisibly, silently collected—the phone logs, e-mails, browsing histories, and digital photo libraries generated by a population engaged in the treasonous business of daily life— required a tangible, physical depository. And this was it: a multibillion-dollar facility clearly designed to unscramble, analyze, and store imponderable masses of information whose ultimate uses were unknowable.
Google’s data mines, presumably, exist merely to sell us products, but the government’s models of our inner selves might be deployed to sell us stranger items. Policies. Programs. Maybe even wars.
Such concerns didn’t strike me as farfetched, but I was reluctant to air them in mixed company. I knew that many of my fellow citizens took comfort in their own banality: You live a boring life and feel you have nothing to fear from those on high. But how could you anticipate the ways in which insights bred of spying might prove handy to some future regime? New tools have a way of breeding new abuses. Detailed logs of behaviors that I found tame—my Amazon purchases, my online comments, and even my meanderings through the physical world, collected by biometric scanners, say, or license-plate readers on police cars—might someday be read in a hundred different ways by powers whose purposes I couldn’t fathom now. They say you can quote the Bible to support almost any conceivable proposition, and I could only imagine the range of charges that selective looks at my data might render plausible.
The National Security Agency’s Utah Data
Center, south of Salt Lake City. Keeping the
center’s servers from overheating could
require almost 2 million gallons of water a
day. (Rick Bowmer/AP)
Everything about the data center was classified, but reports had leaked out that
hinted at the magnitude of its operations.
Aerial photos on the Web showed a
complex of slablike concrete buildings
arrayed in a crescent on a broad, bare
hillside. The center was said to require enough power to supply a city of tens of
thousands of people. The cooling plants
designed to keep its servers from
overheating and melting down would
consume fantastic quantities of water—
almost 2 million gallons a day when fully operational, I’d read—pumped from a
nearby reservoir. What couldn’t be
conveyed by such statistics was the potency
of the center’s digital nucleus. How much
information could it hold, organize, screen,
and, if called upon, decrypt? According to experts such as William Binney, a
government whistle-blower and former top
NSA cryptologist, the answer was simple:
almost everything, today, tomorrow, and for
decades to come. The data center,
understood poetically (and how better to understand an object both unprecedented
and impenetrable?), was as close as
humanity had come to putting infinity in a
box.
With me was a friend named Dalton Brink, a
former Navy nuclear technician. We’d driven
down from Montana the night before, tuned
in to one of those wee-hours AM talk shows
whose hosts tend to suffer from a wretched
smoker’s cough and whose conspiracy- minded guests channel a collective
unconscious understandably disturbed by
current events. Their hushed revelations are
batty but compelling, charged with weird
folkloric energies: Our nation’s leaders have
reptile DNA and belong to abominable sex cults. Microwave stations above the Arctic
Circle whose beams cause cluster headaches and amnesia are crippling America’s truth-seeking subversives. To those who understand that fiction warps the truth in order to tell the truth, the literal meanings of such tales are beside the point.
Nightmares are a form of news.
The manic broadcast caused us to reflect that in the days before our trip, we’d e-mailed promiscuously about our plans, using all sorts of keywords that might draw the interest of national-security spybots. And supposing that we had raised red flags, it was technologically conceivable that our movements were being monitored through the GPS chips in our phones.
Word had by then leaked out about so-called stingray devices (fake cellphone towers, some of them mounted on prowling aircraft) that secretly swept up information from any mobile phone within their range. We knew that had we been deemed especially interesting, our phones might have been remotely activated to serve as listening devices—a capability first reported on way back in 2006, when the FBI employed the tactic in a Mafia investigation.
These wild speculations seemed less wild
the next morning, when we woke to discover that our car had a flat tire. The cause was a long, sharp screw with a washer fitted around its base so that it would have stood straight up when placed behind a tire. Since the tire had been fine during the drive, the puncture must have occurred in Salt Lake City, where we’d
stayed the night. A mischievous prank, no
doubt.
And yet there was doubt—not a whole lot of it, but some. PRISM. XKeyscore. Stingrays. They sow doubt, and not only in self-styled gonzo journalists out on a lark.
One might be forgiven for thinking that sowing doubt is one of their main functions. We set out for the data center on a spare tire, stopping along the way to fix the old one at a Firestone store. Its employees dealt with us in an upbeat, tightly scripted manner that appeared to stem from their awareness of several cameras angled toward the service counter.
The situation reminded me that the ferreting-out of secrets is merely one purpose of surveillance; it also disciplines, inhibits,
robbing interactions of spontaneity and
turning them into self-conscious performances.
