Infinite Exposure

by Roland Hughes

  This was all so simple when it started. The cleric had arranged for a computer that was envied by all, even the rich students, to be delivered to him at the university. At first, all he had to do was study hard and graduate. Once out in the working world, all he had to do was to send a few emails back and forth. Some of them simply snapshots. None of them were pornography of any kind. Perhaps that was where it all went wrong. Had they used porn to embed their messages, really good porn, nobody would have noticed there was anything embedded in the messages. They could have even set up a porn Web site and made money to fund the cause while transmitting messages around. Sad that he would never get to suggest that to his cell.

  The man was still staring at Nedim. He might not have even blinked since the staring contest started a while ago. Nedim couldn't be certain of much at this point.

  “Just how do you propose to find them?” asked Nedim.

  “You will lead us to them,” was the man's response.

  “I know not where they are or what they look like,” responded Nedim. It was a lie. He knew where some of them were and what some of them looked like, but not enough of them to keep himself alive.

  “Still, you will lead us to them,” responded the man. “We can have no further conversation about this without a signed confession. You have a choice to make now. Sign the confession and lead us to them, or we execute you in a few minutes when prayer is over.”

  “You will kill me as soon as I sign.”

  “No. At least not until we are done. Then it will depend upon how well you cooperated and how many of these people,” he paused to tap the print outs, “we have killed. The confession is to be placed on file along with your picture and the other evidence. Should you try to run, hide, or stop helping us track down these individuals, the information will be handed over to every news agency in the world along with a statement promising 200,000 euros for your return, dead or alive.”

  Something was odd about that last statement, but Nedim didn't have time to think it through. The man went right on.

  “So. Die now, or risk dying later. Make your decision.”

  “My hand has no feeling,” responded Nedim. They both looked at the hand by the pen. It was white, and the wrist was purple. A motion of some kind from the man caused the brute to release his wrist. A thousand needles rushed out to the ends of his fingers, but he could not bring his other hand around to comfort it. In an act of pure agony, both emotionally and physically, Nedim signed the confession.

  Once the confession had been signed, the bag, which Nedim had not seen enter the room, was put back on his head. He was forced to stand and his hands were cuffed. He assumed they were going to execute him now, despite what they had said. The feeling in his hand was still reminding him of his betrayal. In truth, he was at peace about dying now. A public execution would make the news quickly and his brothers would be able to flee to safety.

  The long walk up and down sets of stairs occurred again. Nedim didn't bother to count. In truth, he didn't begin to panic until they shoved him into a vehicle. His knees hit what felt like seats in front of him, so he assumed he was in the back. They didn't need a car to get him to the mosque courtyard for execution! He had heard the call to prayer in the room. It couldn't be more than a few blocks! “No!” he shouted. “The mosque is close! I heard the call to prayer!”

  He heard the brutes, now on either side of him in the vehicle, begin to laugh and hold him in place. “Relax,” said the voice of the man. “We are going to take your picture.”

  “Why couldn't you just do that here?” Nedim asked.

  “The camera and fingerprinting equipment are at another location,” the man responded.

  When the engine started, Nedim could tell from the quiet and the air conditioning that this was a car. The seats felt like leather on his legs, not cheap vinyl or cloth. It must be one of those dark Mercedes he had seen secret police and diplomats riding around in. The smell inside was not the smell of the city he was used to, nor of sweat and fear. It smelled clean and new.

  They drove for what seemed like quite a while. Many turns, stops, speedy stretches and slow crawls. There was no way to tell how far they had driven, or which direction they had ended up going.

  Finally, the engine was turned off at a stop. Nedim was roughly pulled from the back of the car. He walked into a building, down a flight of stairs, and had his bag taken off inside of another windowless stone room. There was a big white sheet hanging on one wall, some lights shining on it, and a mounted camera facing it. Along another wall was a table with an ink pad and some forms. Beside all of this was a computer with a printer. The computer had a cable running over to the camera.

  This room came equipped with two new people. Both of them were white, but both looked strikingly different. He judged their age to be in the late 20s to early 30s range. Nedim was taken over in front of the sheet and made to face forward. A series of front and side photos were taken, then he was dragged over to the table.

  While Nedim's handcuffs were being removed, he noticed something odd about this place. Silence. There were no noises coming from other parts of the building. No conversations. No mechanical devices. No sounds of people outside. This place must be very isolated, he thought.

  The fingerprinting proceeded while the printer spat out his photograph on a page with all his personal information. The print out finished about the time his last finger impression was being taken. The camera man placed it into a folder he handed to the man in the suit. “We own ya now mate,” he said when he looked at Nedim.

  He's British! A voice screamed in Nedim's head, or perhaps he screamed it, he couldn't be certain. The man who had been taking Nedim's fingerprints said, “That we do,” in the thickest German accent Nedim had ever heard as he handed the form over to the man in the suit.

