What He Knew
The engineer saw the machine from the inside.
Revelation || Truth || History
Her father had fourteen months of conversations to compress into the hours they had in that federal conference room, with Diaz present for the official parts and gone for the rest. He was methodical about it — an engineer’s approach to an engineer’s problem — and what he told her filled in the last gaps of the picture with the finality of pieces found at the bottom of a puzzle box. The original program had been monitoring infrastructure: power grids, communications networks, water systems. Legitimate national security functions in a Cold War context. What had made it problematic was the human component: the surveillance of individuals who lived and worked near the installations, initiated in 1987 as a “proximity security protocol” and never discontinued. By the early nineties, the data collected on those individuals — their communications, their behaviors, their patterns — had acquired sufficient commercial value that private actors had recognized the opportunity.
The privatization had not been a corporate takeover. It had been more elegant than that: key individuals within the original program had, gradually, over several years, established private entities through which they could monetize the data collection without technically ceasing to be government contractors. The program existed simultaneously in both domains — federal and private — in a way that made accountability for either domain almost impossible to establish. “Almost,” her father said. He looked at his hands, which had built some of this. “You found the seam,” he said. “Patricia found it. James found it. You found it again.” She said: “You found it first.” He was quiet for a while. “I found it,” he said. “I ran.” She started to say something. He looked at her. “I know,” he said. “I know.”