The Firestone employees, with their smiles and good manners, had the same forced cheerfulness I’d long ago noticed in my Facebook feed, a parallel universe of marriage announcements and birthday well-wishes straight out of the Midwestern 1950s.
Both were miniature versions, it occurred to me, of the society we’d all soon inhabit—or already did but had yet to fully acknowledge.
It was dark when we finally reached Saratoga Springs and looked for an inconspicuous parking spot from which to launch our raid. We ended up in a hivelike subdivision whose immaculate streets and culs-de-sac were named after fruits (Muskmelon Way) and religious concepts (Providence Drive). Above the beige houses rose the spires of identical brand-new Mormon churches, packed in so closely that we could see six of them from our parking spot.
Many of the houses looked unoccupied, as though built for an army of workers that hadn’t yet arrived. In one of the driveways was a car whose license plate ended in NSA. We had parked where Providence Drive ran out, at the edge of a field, across which we could see the data center’s curving access road. It ran uphill to the facility’s entrance: a pillared gate of Platonic, spectral beauty that seemed less like a military checkpoint thana dimension-spanning star bridge. Behind it,
cool green lights marked the perimeter.
We started walking.
A few minutes later we heard a thwop thwop sound. We turned in its direction, toward a ridgeline, and as we did the sound changed character, deepening and thrumming in our chests.
The craft had a palpable, heavy-bellied
presence but no detectable outline, no
silhouette; the only visible sign of its
approach was a tiny blinking red light. It
seemed to slow down and then hover overhead. “I think it’s scanning us,†Dalton said, and something told me he was right; the modern nervous system, groomed by its experiences in airports, is sensitive to high-tech probing.
I gazed straight up at where I thought the
invisible vessel was and pictured two green thermal images—our bodies—displayed on
a screen inside its cockpit. What other feats
could the craft’s instruments perform? Could
they extract the contents of the phones
buttoned into the pockets of our coats, learn
our identities, run background checks, and determine the level of threat we posed?
Anything seemed possible.
The systems protecting this new holy of holies were surely among the most advanced available. We stood there in our boots, our heads tipped back, absorbing the interest of the floating colossus. The experience was
strangely bracing. In the age of Big Data
and Big Surveillance, the overlords rarely
sally forth to meet you. Then it was over. The formless thing flew off, leaving us with
the sense that we’d been toyed with. We
were nothing to it, two pranksters in the
snow.
Twenty more minutes of trudging through
knee-high drifts brought us closer to the
center than I’d thought would be permitted.
We weren’t sure whether the place was
functioning yet—I’d read about fires erupting
inside the buildings that housed the servers. Perhaps the reports were true; the place
seemed deserted. Moon-of-Jupiter deserted,
as in incapable of sustaining life. Gazing at it
from 50 yards outside its fence, I felt
absolutely nothing coming back: no hum, no
pulse, no buzz, no aura, no emission or emanation of any kind. It had substance but
no presence, as though all of its is-ness was
directed inward. It awed me, the Utah Data Center at night.
It awed me in an unfamiliar way—not with its
size, which was hard to get a fix on, but with
its overwhelming separateness. To think
that virtually every human act, every
utterance, transaction, and conversation that occurred out here—here in the world
that seemed so vast and bustling, so
magnificently complex—could one day be
coded, compressed, and stuck in there, in a
cluster of buildings no larger than a couple
of shopping malls. Loss of privacy seemed like a tiny issue, suddenly, compared with
the greater loss the place presaged: loss of
existential stature.
About 20 miles north of Saratoga Springs,
across the Wasatch Valley from the NSA’s
fortress of secrets, is a convention center in
Sandy, Utah, that regularly hosts a
gathering of some of America’s most
suspicious minds: the Rocky Mountain Gun Show. Dalton and I visited it the next day,
still frazzled by our encounter with the data
center and convinced that such a monstrous
creation must cast a spiritual shadow of
some kind. We wanted to see what that, too,
looked like up close. Flanking the entrance to the gun show were two enormous army-style trucks painted in camouflage whose tires were the size of children’s wading pools. Their cabs were too high to access without steps. Both were for sale, which seemed to mean there existed buyers for such behemoths, people
who could imagine needing them. To do
what, however, in what exigencies? To
transport food across demolished cities? To
blockade an airport? To storm the data
center?
