Our Connected World and the Unseen Legacies of 9/11

Tom Drake arrived at work on his first day as a full-time employee of the National Security Agency before sunrise on a cool, clear morning: September 11, 2001. As he shadowed the NSA’s director of signals intelligence in a briefing about a new $4 billion plan, codenamed Trailblazer, that would better apply the agency’s spying to the Internet, an aide opened a door and interrupted with news: A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Minutes later, the aide returned. The south tower had been hit, too.