Patriots Versus Bureaucrats

by Thomas Temple

  Buffalo, New York

  5:46pm

  Huddled with a man known as the “Mountie,” Hawkins asked the same question that he had posed to the Vulcan several hours earlier. The reply from the well-dressed man of fifty-five was even more positive: “No problem at all, but the variable that we cannot control is the weather. The good news is that rain is very unlikely in that part of Utah around Labor Day.”

  “Yeah, that’s the calculated risk we have to take. If the weather screws everything up then we’ll just abort and go back to the drawing board,” was Hawkins’ rejoinder.

  Leaving another briefcase with one hundred thousand cash and all the information on the BLM’s computer codes and equipment, Hawkins left the downtown office building and headed to the airport via a taxi. The Mountie finished his work day as an insurance adjuster and drove to his home in nearby West Seneca. He would travel to his small farm near Welland in his native Ontario this weekend to devise the Labor Day activities for the BLM.

  Snyder Security Services’ corporate jet arrived in St. Louis at 10:03pm and Hawkins called it a day. Tomorrow was Saturday and he would start planning the Citizens Constitutional Court proceedings to be held in the vicinity of Bardstown, Kentucky, sometime in the future, depending upon opportunity. The “Drama Club” in the employ of the Collective would be playing a major role.

  August 19, 2014

  9:22am

  St. Paul, Minnesota

  Vulcan reviewed all of the code and programming modifications for his beta test. He had selected the home office of the Great Plains Life and Casualty Company in St. Paul as his surrogate for the EPA headquarters in Washington, DC. Two of the insurance company’s agency offices located in Hibbing and Mankato would imitate EPA regional headquarters. He carefully selected Minsk in Belarus as the termination point of the intrusion. Vulcan had entered the systems of Great Plains Life and Casualty on numerous occasions without detection even though they had fairly sophisticated anti-hacking programs and procedures in place. This would be a good test of his efforts against the EPA computer systems which he had been studying for the last two weeks. It took less than fifteen minutes for Vulcan to deposit his virus in the secure systems of Great Plains and show an electronic trail that bounced through five continents terminating at a Wi-Fi coffee house in Minsk. The renegade program would come to life at the stroke of midnight on August 19.

  Confusion reigned at the home office of Great Plains Life and Casualty on the morning of August 20. Vulcan was able to verify that his attack had been totally successful and the agency offices in Hibbing and Mankato had served their purpose perfectly. Now all he had to do was set everything to scale, allow for time differences, and select another city as the terminal link. He would easily be ready to attack successfully on Saturday, August 30.

  August 21, 2014

  11:15am

  Phoenix, Arizona

  The meeting with Bishop Ruiz had gone very well for Mother Mary Annette of the PBVM Presentation Sisters. She had been selected as the chief delegate to the Convocation of Interfaith Understanding to be held over the Labor Day weekend at the Goose Island campground near Moab, Utah. The nun had also been the delegate for last year’s event in Atlanta. The host this year would be The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, known by most people simply as the Mormon Church.

  Elder Maxwell Jonell of the Mormon delegation would be the Executive Director for this year’s event. Mother Mary Annette had met with the Bishop to discuss items that would be addressed at the coming event and received the prelate’s blessing for a safe and successful convocation. Bishop Ruiz was strongly committed to interfaith understanding and cooperation and had the full support of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

  August 22, 2014

  2:45pm

  Salt Lake City, Utah

  Elder Jonell was pleased with the arrangements he had made for the Convocation of Interfaith Understanding. A local RV dealership was providing sixteen luxury RVs at no cost and also transporting them to and from the Goose Island campground. The logistics had fallen nicely into place with the goodwill and generosity of several businesses within the state, including a kosher wholesaler that would provide food and drink for Rabbi Silver and his contingent. The permit from the Bureau of Land Management to use exclusively the Goose Island campground for the Labor Day weekend had finally been granted, though with the usual bureaucratic hassles.