Having lived in Montana for almost 25 years, I knew my share of apocalyptic oddballs. They entertained some strange scenarios and counted among their numbers every sort of zealot, kook, and hater. But perhaps they were also canaries in the coal mine, preternaturally sensitive to bad vibrations that calmer folks were just starting to feel. I was coming to think of paranoia as a form of folk art, the poetic eruption of murky inklings, which made the gun show a kind of gallery. The buying and selling of firearms and their accessories was only part of what went on there; the place was also a forum for dark visions and primitive fears, where like-minded people, provoked by developments beyond their ken, shared their apprehensions.
A decade ago, at a similar event in Livingston,
Montana, a fellow had told me that my TV
was capable of watching me back. I didn’t
take him seriously—not until this year, when
I read that the voice-recognition capabilities
built into certain Samsung sets could capture and then forward to third parties the
conversations held nearby. Inside the show, a clean-cut salesman stood beside a woman who gazed at him with an expression that bordered on idolatry. He showed us a line of shotgun ammunition designed to shred a human target with scores of tiny, multisided blades. Another shell contained a bunched-up wire precisely weighted at both ends such that it would uncoil and stretch out when fired, sawing its target into pieces. The man also sold “bug out†bags stocked with handsaws, fuel pellets, first-aid kits, and other equipment that might prove helpful should relations
between the watchers and the watched
catastrophically deteriorate. The key, the
man said, would be surviving those first few
days after the ATMs stopped working and
the grocery stores were looted bare. The couple didn’t push their goods on us,
only their outlook. When they learned we
were from Montana, they asked whether
we’d seen the FEMA camps where,
supposedly, thousands of foreign troops
were stationed in anticipation of martial law. The salesman was concerned that these
troops would “take our women,†and he
recommended a podcast—The Common
Sense Show, hosted by someone named
Dave Hodges—that would prepare us for
the coming siege. The man’s eyes slid sideways as he spoke, as though on alert
for lurking secret agents.
Later, I learned that his worry was not entirely unfounded. In January of this year, the ACLU unearthed an e-mail describing a federal plan to scan the license plates of vehicles parked outside gun shows. The plan was never acted on, apparently, but reading about it caused me
some chagrin; I’d thought the jumpy
salesman had completely flipped his wig. The gun show was not about weaponry,
primarily, but about autonomy—construed in
this case as the right to stand one’s ground
against an arrogant, intrusive new order
whose instruments of suppression and
control I’d seen for myself the night before. There seemed to be no rational response to
the feelings of powerlessness stirred by the
cybernetic panopticon; the choice was
either to ignore it or go crazy, at least to
some degree. With its coolly planar
architecture, the data center projected a stern indifference to the qualms that its
presence inevitably raised. It practically
dared one to take up arms against it, a
Goliath that roused the instinct to grab a
slingshot. The assault rifles and grenade
launchers (I handled one, I hope for the last time) for sale were props in a drama of
imagined resistance in which individuals
would rise up to defend themselves. The
irony was that preparing for such a fight in
the only way these people knew how—by
plotting their countermoves and hoarding ammo—played into the very security
concerns that the overlords use to justify
their snooping. The would-be combatants in
this epic conflict were more closely linked,
perhaps, than they appreciated.
A voice on the PA system announced that
the show would be closing in 15 minutes,
causing vendors to slash their prices and
customers to stuff their bags with
camouflage jumpsuits, solar-powered radios,
and every sort of doomsday camping gear. In the car, headed north on I-15 toward
home, I donned my new bulletproof shooting
glasses while Dalton plugged his phone into
the stereo and played an episode of The
Common Sense Show. Its murky,
subterranean acoustics suggested that it had been recorded in a fallout shelter. Dave
Hodges’s guest, a certain Dr. Jim Garrow,
purported to be a retired spook who’d spent
the past few decades in “deep cover†and
become privy to many “chilling†schemes,
including one to convert pro-sports arenas into cavernous detention centers where
noncompliant freedom lovers would be
guillotined en masse. Guillotined? Why bring
back those contraptions? Because their
blades killed instantly and cleanly, yielding
high-grade corpses whose body parts could be plundered and reused by ghoulish,
power-mad elites intent on achieving
immortality.
