Oh hell. Spend months building cooperation between agencies, and the FBI backs out. Just when we need them.
Well, I didn’t have much of a choice. We could do what we were told and close up, toss away five months of tracking, or we could stay open and risk censure by the FBI.
Closing down would give the hacker freedom to roam our networks without anyone watching him. Staying open wouldn’t lead us to the hacker, since the Bundespost wouldn’t trace unless the FBI gave the go-ahead. Either way, the hacker wins.
Time to call on my boss. Roy Kerth believed the news right away. “I never did trust the FBI. We’ve practically solved the case for them, yet they won’t investigate.”
“So what do we do?”
“We don’t work for the FBI. They can’t tell us what to do. We’ll stay open until the Department of Energy tells us to shut down.”
“Should I call DOE?”
“Leave that to me. We’ve put in a hell of a lot of work, and they’re going to hear about it.” Roy mumbled a bit—it didn’t sound like praise for the FBI—then stood up and said firmly, “We’ll stay open, all right.”
But monitoring the hacker in Berkeley wasn’t tracing him in Germany. We needed the FBI, even if they didn’t need us.
What’ll the CIA say?
“Hi, it’s Cliff. Our friends at the, uh, ‘F’ entity have lost interest.”
“Who’d ya talk to?” Teejay asked.
“The entity’s local representative and an officer from their East Coast office.” I was learning spookspeak.
“OK. I’ll check into it. Hold still till you hear from me.”
Two hours later, Teejay called back. “The word is close up shop. Your contact, Mike, is off the case. His entity is off chasing pickpockets.”
“So what do we do?”
“Just sit still,” the spook said. “We can’t get involved—FCI belongs to Mike’s entity. But someone may lean on Mike’s entity. Just wait.”
FCI? Federal Cat Inspector? Federation of Carnivorous Iguanas? I couldn’t figure it out. “Uh, Teejay, what’s FCI?”
“Shhh. Don’t ask questions. Wheels are turning in places you don’t know about.”
I called Maggie Morley—our scrabble whiz and all-knowing librarian. Took her three minutes to find the acronym. “FCI means Foreign Counter-Intelligence,” she said. “Met any spies lately?”
So the CIA doesn’t handle counterintelligence. The FBI doesn’t want to waste time on this one. And the Deutsche Bundespost wants an official notice from the United States. Whee.
One other agency might be able to help. Zeke Hanson at the National Security Agency was sympathetic—he’d watched every step of progress we’d made, and knew how much we needed the FBI’s support. Could he help out?
“I’d love to help, Cliff, but we’re not able to. The NSA listens rather than talks.”
“But isn’t this what the National Computer Security Center is for? To solve computer security problems?”
“You know the answer. No and no. We’re trying to secure computers, not catch hackers.”
“Can’t you call the FBI and at least encourage them?”
“I’ll spread the word, but don’t hold your breath.”
At best, NSA’s computer security center tried to set standards and encourage computer security. They had no interest in serving as a clearing-house for problems like mine. And they certainly couldn’t get a search warrant. NSA had no connections with the FBI.
Teejay called back in a couple of days. “We made a grandstand play,” the CIA agent said. “Mike’s entity is back on track. Tell me if they give you any more trouble.”
“What’d you do?”
“Oh, talked to a couple friends. Nothing much.” What kind of friends does this guy have? To turn the FBI around in two days … who’s he talking to?
It didn’t take long before Mike Gibbons of the FBI called. He explained German law to me: hacking into a computer wasn’t a big deal there. As long as you didn’t destroy the computer, breaking into a system wasn’t much worse than double parking.
This didn’t make sense to me. If German law was this lenient, why did the Deutsche Bundespost take the case so seriously?
Mike understood my concerns, and at least agreed to keep working on the case. “You should know, though, that last year a German hacker was caught in a Colorado computer, but couldn’t be prosecuted.”
Would the FBI’s Legal Attache get off his butt?
