Not only had the Soviet Union—the chief object of the NSA’s spying, and its raison d’etre—disappeared from the map, but now the agency also realized that the main threat was going to be “super-empowered” individuals—terrorists—who might be talking on cell phones or computers anywhere on earth. Above all, these new bad guys were using private technology, rather than the sort of intra-government communications systems that the NSA used to monitor in the Soviet Union or China.

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In a period of a decade or so, Hayden said, the agency went “from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an al-Qaida member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting-edge.”

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