The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  I did notice that seven of the twelve were women, a higher percentage than I had expected, and what I would later find out was well above the NSA average. I mentioned it to Melody, who shrugged and said, “Women don’t posture. There’s no room on this team for personal ambition or for trying to appear to be something you’re not. If I get even a hint of that, I’m not interested. Your average male intelligence agent, well . . .”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  “This will be your quad,” Melody said. The other three chairs were taken by an older white man with a fringe of white hair at the back of his head, an Asian woman with a slender face and large glasses, and Shaunessy Brennan.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Shaunessy said.

  Melody ignored her. “And this will be your seat.” The fourth spot had a sagging swivel chair with a broken arm, and no computer.

  “You mean you vouched for him? After he pulled that stunt?” Shaunessy said.

  “We were told to hack into the account,” I said, for what seemed like the twentieth time. “I was following instructions.”

  “He’s part of the team, for better or worse,” Melody said, and that seemed to end the discussion. To me, she added, “We’ll get you a machine and a better chair. Office furniture requisitions take forever around here. You’ll need your own account as well.”

  “Don’t worry, he can just hack into somebody else’s,” Shaunessy said. “Though I don’t know why he needs a computer at all. Just give him a pencil and a stack of paper.”

  “Why don’t you come with me for now, and we’ll get you set up as best we can,” Melody said.

  I followed her back to her office. It was crowded with knickknacks, mostly geekware of some kind or another. I saw a binary clock, a chess set with a half-finished game, and a plush Cthulhu. Her bulletin board had a photo of a little girl—I was guessing a granddaughter—dressed as Chewbacca, and a hand-lettered sign that read TANSTAAFL.

  Melody sat in her swivel chair with the same elegance she might have if it were a throne. “Welcome to the team,” she said formally.

  I took the chair opposite her desk. “Thank you. Just what team is this?”

  “The team of misfits,” she said. It seemed to be a joke, but she didn’t smile. “I’d like to say we do the jobs nobody else can do. But often we just do the jobs nobody else wants to do.”

  I didn’t answer. My eyes roamed the office and settled on the chess set. White was a knight up, but its pawn structure had been demolished. I liked Black’s chances better.

  “The vast majority of all traffic these days is encoded with public key encryption,” Melody said. “Which, I’m sorry to say, is unbreakable.”

  I waited. The whirring noise in the background was the only sound. “As far as most people think,” I prompted her.

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “RSA encryption really is unbreakable, if it’s done right. We have more compute power than anyone else in the world, and we can’t touch it.”

  “But this is the NSA,” I said.

  She sighed. “Then I guess your disillusionment starts here. You’re a mathematician. Do I really have to give you a primer on big numbers?”

  “But . . . the NSA,” I said.

  “2048-bit encryption. The kind your phone can manage in a few milliseconds.

  How many possible keys is that?”

  “22048,” I said immediately.

  “Which means that to find your key in a brute force attack, I need to make 22048 guesses. Or half of that, on average.”

  “But you don’t brute force it,” I said. “Come on, you’ve got the Sieve of Atkin, at the very least, to narrow the guesswork, and you’ve probably got a lot better tricks than that.”

  “We do,” she said, the hint of a smile playing around her lips. “But bear with me. Say I have a computer that costs one dollar and can make a billion guesses a second. We’re not even in the ballpark there, but let’s just imagine such a computer exists. How many computers would I need to guess your key in, say, a million years?”

  “Brute force?” I did the math. “A billion is 230, give or take. A year is maybe 225, so a million years is 245 . . . altogether, call it 21973,” I said.

  “And how much do you think we can knock off with prime sieving?”

  “That allows you to skip all the non-prime numbers,” I said. “The rule of thumb is an average separation of 2.3 primes per digit, so with numbers of that size, I’m going to guess you have a prime every, what, one or two thousand?”

  “Which brings it down to what?”

  “21969,” I said. “Ish.”

  “And do you think we have 21969 computers?”

  My faith in the NSA was waning, and I was starting to feel a little foolish. “No.”

  “Or 21969 dollars to buy them?”

  I sighed. “I get the picture. I just thought that there would be, you know, another way. That somebody would have invented something by now to crack it.”

  Melody smiled beatifically. “Now don’t despair. I said properly encrypted messages were unbreakable, but, fortunately for us, very few messages are properly encrypted. Even now, less than ten percent of HTTP traffic goes through SSL, and of those that do, the vast majority use the primes hardcoded in their key exchange software. Software packages that do the encryption can have bugs, which we can exploit if we find them or know about them. Also, although the message might be sent encrypted, it has to be decrypted on the other side, and that computer system itself might be vulnerable to attack.”

  “So . . . that’s what this team does?”

  “No. The NSA already has thousands of hackers, algorithm experts, and mathematicians who work on those problems. We have experts on every operating system and software package out there, teams that invent ways to identify non-randomness, teams that look for ways to knock an order of magnitude or two off of the time it takes to crunch through a trillion keys.”