  August 24, 2014

  1:33pm

  Buffalo Public Library, Main Branch

  Buffalo, New York

  The Mountie set his laptop on a reference table in the fiction section, turned it on, and began typing commands. Fifteen minutes later he left the library and returned to his home in West Seneca. Then he placed a special disk into the laptop and powered the system up. In a matter of seconds the hard drive was fried. Forty minutes later the same computer was resting at the bottom of Lake Erie.

  August 25, 2014

  10:48am

  BLM Field Office, Moab, Utah

  Sam Dickinson, Special Agent in Charge of the criminal division of the Moab, Utah, field office could hardly believe the briefing he and the other BLM special agents had just received from the BLM’s regional director. The next few days were going to be very busy for not only his field office, but for every BLM Law Enforcement Ranger and Special Agent within Utah. There would be no shortage of BLM manpower like there was in Nevada during the Bundy affair. This time the BLM would be well prepared and ready for any armed showdown.

  August 30, 2014

  9:00am

  McLean, Virginia

  Michael Shaunessy locked his front door and got into the waiting cab. His destination was Dulles airport where he was due to take a flight to Dublin via AerLingus. He had looked forward to this trip to the land of his forbearers for many years. Shaunessy did not plan to take his trip this soon because he thought that he would still be the Assistant Director of Information Technology, Environmental Protection Agency. Office politics had forced his early retirement at the age of sixty. To state that Shaunessy was bitter at having been manipulated into retirement would be a gross understatement. He had spent his entire career of thirty-seven years with the EPA and now they had discarded him like yesterday’s newspaper. The pension of a GS-15 was substantial and he would have a very comfortable retirement, but nothing could compensate for no longer being in charge. The month long trip to Ireland might give him a fresh perspective on how to spend the rest of his years. As a divorcee of many years, Shaunessy had only himself to consider and money would not be an issue.

  As Shaunessy boarded his AerLingus flight, a man pulled out a cell phone and called a colleague waiting in McLean, Virginia. “Clear now,” was the only message. Soon two men dressed in overalls and appearing to be employees of a yard service company entered the back yard of the traveler to Ireland.

  Quickly disabling the alarm system the men entered the house, carrying a very large and heavy lawn and leaf bag. The two men exited in twenty minutes. Unnoticed, they returned to their unmarked van and drove off.

  August 30, 2014

  St. Paul, Minnesota

  12:06pm

  The Vulcan entered the final command that identified the terminus of his intrusion as a computer located at a residence in McLean, Virginia, hit a button on his laptop and received confirmation of commands being executed. He waited thirty minutes to assure himself that all commands had gone forward without impediment. He quickly removed the hard drive from his machine and smashed it with a hammer. Looking outside of the fifth story window of the abandoned warehouse to make sure he was not observed Vulcan pitched the smashed hard drive and the computer into the swirling muddy waters of the Mississippi River below. The computers at the headquarters of the EPA and all ten of regional headquarters began to hum to life. Soon the entire program that Vulcan had so methodically created would be loaded and start executing at midnight.

  August 30, 2014

  Goose Island Campgroun
d

  Moab, Utah

  12:15pm

  Elder Jonell sat between two of his good friends, Mother Mary Annette and Pastor Henry Jefferson, as Rabbi Silver delivered a blessing over the challah bread and other traditional Hebrew food that would soon be consumed by the participants in celebration of the Jewish Shabbat. Everyone was participating in Shabbat, regardless of their religion, in a true show of interfaith appreciation and understanding. Max Jonell was delighted that things had run smoothly since yesterday’s arrival of the delegates. Rabbi Silver was very pleased with the food and wine that Jonell had obtained for the Saturday celebration of Shabbat. Glancing toward Highway 128 Jonell saw a cloud of dust fast approaching and hoped that it was not the result of a motorcycle gang out for a weekend road trip.