“I’m working on that,” Mike said. “Tell your friends at the Bundespost that they’ll hear from us soon.”
That evening, we had another chance to catch the guy. While Martha and I waited in line at the grocery store, my beeper chimed in. I dropped my copy of the National Enquirer (“Alien Visitors from Mars!”) and dashed to the pay phone, dialing Steve White.
“Our friend’s on the line,” I told him.
“OK. I’ll call Germany.”
Quick conversation and a quick trace. The hacker was on for only five minutes, yet Steve tracked him into DNIC #2624-4511-049136. A public access dialup line in Hannover, Germany.
Afterwards, Steve White filled me in on the details. Wolfgang Hoffman, awakened at 3 A.M., started tracing that line from Frankfurt. But the telephone engineer assigned to the Hannover exchange had already gone home for the night. Close, but no cigar.
Wolfgang had one question for us. The University of Bremen was willing to cooperate in catching this guy, but who’s going to pay? The hacker was wasting the University’s money—hundreds of dollars a day. Would we be willing to pay for the hacker?
Impossible. My lab’s paper-clip budget was squeezed—no way would they spring for this. I passed the message back that I’d ask around.
Steve pointed out that someone would have to pay, or the Bundespost will just chop the hacker’s access. Now that they knew how he’s ripping off the Datex network, the Germans wanted to plug the holes.
Yet more news arrived from Germany. A couple of nights ago, the hacker connected into Berkeley for two minutes. Long enough to track him to the University of Bremen. Bremen, in turn, tracked him back to Hannover. It seemed like the hacker wasn’t just breaking into our Berkeley laboratory, but snuck into European networks as well.
“Since they had the chance, why didn’t the Germans trace him within Hannover?”
Steve explained the problems in Hannover’s telephone system. “American telephones are computer controlled, so it’s pretty easy to trace them. But they need someone at the exchange to trace the call in Hannover.”
“So we can’t trace him unless the hacker calls during the day or evening?”
“Worse than that. It’ll take an hour or two to make the trace once it’s started.”
“An hour or two? Are you kidding? Why it takes you ten seconds to trace Tymnet’s lines from California across a satellite and into Europe. Why can’t they do the same?”
“They would if they could. The hacker’s telephone exchange just isn’t computerized. So it’ll take a while for the technician to trace it.”
Lately, the hacker had been showing up for five minutes at a time. Long enough to wake me up, but hardly enough for a two-hour trace. How could I keep him on for a couple of hours?
The Bundespost couldn’t keep technicians on call forever. In fact, they could hardly afford to keep them around for more than a few days. We had one week to complete the trace. After next Saturday evening, the telephone technicians would call it quits.
I couldn’t make the hacker show up at a convenient time. And I couldn’t control how long he hung around. He came and went as he pleased.
“Wake up, you sloth,” said Martha at the obscenely early hour of nine on a Saturday morning. “Today we prepare the ground for our tomato plants.”
“It’s just January,” I protested. “Everything is dormant. Bears are hibernating. I am hibernating.” I pulled the covers over my head, only to have them snatched away. “Come on outside,” said Martha, taking a vis
e-like grip on my wrist.
At first glance, it seemed that I was right. The garden was dead and brown. “Look,” Martha said, kneeling beside a rose bush. She touched the swelling pink buds. She pointed at the plum tree, and looking more closely, I saw a mist of tiny green leaves emerging from the bare branches. Those poor California plants—without a winter to sleep through.
Martha gave me a shovel, and we began the yearly cycle; turning over the soil, adding fertilizer, planting tiny tomato seedlings in their furrows. Every year we carefully planted several varieties that took different amounts of time to ripen, and staggered the planting by several weeks, so we would have a steady supply of tomatoes all summer. And every year, every single tomato ripened on the fifteenth of August.
It was slow, heavy work because the soil was dense with clay and wet from the winter rains. But we finally got the plot spaded, and, dirty and sweaty, stopped to take a shower and have brunch.
