The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever

When I was working at the CIA, if you had told me that there would soon come a youth rebellion that relied on lasers and traffic cones as sword and shield, and that it would come to paralyze one of the world’s richest and most powerful governments, I would have—at the very least—raised an eyebrow. And yet as I write these words nearly a decade later, this is exactly what's happening in Hong Kong, the city where I met with journalists to reveal the secret that would transform me from an agent of government into one of the world’s most wanted men. As it happened, the very book that you now hold in your hands lay on the desk, the desk of the last hotel room I would ever pay for with a credit card.

What I showed those journalists was proof, in the form of the government’s own classified documents, that the self-described “Five Eyes”—the state security organs of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—had together conspired to weaken their laws. They had forced clandestine access to the networks of their largest telecommunications and internet titans (some of whom hadn't needed much in the way of arm-twisting) in pursuit of a single goal: the transformation of the free and fragmented internet into history’s first centralized means of global mass surveillance. This violation of our fundamental privacy occurred without our knowledge or consent, or even the knowledge and consent of our courts and most lawmakers.