  “But not us.”

  “No. Nothing so banal. We work on messages that aren’t public key encrypted. That’s a very small percentage of the overall traffic. Usually, that means they use some old tried and true method, and can be cracked by a Raspberry Pi with one hand tied behind its back. Occasionally, though, we get messages that aren’t encrypted with any recognized variation of obsolete technique, and we can’t read them. I’ll be honest with you: most of those are never cracked. But we’re the team that gets to try.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. “Sounds like just my kind of team.”

  “It’s not glamorous, and it’s not all that valued. I have to constantly fight to keep funding. A lot of the messages we wrestle against probably aren’t even meaningful at all—just scrambled signals that were encoded wrong or garbled by atmosphere or bad equipment. But every once in a while, we crack something that nobody else could.”

  “And that’s not valued?” I asked.

  She blew out a long breath and rubbed the back of her neck. “You have to understand, the vast majority of the messages the NSA intercepts have no intelligence value whatsoever. We go for quantity, not quality, and then try to pick the needles out of the haystack. That means that even when we triumph and crack an indecipherable message, it’s just as likely to be somebody’s grocery list as it is to be something important.”

  She was trying to lower my expectations, but it wasn’t working. I had dreamed about doing this for so long that nothing she could say would lessen my excitement. I was going to pit my mind against the enemies of the United States, and I was going to win. The shabby facilities, Shaunessy’s disapproval, none of it mattered. I worked for the NSA.

  “So, welcome to the team,” Melody said. “Sorry about the seat. We’ll get that replaced, and get you a machine and an account as soon as possible.”

  “What’s the noise?” I asked.

  She looked confused. “What noise?”

  “That constant humming sound. It’s like we’re in a wind tunnel.”

  “Ah.
” She nodded in comprehension. “I’m so used to it, I don’t hear it anymore. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”

  We walked back through the cubicles to the back of the room, to a large wooden door with a keypad. Melody passed her badge over the keypad, which beeped and turned its indicator light from red to orange. She pressed a series of numbers. The light turned green, and a heavy clunk indicated an electromagnetic locking system unlatching. She opened the door, and the whirring sound grew much louder.

  We walked through into a cavernous room. I couldn’t have been more surprised if the door had led directly to the White House. The ceiling was probably twenty feet high, and we were near the top of it. A flight of stairs led down to the floor. For as far as I could see, there were rows and rows of rack-mounted servers, probably thousands of them. Despite all the heat the machines must generate, the air was frigid.

  “The server room,” she said. “And this isn’t the end. We have a hundred thousand square feet of it. Not nearly enough to crack a single properly encoded message with a 128-bit RSA key, mind you. But give us enough information, and we can launch quite an attack on a lot of things.”

  There were a few people among the racks, but the room was mostly empty. One person was riding a bicycle down one of the aisles, which seemed like a good idea, given the amount of distance there was to cover. I noticed that the doorway we had come through was significantly thicker than it needed to be and had grooves on both sides. I asked Melody about it.

  “There’s a steel cage in the wall above the doorway,” she said. “In the case of an attack on the building, it and others like it would crash down, blocking the entrances and making it extremely difficult for anyone outside this room to get in.”

  “And anyone inside to get out,” I said.

  “Well, yes. But in the unlikely event that this building is successfully breached by an enemy force, you’re probably safer locked in here than anywhere else.”

  I also commented on what looked like a ridiculously large yellow locker marked Emergency. “What are they storing in there, automatic weapons?” I asked.

  “I doubt it,” Melody said. “But that’s NSA bureaucracy at its best. It probably took a committee three months to decide on what to put in that locker, and I’ll bet if you actually had an emergency, you’d find it contained every possible thing you could think of, except for the one thing you need.”

  We retreated to the office, and Melody closed the door, which latched with an audible clunk. “I have to catch a plane to Germany this afternoon,” she said. “I’ll make sure I get the ball rolling on getting you a machine and an account, but you’ll have to get the team to show you the ropes.”

  That took the smile off my face. “Wait. You’re leaving? For how long?”

  “Just a week. You’ll be fine. It’ll take a while for you to learn the organization, the security procedures. You’ll have some more mandatory classes to take. The week will go quickly. Just do me a favor.”

  “What?”

  “No more trouble with security. I don’t think I could rescue you a third time.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.

  She held my gaze. “I hope your best is good enough. I want you to be here when I get back.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “I can’t tell you anything,” I said. “Seriously. Come on, you know that.”

  Paul and I were playing Scrabble again, and surprisingly, he was up on points. He had used all his letters with the near-miraculous word zugzwang (using a blank tile for the second Z), which he placed on a double word score for a total of ninety-five points. It was rattling my sense of the balance of the universe, and I was determined to make up the difference.

  “I’m your brother,” Paul said. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “It doesn’t matter if you’re my wife. Dad didn’t tell Mom about the programs he worked with, and I can’t tell you what I’m doing at Fort Meade.”

