At first I only used public computers—a FedEx office here, a public library there. Then, I began posting at home but masked my IP address via TOR, the same network that WikiLeaks uses to ensure its informants’ anonymity. Programs such as TOR make it difficult for investigators to track online activity back to a name—by no means impossible, but difficult. I quickly came to understand why people make mistakes and leave behind digital fingerprints, though: Shielding one’s identity is a cumbersome enterprise. I eventually surrendered all hope of total anonymity and began posting from home, unmasked.

Paranoia gnawed at me. One of my jobs at O’Hare was to guard the airport exit lanes to make sure no one snuck into the secure side. I was also responsible for allowing credentialed law enforcement officers in. Several times a day, CIA and FBI agents would approach me at the exit lane, shiny shoes and all. After my site took off, I couldn’t shake the fear that they were approaching not to show me their badges and be waved through, but to confront me about my blog.

My roommates were the only ones who knew. I came home from work each day to two scruffy, thirty-something guys. The three of us sat around the living room, our laptops open in front of us. They played online poker and “World of Warcraft;” I tracked my site’s web traffic. They read aloud the news sites that linked to my blog, while I watched the hits coming in from the very same outlets.

We joked that it all looked like a scene from the movie Hackers. “Did you hack into the mainframe?” one of my roommates once asked, glancing over at my screen.

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One day, I received an e-mail from a man offering to loan me his apartment in Paris if I would give WikiLeaks every piece of insider information I had. At the time, I thought he was kidding.

Looking back now, I believe the offer was no joke.

***

On Jan. 17, 2013, three weeks after my site went viral, the TSA announced it was canceling its contract with Rapiscan, the manufacturer of the full-body scanners, in favor of a new type of scanner that produced a generic outline of the body instead of graphic nudes.

People wrote in to the blog suggesting that the announcement might have been prompted by the embarrassment my site brought upon the organization. If ever someone wanted to de-anonymize me, it was then. I felt it was in my interest to get out—soon.

The only question was where to go.

I didn’t know how I would ever make a decent living as a writer, but I also knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a mindless cog in a vast bureaucratic machine. On the advice of an editor friend, I had begun applying to graduate school creative writing programs in the weeks before I clicked publish on my site.

I feared I wouldn’t be accepted into any of the seven programs to which I’d applied—and dreaded being stranded in airport purgatory. But I was lucky: The first acceptance came in January, with an offer of a full scholarship. Several more followed.

In flying to visit universities, I found myself checking my airline ticket as soon as it was printed, praying I hadn’t been branded with the SSSS stamp that I knew all too well—the mark of a passenger who has been singled out as a potential threat to national security and designated for special screening. But the selectee mark never did appear.

As a writer, the only thing of value that I could glean from my time at the TSA was the story of it all—the sheer absurdity of working for one of America’s most despised federal agencies. In the six months that I secretly blogged as a TSA employee, I did my best to record every notable piece of stupidity TSA and O’Hare had to offer.

There was “The Things They Ran Through the X-Ray,” a post that detailed the craziest items I had seen put through the X-Ray belt at O’Hare: dildos, puppies, kittens. Even a real live TSA officer: In 2009, one of my friends had run her male colleague through a carry-on X-Ray machine. (It was a slow night.) When management happened upon video footage of the episode, they were both fired.

There was also “No, You Don’t Know What It Is,” a post revealing that the enhanced screening you receive is often just as mystifying to the TSA officer administering it as it is to the traveler. “Random” security “plays” were passed down from headquarters every day, or ordered by our supervisors. The enhanced screening was also triggered by SSSS stamps, which could show up on passengers’ boarding passes for any number of reasons, often reasons we would never know. But we would also sometimes pull a passenger’s bag or give a pat down because he or she was rude. We always deployed the same explanation: “It’s just a random search.”

Then there was the infamous “guyspeak” in my “Insider’s TSA Dictionary.” One of the first terms I learned from fellow male TSA officers at O’Hare was “Hotel Papa,” code language for an attractive female passenger—“Hotel” standing for “hot,” and “Papa” for, well, use your imagination.

I hinted several times on the blog that a determined terrorist’s best bet for defeating airport security would be to apply for a job with the TSA and simply become part of the security system itself. That assertion stemmed from personal experience. A fellow officer once returned to O’Hare from a trip to TSA headquarters and confessed that he had run into some complications: Someone realized that his background check had never been processed in the four years he had been an employee. He could have been anyone, for all TSA knew—a murderer, terrorist, rapist. The agency had to rush to get his background investigated. Who knows how many similar cases there were, and are, at airports around the nation.

***

As much as I wished I could maintain my behind-the-scenes view of the security circus, my heart was not heavy on the May afternoon when I went to turn in my uniform and tell the TSA I wouldn’t be coming back.

“You’ll have to sign all these papers,” the woman in HR told me, barely glancing my way as she handed me a clipboard with a packet of documents. She was accustomed to people coming in and resigning unexpectedly; it seemed as though everyone wanted out of the TSA.

“But as for your uniforms,” she said, “You’ll be giving those to your exit interviewer.”

I was conflicted about whether to go to the interview. I could simply refuse, claiming some sort of emergency—drop my uniforms off in a cardboard box out in front of headquarters, like an unwanted baby. My roommates told me I would be stupid to go. After all, if some government official was going to sit me down for questioning about my involvement with an anonymous whistleblower site, the exit interview would be the place it would happen.

I decided to show. I had committed no crime in daring to speak out; I had only provided information the public had a right to know. As I saw it, $40 million in taxpayer dollars had been wasted on ineffective anti-terrorism security measures at the expense of the public’s health, privacy and dignity. If asked during my exit interview whether I knew anything about a website called “Taking Sense Away,” I decided I would tell the truth.

But the exit interview turned out to be nothing more than a pleasant conversation with a woman in admin. There was no last-minute grilling by a grim-faced government suit. It was just “Jane,” the exit interview girl who had moved from Georgia to Chicago, Southern hospitality intact. The interview consisted of Jane reading from a checklist of TSA uniform pieces I was on record as owning, and me, for the most part, apologizing for having lost many of them years ago.

Jane smiled, assuring me it was fine. She shook my hand, wished me luck in my new role as a grad student, and that was it. I left headquarters, officially relieved of my federal post.