The men’s demeanor as they described this
nightmare was unhurried and curiously
blasé. Neurotics like me who were still
learning to cope with being monitored were
prone to pangs of disquiet and unease, but
for The Common Sense Show types, a strange equanimity was possible. What were
merely unsettling times for most of us were,
for Hodges and his fans, a prelude to
detainment and dismemberment, grimly
fascinating to observe, potentially thrilling to
oppose, but no cause for prescription sedatives. The podcast brought on a trance state ideal
for long-haul driving. Memories of the
monolithic data center faded and dispersed,
supplanted by visions of organ-stealing
supermen that would reappear in my mind’s
eye when I read, many months later, of an ambitious Italian surgeon intent on
perfecting “full body†transplants involving
grafting human heads onto bodies other
than their own. We crossed into southern Idaho at dusk and
made a side trip to Lava Hot Springs, an
isolated mountain town renowned for its
therapeutic thermal pools. I wanted to wash
the black helicopter off me. Consorting with
the twitchy gun-show folks after skulking around the data center had weakened my
psychological immune system. Paranoia is
an infernal affliction, difficult to arrest once it
takes hold, particularly at a time when every
week brings fresh news of governmental
and commercial schemes that light up one’s overactive fear receptors: AT
Now Zander.... You my friend have the "shortest" post... Now this could be the "longest" one...lol
week, and I wanted to add some to my
oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her
where she’d put them. She was washing her
face in the bathroom, running the faucet,
and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her
help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My
phone was charging on the counter. Bored,
I picked it up to check the app that
wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band
I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night
before but had gotten a mere two hours of
“deep sleep.†I saw that I’d reached exactly
30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps.
And then I noticed a message in a small
window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,†it read. It told me to eat
more walnuts.
It was probably a coincidence, a fluke. Still, it
caused me to glance down at my wristband
and then at my phone, a brand-new model
with many unknown, untested capabilities.
Had my phone picked up my words through
its mic and somehow relayed them to my wristband, which then signaled the app?
The devices spoke to each other behind my
back—I’d known they would when I “pairedâ€
them—but suddenly I was wary of their
relationship. Who else did they talk to, and
about what? And what happened to their
conversations? Were they temporarily archived, promptly scrubbed, or forever
incorporated into the “cloud,†that ghostly
entity with the too-disarming name?
“I think it’s scanning us,†Dalton said, and
something told me he was right.
It was the winter of 2013, and these “walnut
moments†had been multiplying—jarring little
nudges from beyond that occurred
whenever I went online. One night the previous summer, I’d driven to meet a friend
at an art gallery in Hollywood, my first visit
to a gallery in years. The next morning, in
my inbox, several spam e-mails urged me to
invest in art. That was an easy one to figure
out: I’d typed the name of the gallery into Google Maps. Another simple one to trace
was the stream of invitations to drug and
alcohol rehab centers that I’d been getting
ever since I’d consulted an online calendar
of Los Angeles–area Alcoholics Anonymous
meetings. Since membership in AA is supposed to be confidential, these e-mails
irked me. Their presumptuous, heart-to-heart
tone bugged me too. Was I tired of my
misery and hopelessness? Hadn’t I caused
my loved ones enough pain?
Some of these disconcerting prompts were
harder to explain. For example, the
appearance on my Facebook page, under
the heading “People You May Know,†of a
California musician whom I’d bumped into
six or seven times at AA meetings in a private home. In accordance with AA
custom, he had never told me his last name
nor inquired about mine. And as far as I
knew, we had just one friend in common, a
notably solitary older novelist who avoided
computers altogether. I did some research in an online technology forum and learned
that by entering my number into his
smartphone’s address book (compiling
phone lists to use in times of trouble is an
AA ritual), the musician had probably
triggered the program that placed his full name and photo on my page.
Then there was this peculiar psychic
incursion. One night, about a year before my
phone suggested I eat more walnuts, I was
researching modern spycraft for a book I
was thinking about writing when I happened
across a creepy YouTube video. It consisted of surveillance footage from a Middle
Eastern hotel where agents thought to be
acting on behalf of Israel had allegedly
assassinated a senior Hamas official. I
watched as the agents stalked their target,
whom they apparently murdered in his room, offscreen, before reappearing in a
hallway and nonchalantly summoning an
elevator. Because one of the agents was a
woman, I typed these words into my
browser’s search bar: Mossad seduction
techniques. Minutes later, a banner ad appeared for Ashley Madison, the dating
site for adulterous married people that
would eventually be hacked, exposing tens
of millions of trusting cheaters who’d
emptied their ids onto the Web. When I tried
to watch the surveillance footage again, a video ad appeared. It promoted a slick
divorce attorney based in Santa Monica, just
a few miles from the Malibu apartment
where I escaped my cold Montana home
during the winter months.
Paranoia, Half a Century Ago Adultery, divorce. I saw a pattern here, one that I found especially unwelcome because at the time I was recently engaged.