  He's German! Screamed the same voice Nedim had heard only moments ago. That explains the euros! This was very bad indeed. Not only had he been captured, but he had been captured by people who weren't even on the list to be killed yet.

  A Brit working with clandestine Pakistani operatives was a very bad sign. A German working with all of them was a very bad sign indeed! It was obvious to Nedim the men in this room were not under the control of anyone government. Perhaps there was no government controlling them at all.

  Nedim had heard stories about freelance operators like this from the days when bin Laden was throwing the Russians out of Afghanistan. They did what they pleased, always seemed to have limitless stores of weapons and funding. Sometimes they would go into a village and kill everyone there, then leave a few dead Russian soldiers and some Russian weapons for the news reporters to find. These types of men didn't fight for a cause, they fought for money and the thrill of the kill.

  When Nedim's mind came back to the room he realized all of the men were laughing at him. Even the man in the suit.

  Slither of Snake

  Once the men had finished laughing at him, the bag and car routine were repeated. All of this time he had not been offered water or allowed to go to the bathroom. Even in this luxury ride, the bumps were starting to be excruciating. His bladder was nearly beyond its capacity. It would have been much worse had he not gone back to bed after relieving himself just before the security forces came crashing through his front door.

  This time, when the car finally stopped, and the bag was removed, he realized he was in front of his own home. There were two new men waiting for him outside of the door. He noticed the door was shut and it looked like it had been replaced. The men were dressed in common clothing. One of them opened the door for him. Everybody went inside.

  Pointing to one of the new men, the man in the suit said, “This is your cousin Umar from Saudi.” Pointing to the other new man he said, “This is your friend Ramesh from university. This is how you will refer to them both in public and private. One of them will be with you at all times. You can see that your computer has been returned to you. We have a complete image of the hard drive. You
will explain the code contained in each message you transfer and translate it for these men. They will report back to me. You and I will not meet again unless your life is about to end.”

  With that the suit and the two brutes left. Once inside of the car, the brute behind the wheel uttered, “We are just going to let him continue?”

  “We have installed a Trojan horse on his computer. Each mail message he sends will contain this Trojan. When a user opens the mail message it will create a connection to a server we have running. There it will send the IP address of the connecting machine and various other pieces of data from it. We have a database of every IP address from every known university, library and Internet café. It will be a slow process, but we will get them all.”

  The driver pulled away from the house and started the return to headquarters. From the back seat, the man in the suit continued, “What do you know about these men we intend to kill?”

  “They are terrorists who will bring the wrath of all nations down upon us. If they are allowed to continue, neither we nor our country will survive,” responded the driver.

  “Is that all you know?”

  “It is enough.”

  “It is enough to want them dead, it is not enough to make it happen. These men are creatures of habit. While they may implement variations of a theme, they will not cease a pattern they perceive to be working.”

  “Do you think Nedim is the only email relay in this network?”

  Silence.

  “He is one of many. We know this, but until now, had not cracked it. Now we have a crack. Yes, he will lead us to the cells he communicates with and we will take them out after observing them, but that is not the real benefit. The real benefit will be the other relays he leads us to. This is a many-headed beast. Taking down a few cells responsible for one terrible bombing may make great headlines, but it will not kill the beast. To do that, you need one massive move that cuts off many heads at once. This will cause the beast to go into panic and bleed to death. We will pump this well until it runs dry, then we will decide what to do with the head of Nedim.”

  ****

  Back at his home Nedim finally got to answer his most urgent call, put on some clothes and confront his keepers. One of the men, he could not remember if it was his cousin or his friend, informed him it was time to check his email. He resigned himself to doing just that. The men produced a small recording device and began taking notes in college thesis-type notebooks. At least that would lend credibility to the university friend story, if he could ever remember which was which.

  There were only five emails waiting for him, yet getting through the first four took over an hour. He went through the explanation on routing. Each group wishing to receive information would send him a baseline photo. Phrases in the text that came with it would tell him who should receive the image. They also told the receivers what information the sender was looking for. Every operative in the field had access to the same editing software which would distribute the response they typed as a seemingly random set of bit errors in the image. The response itself would be short and use phrases the operatives were told to use.

  No translations were ever written down. Each person gathering intelligence had to memorize this handful of phrases. These were along the same lines as the phrases they had been using in open phone calls and emails in the past — before they figured out intelligence agencies were listening in. Now they hid the information inside of the images. You had to capture the base image before you could even hope to find the message to decode.

  When distributing base images, they were not sent all at once. Over the course of the week Nedim would distribute the image to everyone who should receive it. Some would have messages embedded in them and be sent to decoys. The decoy messages would be scattered in the distribution so that any agency intercepting a “new” photo could not be certain it was a base photo unless someone had already been significantly compromised. Decoy messages were sent to some suspected of being compromised as well. In short, a base image used to go out to somewhere between 20 and 400 email addresses.

