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Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
A breakdown of the cache of NSA-intercepted communications provided to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.
Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.
No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.
A composite image of two of the more than 5,000 private photos among data collected by the National Security Agency from online accounts and network links in the United States. The images were included in a large cache of NSA intercepts provided by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. (Images obtained by The Washington Post)
Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
“None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance. “No additional information,” writes a civilian analyst. Another makes fun of a suspected kidnapper, newly arrived in Syria before the current civil war, who begs for employment as a janitor and makes wide-eyed observations about the state of undress displayed by women on local beaches.
By law, the NSA may “target” only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based on probable cause from a special surveillance court. For collection under PRISM and Upstream rules, analysts must state a reasonable belief that the target has information of value about a foreign government, a terrorist organization or the spread of nonconventional weapons.
Most of the people caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as such. “Incidental collection” of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, but in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. In criminal wiretaps, for example, the FBI is supposed to stop listening to a call if a suspect’s wife or child is using the phone.
There are many ways to be swept up incidentally in surveillance aimed at a valid foreign target. Some of those in the Snowden archive were monitored because they interacted directly with a target, but others had more-tenuous links.
If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply “lurked,” reading passively what other people wrote.
“1 target, 38 others on there,” one analyst wrote. She collected data on them all.
In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people.
The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers. Raj De, the agency’s general counsel, has testified that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.
The Obama administration declines to discuss the scale of incidental collection. The NSA, backed by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., has asserted that it is unable to make any estimate, even in classified form, of the number of Americans swept in. It is not obvious why the NSA could not offer at least a partial count, given that its analysts routinely pick out “U.S. persons” and mask their identities, in most cases, before distributing intelligence reports.
If Snowden’s sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 “transparency report,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year’s collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden’s sample, the office’s figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
U.S. intelligence officials declined to confirm or deny in general terms the authenticity of the intercepted content provided by Snowden, but they made off-the-record requests to withhold specific details that they said would alert the targets of ongoing surveillance. Some officials, who declined to be quoted by name, described Snowden’s handling of the sensitive files as reckless.
In an interview, Snowden said “primary documents” offered the only path to a concrete debate about the costs and benefits of Section 702 surveillance. He did not favor public release of the full archive, he said, but he did not think a reporter could understand the programs “without being able to review some of that surveillance, both the justified and unjustified.”
“While people may disagree about where to draw the line on publication, I know that you and The Post have enough sense of civic duty to consult with the government to ensure that the reporting on and handling of this material causes no harm,” he said.
In Snowden’s view, the PRISM and Upstream programs have “crossed the line of proportionality.”
“Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love letters of innocent bystanders,” he added, “their continued storage in government databases is both troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?”
For close to a year, NSA and other government officials have appeared to deny, in congressional testimony and public statements, that Snowden had any access to the material.
As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.
“He didn’t get this data,” Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. “They didn’t touch —”
“The operational data?” the reporter asked.
“They didn’t touch the FISA data,” Alexander replied. He added, “That database, he didn’t have access to.”
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about “raw” intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.
“We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic, the training that people have to have, the technological lockdowns on access,” Litt said. “Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.”
In the interview, Snowden said he did not need to circumvent those controls, because his final position as a contractor for Booz Allen at the NSA’s Hawaii operations center gave him “unusually broad, unescorted access to raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] under a special ‘Dual Authorities’ role,” a reference to Section 702 for domestic collection and Executive Order 12333 for collection overseas. Those credentials, he said, allowed him to search stored content — and “task” new collection — without prior approval of his search terms.
“If I had wanted to pull a copy of a judge’s or a senator’s e-mail, all I had to do was enter that selector into XKEYSCORE,” one of the NSA’s main query systems, he said.
The NSA has released an e-mail exchange acknowledging that Snowden took the required training classes for access to those systems.
