The NSA dominated headlines this week after The Intercept published agency documents on June 5 that detailed Russian efforts to hack the 2016 election. An hour after the story went live, the FBI arrested Reality Winner, an intelligence contractor and the alleged source of the leaked report. Winner, who may be released on bond on Thursday, is expected to plead not guilty to charges of “removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.”

Photos of Winner, a 25-year-old woman who lives in Augusta, Georgia, are circulating widely. So is the official photo of the NSA campus in Fort Meade, Maryland—one of the most striking architectural images of the moment. It is a reminder that the built environment of the security state has taken dark turns over the last 30 years.

National Security Agency
National Security Agency - All that is known about this photo for sure is that it was taken after 1986. The Headquarters Building for the National Security Agency is the one in the back, a modest nine-story structure that resembles an anonymous apartment complex. It was completed in 1963; the lower, mall-shaped building, Operations Building 1, predates it by a decade. The more prominent towers—a pair of blue-black boxes, Operations 2A and 2B, clad in copper to block electromagnetic signals, like a Faraday cage—were finished in 1986. ... The hundreds of cars parked around the building stand in for the thousands of intelligence workers inside—the serfs of the deep state, as it were. The photo anonymizes them: It’s not possible to make out the make or model of most of the vehicles, much less any information about the lives of the employees who drive them. Dots of colors of vehicles reflected in the mirrored building envelope betray nothing about what happens inside. Fort Meade looks like it might be the end of the earth, an exurb you never hope to have reason to visit. Like the FBI Building, the NSA headquarters is a metaphor for the agency it hosts. © National Security Agency