In the shower, I felt revived. Martha sudsed my back while I basked in hot water. Maybe the wholesome rustic life wasn’t so bad after all.
Martha was in the midst of shampooing my hair when the nasty whine of my beeper, buried in a pile of clothing, destroyed our peace. Martha groaned and started to protest: “Don’t you dare.…”
Too late. I jumped out of the shower and ran to the living room, switched on my Macintosh, and called the lab computer. Sventek.
A second later, I’m talking to Steve White at his home. “He’s here, Steve.”
“OK. I’ll trace him and call Frankfurt.”
A moment later, Steve’s back on the line. “He’s gone. The hacker was here a moment ago, but he’s disconnected already. No use calling Germany now.”
Damn. I stood there in utter frustration; stark naked, wet and shivering, standing in a puddle in our dining room, dripping blobs of shampoo onto my computer’s keyboard.
Claudia had been practicing Beethoven, but startled by the sight of her roommate charging, naked, into the living room, she’d put down her violin and stared. Then she laughed and played a few bars of a burlesque tune. I tried to respond with a bump and grind, but was too obsessed with the hacker to pull it off.
I wandered sheepishly back into the bathroom. Martha glowered at me, then relented and pulled me into the shower again, under the hot water.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I apologized. “It’s our only chance to nail him, and he wasn’t around long enough to catch.”
“Great,” Martha said. “Long enough to drag you out of the shower, but not enough time to find out where he is. Maybe he knows you’re watching him, and he’s purposely trying to frustrate you. Somehow, he telepathically knows when you’re in the shower. Or in bed.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.” I was, too.
“Honey, we’ve got to do something about this. We can’t let this guy keep yanking us around. And all those spooks in suits you keep talking to—what have they ever done to help? Nothing. We have to take this into our own hands.”
She was right: I’d spent hours on the phone to the FBI, CIA, NSA, OSI, and the DOE. Still others, like the BKA, knew about our problem, yet nobody took the initiative.
“But what can we do without the government’s help?” I asked. “We need search warrants and all that. We need official permission to do phone traces.”
“Yeah, but we don’t need anyone’s permission to put stuff in our own computer.”
So what?
Under the steaming water, Martha turned to me with a sly look.
“Boris? Darlink, I hev a plan …” Martha shaped a goatee and mustache out of soap suds on my face.
“Yes, Natasha?”
“Ees time for ze secret plan 35B.”
“Brilliant, Natasha! Zat will vork perfectly! Ah, darlink … vhat is secret plan 35B?”
“Ze Operation Showerhead.”
“Yes?”
“Vell, you see, zee spy from Hannover seeks ze secret information, yes?” Martha said. “We give him just vhat he vants—secret military spy secrets. Lots of zem. Oodles of secrets.”
“Tell me, Natasha dahlink, zees secrets, vhere shall ve get them from? Ve don’t know any military secrets.”
“Ve make zem up, Boris!”
Yow! Martha had come up with the obvious solution to our problem. Give the guy what he’s looking for. Create some files of phony information, laced with bogus secret documents. Leave ’em laying around my computer. The hacker stumbles on them, and then spends a couple hours lapping it up, copying it all.
Elegant.
How much stuff? As I rinsed Martha’s hair, I calculated: we want him on for two hours. He’s connected over a 1200-baud line, which means he can read about one hundred twenty characters a second. In two hours, he could scan about one hundred fifty thousand words.
“Oh, Natasha, my charming counter-counter-spy, there’s just vun problem. Where do ve find five hundred pages of fake secrets?”
“Simple, dollink. Ze secrets, ve invent. Ze regular data, ve use vhat’s already lying around.”
As the hot water ran out, we clambered out of the shower. Martha grinned as she explained further. “We can’t invent that much information overnight. But we can create it as we go along, staying just ahead of him. And we can take ordinary bureaucratic documents, modify them a bit, and give them secret-sounding titles. Real secret documents are probably thick with boring, bureaucratic jargon …”
“… So we’ll just take a bunch of those unintelligible Department of Energy directives that are always littering my desk, and change them to look like state secrets.”