At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
More than 1,000 distinct “minimization” terms appear in the files, attempting to mask the identities of “possible,” “potential” and “probable” U.S. persons, along with the names of U.S. beverage companies, universities, fast-food chains and Web-mail hosts.
Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years.
Even so, unmasked identities remain in the NSA’s files, and the agency’s policy is to hold on to “incidentally” collected U.S. content, even if it does not appear to contain foreign intelligence.
In one exchange captured in the files, a young American asks a Pakistani friend in late 2009 what he thinks of the war in Afghanistan. The Pakistani replies that it is a religious struggle against 44 enemy states.
Startled, the American says “they, ah, they arent heavily participating . . . its like . . . in a football game, the other team is the enemy, not the other teams waterboy and cheerleaders.”
“No,” the Pakistani shoots back. “The ther teams water boy is also an enemy. it is law of our religion.”
“haha, sorry thats kind of funny,” the American replies.
When NSA and allied analysts really want to target an account, their concern for U.S. privacy diminishes. The rationales they use to judge foreignness sometimes stretch legal rules or well-known technical facts to the breaking point.
In their classified internal communications, colleagues and supervisors often remind the analysts that PRISM and Upstream collection have a “lower threshold for foreignness ‘standard of proof’ ” than a traditional surveillance warrant from a FISA judge, requiring only a “reasonable belief” and not probable cause.
One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans. Others are allowed to presume that anyone on the chat “buddy list” of a known foreign national is also foreign.
In many other cases, analysts seek and obtain approval to treat an account as “foreign” if someone connects to it from a computer address that seems to be overseas. “The best foreignness explanations have the selector being accessed via a foreign IP address,” an NSA supervisor instructs an allied analyst in Australia.
Apart from the fact that tens of millions of Americans live and travel overseas, additional millions use simple tools called proxies to redirect their data traffic around the world, for business or pleasure. World Cup fans this month have been using a browser extension called Hola to watch live-streamed games that are unavailable from their own countries. The same trick is routinely used by Americans who want to watch BBC video. The NSA also relies routinely on locations embedded in Yahoo tracking cookies, which are widely regarded by online advertisers as unreliable.
In an ordinary FISA surveillance application, the judge grants a warrant and requires a fresh review of probable cause — and the content of collected surveillance — every 90 days. When renewal fails, NSA and allied analysts sometimes switch to the more lenient standards of PRISM and Upstream.
“These selectors were previously under FISA warrant but the warrants have expired,” one analyst writes, requesting that surveillance resume under the looser standards of Section 702. The request was granted.
She was 29 and shattered by divorce, converting to Islam in search of comfort and love. He was three years younger, rugged and restless. His parents had fled Kabul and raised him in Australia, but he dreamed of returning to Afghanistan.
One day when she was sick in bed, he brought her tea. Their faith forbade what happened next, and later she recalled it with shame.
“what we did was evil and cursed and may allah swt MOST merciful forgive us for giving in to our nafs [desires]”
Still, a romance grew. They fought. They spoke of marriage. They fought again.
All of this was in the files because, around the same time, he went looking for the Taliban.
He found an e-mail address on its English-language Web site and wrote repeatedly, professing loyalty to the one true faith, offering to “come help my brothers” and join the fight against the unbelievers.
On May 30, 2012, without a word to her, he boarded a plane to begin a journey to Kandahar. He left word that he would not see her again.
If that had been the end of it, there would not be more than 800 pages of anguished correspondence between them in the archives of the NSA and its counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate.
He had made himself a target. She was the collateral damage, placed under a microscope as she tried to adjust to the loss.
Three weeks after he landed in Kandahar, she found him on Facebook.
“Im putting all my pride aside just to say that i will miss you dearly and your the only person that i really allowed myself to get close to after losing my ex husband, my dad and my brother.. Im glad it was so easy for you to move on and put what we had aside and for me well Im just soo happy i met you. You will always remain in my heart. I know you left for a purpose it hurts like hell sometimes not because Im needy but because i wish i could have been with you.”