  “At least tell me if the NSA is listening in on my phone calls.”

  I gave him a look. “Nobody would want to listen to your phone calls. I doubt even Destiny wants to listen to them, but she doesn’t have much choice.”

  It had been a month since Paul’s return to the United States, and he was doing fine. Better than fine, in fact. He seemed full of energy, enjoying life to the fullest, and had even started dating a girl named Destiny that he’d met at a local chess club. I had thought it would take longer for him to recover from his ordeal, but apparently what he had learned from the experience was the ability to appreciate the life that he had. It seemed a healthy reaction, and I was glad he was doing so well.

  I used Paul’s Z to place the word blitz for thirty-two points, which brought me to within ten points of his lead. I gave him a smug smile, which vanished as he used my B to place babirusa, using all his letters again.

  “What’s with you today?” I said. “Have you been studying the dictionary or something?”

  He raised his hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Maybe you’re just slipping. The NSA is scrambling your brain.”

  “The NSA’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” I said, more a statement of faith than of certainty. I still barely knew what I was doing, and half the time I got lost trying to get back to my room from the cafeteria.

  “Deciphered any messages yet?” he said.

  I hadn’t, but as I placed the tiles for my next word, I said, “That’s classified.”

  “At least tell me if there are any hot women secret agents.”

  “Radioactive,” I told him. “They breed them in underground labs with an alien dark-energy generator they retrieved from outer space. The ones that don’t explode on contact they use as spies to seduce secrets from our enemies.”

  “I thought that was the CIA,” he said.

  “Common misconception. The CIA does it old school, with electrodes and a soldering iron.”

  Paul suddenly winced and touched his temples.

  “You okay?”

  “Headache. Just the beginning of spring allergies, I think.”

  “Do you need to lie down?” I never used to worry when my brother had a simple headache, but ever since his collapse at the airport, I had been quick to fear the worst.

  “You wish,” he said, and placed the word quisling, tile by triumphant tile, across two triple word scores.

  My humiliating trouncing at the Scrabble board was repeated the next day. In desperation, I suggested chess, usually Paul’s game of choice. That turned out even worse, with Paul chasing my pieces across the board with a series of brilliant moves, each of which gave me little choice but to cede him more control of the center of the board. Eventually, he skewered my queen and king with a combination I didn’t see coming, and I acknowledged myself beaten.

  Despite losing all of the samples he had taken on his Amazon trek, Paul was apparently making great strides with his research, too. He was full of stories about multilocus genotyping and clonal lineage, largely incomprehensible to me but greatly exciting to him.

  My time at work, on the other hand, was making me feel like the greatest moron ever to walk the planet. The NSA used more acronyms than they used actual English words, all of them symbols for this or that program, person, country, technology, or division. I felt like I was learning a new dialect of English, one with no dictionary. When I asked for clarification, the answers were usually cluttered with just as many incomprehensible terms as the original statement. I was left with the impression that there was no reason to bother encrypting the NSA’s interoffice communications, since no one outside the NSA would understand what they were talking about anyway.

  I spent most of my time working with Andrew Shenk, the other man in my cubicle. He was a Spanish speaker and mathematician, who was the team’s specialist on South American indecipherables. There had been a recent rash of such messages from Colombia, all of which had a similar signature, but which no one had been able to crack. The messages had been traded between representatives
of Colombia’s two major guerrilla armies, the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional). The two groups were historically hostile not only to the government but to each other, yet they had recently been working with some degree of cooperation.

  I was getting a crash course in Colombian politics, and while I had known of the existence of these two groups—they had been involved in ongoing rebellions and terrorism against their government for decades— I was surprised to learn that they consisted of thousands of well-armed soldiers and dominated significant portions of the country. The Colombian police and military were more or less powerless in FARC- or ELNcontrolled territory, where the guerrillas conducted all kinds of illegal activities, including logging and mining in protected regions of the Amazon jungle and the forcible taxation of local farms. Their primary source of funds, however, was the drug trade, supplying the never-ending appetite of the United States and Europe for cocaine.

  “Why are we worrying about drugs anyway?” I asked. “Isn’t that the FBI’s job?”

  Andrew looked at me like I was an idiot. He had a great surprised-at-the-depths-of-my-ignorance look, and he used it often. “Drugs are money,” he said. “Money is power. Keeping track of the balance of power in South America is all about understanding the flow of drugs. More than troops and weapons, even. The FBI tries to slow the torrent of drugs into this country; that’s not our concern, at least not directly. But how it affects the balance of power? That’s central to what we do.”

  I was in too deep to pretend I knew what I was talking about, so I decided to dig a little deeper. “What does it matter who is in control of which part of Colombia? One of them gets assassinated, another one takes his place, the FARC gets the upper hand over the ELN for a few months— why do we care? If it affects how the drugs are getting smuggled, then I get that. But it’s not like Colombian revolutionaries are going to threaten the sovereignty of the United States.”