Evidently, some callous algorithm was betting against my pending marriage and offering me an early exit. Had merely typing seduction into a search engine marked me as a rascal? Or was the formula more sophisticated? Could it be that my online choices in recent weeks—the travel guide to Berlin that I’d perused, the Porsche convertible I’d priced, the old girlfriend to whom I’d sent a virtual birthday card—indicated longings and frustrations that I was too deep in denial to acknowledge?
When I later read that Facebook, through
clever computerized detective work, could
tell when two of its users were falling in love, I wondered whether Google might have
similar powers. It struck me that the search
engine might know more about my
unconscious than I do—a possibility that
would put it in a position not only to predict
my behavior, but to manipulate it. Lose your privacy, lose your free will—a chilling thought.
Around the same time, I looked into changing my car-insurance policy. I learned that Progressive offered discounts to some drivers who agreed to fit their cars with a tracking device called Snapshot. That people ever took this deal astonished me. Time alone in my car, unobserved and unmolested, was sacred to me, an act of self-communion, and spoiling it for money felt heretical. I shared this opinion with a friend. “I don’t quite see the problem,†he replied. “Is there something you do in your car that you’re not proud of? Frankly, you sound a little paranoid.â€
My friend was right on both counts. Yes, I did things in my car I wasn’t proud of (wasn’t that my birthright as an American?), and yes, I’d become a little paranoid. I would have to be crazy not to be.
The night i saw my first black helicopter—or
heard it, because black helicopters are
invisible at night—I was already growing
certain that we, the sensible majority, owe
plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.
The Mormon elder who told me when I was a teenager back in 1975 that people soon would have to carry “chips†around or “be banished from the marketplace.â€
The ex–Army ranger in the 1980s who said
an “eye in the sky†could read my license
plate.
The girlfriend in 1993 who forbade me to rent a dirty video on the grounds that “they keep lists of everything.â€
The Hollywood actor in 2011 who declined to
join me on his sundeck because he’d put on
weight and a security expert had advised him that the paparazzi were flying drones.
The tattooed grad student who, about a year before Edward Snowden gave the world the lowdown on code-named snooping programs such as PRISM and XKeyscore, told me about a childhood friend of his who worked in military intelligence and refused to go to wild parties unless the guests agreed to leave their phones locked outside in a car trunk or a cooler, preferably with the battery removed, and who also confessed to snooping on a girlfriend through the camera in her laptop.
The night I vowed never again to mock such
people, in January 2014, I was standing
knee-deep in a field of crusty snow at the edge of a National Guard base near Saratoga Springs, Utah, a fresh-from-the-factory all-American settlement, densely flagpoled and lavishly front-porched, just south of Salt Lake City. Above its rooftops the moon was a pale sliver, and filling the sky were the sort of ragged clouds in which one might discern the face of Jesus.
I had on a dark jacket, a dark wool cap, and a black nylon mask to keep my cheeks from
freezing.
The key would be surviving those first days
after the ATMs stopped working and the
grocery stores were looted bare.
I’d gone there for purposes of counterespionage. I wanted to behold up
close, in person, one of the citadels of modern surveillance: the National Security Agency’s recently constructed Utah Data Center. I wasn’t sure what I was after, exactly—perhaps just a concrete impression of a process that seemed elusive and phantasmagoric, even after Snowden disclosed its workings.
The records that the NSA blandly rendered as mere “data†and invisibly, silently collected—the phone logs, e-mails, browsing histories, and digital photo libraries generated by a population engaged in the treasonous business of daily life— required a tangible, physical depository. And this was it: a multibillion-dollar facility clearly designed to unscramble, analyze, and store imponderable masses of information whose ultimate uses were unknowable.
Google’s data mines, presumably, exist merely to sell us products, but the government’s models of our inner selves might be deployed to sell us stranger items. Policies. Programs. Maybe even wars.
Such concerns didn’t strike me as farfetched, but I was reluctant to air them in mixed company. I knew that many of my fellow citizens took comfort in their own banality: You live a boring life and feel you have nothing to fear from those on high. But how could you anticipate the ways in which insights bred of spying might prove handy to some future regime? New tools have a way of breeding new abuses. Detailed logs of behaviors that I found tame—my Amazon purchases, my online comments, and even my meanderings through the physical world, collected by biometric scanners, say, or license-plate readers on police cars—might someday be read in a hundred different ways by powers whose purposes I couldn’t fathom now. They say you can quote the Bible to support almost any conceivable proposition, and I could only imagine the range of charges that selective looks at my data might render plausible.