His replies were cool, then insulting, and gradually became demanding. He would marry her but there were conditions. She must submit to his will, move in with his parents and wait for him in Australia. She must hand him control of her Facebook account — he did not approve of the photos posted there.
She refused. He insisted:
“look in islam husband doesnt touch girl financial earnigs unless she agrees but as far as privacy goes there is no room….i need to have all ur details everything u do its what im supposed to know that will guide u whether its right or wrong got it”
Later, she came to understand the irony of her reply:
“I don’t like people knowing my private life.”
Months of negotiations followed, with each of them declaring an end to the romance a dozen times or more. He claimed he had found someone else and planned to marry that day, then admitted it was a lie. She responded:
“No more games. You come home. You won’t last with an afghan girl.”
She begged him to give up his dangerous path. Finally, in September, she broke off contact for good, informing him that she was engaged to another man.
“When you come back they will send you to jail,” she warned.
They almost did.
In interviews with The Post, conducted by telephone and Facebook, she said he flew home to Australia last summer, after failing to find members of the Taliban who would take him seriously. Australian National Police met him at the airport and questioned him in custody. They questioned her, too, politely, in her home. They showed her transcripts of their failed romance. When a Post reporter called, she already knew what the two governments had collected about her.
Eventually, she said, Australian authorities decided not to charge her failed suitor with a crime. Police spokeswoman Emilie Lovatt declined to comment on the case.
Looking back, the young woman said she understands why her intimate correspondence was recorded and parsed by men and women she did not know.
“Do I feel violated?” she asked. “Yes. I’m not against the fact that my privacy was violated in this instance, because he was stupid. He wasn’t thinking straight. I don’t agree with what he was doing.”
What she does not understand, she said, is why after all this time, with the case long closed and her own job with the Australian government secure, the NSA does not discard what it no longer needs.
Jennifer Jenkins and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — She is a disheveled woman, hair mussed, upper teeth gone, muddy walking cane taped together. But in the Jungle, Maria Esther Salazar is a person to be reckoned with.
Her shelter, supported by tree branches, is a gathering place. Inside, friends huddle around a folding table in armchairs, smoking pot, dozing, sharing stories, arguing. Outside, they squat by her cooking fire frying pancakes or warming soup, handouts from Sunday church groups. Her son Bobby lives with his girlfriend just a few tents away. Her weed connection has coffee ready for her in the morning at his tent.
It’s easy to forget that the geeks and Web entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are making their millions just miles away. In the mile-square Jungle — believed to be the nation’s largest homeless encampment — Salazar and hundreds of others live in tents, makeshift shacks, caves and tree houses along polluted Coyote Creek, spending their days and nights under tarps or blankets, in various states of mental confusion and intoxication.
Salazar has been either homeless, in jail, or squatting at someone else’s house for 30 years. But that may be about to change.
On a cool Tuesday morning in February, Salazar limps out of her fenced compound. A passing social worker, a city homeless coordinator and a psychologist are making their weekly rounds.
“Hey you,” she shouts, her voice gravelly beyond her 50 years. “You’re supposed to be helping me.”
They have no answer for her. But when the social worker returns to her desk, she finds the news she had been waiting for: in a county with a seven-year, 20,000-person waiting list she’d never top, Salazar had finally qualified for housing support: a new locally funded, $1,295 monthly subsidy aimed at ending chronic homelessness awaited her.
Now Maria Esther Salazar, a woman with a criminal record, two dogs, no phone and no identification has to find an apartment in one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S., or the subsidy could disappear.
And she isn’t sure she wants to leave.
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San Jose, America’s 10th largest city, is at the heart of the Silicon Valley, a region leading the country for job growth, income, innovation and venture capital. Tech giants Google, Apple, Yahoo, eBay, Facebook, Intel and many more call the 1,850 square mile stretch of business parks, small cities and suburbs south of San Francisco home. As tech roars back from the recession, housing costs have soared.
