21°19'N, 157°50'W, Honolulu, Hawaii-State, USA, 19:40 Hawaii time.

In a luxury apartment by the sea, Edward Snowden had just gotten off work and turned on his computer a little tiredly.

His girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, was preparing a sumptuous dinner when the smell of grilled steak wafted from the kitchen to the study, causing him to be a little hungry.

He is a man with a lot of temperament and demeanor, and his tired look does not weaken his temperament by half a point, but adds some of his charming taste to attract the opposite sex.

With the sound of the computer motherboard fan "buzzing", he sat down at the computer desk, leaned back relaxedly, leaned back on the back of the black leather swivel chair, the back of his neck rested on the top of the back of the chair, and looked at the light shells inlaid on the rococo-style ceiling above his head, and let out a long breath.

As an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Allen & Co., he has been working for the NSA for a year, and his daily work is simply torture for him, because what he does every day is a kind of desecration of his inner convictions.

He couldn't stand it, he felt pain, he tried to struggle, but he couldn't find any hope of success.

Whether it is the NSA, Booz Allen Allen, or even the CIA before it, and even the intelligence agencies among those allies of the United States, they are all behemoths, powerful, ruthless, and impersonal. They were like a big net, tightly wrapped in Snowden, unable to move or breathe.

More than once, he was awakened in a dream by the muzzle of the black hole sent by these behemoths to send agents, and he was scared to sweat profusely, but fortunately he fell asleep again under the gentle comfort of his girlfriend Lindsay.

However, the frequency of such scenes is increasing day by day.

He was in real pain.

The computer has been booted up, the LIUNX login shell (system interactive interface) appeared in front of him, he successfully logged in as a superuser with the account he had set up, and typed a few commands after the # prompt to open the GUIN (graphical user interface) XWindow of LIUNX.

"Ding-dong......"

A new email prompt sounded, and Snowden opened the email program, logged into his email account, and found that the email came from a secret account of his.

His eyelids jumped, and he had a faint sense of foreboding.

This secret email account was created by him for some kind of consideration, and the security is quite high, and there are very few people who know about this account, there is no need, and no one will send emails to this account.

As soon as an email comes in, it means that something big has happened.

But who was sending the email? He didn't get any news at all, he was completely unprepared.

He scrutinized the header of the email, tracing the IP address of the server through which the email passed, but the end result made him more and more uneasy.

Because this email has gone through at least 20 springboards, including those of the deep web and the public network, several of which are even hidden in the massive exchange data and transmitted encrypted in the form of data redundancy. This makes it almost impossible to trace the email from address.

He took more and more care to drag the email to a sandbox mirror system, turned on multiple anti-virus and security software, and ran the security script he wrote to make sure that nothing went wrong, and then opened the email in the mirror system.

All he could see was a mess of gibberish. However, in his hands, these garbled characters were quickly recompiled and transformed into lines of text.

He was able to compile the garbled characters with ease because the email was encrypted in a unique way that only he knew. This type of encryption is known only to a few people. But before everyone's email is sent, they will add their own code code to the email. The email, however, was coded by no one he knew, but another unknown codename, compiled and called "The Monitored".

Obviously, this is a name with irony in it.

And the content of the email shocked Snowden even more: Mr. Snowden, I think, you need help. If you still don't accept Plan P, I'd love to get you in touch.

Below is a temporary IP address and login password. The following is marked with a sentence: Please log in within five minutes, and do not wait for the obsolete.

Seeing the words of Plan P, Snowden couldn't help but stand up, because of the excessive force, the swivel chair behind him "plopped" and fell to the ground, causing Lindsay in the kitchen to ask: "Honey, what happened?"

"Nothing!" just accidentally knocked over the chair...... Snowden said quickly.

"Oh, My-Dear, you have to be careful. Lin Track, who is busy: "I have to learn to take care of myself when I am not there." ”

"OKOK, I understand......"

Snowden fell silent for a moment after prevaricating his girlfriend, hesitating to go to that IP address. Project P is his abbreviation for PRISM, which the NSA and CIA call are officially US-984XN, not just the initials of the word PRISM.