The National Security Agency’s Utah Data
Center, south of Salt Lake City. Keeping the
center’s servers from overheating could
require almost 2 million gallons of water a
day. (Rick Bowmer/AP)
Everything about the data center was classified, but reports had leaked out that
hinted at the magnitude of its operations.
Aerial photos on the Web showed a
complex of slablike concrete buildings
arrayed in a crescent on a broad, bare
hillside. The center was said to require enough power to supply a city of tens of
thousands of people. The cooling plants
designed to keep its servers from
overheating and melting down would
consume fantastic quantities of water—
almost 2 million gallons a day when fully operational, I’d read—pumped from a
nearby reservoir. What couldn’t be
conveyed by such statistics was the potency
of the center’s digital nucleus. How much
information could it hold, organize, screen,
and, if called upon, decrypt? According to experts such as William Binney, a
government whistle-blower and former top
NSA cryptologist, the answer was simple:
almost everything, today, tomorrow, and for
decades to come. The data center,
understood poetically (and how better to understand an object both unprecedented
and impenetrable?), was as close as
humanity had come to putting infinity in a
box.
With me was a friend named Dalton Brink, a
former Navy nuclear technician. We’d driven
down from Montana the night before, tuned
in to one of those wee-hours AM talk shows
whose hosts tend to suffer from a wretched
smoker’s cough and whose conspiracy- minded guests channel a collective
unconscious understandably disturbed by
current events. Their hushed revelations are
batty but compelling, charged with weird
folkloric energies: Our nation’s leaders have
reptile DNA and belong to abominable sex cults. Microwave stations above the Arctic
Circle whose beams cause cluster headaches and amnesia are crippling America’s truth-seeking subversives. To those who understand that fiction warps the truth in order to tell the truth, the literal meanings of such tales are beside the point.
Nightmares are a form of news.
The manic broadcast caused us to reflect that in the days before our trip, we’d e-mailed promiscuously about our plans, using all sorts of keywords that might draw the interest of national-security spybots. And supposing that we had raised red flags, it was technologically conceivable that our movements were being monitored through the GPS chips in our phones.
Word had by then leaked out about so-called stingray devices (fake cellphone towers, some of them mounted on prowling aircraft) that secretly swept up information from any mobile phone within their range. We knew that had we been deemed especially interesting, our phones might have been remotely activated to serve as listening devices—a capability first reported on way back in 2006, when the FBI employed the tactic in a Mafia investigation.
These wild speculations seemed less wild
the next morning, when we woke to discover that our car had a flat tire. The cause was a long, sharp screw with a washer fitted around its base so that it would have stood straight up when placed behind a tire. Since the tire had been fine during the drive, the puncture must have occurred in Salt Lake City, where we’d
stayed the night. A mischievous prank, no
doubt.
And yet there was doubt—not a whole lot of it, but some. PRISM. XKeyscore. Stingrays. They sow doubt, and not only in self-styled gonzo journalists out on a lark.
One might be forgiven for thinking that sowing doubt is one of their main functions. We set out for the data center on a spare tire, stopping along the way to fix the old one at a Firestone store. Its employees dealt with us in an upbeat, tightly scripted manner that appeared to stem from their awareness of several cameras angled toward the service counter.
The situation reminded me that the ferreting-out of secrets is merely one purpose of surveillance; it also disciplines, inhibits,
robbing interactions of spontaneity and
turning them into self-conscious performances.
The Firestone employees, with their smiles and good manners, had the same forced cheerfulness I’d long ago noticed in my Facebook feed, a parallel universe of marriage announcements and birthday well-wishes straight out of the Midwestern 1950s.
Both were miniature versions, it occurred to me, of the society we’d all soon inhabit—or already did but had yet to fully acknowledge.
It was dark when we finally reached Saratoga Springs and looked for an inconspicuous parking spot from which to launch our raid. We ended up in a hivelike subdivision whose immaculate streets and culs-de-sac were named after fruits (Muskmelon Way) and religious concepts (Providence Drive). Above the beige houses rose the spires of identical brand-new Mormon churches, packed in so closely that we could see six of them from our parking spot.
Many of the houses looked unoccupied, as though built for an army of workers that hadn’t yet arrived. In one of the driveways was a car whose license plate ended in NSA. We had parked where Providence Drive ran out, at the edge of a field, across which we could see the data center’s curving access road. It ran uphill to the facility’s entrance: a pillared gate of Platonic, spectral beauty that seemed less like a military checkpoint thana dimension-spanning star bridge. Behind it,
cool green lights marked the perimeter.