An average home price is $1 million, and two bedroom apartments start at $1,700. The widening gap between the wealthiest and everyone else is palpable. Freeways back up with commuters who work, but cannot afford to live, in the area. There are daily lines at food pantries. Here, according to federal data, you’ll find one of the largest unsheltered populations in the country; homeless people camp on corners, under bridges, along creeks.
Residents of the Jungle are well aware of the affluent world that lies just outside its borders. They call it “going up,” walking the dirt path up to busy Story Road, where fleets of cars, rumbling delivery trucks, packed city buses and minivans of families heading to Happy Hollow Park and Zoo across the street never notice the despair below. It’s just one long block from the city’s municipal ballpark and San Jose State University’s stadium. Less than a mile away, downtown San Jose is booming.
The Jungle is home at times to as many as 350 residents, almost all San Jose locals. Snaking trails wind through trees and bushes, with Spanish-speaking sections and neighborhoods like Little Saigon, where Vietnamese residents have dug large rooms into steep hillsides. They squat by the creek to wash dishes and get water, and stand watch over each other at night.
“I’m blessed because every day is a blessing, but the Jungle is tough,” says longtime resident Shante Thomas. About three months ago she awoke being beaten up: she was stuck in her right eye with a stick and blinded.
There are fenced communes with “Stay Out” signs, a tree house built by an out of work carpenter, hand-dug latrines. And — stretching out toward the freeway in a more open field of what used to be the city dump — a string of severely mentally ill people who burst from their tents screaming and punching at unseen terrors. A man staggers by, bleeding from his ear after being hit with a shovel. A pregnant woman calls for help on the cold dirt under a tarp, her legs too swollen to get up. Some residents have hauled in generators to power televisions and stereos but most use candles and flashlights when the sun goes down.
“We’re like the scum of the earth,” says Salazar. “We’re like nobody.”
The Jungle and several hundred smaller encampments in the region are the consequence of urban sprawl, with large open spaces that are not parks, and thus without rangers. Similar tent cities have sprung up in recent years in places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, where law enforcement evicted 78 residents from self-governed Camp Take Notice in the fall. The 30 residents of Camp Quixote in Olympia, Washington, organized into a non-profit and now live in tiny cottages with a shared kitchen, laundry and showers.
Eventually, environmental and social concerns prompt homeless encampments to be cleaned out or cleaned up. San Jose has swept hundreds of encampments in recent years, and many of those homeless now live in the Jungle, where piles of human waste, cast-off clothing, discarded food and car parts rot. The city’s plan is to clean it out. No one will say exactly when.
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Bicycles, cigarettes and drugs are the key currencies in the Jungle. No one has much cash, and many, like Salazar, subsist on $147 a month in food stamps and another $200 in general assistance.
Pets are crucial in this world, often eating before their owners. There are cats and kittens, dogs large and small, chickens, ducks, even a bunny, Dillon, whose owner pushes him in a stroller watched over by a handsome German shepherd KayKay. Some dogs, like a black, snarling pit bull chained to a tree, occasionally attack, and KayKay gets fierce if anyone messes with the bunny. But most pets, including Salazar’s Chihuahuas, Minneapolis and Chico, spend their days on their owners’ laps or skipping behind their heels as they visit friends and take care of business.
Salazar says she likes the Jungle. It beats jail.
“No one comes down to bother us. No cops or nothing,” she says. “When I’m in jail I worry about my dogs. There’s a lot of stress there. It’s so hectic.”
Salazar has a three-foot high stack of criminal case files at the county courthouse. She’s been arrested more than 35 times, convicted of 17 felonies, almost all drug related.
She was born in Harlingen, Texas; her mother moved her and her seven siblings to San Jose when she was a toddler.
At 11, everything fell apart.