  No less than twenty-five vehicles turned off of Highway 128 onto the gravel road that provided access to the Goose Island campground. The vehicles were marked as belonging to the Bureau of Land Management and several national news networks. The delegates were surprised to discover that the twenty vehicles belonging to the BLM were manned by heavily armed men in full SWAT equipment. The vehicles all came to a stop at the tent that had been erected for the Shabbat services and meal.

  As Executive Director, Elder Maxwell Jonell felt obligated to find out what all of the fuss was about and he approached a man who was in the process of deploying approximately one hundred armed men around the campground. After identifying himself Jonell was thrown to the ground and handcuffed. The man in charge used a bullhorn to order all of the delegates to remain seated while his men searched the campground under the authority of a Federal warrant. He also advised that anyone who did not follow his orders would be arrested and charged with hindering a Federal investigation. Twenty of the armed men surrounded the delegates while the remaining eighty or so went about entering and searching the sixteen RVs that served as accommodations for the delegates. Suitcases were emptied, computers seized, and papers stuffed into bags marked “evidence.”

  Rabbi Silver was outraged to have the Shabbat service so viciously interrupted and demanded an explanation. He was also thrown to the ground and handcuffed while three agents pointed automatic weapons at his head. Mother Mary Annette dropped to her knees and began praying. “You were told to remain seated,” barked one of the black dressed troopers who then handcuffed her and drug her roughly to one of the black SUVs where she was shoved into a backseat.

  Pastor Henry Jefferson of the Association of African-American Baptist Clergymen had witnessed this scene before during the civil rights marches of the 1960s and was determined to not meekly submit to the forces of oppression. Standing on his chair the seventy-eight year old clergyman shouted “Brothers and sisters of faith your time has come to stand with the Lord and fight the agents of Satan!”

  The crowd rose to their feet and began to head towards the place that Elder Jonell and Rabbi Silver were laying handcuffed and towards the SUV that held Mother Mary Annette. The crowd of over sixty delegates surged forward and was met by batons, tasers, and rifle butts. All of the previous events and the ensuing melee were caught on camera with audio by the news services that had been invited by the BLM. The live feeds went directly to the offices of the television stations and the BLM’s on scene commander’s order to shut off the cameras came too late. The actions of the BLM would be on virtually every local and national TV station that evening.

  Twenty-six delegates were injured seriously enough to be hospitalized and fourteen delegates had been arrested. One of the newsmen overheard the BLM agents interrogating Elder Jonell. The BLM interrogators were demanding that Jonell provide information on the whereabouts of the Mormon Militia for the Restoration of Utah and their weapons cache. The BLM had briefed the news media in advance of the raid, claiming that they had received “credible information” that the Convocation of Interfaith Understanding was just a front for the Mormon Militia for the Restoration of Utah (MMRU) and that Elder Maxwell Jonell was the ringleader.

  The “credible information” had been a series of crudely encoded emails that originated in Salt Lake City and were sent to seventeen locations within the state of Utah. The coded messages purported to show a plot to take over the Arches National Park near Moab. This armed takeover of a national park was going to be effected by a secret militia called “Mormon Militia for the Restoration of Utah” or MMRU for short. Elder Maxwell Jonell of the Mormon Church was the commander of the militia and was going to use the Convocation of Interfaith Understanding as a diversion for the operation. The Convocation was infested with a large number of radical sympathizers who would aid the MMRU. This intelligence had been passed through the channel of NSA to Homeland Security to Department of the Interior to Bureau of Land Management. As the raid commenced at 12:15 pm in Utah, a disguised worm embedded by the Mountie began to erase all traces of the original emails on every computer that contained them. When the BLM regional director was asked by the news media to produce the emails as justification for the raid he confidently ordered his staff to do so.

  When his staff could not find them he asked the Department of the Interior for them, and when the Department of the Interior couldn’t find them he asked Homeland Security, and when Homeland Security couldn’t find them he asked NSA. When NSA revealed that they had no copies of the emails he knew he was royally screwed. The media’s inquiries would be far tamer that what he could expect in front of the House or Senate committee hearings that would surely follow. Sure, he could produce hard copies of the emails but with no electronic trail they wouldn’t be worth the paper they were printed on as credible proof of their existence. Nobody at NSA or Homeland Security was going to fall on their sword to save BLM.

