This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

In 2010, Perlroth was recruited to work as the lead cybersecurity journalist for the New York Times due to her engaging writing style and her work covering Silicon Valley corporations for Forbes magazine. In 2013, the NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked confidential documents about the US government’s domestic espionage activities to journalists in an effort to hold government agencies accountable for widespread invasions of privacy and violations of civil liberties. The British newspaper The Guardian enlisted the New York Times to assist in analyzing the leaked documents and to place pressure on government factions opposed to the publication of this information. 

Perlroth and several colleagues worked on the project in intense secrecy and under a strict nondisclosure agreement; they could only access hard copies of the documents while they were confined to a windowless storage closet. The documents showed that the NSA had been investing huge amounts of money into digital espionage and compiling massive quantities of metadata and personal information by indiscriminately wiretapping and hacking the devices of American citizens. The documents contained numerous references to “zero-days”; in terms of software, this phrase refers to critical security vulnerabilities that are unknown to the manufacturer and are therefore exposed to exploitation by