We started walking.
A few minutes later we heard a thwop thwop sound. We turned in its direction, toward a ridgeline, and as we did the sound changed character, deepening and thrumming in our chests.
The craft had a palpable, heavy-bellied
presence but no detectable outline, no
silhouette; the only visible sign of its
approach was a tiny blinking red light. It
seemed to slow down and then hover overhead. “I think it’s scanning us,†Dalton said, and something told me he was right; the modern nervous system, groomed by its experiences in airports, is sensitive to high-tech probing.
I gazed straight up at where I thought the
invisible vessel was and pictured two green thermal images—our bodies—displayed on
a screen inside its cockpit. What other feats
could the craft’s instruments perform? Could
they extract the contents of the phones
buttoned into the pockets of our coats, learn
our identities, run background checks, and determine the level of threat we posed?
Anything seemed possible.
The systems protecting this new holy of holies were surely among the most advanced available. We stood there in our boots, our heads tipped back, absorbing the interest of the floating colossus. The experience was
strangely bracing. In the age of Big Data
and Big Surveillance, the overlords rarely
sally forth to meet you. Then it was over. The formless thing flew off, leaving us with
the sense that we’d been toyed with. We
were nothing to it, two pranksters in the
snow.
Twenty more minutes of trudging through
knee-high drifts brought us closer to the
center than I’d thought would be permitted.
We weren’t sure whether the place was
functioning yet—I’d read about fires erupting
inside the buildings that housed the servers. Perhaps the reports were true; the place
seemed deserted. Moon-of-Jupiter deserted,
as in incapable of sustaining life. Gazing at it
from 50 yards outside its fence, I felt
absolutely nothing coming back: no hum, no
pulse, no buzz, no aura, no emission or emanation of any kind. It had substance but
no presence, as though all of its is-ness was
directed inward. It awed me, the Utah Data Center at night.
It awed me in an unfamiliar way—not with its
size, which was hard to get a fix on, but with
its overwhelming separateness. To think
that virtually every human act, every
utterance, transaction, and conversation that occurred out here—here in the world
that seemed so vast and bustling, so
magnificently complex—could one day be
coded, compressed, and stuck in there, in a
cluster of buildings no larger than a couple
of shopping malls. Loss of privacy seemed like a tiny issue, suddenly, compared with
the greater loss the place presaged: loss of
existential stature.
About 20 miles north of Saratoga Springs,
across the Wasatch Valley from the NSA’s
fortress of secrets, is a convention center in
Sandy, Utah, that regularly hosts a
gathering of some of America’s most
suspicious minds: the Rocky Mountain Gun Show. Dalton and I visited it the next day,
still frazzled by our encounter with the data
center and convinced that such a monstrous
creation must cast a spiritual shadow of
some kind. We wanted to see what that, too,
looked like up close. Flanking the entrance to the gun show were two enormous army-style trucks painted in camouflage whose tires were the size of children’s wading pools. Their cabs were too high to access without steps. Both were for sale, which seemed to mean there existed buyers for such behemoths, people
who could imagine needing them. To do
what, however, in what exigencies? To
transport food across demolished cities? To
blockade an airport? To storm the data
center?
Having lived in Montana for almost 25 years, I knew my share of apocalyptic oddballs. They entertained some strange scenarios and counted among their numbers every sort of zealot, kook, and hater. But perhaps they were also canaries in the coal mine, preternaturally sensitive to bad vibrations that calmer folks were just starting to feel. I was coming to think of paranoia as a form of folk art, the poetic eruption of murky inklings, which made the gun show a kind of gallery. The buying and selling of firearms and their accessories was only part of what went on there; the place was also a forum for dark visions and primitive fears, where like-minded people, provoked by developments beyond their ken, shared their apprehensions.
