Barry Eisler
The God's Eye View
For the whistleblowers
The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.
Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era… governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of every one of us.
Comrades, I must tell you again: we must collect everything! Nothing can be missed!
PROLOGUE
General Theodore Anders was dreaming of marlin fishing when the secure phone rang on the bed stand next to him. He sat up immediately, concerned but not unduly so. He’d been awakened plenty of times over the course of his career, and by much worse than a telephone.
He blinked and reflexively scanned the room by the dim light of the bedside digital alarm clock. His wife, Debbie, continued snoring softly beside him. She’d learned to tune out NSA’s intrusions almost immediately after he’d been appointed director. If it were an internal problem, he wouldn’t be able to tell her. If the problem were external, she’d see it on the news soon enough. Either way, she didn’t want to know, or at least not before she had to. She was a good woman.
He cleared his throat and picked up the handset before the unit could ring a second time. In the army, he’d learned to impress his superiors with an image of constant readiness. The habit had stayed with him long since his superiors had become his subordinates.
“Go ahead,” he said quietly. It was his standard greeting — a crisp, efficient command. He also liked responding to a knock with a single word: Come. The implication being that the extra syllable of the standard Come in was wasteful and unnecessary. Debbie hated it and had trained him not to do it at home. She told him it was how someone talked to a dog—come, sit, stay. Which, he had to admit, was probably part of the appeal.
He was expecting an immediate, succinct briefing on whatever situation had necessitated the call. So he was surprised to hear his executive officer instead say, “This is General Remar. Your access protocol, please.”
Anders was momentarily so surprised he said, “Mike, it’s me.”
“I’m sorry, Ted. I need your access protocol before proceeding.”
The access protocol was an additional layer of security for use of the secure phone, a way of determining the bona fides of the person on the other end of the line. In all the years they had worked together, Remar had never asked for it when calling Anders at home. Either something exceptionally bad was afoot, or his XO was taking extra care to cover his ass by following strict procedure. Which, Anders knew, amounted to the same thing. He felt a shot of warmth in his gut as adrenaline spread through his system.
He thought for a moment. What was the last protocol he’d been issued? “Romeo Bravo Foxtrot. Seven, three, niner.”
“Victor Delta Golf. Eight, one, four.”
“All right, what is it?”
“Data breach. Potentially huge.”
The warmth in his gut got hotter. “Define huge.”
“We don’t even know yet. Tens of thousands of documents. Maybe more. This guy had access to everything. PRISM. XKeyscore. Policy Directive 20. Boundless Informant. Upstream. Everything.”
The heat in his stomach was suddenly a frozen knot. This was bad. Unbelievably bad.
“Who?”
“We’re 80 percent sure it’s a contractor named Snowden. Edward Snowden. Former CIA infrastructure analyst, DIA counterintel trainer, full administrator privileges.”
Full administrator privileges. For a moment, Anders actually couldn’t breathe.
“Wait,” he said. He got out of bed, picked up the base unit, and padded silently across the soft carpet into the bathroom, the long phone cable snaking along behind him. He left the light off because the darkness was suddenly comforting, a hiding place, a cocoon. He cradled the handset between his cheek and shoulder, closed and locked the door, turned on the sink faucet to mask sound, and stepped inside the glassed-in shower stall. Only then did he close his eyes and say, “Tell me he didn’t have access to God’s Eye.”
“He didn’t have permissions.”
“I know he didn’t have permissions. That’s not what I asked.” He realized his tone was sharper than he’d intended.
“There’s no evidence of a breach there. But Snowden… this guy is extremely capable. We’re interviewing his colleagues. The word genius is coming up a lot.”
“We need to know if God’s Eye is secure. I don’t care what else has been compromised. That is the absolute top priority.”
“I’m working on it. But it’s slow going because I can’t bring in an ordinary forensics team.”
No, of course not. In the history of the US government, there had never been a program as compartmented and prejudiced as God’s Eye. Though he was suddenly terrified none of it had been enough.
He opened his eyes and blew out a long breath, working to calm himself. “Where is Snowden now?”
“We believe he’s in Hong Kong.”
“No. He’s working with MSS?”
The Ministry of State Security was the Chinese intelligence agency, a kind of combination CIA and FBI. If Snowden was an MSS agent, maybe this could be contained. A rival intelligence service, true, but that didn’t mean certain protocols didn’t exist, certain understandings couldn’t be reached.
“We don’t think so. Greenwald and Poitras are there, too. We think he’s giving the documents to them.”
He blinked. Was he having a nightmare? Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras… this was far worse than MSS. Unimaginably worse.
A long, silent moment went by. He’d been in Santiago in 2010, when Chile had been hit by the 8.8 quake. For three long minutes, what he’d always known to be solid ground had bucked and roiled beneath him. This was like that. Only more surreal.
He forced himself to focus. “Has the Guardian contacted us yet?”
The Guardian was where Greenwald worked. Before its management published anything, they would reach out to NSA for comment.
“Not yet.”
He felt an iota of desperate hope. They still had a chance. A slim chance, probably, but…
“How fast can we get a team into Hong Kong?”
“There are contractors dealing with Abu Sayyaf in Mindanao right now. We could have them on the ground in Hong Kong in six hours. Maybe less.”
“Do it. Right now. OBL rules, you understand?”
The SEALs who had taken out Osama bin Laden had understood that under no circumstances was he to be captured.
“Ted, we’re talking about… these people are Americans.”
Remar was a good XO, and as loyal a man as Anders had ever known. As he should be. Anders had pulled him from a burning Humvee in the early days of Desert Storm, saving his life if not the right side of his face. After which Remar had hitched himself to Anders’s rising star and relentlessly watched Anders’s back. But no one was perfect, and Remar’s weakness was a streak of squeamishness. Anders wasn’t sure where it came from — some innate wiring in his personality? Childhood environment? The experience of multiple reconstructive and plastic surgeries that had fostered too much empathy with other people’s pain? Some combination, probably. And while Remar’s different worldview often functioned as a useful pressure check on Anders’s somewhat more ruthless instincts, now was absolutely not the time.