Permanent Record - Day 27

It was only when Frank repeated this same tape-changing ritual the next night, and the night after that, and on every night we worked together thereafter, that I began to understand why the agency kept him around—and it wasn’t just for his sense of humor. Frank was the only guy willing to stick around between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. who was also old enough to know how to handle that proprietary (专用的) tape system. All the other techs who’d come up in the dark ages when tape was the medium now had families and preferred to be home with them at night. But Frank was a bachelor and remembered the world before the Enlightenment.

After I found a way to automate most of my own work—writing scripts to automatically update servers and restore lost network connections, mostly—I started having what I came to call a Frank amount of time. Meaning, I had all night to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I passed a fair number of hours in long talks with Frank, especially about the more political stuff he was reading: books about how the country should return to the gold standard*, or about the intricacies (复杂) of the flat tax*. But there were always periods of every shift when Frank would disappear. He’d either put his head into a whodunit novel* and not lift it until morning, or he’d go strolling the halls of the agency, hitting the cafeteria for a lukewarm (微温的) slice of pizza or the gym to lift weights. I had my own way of keeping to myself, of course. I went online.

Gold standard 金本位制，中央银行必须持有足够的黄金储备来支持其发行的货币。经典的例子是二战后建立的“布雷顿森林体系”：每盎司黄金固定兑换35美元，其他成员国货币再与美元挂钩。该体系于1971年被尼克松政府废除，各国从此进入“法定货币”Fiat Money 时代。

对于Frank这样的自由意志主义者来说，“回归金本位”不仅仅是一个经济政策提议，更是一种意识形态宣言。这代表他们极度不信任政府和中央银行体系，认为现行的法定货币体系是一个巨大的骗局，是政府无限扩张权力的工具，渴望一种超越政治操纵的、客观的货币锚点。

Flat tax 单一税，是对所有纳税人，不论收入高低，都适用同一个税率。
Whodunit = Who + done + it，侦探小说

When you go online at the CIA, you have to check a box for a Consent to Monitoring Agreement, which basically says that everything you do is being recorded and that you agree that you have no expectation of any privacy whatsoever. You end up checking this box so often that it becomes second nature. These agreements become invisible to you when you’re working at the agency, because they pop up constantly and you’re always trying to just click them down and get back to what you were doing. This, to my mind, is a major reason why most IC workers don’t share civilian concerns about being tracked online: not because they have any insider information about how digital surveillance helps to protect America, but because to those in the IC, being tracked by the boss just comes with the job.

Anyway, it’s not like there’s a lot to be found out there on the public Internet that’s more interesting than what the agency already has internally. Few realize this, but the CIA has its own Internet and Web. It has its own kind of Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia, which provides agents with information about agency teams, projects, and missions; and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network. Every CIA component has its own website on this network that discusses what it does and posts meeting minutes and presentations. For hours and hours every night, this was my education.

According to Frank, the first things everyone looks up on the CIA’s internal networks are aliens and 9/11, and that’s why, also according to Frank, you’ll never get any meaningful search results for them. I looked them up anyway. The CIA-flavored Google didn’t return anything interesting for either, but hey—maybe the truth was out there on another network drive (局域网内的网盘). For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence. But Al-Qaeda (基地组织) did maintain unusually close ties with our allies the Saudis (沙特), a fact that the Bush White House worked suspiciously hard to suppress as we went to war with two other countries (指伊拉克和阿富汗).

Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didn’t quite understand at the time, and that no major American employer outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: the computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The higher up this employee is, and the more systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to virtually every byte of his employer’s digital existence. Of course, not everyone is curious enough to take advantage of this education, and not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity. My forays (short visit) through the CIA’s systems were natural extensions of my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit together into the whole. And with the official title and privileges of a systems administrator, and technical prowess (great ability or skill) that enabled my clearance to be used to its maximum potential, I was able to satisfy my every informational deficiency and then some (远不止于此). In case you were wondering: Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails* are not a thing.

Chemtrails= chemical + contrails（飞行云/凝结尾迹）。它指的是一个阴谋论，即飞机在高空飞过时产生的尾迹并非正常的凝结尾迹，而是含有化学或生物制剂的秘密喷洒物。

阴谋论者认为，政府（或其他秘密组织）正在通过飞机秘密喷洒这些物质，以达到诸如：控制天气（气候工程），进行人群心理或生理控制，抑制人口增长，毒害人类或环境等不可告人的目的。科学界和官方机构普遍否认此说法。飞机尾迹主要是凝结尾迹，是飞机发动机排出的热湿废气与高空冷空气相遇时，水蒸气凝结成的冰晶云，是完全正常的自然现象。

On the CIA’s internal news sites I read top secret dispatches (急件) regarding trade talks and coups (政变) as they were still unfolding. These agency accounts of events were often very similar to the accounts that would eventually show up on network news, CNN, or Fox days later. The primary differences were merely in the sourcing and the level of detail. Whereas a newspaper or magazine account of an upheaval (剧变) abroad might be attributed to “a senior official speaking on condition of anonymity,” the CIA version would have explicit sourcing—say, “ZBSMACKTALK/1, an employee of the interior ministry (内政部) who regularly responds to specific tasking, claims secondhand knowledge, and has proven reliable in the past.” And the true name and complete personal history of ZBSMACKTALK/1, called a case file, would be only a few clicks away.

Sometimes an internal news item would never show up in the media at all, and the excitement and significance of what I was reading both increased my appreciation of the importance of our work and made me feel like I was missing out by just sitting at a workstation. This may come off as naive, but I was surprised to learn how truly international the CIA was—and I don’t mean its operations, I mean its workforce. The number of languages I heard in the cafeteria was astounding. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of my own provincialism (地方主义，眼界狭隘). Working at CIA Headquarters was a thrill, but it was still only a few hours away from where I’d grown up, which in many ways was a similar environment. I was in my early twenties and, apart from stints (短暂停留) in North Carolina (童年住的地方), childhood trips to visit my grandfather at Coast Guard bases where he’d held commands, and my few weeks in the army at Fort Benning, I’d never really left the Beltway.

As I read about events happening in Ouagadougou (西非布基纳法索, 瓦加杜古), Kinshasa (中非刚果, 金沙萨), and other exotic cities I could never have found on a noncomputerized map, I realized that as long as I was still young I had to serve my country by doing something truly meaningful abroad. The alternative, I thought, was just becoming a more successful Frank: sitting at progressively bigger desks, making progressively more money, until eventually I, too, would be obsolesced (淘汰) and kept around only to handle the future’s equivalent of a janky tape machine.

It was then that I did the unthinkable. I set about going govvy.

I think some of my supervisors were puzzled by this, but they were also flattered, because the typical route is the reverse: a public servant at the end of their tenure (任期) goes private and cashes in. No tech contractor just starting out goes public and takes a pay cut. To my mind, however, becoming a govvy was logical: I’d be getting paid to travel.

I got lucky, and a position opened up. After nine months as a systems administrator, I applied for a CIA tech job abroad, and in short order (迅速地) I was accepted.

My last day at CIA Headquarters was just a formality. I’d already done all my paperwork and traded in my green badge for a blue. All that was left to do was to sit through another indoctrination, which now that I was a govvy was held in an elegant conference room next to the cafeteria’s Dunkin’ Donuts. It was here that I performed the sacred rite in which contractors never participate. I raised my hand to swear an oath of loyalty—not to the government or agency that now employed me directly, but to the US Constitution. I solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The next day, I drove my trusty old Honda Civic out into the Virginia countryside. In order to get to the foreign station of my dreams, I first had to go back to school—to the first sit-in-a-classroom schooling I’d ever really finish.