“Kidnap, Sex Offenses: 2 S.J. Men Held On 13 Charges,” read the San Jose News headline
The article describes how “the young victim was picked up, driven to three different locations, and forced at knifepoint to comply with sexual demands” over three days. She remembers seven attackers, repeatedly raping her.
Forty years later, she tears up.
“Now I make a joke about it,” she says softly, smiling and crying at the same time. “I say I’m the president of the man-haters club.”
Salazar avoided people and school for years, started smoking crack at 19, and then began getting arrested, over and over again. Her latest stint, an eight-month sentence for drug possession, ended in January. She moved back into the Jungle, where an ex-boyfriend had cared for her tent and dogs.
Salazar’s had four children but raised none. Her mother or foster parents took them in. Two adult daughters now have kids of their own; one recently became a nurse, another drives a school bus. One is getting married this summer and has invited her mom.
“It’s hard for them to see me now,” said Salazar, but they do visit.
She lost track of one son after child protective services terminated her parental rights while she was in jail. She’d like to find him. Another is her neighbor, who lives in a small tent strewn with jackets and towels, bike rims and chains, rotting plates of pasta.
Salazar has lived, at times, with her daughters. She’s also lived in shelters or with boyfriends.
She’s never worked, she says. “Not a day in my life. Never.”
And she says she never took any welfare, perhaps not realizing her $347 a month in public assistance is just that.
___
For almost two years of drought, the Jungle was virtually rain-free. But that changed in March when heavy storms rolled in one night.
One man fell into the creek and had to be rescued by firefighters. Mud was everywhere, in tents, cooking pots, blankets and clothes. By sunrise, as the first rains tapered, shovels came out and the place was buzzing with people digging trenches to drain tent floors. One man carried a post-hole digger from campsite to campsite, offering services. A woman named Heidi pulled a Boy Scout handbook out of her backpack and realized she needed a tent pole to make a peak, not a valley, with her roof.
Heidi struggled for hours trying to dig a drainage ditch.
“I’m working like a Hebrew slave,” she says, panting as she pauses to chat. “This is the United States of America and we should be helping people a whole lot better than what we’re doing.”
Salazar’s tent was water tight, but she isn’t happy amid the omnipresent trash: torn lingerie, a half-eaten corn cob, a sticky Starbucks cup, molding bread, a dented deodorant aerosol can.
“I’ll be glad to get out of this hell,” she says. “That was a very rough night.”
Window installer Juan Gonzalez, who moved into the Jungle two weeks earlier, takes advantage of the wet soil to cut a staircase into the hillside. He builds banisters with castoff lumber, and stacks pallets on a platform for his tent.
“It’s not so bad,” he says in Spanish. “Everyone takes care of everyone.”
A team of evangelists arrives, passing out bottles of water and plastic bags.
A sopping wet, powerfully built man nicknamed “D” who lives alone on a steep embankment ties a rope to climb up the slick mud.
“Any spot is a good spot as long as you live right,” he says, cooking a mixture of potato chips, Spam, a burrito end and a handful of mushrooms over a fire burning in a hole-punched oil can. His hair is shaved to a diamond point; shell-studded arm bands and a golden rope over his shoulders make him look like a ninja. His socks are drenched. He has no shoes.
“I just don’t like society and everything we are becoming,” he rambles, talking about power and energy, God and humanity. “I will not go up. And I don’t need shoes.”
___
When it comes to solving homelessness, says Jennifer Loving, “We have completely failed.”
Growing up, Loving’s family ran a church in Venice Beach Calif., which served as a shelter for anyone who needed a place to stay; she’s dedicated her life to housing homeless people. For years she tried the traditional model — move someone into a shelter, then transitional housing, and then, if they’re sober and mentally stable, house them.
Now, as executive director of Destination: Home, she is spearheading a new, concerted effort in San Jose to house people, a far cheaper alternative to the rotating circuit from the emergency room to local jail. Studies vary, but the cost of each person living on the street is estimated about $60,000, while the cost of housing someone is about $16,000 a year.
