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The Stellarwind cryptonym replaced it soon afterward. On Columbus Day, October 8, Hayden briefed them on their new jobs in a specially compartmented new operation. Trusted lieutenants began calling in a small group of analysts, programmers, and mathematicians on October 6 and 7.
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When the cluster expanded, incorporating some 200 machines, Mainway spilled into an annex in the Tordella Supercomputer Facility nearby. Hayden cleared out space in a specially restricted wing of OPS 2B, an inner sanctum of the gleaming, mirrored headquarters complex at Fort Meade, Maryland. They commandeered 50 state-of-the-art computer servers from Dell, which was about to ship them to another customer, and lashed them into a quick and dirty but powerful cluster.
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When NSA director Mike Hayden received the execution order on Octofor “the vice president’s special program,” NSA engineers assembled a system from bare metal and borrowed code within a matter of days, a stupendous achievement under pressure.
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Stellarwind defined the operation Mainway was a tool to carry it out.Īt the time, the NSA knew how to do this sort of thing with foreign telephone calls, but it did not have the machinery to do it at home. Mainway came to life alongside Stellarwind, the domestic surveillance program created by Cheney in the first frantic weeks after al Qaeda flew passenger airplanes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The resulting operation was the lawless precursor of the broader one that I was looking at now. The assignment, forbidden by statute, was to track telephone calls made and received by Americans on American soil. Bush, to do something the NSA had never done before. Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had drafted orders, signed by President George W. NSA engineers had built Mainway in urgent haste after September 11, 2001. One name caught my eye on a chart that listed systems at highest risk: Mainway. The latent power of new inventions, no matter how repellent at first, does not lie forever dormant in government armories. The gun on display in the first act-nuclear warheads, weaponized disease, Orwellian cameras tracking faces on every street-must be fired in the last. Chekhov’s famous admonition to playwrights is apt not only in drama, but in the lived experience of humankind. And in fact, in history, capabilities do not go unused in the long term. An unfired gun is no less lethal before it is drawn. If the power implications do not seem convincing, try inverting the relationship in your mind: What if a small group of citizens had secret access to the telephone logs and social networks of government officials? How might that privileged knowledge affect their power to shape events? How might their interactions change if they possessed the means to humiliate and destroy the careers of the persons in power? Capability matters, always, regardless of whether it is used. This was the Dark Mirror embodied, one side of the glass transparent and the other blacked out. Mere creation of such a database, especially in secret, profoundly changed the balance of power between government and governed.
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Any information in sufficient volume, he wrote, amounted to a “database of ruin.” It held personal secrets that “if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm.” Nearly anyone in the developed world, he wrote, “can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment, or financial or identity theft.” Revelations of “past conduct, health, or family shame,” for example, could cost a person their marriage, career, legal residence, or physical safety. During a conversation at the Aspen Security Forum that July, six weeks after Snowden’s first disclosure and three months after the Boston Marathon bombing, Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, assured me that the records were “stored,” untouched, until the next Boston bomber came along.Įven by that account, the scale of collection brought to mind an evocative phrase from legal scholar Paul Ohm. I assumed that the NSA cleaned up the list-date goes here, call duration there-and converted it to the agency’s preferred “atomic sigint data format.” Otherwise I thought of the records as inert. At first I imagined them in the form of a simple, if gargantuan, list. It occurred to me that I did not even know what the records looked like. The public debate was missing important information.