  Tuesday, September 2, 2014

  Washington, DC

  7:30am

  Although it was early by Washington standards the home office of the Bureau of Land Management at 1849 C Street NW was humming with activity. The Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior was in attendance along with several members of the White House senior staff. The Director of the Bureau of Land Management was on the proverbial hot seat to say the least. The fallout from the raid at the Convocation of Interfaith Understanding began immediately after the evening news on Saturday. The Labor Day holiday did not postpone the calls and texts that had been arriving nonstop from angry people. These angry people included some folks that you did not want to anger such as the Governor and both Senators from the State of Utah, the Anti- Defamation League, the Executive Director of the Association of African-American Baptist Clergymen, the President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and, of course, the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. All of these angry people knew how to obtain media attention for their anger and they were not the least bit shy in expressing their outrage in front of any camera. Their private conservations with Government officials had been more candid. Either heads were going to roll at the BLM or politicians would feel great wrath at the polls in the upcoming mid-term elections.

  Senators and Congressmen eagerly announced committee hearings dealing with the Goose Island raid. Several politicians up for re-election proposed bills to cut the BLM budget and one Congressman from Utah even sponsored a bill to eliminate the BLM in its entirety. Cartoonists delighted in portraying the BLM as jackbooted thugs akin to Nazi storm troopers. Suddenly it was now the BLM on the nightly news instead of the IRS. The citizens had discovered another Government bureaucracy to despise and hate. Meanwhile, Rabbi Silver placed a call to Chicago to speak with his old high school classmate, Jake Wasserman. Then the FBI announced that they could find no evidence of a group called the Mormon Militia for the Restoration of Utah as having ever existed. The Secretary of the Interior summed matters up succinctly to the Director of the BLM when he stated rather pointedly, “So you arrested an important Elder in the Mormon Church and a well-respected Rabbi and then you proceeded to manhandle a nun and then split open the head of an elderly black pastor… on a bogus tip
… and all in front of the TV cameras! Who’s running things in your bureau, the fucking Marx Brothers?”

  The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Bella Alice Rasmussen, was on her way to work from her home in Silver Spring, Maryland, when she received a call from one of her assistants informing her that there had been a system wide computer glitch over the holiday weekend. After completing the call Rasmussen instructed her chauffer to turn up the local news again so that she could follow the disaster unwinding over at the BLM. She was thankful that she did not have to deal with a problem like the BLM had. “Give me a computer glitch any day,” she thought to herself. Or not.

  Administrator Rasmussen left her vehicle and took the private elevator from the parking structure to her executive office suite. The appearance of her senior staff waiting in the conference room warned her that something was terribly amiss. Ten minutes of briefing by the Director of Information Technology brought life to her worst fears.

  Somehow the complete computer files of every regional office in the EPA had been switched to another regional office. The Boston regional office now had the files of the New York regional office and New York had the files belonging to Boston. Philadelphia had Atlanta’s files and vice versa. And so it went with Chicago and Kansas City, Denver and Dallas, and San Francisco and Seattle. The result was that no EPA region could conduct any business. Then things got worse when it was discovered that the files in the home office had been corrupted and any entrance to a file from any computer in any of the nine EPA offices within the Washington DC area were transmitted to a pornographic website. Bella Rasmussen’s management style was rough and bullying so naturally she started screaming at anyone and everyone. Singled out in particular were the Director of Information Technology and his newly promoted Assistant Director. The feared and loathed EPA was now completely paralyzed. Rasmussen’s first call was to the Director of the EPA’s Criminal Investigations Division who after several hours of assessing the situation called in the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, known as US-CERT. They would apply the Einstein 2 and 3 programs to determine who was responsible for the problem but they would not be much help in restoring EPA’s computer operations.