“I know this sounds incredibly obvious,” she said, “but we’re housing them first.”
Once someone has an apartment, a social worker with a relatively low case load is assigned the job of keeping them housed.
In a 24-month pilot, they’ve housed 630 people, 76 percent of whom were still in their home a year after moving in. One man slept in a tent, inside his apartment, for three weeks. Another, an amputee who had been sleeping in a creek bed, stopped making his near-daily trips to the emergency room.
Dozens of cities have seen similar results from Housing First initiatives, including New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta. Now that it’s proving effective in San Jose, Loving is pitching a Silicon Valley disruptive moonshot: $500 million would be enough to house the 2,500 chronically homeless people in the county, she says.
“This is not giving out a blanket and a bowl of soup,” said Loving. “This is solving one of the worst crises we have in the U.S. today.”
___
In April, Salazar’s social worker found a studio apartment for her.
No dogs — no dice.
Then there was a motel room. Salazar said no again.
“I’d just get back into trouble if I stayed right there on the strip where everyone is hustling,” she says.
There was a possibility in Gilroy, a farming town an hour south. Too far, Salazar decided.
She got an extension on her housing voucher, and a bus pass she used to visit the homeless shelter for a shower. She got an identification card for the first time in 13 years but it was stolen two days later. She saw a doctor, got a medical card, made an appointment with the DMV to get her very first driver’s license. She cleaned up her tent and added on with more tarps and construction cast-offs, building a wooden fence with a swinging gate.
“I’ve got a living room here, kitchen here, master bedroom,” she says, pushing tarps aside.
But what about moving out?
“I can’t really see that happening anymore,” she says.
But the Jungle is feeling grim. A man was found dead in his tent. The police came down, and the coroner.
“Can you believe it? There’s his body, right there,” says Salazar, her eyes wide.
___
Rumors spread in May that city authorities are going to sweep the camp. If Salazar’s still there come July, “for reals, I’ll take the first thing I can get.”
She’s still caught up in life in the Jungle. Today is laundry day. This involves filling a shopping cart with four large garbage bags of clothes and blankets, pushing it up a 100 yard dirt hill and along two blocks to the Laundromat where she fills 12 washing machines.
But her life is beginning to change. A psychiatrist has certified Minneapolis and Chico as “therapeutic companion dogs.” She gives away their puppies and starts imagining a home, with furniture and a television, a closet for her shoes.
“All of this is going to be overwhelming for me,” she says, sitting with friends in a tent.
She’s silent for a few minutes, petting the dogs and looking around her books and reading glasses, melting candles. “But I’m sure I can do it.”
A month later, it appears her dreams are about to come true. She whispers urgently that she’s been accepted into an apartment. Her housing voucher will cover all but $20 of the $1,315 a month rent.
She says she’s told no one in the encampment, not even the six friends who are at that moment smoking and drinking, sharing drugs, showing each other their knives, eating pancakes, in one of her two tent rooms.
“I’m scared they’re going to see everything getting packed,” she says. Her white t-shirt and tight jeans are filthy with dirt and food. She has yet another new bicycle, her fifth since February.
Her neighbor in the encampment recently got housed — he put his place up for auction before he left. She doesn’t know what she’ll do with hers.
“I’m kind of scared. I’ve never had to do anything like this in my life,” she said.
She’s never paid her own rent, locked her own door. Signing up for utilities terrifies her.
“I’m going to be in the dark in my apartment. I’m not going to turn the lights on, so I don’t have to spend all my money on an electricity bill,” she says.
She has no plans to work.
“Oh no, this is my retirement. I’m going to kick back now, do grandparent stuff, go to the amusement park.”
Will she miss friends in the encampment?
“I’ve had enough of people to last me a lifetime here in the Jungle,” she says.
