I Never Stopped Watching My Back After receiving a trove of documents from the whistleblower, I found myself under surveillance and investigation by the U.S. government

Over six hours that day and eight hours the Snowden interview…

-When we broke for the night I moved the audio files from the memory card of my voice recorder to an encrypted archive on my laptop, along with the notes I had typed. Was I just being paranoid?

In June 2013, when the Snowden story was less than two weeks old, I went on Face the Nation to talk about it. Afterward, leaving the studio While In the back of a cab I pulled out my iPad. The display powered on, then dissolved into static and guttered out. Huh? A few seconds passed and the screen lit up again. White text began to scroll across an all-black background. The text moved too fast for me to take it all in, but I caught a few fragments.

# root:xnu …

# dumping kernel …

# patching file system …

Wait, what? It looked like a Unix terminal window. The word root and the hashtag symbol meant that somehow the device had been placed in super-user mode Someone had taken control of my iPad, blasting through Apple’s security restrictions and acquiring the power to rewrite anything that the operating system could touch. I dropped the tablet on the seat next to me as if it were contagious. I had an impulse to toss it out the window. I must have been mumbling exclamations out loud, because the driver asked me what was wrong. I ignored him and mashed the power button. Watching my iPad turn against me was remarkably unsettling. This sleek little slab of glass and aluminum featured a microphone, cameras on the front and back, and a whole array of internal sensors. An exemplary spy I took a quick mental inventory: No, I had not used the iPad to log in to my online accounts. No, I didn’t keep sensitive notes on there. None of that protected me as much as I wished to believe. For one thing, this was not a novice hacking attempt. Breaking into an iPad remotely, without a wired connection, requires scarce and perishable tools. Apple closes holes in its software as fast as it finds them. New vulnerabilities are in high demand by sophisticated criminals and intelligence agencies.

-Someone had devoted resources to the project of breaking into my machine. I did not understand how my adversary had even found the iPad. If intruders had located this device, I had to assume that they could find my phone, too, as well as any computer I used to access the internet. I was not meant to see the iPad do what it had just done; I had just lucked into seeing it. If I hadn’t, I would have thought it was working normally. It would not have been working for me.

-This was the first significant intrusion into my digital life—that I knew of. It was far from the last. In the first days of 2014, an NSA whistleblower, Tom Drake, told me he had received an invitation from one of my email addresses, asking him to join me for a chat in Google Hangouts. It looked exactly like an authentic notice from Google, but Drake had the presence of mind to check whether the invitation had really come from me. It had not. An impostor posing as me wanted to talk with Drake.

-Shortly after that, Google started refusing my login credentials on two accounts. An error message popped up in my mail client: “Too many simultaneous connections.” I looked under the hood and found that most of the connections came from IP addresses I did not recognize. On the Gmail page, a pink alert bar appeared at the top, reading, “Warning: We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer. Protect yourself now.” Which state sponsor? Per company policy, Google will not say, fearing that information could enable evasion of its security protocols. I did some further reporting and later learned from confidential sources that the would-be intruder in my accounts was Turkey’s national intelligence service, the Millî Istihbarat Teşkilatı. Even though I never send anything confidential over email, this was terrible news. A dozen foreign countries had to have greater motive and wherewithal to go after the NSA documents Snowden had shared with me—Russia, China, Israel, North Korea, and Iran, for starters. If Turkey was trying to hack me too, the threat landscape was more crowded than I’d feared. Some of the hackers were probably better than Turkey’s—maybe too good to be snared by Google’s defenses. Not encouraging.

-The MacBook Air I used for everyday computing seemed another likely target. I sent a forensic image of its working memory to a leading expert on the security of the Macintosh operating system. He found unexpected daemons running on my machine,

-In January 2014, I became an early adopter of SecureDrop, an anonymous, encrypted communications system for sources and journalists.

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