The existence of a drone program was a secret. The legal justification for the drone program was a secret. It was a secret that through a program called SOMALGET the National Security Agency was recording and archiving the content of every single cell phone conversation in Afghanistan, and it remains unknown what percentage of conversations in Pakistan. It was a secret that algorithms then combed through these conversations and routed concerning ones to linguists, who gisted—paraphrased—anything that seemed important. It was not much of a secret, however, to the men on whom they eavesdropped. They knew America was listening, just as they knew that the high-pitched drones above them transmitted video data back to the States, a long-running film of their daily lives. In western Pakistan, men got high on khat over lunch and told dirty jokes while she listened.
My friend's toddler calls shadows "zero" things; the shadow of a hippo is a "zero hippo," the shadow of herself "zero me." A zero America precedes even the name, but after 2001, government in secret was unfathomably well funded. Much of it remains literally hidden: in bunkers underground or in the vast underground netherworld of dystopian Crystal City. But much is hidden by virtue of its ability to blend into a corporate landscape too dull to take in: glassy buildings you float past without processing their existence, mile-long office parks behind straight lines of spindly trees. They have names such as "National Business Park" and "L-3 Communications," names that in their intentional forgettability oppose the purpose of naming; often there is no exterior signage of any kind. Sometimes they are siloed in clusters of bland buildings, but the secret state also dispersed itself amidst extant office buildings. There are floors of D.C. buildings not listed in the lobby's directory. Government agencies few Americans had heard of spent amounts of money few could fathom; the National Geospatial Agency built itself a $1.8 billion facility in the bland suburb of Springfield, Virginia, that, in the literalism prevalent in so much public art and architecture, looked from above—or from a drone—like a giant eye. The head of the Army's intelligence school described all this new construction as being "on the order of the pyramids," but the pyramids are spread over a much smaller geographic area. The "alternative architecture" of secret America, as journalist Dana Priest calls it, extends from D.C. to Tampa to Indianapolis to Salt Lake City to San Antonio and beyond, in landscapes so dull as to seem staged: office parks with ghostly Starbucks and unused gyms flanked by extended-stay hotels. Each secret program established by the government was serviced by an army of contractors hawking technical skills, language skills, data entry; each CEO well aware that a seemingly limitless amount of money was available and oversight nonexistent.