  “Used to?” asked one of the men.

  “I came up with a better way. Now when a new image comes in I encrypt a phrase in it, then only send it out to four or five decoys along with the list. The decoys get a different phrase. Even if any of them are intercepted, they still cannot be used for decoding. All of the operatives know the phrase and remove it from the image prior to using it as a base image.”

  “What is the phrase?”

  “God is Great.”

  “And the decoy phrase?”

  “Whatever I feel like typing from the Holy Quran.”

  Both men were shocked to learn the software was a simple piece of Open Source software originally done as a proof for some thesis work, then continued by a community looking to transfer sensitive data cheaply and securely over the Internet. While it had originally focused on transferring financial data, clinical trial research and the like, this group had co-opted it for their own sensitive data.

  Two of the messages contained images with coded phrases in them. Once he had translated them, Nedim emailed them onto the original sender of the image.

  One of the men asked Nedim how he knew where to send the responses because they had seen no indication in the message or the brief look they had gotten on his computer.

  “Simple. One sender always uses images of birds, another beach scenes, another fish, etc. It has never been difficult to keep track of the destination because of this.”

  The third message was interesting. It contained one phrase and an FTP address. Nedim pasted the FTP address into his browser and began a binary download of the ZIP file. After downloading the file, Nedim sent the original email onto its destination.

  When an attempt to unzip the file was made, it prompted for a password. The file name had been the letter “T” followed by a series of digits and dashes with a “.zip” extension. The phrase had been “Great View.”

  Both men wanted to know how Nedim had known the password. “It was obvious,” he responded. The digits in the file name were the longitude and latitude for somewhere in Chicago. All of the world heard about the great view from the Sears Sky Deck when “The World's Tallest Building” was built.

  At first, the files contained in this compressed file appeared to be nothing more than tourist snapshots. An odd number of them seemed to be focusing on the lake view, but all views seemed to be represented. When spread out, they would give you a full 360 degree view from the Sky Deck. This was followed by some shots which seemed to come from some air tour out over the lake. Odd vacation to be sure, but nothing incriminating.

  Then they came to the spreadsheets. One contained detailed information about guard numbers and rotations for building security. Another contained information about police patrols and force size.

  Following the spreadsheets were PDF files containing the original construction blueprints for the building. These showed the type of steel, quantity and placement of it. They showed the location and weight of the counter-balance units. A detailed discussion was also included from some architectural magazine story about how the smaller towers supported the main tower in those great Chicago winds.

  Just to be complete there were also photos of the parking garage entrance, the various levels and even some of the supports running through those levels. One picture even went so far as to have a tape measure held up to the support pillar for size.

  This was obviously a completed recon effort. All information had been gathered and delivered for those who make strike decisions. It was left up to the leaders to decide if, how, and when to strike the target. They had Nedim make a copy of the entire directory where he had decompressed the file.

  Both men were so floored by the scope and magnitude of what was going on they almost forgot to look at the last email. It seemed innocuous enough. It looked like a form letter from a technical support company. It was announcing they had closed his ticket number and instruc
ted him to re-open it if he had any further concerns on this issue. At the end was a fax number if he needed to fax any screen prints or service contract information to the technical support. It was signed “John.”

  After what they had just seen, both men had a hard time believing this was a routine business email. Nedim showed them the email he had sent technical support regarding an issue where his computer was locking up and their response about downloading a new set of drivers. This seemed to satisfy both men. Oddly enough, they both understood that Windows was an unstable operating system.

  With that complete and the CD in the men's hands, Nedim announced it was time for him to go to work. He actually was a software analyst by trade and he worked for an off-shoring company, which meant he worked nights a few days per week so he could participate in conference calls with the U.S. clients. Nedim had no qualms about taking money from infidels before killing them.

  Once dressed and with lunch packed, the man who was supposed to be his friend from the university announced he would be walking with him to work. The other man would be delivering the information they had gathered to their superiors. During the walk to work, Nedim said, “I suppose you are also monitoring my work email?” There was no response from the other man. Of course there wouldn't be.

  The very first thing Nedim did after sitting down at his desk and logging in was to hand write a note.

  John,

  Infidels at my door. Stay clear.

  Ned

  He then immediately faxed the note to the number from the technical support email and tossed the note into the shred bin.

  John's real name was Kaliel. Nedim had met him at university and talked with him at the mosque. John now worked for a technical support company in India, another off-shore operation that required its people to use an American name when dealing with U.S. customers. John had been sent to America on an H1-B Visa for a few years. John worked with the very same team that assembled the information on the Sears Tower. The email was to let Nedim know that John was back home. He was to fax once he had pulled down the file and forwarded it on. One of the other team members, also working in the U.S. on H1-B Visa, had been tasked with assembling the file and posting it in a blind FTP location on the Web. To keep cells isolated, each operative only knew where to put a message, not where it actually ended up.