ONE
Looking Through the Window
The first thing I ever hacked was bedtime.
When I was young, it always felt unfair that my parents forced me to go to sleep before they or my sister did. I wasn’t even tired. Life’s first little injustice.
Many nights of the first several years of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining. Until the night I turned six and discovered direct action.
I had just had one of the best days of my life, complete with friends, a party, and gifts, and I wasn’t about to let it end. So I went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours, trying to trick my parents into thinking it was earlier in the evening.
When the authorities—my parents—failed to notice, I was mad with power, galloping laps around the living room. I, the master of time, would never again be sent to bed. I was free.
I fell asleep on the floor, having finally seen the sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. But when I awoke, the clocks in the house once again matched my father’s watch.
If you’re like most people these days, you set your watch, if you wear one, to the time on your smartphone. But if you look at your phone, and I mean really look at it, burrowing deep through its menus into its settings, you’ll eventually see that the phone’s time is “automatically set.” Every so often, your phone quietly—silently—asks your service provider’s network, “Hey, do you have the time?” That network, in turn, asks a bigger network, which asks an even bigger network, and so on through a great succession of towers and wires until the request reaches one of the true masters of time, a network time server run by the atomic clocks kept at places like the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States, the Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology in Switzerland, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. That long invisible journey, accomplished in a fraction of a second, is why you don’t see a blinking 12:00 on your phone’s screen every time you power it up again after its battery runs out.
I was born in 1983, at the end of the era in which people set the time for themselves. That was the year that the US Department of Defense created a computer network for the public called the internet. This virtual space gave rise to the Domain Name System that we still use today—the .govs, .mils, .edus, and, of course, .coms. And yet it would be another six years before the World Wide Web was invented, and about nine years before my family got a computer with a modem that could connect to it.
Of course, the internet is not a single entity, although we tend to refer to it as if it were. I’m going to use the term in its broadest sense, to mean the universal network of networks connecting the majority of the world’s computers to one another via a set of shared protocols.
Don’t worry if you think you don’t know a protocol from a hole in the wall. You’ve used them without knowing it. Think of protocols as languages for machines, the common rules they follow to be understood by one another. Every time you check your email, you use a language like IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) or SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). And the time-setting procedure on your phone that I mentioned uses NTP (Network Time Protocol).
The takeaway is this: These protocols have given us the means to digitize just about everything. The internet has become almost as integral to our lives as the air through which so many of its communications travel. And to digitize something is to record it in a format that will last forever.
Here’s what strikes me when I think back to my childhood, particularly those first nine internet-less years: I can’t account for everything that happened back then, because I have only my memory to rely on. My generation is the last in American, and perhaps even in world, history whose childhoods aren’t up on the cloud. They’re mostly trapped in analog formats like handwritten diaries and Polaroid cameras. My schoolwork was done on paper with pencils and erasers, not on networked tablets that logged my keystrokes. My growth spurts weren’t tracked by smart-home technologies, but notched with a knife into the wood of the door frame of the house in which I grew up.
* * *
We lived in a grand old redbrick house on a little patch of lawn shaded by dogwoods and magnolias. Their flowers often served as cover for the plastic army men I used to crawl around with. The house had an atypical layout: Its main entrance was on the second floor, accessed by a massive brick staircase. This floor was the primary living space, with the kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms.
Above this main floor was a dusty, cobwebbed, and forbidding attic, haunted by what my mother promised me were squirrels, but what my father insisted were vampire werewolves that would devour any child foolish enough to venture up there. Below the main floor was a more or less finished basement.
My bedroom, which was part of an addition to the house, had a view of the den through a window in what had originally been the exterior wall of the house. This window, which once looked outside, now looked inside.
Though the window had a curtain, it didn’t provide much privacy. From as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was to tug the curtain aside and peek through it into the den. Which is to say, from as far back as I can remember, my favorite activity was spying.
I spied on my older sister, Jessica, who was allowed to stay up later than I was and watch the cartoons that I was still too young for. I spied on my mother, who’d sit on the couch to fold the laundry while watching the nightly news. But the person I spied on the most was my father, who’d commandeer the den into the wee hours.
My father was in the Coast Guard. He sometimes wore a uniform and sometimes didn’t. He left home early and came home late, often with new gadgets, some of which he’d show me and some of which he’d hide. Which would you be more interested in?
The gadget that most caught my eye arrived one night just after I was supposed to be asleep. I was about to drift off when I heard my father’s footsteps coming down the hall. I stood up on my bed, tugged aside the curtain, and watched. He was holding a mysterious box the size of a shoebox, and he removed from it a beige object that looked like a cinder block. Long black cables snaked out of it like the tentacles of some deep-sea monster from one of my nightmares.
Working slowly and methodically—which was partially his disciplined, engineer’s way of doing everything and partially an attempt to stay quiet—my father untangled the cables and stretched one across the shag carpet from the back of the box to the back of the TV. Then he plugged the other cable into a wall outlet behind the couch.
Suddenly, the TV lit up, and with it my father’s face lit up, too. Normally, he spent his evenings sitting on the couch, cracking sodas and watching the people on TV run around a field, but this was different. My father was controlling what was happening on TV.
I had come face-to-face with a Commodore 64—one of the first home computer systems on the market.
At the time, I had no idea what a computer was, as they were not yet widespread like they are today. I knew only one thing: Whatever he was doing, I wanted to do it, too.
After that, whenever my father came into the den to break out the beige brick, I’d stand up on my bed, tug away the curtain, and spy on his adventures. One night I was truly confused by what he was doing—was it for fun or was it part of his job?—when I peeked through the window and saw him flying.
My father was piloting his own helicopter right there, right in front of me, in our den, on the TV screen. He took off from a little base, complete with a tiny waving American flag, into a black night sky full of twinkling stars, and then immediately crashed to the ground. He gave a little cry that masked my own, but just when I thought the fun was over, he was right back at the little base again with the tiny flag, taking off one more time.
The game was called Choplifter! and it was thrilling. Again and again the helicopter landed and lifted off as my father tried to rescue a flashing crowd of people and ferry them to safety. That was my earliest sense of my father: He was a hero.
The first time he landed that helicopter intact with a full load of miniature people, he cheered just a little too loud. His head snapped to the window to check whether he’d disturbed me, and he caught me dead in the eyes.
I leaped into bed, pulled up the blanket, and lay perfectly still as my father’s heavy steps approached my room.
He tapped on the window. “It’s past your bedtime, buddy. Are you still up?”
I held my breath. Suddenly he opened the window, reached in, picked me up—blanket and all—and pulled me through into the den. It all happened so quickly, my feet never even touched the carpet.
Before I knew it, I was sitting on my father’s lap as his copilot. I was too excited to realize that the joystick he’d given me wasn’t plugged in. All that mattered was that I was flying alongside my father.
Copyright © 2021 by Edward Snowden.
