September 11th happened when I was 18 years old. And it was one of those things that really changes the politics not only of the people but of the place. And at the time, I didn’t really question that. It just seemed like, you know, we had this new problem. Everybody on TV is saying we can deal with it. And when everybody else was protesting the Iraq War, I was volunteering to join it. And that’s because I believed the things that the government was saying — not all of them, of course, but I believed that the government was mostly honest, because it seemed to me unreasonable that the government would be willing to risk sort of our long-term faith in the institution of government for short-term political advantage. As I said, I was a very young man.
And I ended up going to work for the CIA undercover overseas out in the diplomatic platforms. Then I moved into contracting, which is really — you’re still working for the government, in government offices, taking the directives from government managers, working on government equipment, but the badge that you wear that identifies you changes from blue to green — the color of money, because most people go into contracting still working for the government in these classified spaces because you make basically twice as much for the same work. And then I worked in Japan for the NSA, before eventually bouncing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until I ended up in Hawaii in a little place called the Office of Information Sharing.
And it was only here — and I was the sole employee of the Office of Information Sharing; they didn’t realize how good I would be at that
— source democracynow.org | Dec 24, 2021