___
At 1 p.m. on Friday the 13th of June, Salazar’s social worker is waiting to meet her “up top” with her belongings and dogs. But Salazar, hair clean and wet, mascara thick and in a new, low cut tank dress, isn’t nearly ready. She has four shopping carts loaded with bags, but many more piles of clothes, food, pots and pans, bottles and furniture remained. Chico is missing. And there’s her marijuana, her bong, her joints — could she bring them?
They couldn’t have picked a more perfect moving day — the sky is cloud free, a cool breeze wafts through the Jungle, carrying happy screams and laughter from the roller coaster at Happy Hollow across the street, crowded with school children starting summer vacation.
She scrambles into her social worker’s car with a few bags and Minneapolis, scrambling around her lap, licking her cheeks.
Ten minutes later, but a world away, they pull into Parkside Terrace, a clean, neat two-story apartment complex tucked away from busy streets. Salazar checks out the clubhouse, the park and barbeque areas, fitness center, community playground. The dog rolls on the grass outside the leasing office while Salazar nervously helps herself to cookies and coffee.
She’ll miss the Jungle, she says. “Everybody comes to my house for anything they need. It just so happens everyone shows up when I’m cooking.”
Her social worker and housing specialist James Worley from nonprofit Abode Services explain that $1,295 rent will automatically be paid through a combination of public and private funds. The remaining $20 will be sent from the Santa Clara County General Services Agency out of her account.
A leasing manager explains the apartment rules. Smoking is OK. Pets must be on a leash. No disruptive parties.
Then he hands her the keys.
“I love it! Everything is so white! It’s my favorite color!” says Salazar, bursting into her new home, a second-floor, carpeted, corner apartment. Her social worker carries in a box of bread, cheese, cereal and canned spaghetti, a bucket of cleaning supplies, a twin set of bedding, towels, toiletries, and a “kitchen starter set.”
“I’m going to make everybody take their shoes off when they come to visit,” says Salazar, running her hand over the kitchen counters, stepping in and out of the closet, turning on the tap.
But now it’s time for the social worker to leave. And it’s time for Salazar to move on with her life.
She isn’t ready.
Stepping out of her apartment, she forgets to lock the door. She asks her social worker for a ride back to the Jungle. In 10 minutes she’s back in her tent, passing snacks and smokes around as friends stumble in. She says a friend is asking another friend with a truck to help her move the rest of her stuff. She says she might give her tent and bed away. The hours pass, as they sit around a table strewn with McDonald’s wrappers, rags, ashtrays, dried out carrots, ice tea cans, a half-finished Big Gulp.
She looks at her muddy carpets, and says she’ll need them in her apartment as well, to protect the clean ones. But she’s not planning to leave tonight.
Perhaps she was just more comfortable in the Jungle.
“You know what? Right now I am,” she says. “And now that I have a key, I can come and go over there anytime I want.”
___
A week and a half later, Salazar is spending less and less time in the Jungle. She feels safer at the apartment, but it took a while to settle in.
“I don’t know how I did it,” she says. “That Jungle was just in me.”
Why, Salazar is asked, is the government housing her, feeding her, providing her with her psychiatric medications and so much other care?
“I don’t think the government had anything to do with it, I think it was God. If the government knew who they were helping they would stop in a heartbeat. I don’t believe I have anything coming, I don’t believe I should be asking for anything. A lot of people who worked hard their lives, I’m sure they’re going to be pretty upset if they see what I’m getting. But they don’t know the relationship I have with God.”
A pause.
“I could be wrong. Maybe I’m giving Him too much credit.”
After some fighting, she has given her rambling, trashy, makeshift tent to her son Bobby. “It was a bit of chaos,” she says.
He’s moved in.
EDITOR’S NOTE _ For six months, a reporter and photographer for The Associated Press followed one woman’s life in the Jungle, a homeless encampment in the heart of Silicon Valley. Would she find a safe home?
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