A decade ago, at a similar event in Livingston,
Montana, a fellow had told me that my TV
was capable of watching me back. I didn’t
take him seriously—not until this year, when
I read that the voice-recognition capabilities
built into certain Samsung sets could capture and then forward to third parties the
conversations held nearby. Inside the show, a clean-cut salesman stood beside a woman who gazed at him with an expression that bordered on idolatry. He showed us a line of shotgun ammunition designed to shred a human target with scores of tiny, multisided blades. Another shell contained a bunched-up wire precisely weighted at both ends such that it would uncoil and stretch out when fired, sawing its target into pieces. The man also sold “bug out†bags stocked with handsaws, fuel pellets, first-aid kits, and other equipment that might prove helpful should relations
between the watchers and the watched
catastrophically deteriorate. The key, the
man said, would be surviving those first few
days after the ATMs stopped working and
the grocery stores were looted bare. The couple didn’t push their goods on us,
only their outlook. When they learned we
were from Montana, they asked whether
we’d seen the FEMA camps where,
supposedly, thousands of foreign troops
were stationed in anticipation of martial law. The salesman was concerned that these
troops would “take our women,†and he
recommended a podcast—The Common
Sense Show, hosted by someone named
Dave Hodges—that would prepare us for
the coming siege. The man’s eyes slid sideways as he spoke, as though on alert
for lurking secret agents.
Later, I learned that his worry was not entirely unfounded. In January of this year, the ACLU unearthed an e-mail describing a federal plan to scan the license plates of vehicles parked outside gun shows. The plan was never acted on, apparently, but reading about it caused me
some chagrin; I’d thought the jumpy
salesman had completely flipped his wig. The gun show was not about weaponry,
primarily, but about autonomy—construed in
this case as the right to stand one’s ground
against an arrogant, intrusive new order
whose instruments of suppression and
control I’d seen for myself the night before. There seemed to be no rational response to
the feelings of powerlessness stirred by the
cybernetic panopticon; the choice was
either to ignore it or go crazy, at least to
some degree. With its coolly planar
architecture, the data center projected a stern indifference to the qualms that its
presence inevitably raised. It practically
dared one to take up arms against it, a
Goliath that roused the instinct to grab a
slingshot. The assault rifles and grenade
launchers (I handled one, I hope for the last time) for sale were props in a drama of
imagined resistance in which individuals
would rise up to defend themselves. The
irony was that preparing for such a fight in
the only way these people knew how—by
plotting their countermoves and hoarding ammo—played into the very security
concerns that the overlords use to justify
their snooping. The would-be combatants in
this epic conflict were more closely linked,
perhaps, than they appreciated.
A voice on the PA system announced that
the show would be closing in 15 minutes,
causing vendors to slash their prices and
customers to stuff their bags with
camouflage jumpsuits, solar-powered radios,
and every sort of doomsday camping gear. In the car, headed north on I-15 toward
home, I donned my new bulletproof shooting
glasses while Dalton plugged his phone into
the stereo and played an episode of The
Common Sense Show. Its murky,
subterranean acoustics suggested that it had been recorded in a fallout shelter. Dave
Hodges’s guest, a certain Dr. Jim Garrow,
purported to be a retired spook who’d spent
the past few decades in “deep cover†and
become privy to many “chilling†schemes,
including one to convert pro-sports arenas into cavernous detention centers where
noncompliant freedom lovers would be
guillotined en masse. Guillotined? Why bring
back those contraptions? Because their
blades killed instantly and cleanly, yielding
high-grade corpses whose body parts could be plundered and reused by ghoulish,
power-mad elites intent on achieving
immortality.
The men’s demeanor as they described this
nightmare was unhurried and curiously
blasé. Neurotics like me who were still
learning to cope with being monitored were
prone to pangs of disquiet and unease, but
for The Common Sense Show types, a strange equanimity was possible. What were
merely unsettling times for most of us were,
for Hodges and his fans, a prelude to
detainment and dismemberment, grimly
fascinating to observe, potentially thrilling to
oppose, but no cause for prescription sedatives. The podcast brought on a trance state ideal
for long-haul driving. Memories of the
monolithic data center faded and dispersed,
supplanted by visions of organ-stealing
supermen that would reappear in my mind’s
eye when I read, many months later, of an ambitious Italian surgeon intent on
perfecting “full body†transplants involving
grafting human heads onto bodies other
than their own. We crossed into southern Idaho at dusk and
made a side trip to Lava Hot Springs, an
isolated mountain town renowned for its
therapeutic thermal pools. I wanted to wash
the black helicopter off me. Consorting with
the twitchy gun-show folks after skulking around the data center had weakened my
psychological immune system. Paranoia is
an infernal affliction, difficult to arrest once it
takes hold, particularly at a time when every
week brings fresh news of governmental
and commercial schemes that light up one’s overactive fear receptors: AT
Now Zander.... You my friend have the "shortest" post... Now this could be the "longest" one...lol
Semper Fidelis
![[Image: SyAa0qj.png]](https://i.imgur.com/SyAa0qj.png)
USMC
USMC
Nemo me impune lacessit