Martha continued. “We’ll have to be careful to keep it bland and bureaucratic. If we head a document with ‘CHECK OUT THIS TOP SECRET ULTRA-CLASSIFIED NEAT STUFF,’ then the hacker’s going to get suspicious. Keep it all low-key. Forbidden enough to keep him interested, but not an obvious trap.”
I rolled her ideas around my mind and realized how to implement them. “Sure. We invent this secretary, see, who works for people doing this secret project. And we let the hacker stumble onto her word processing files. Lots of rough drafts, repetitive stuff, and interoffice memos.”
Claudia greeted us in the living room, where she had mopped up the pond I’d left behind. She listened to our plan and suggested a new wrinkle: “You know, you could create a form letter in your computer that invites the hacker to write in for more information. If the hacker fell for it, he might include his return address.”
“Right,” said Martha, “a letter promising more information, of course!”
The three of us sat around the kitchen table with devious grins, eating omelets and elaborating on our plan. Claudia described how the form letter should work: “I think it ought to be like a prize in a crackerjack box. Write to us, and we’ll send you, uh … a secret decoder ring.”
“But come on,” I said, “there’s no way he’ll be stupid enough to send us his address.” Seeing that I had thrown cold water on my coconspirators, I added that it was worth a try, but the main thing is to give him something that’ll take a couple of hours to chew on.
Then I thought of another problem. “We don’t know enough about military stuff to make sensible documents.”
“They don’t have to make sense,” Martha grinned diabolically. “Real military documents don’t make sense either. They’re full of jargon and double-talk. You know, like ‘the procedure for implementing the highly prioritized implementation procedure is hereinafter described in section two, subparagraph three of the procedural implementation plan.’ Eh, Boris?”
Well, Martha and I biked up to the laboratory and logged onto the LBL computer. There we shoveled through a mound of real government documents and directives, which were overflowing with far more turgid bureaucratese than we could ever invent, changing them slightly so that they’d look ‘classified.’
Our documents would describe a new Star Wars project. An outsider reading them would believe that Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory had just landed a fat government
contract to manage a new computer network. The SDI Network.
This bogus network apparently linked together scores of classified computers and extended to military bases around the world. By reading our files, you’d find lieutenants and colonels, scientists and engineers. Here and there, we dropped hints of meetings and classified reports.
And we invented Barbara Sherwin, the sweet, bumbling secretary trying to figure out her new word processor and to keep track of the endless stream of documents produced by our newly invented “Strategic Defense Initiative Network Office.” We named our fictitious secretary after an astronomer, Barbara Schaefer, and used the astronomer’s real mailing address. I mentioned to the real Barbara to watch for any strange mail addressed to Barb Sherwin.
Our fake memoranda included budget requests ($50 million for communications costs), purchase orders, and technical descriptions of this network. We cribbed most of them from files laying around the computer, changing the addresses and a few words here and there.
For a mailing list, I grabbed a copy of the lab newsletter’s list of names and addresses. I just flipped every “Mr.” to “Lieutenant,” every “Mrs.” to “Captain,” every “Dr.” to “Colonel,” and every “Professor” to “General,” The addresses? Just stir in an occasional “Air Force Base” and “Pentagon.” In half an hour, my ersatz mailing list looked like a veritable military Who’s Who.
Some of the documents, however, we fabricated completely: correspondence between managers and petty bureaucrats. An information packet describing the technical capabilities of this network. And a form letter saying that the recipient could get more information on the SDI Network by writing to the project office.
“Let’s label the account, the ‘Strategic Information Network Group,’ ” I said. “It’s got a great acronym: STING.”
“Naw. He might catch on. Keep it bureaucratic,” Martha said. “Use SDINET. It’ll catch his eye, all right.”
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