Then, before his eyes, the entire email file disappeared in the sandbox image.

He hurriedly logged in to the mail server, only to find that the email had disappeared without a trace, not even leaving any trace, and there was no record in the system log, as if the email had never existed.

Not only that, but even the body of the letter that he recompiled in the sandbox image is gone.

Fortunately, he had just written down the IP address and account password. This is his talent for numbers and passwords, otherwise he would not have been able to successfully join the CIA and NSA as a computer and cryptography expert with a degree that he did not get a high school diploma.

Snowden is sure that the sandbox image cannot be connected to the outside network, because when he opened the sandbox image before, he completely cut off the network connection of his computer, and it is impossible for anyone to control the self-destruction of the email through the network.

The only possibility is that the email contains a control code that he was unable to discover, and when the time is up, it will be automatically destroyed.

However, even when the encryption rules are mastered by themselves, who is so powerful that his control code can still play a role after encryption and decryption, or can it play a role in a simulated environment like a sandbox image?

Snowden knows all too well how technical this is. He didn't even understand what the principle of this technology was. With his current level of technology, no matter how advanced the computer technology on this planet is, at least he can still understand the principle. Could it be that this letter is from a mysterious alien? How else could it have reached such an extent?

To go or not?

He only hesitated for ten seconds, and then immediately decided.

Such technology, as a technology fanatic, he will never let go.

He then opened the Tor browser and, through the multiple springboards, logged into that address.

Tor browser is the onion head browser, which belongs to one of the deep web entrances, is an anonymous access to the network software, can communicate anonymously on the Internet through Tor, in order to achieve the purpose of anonymity, it will be scattered around the world of computers and together to form an encrypted loop.

And Snowden is quite supportive of Internet freedom organizations, including this browser. Its security and secrecy also earned Snowden his trust.

This is a temporary web chat room. The chat room will not record any visitors' IP addresses as well as any chat logs.

Seeing this, Snowden was somewhat relieved. However, before chatting in advance, he scanned the external link to the chat room to make sure that only he was connected to another unknown visitor and that all data was sent in encrypted terms.

Tourist.w54sfg-3: Hello, Mr. S, welcome to the world of the monitored.

Tourist.w54SFG-3 renamed "Monitored".

Tourist _s6gh56#^ renamed to "Freedom Network"

Freedom Network: Hello.

Monitored: Freedom Network, I know you have a lot of questions, but that's okay, I'll explain it to you slowly.

Freedom Network: You name it.

Monitored: I know you work for the NSA, and I think you should understand that the NSA has a big plan, which they call Project Prism. You don't like that, do you?

Freedom Network: Why do you say that? I'm a qualified employee.

Monitored: Of course I have to say that. And you also know that in 2008, when you were working in Geneva as a CIA technical employee, you were criticized by your boss for being suspected of leaking secrets. Since then, you've been sick of these guys who monitor and steal private information.

Freedom Network: Did you investigate me?

Monitored: This is just a kind of insurance measure for future partners.

Freedom Network: Why should I work with you?

Monitored: Because you don't have a choice. Isn't it?

Freedom Network: What exactly do you mean?

Monitored: Quite simply, I don't like it. I'm a geek who specializes mainly in the field of computing. But some time ago, I accidentally discovered that my private information was being monitored. And when I checked all the way, I found out that it was actually a behemoth that monitored me: the NSA. Moreover, I also found out the big plan of this behemoth: Project Prism. Their ambition and unbridled brazenness made me hard-sighted.

Monitored: So, obviously, there's only one thing I can do.

Freedom Network: Are you a geek, not a hacker? or a hacker?

Monitored: That's right, I'm not. Because I never invade. When I first started learning about computers and networks, I vowed to maintain the freedom and security of the Internet and computers, and never hack into other people's computers. Recently, of course, this precept was broken. However, I never hacked into companies and private computers, but government departments such as the NSA and CIA, which do not take personal privacy and Internet freedom seriously. I think this is not an invasion of his "human" computer, but a fight against cyber power and hegemony.