by Brad Thor
Scrapbook! What if that’s exactly what it was? The articles obviously only told part of the story, like pictures. What if there was something written on the back of them—something that explained why the articles were significant?
Reopening one of the articles he had been reading, he looked at it from a new perspective. Most of the hackers he knew were incredibly bright, and Caroline Romero had been no exception. Many enjoyed the digital art of steganography, disguising messages or information but hiding them right in plain sight. They could be hidden among the millions of pixels in an image or even inside a digital sound file. The possibilities were endless. It was known as security through obscurity.
Caroline, though, was practical. Considering the hoops Nicholas had jumped through to gain access to the drive, he couldn’t believe she would have set up another huge leap of security challenges.
Studying the document in front of him, he realized something. The Web article, like all the others, was the printable version. That meant it didn’t contain pictures, but it did still contain links.
Even though he knew none of his equipment was currently connected to the Internet, he still checked one more time, just to be sure.
Convinced that he was safe, he floated his cursor over the article he was reading and clicked on one of its links.
Instantly he was transported into a whole new area of the drive he hadn’t known existed.
CHAPTER 20
Whatever new technology was being used for the drive, it was impressive. Not only was the storage capacity unlike anything that had come before, so was its ability to partition off and disguise enormous chunks of data as simply unused space. It was like a movie lot—the building façades look perfectly real, but open up one of the windows, or walk through one of the doors, and there’s an entirely different reality behind it.
Nicholas was tempted to wake Nina, who had once again fallen asleep on his bed, but decided to keep reading.
Clicking back and forth between the surface articles and what Caroline had attached beneath, he began to understand what she had attempted to do. It was a complete, painstakingly thorough documentation of every single venture and initiative that Adaptive Technology Solutions had ever been involved in. From the articles and wiki pages on DHS to investigative reports on the NSA, every piece of hardware, every software program, every patch, every string of code ever written, updated, or sold was documented. The depth to which ATS was entangled with the United States government astounded even him. The deeper he delved into the information, the further down the rabbit hole he was taken.
Considering his history in the sale and purchase of classified information on the black market, Nicholas was particularly interested in the dossier Caroline had assembled on the National Security Agency. Much of what he had always suspected was suddenly confirmed.
Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks, the unparalleled listening ability of the National Security Agency—which had always been aimed outside the United States—was turned inward. No longer was the NSA restricted to tracking foreign spies and terrorists, whose surveillance had to be signed off on by a judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now, in the name of national security, all American citizens were suspects, and due process had been completely abandoned.
Under contract from the NSA, Adaptive Technology Solutions’ personnel entered telecommunications buildings across the country and secretly installed devices called beam splitters onto their switches so that duplicate copies of all landline, cell phone, e-mail, text message, and Internet traffic would be sent to highly secure, top-secret NSA server farms located across the country.
There, every citizen’s electronic traffic was sorted and sifted by NSA analysts, using ATS software and equipment to search for and flag particular words and phrases. Anyone and everyone could and was being targeted. Privacy had been obliterated.
No matter how fast the technology moved or how secure devices were touted as being, ATS, and thereby the NSA, always got hold of new technology before the general public, thanks to secret national security directives, as well as an active campaign of industrial espionage spearheaded by ATS itself. Though he had long suspected it, Nicholas was stunned by the extent to which the United States had become a burgeoning surveillance state. In the name of “security,” the liberty of citizens was being eroded, not on a yearly basis, not even on a daily basis, but continuously, around the clock, 24/7.
In addition to the warrantless wiretapping and the all-encompassing dragnet the NSA had spread across the Internet, Caroline had chronicled in her files a host of other operations geared toward what she termed Total Surveillance, much of it either unknown to the population at large or being deployed in such a fashion as to appear harmless, or better yet, useful.
Radio Frequency Identification—RFID tags—were a perfect example. They could be used to track everything from casino chips, livestock, and bottles of shampoo at Walmart to people. In fact, multiple high-end nightclubs in Europe were encouraging VIPs to be “tagged,” whereby an RFID tag the size of a grain of rice—similar to what’s implanted in many pets in order to ID them if they get lost—was placed under the recipient’s skin to facilitate faster access to the club and an easier way to run a tab and pay for drinks. In return, the nightclub was able to cut down on employee theft and harvest a wealth of useful data about its best customers.
National governments were even getting into the game. The Mexican Attorney General’s office had tagged eighteen key staff members in order to control access to their secure data rooms, and the United States, which was already inserting RFID tags in all of its passports, was actively considering tagging sex offenders. The potential abuses of this technology were beyond calculation, and Nicholas was reminded of the identification numbers tattooed on Nazi concentration camp victims.
Smartphones and onboard vehicle navigation systems regularly spied on customers, with the data being sold left, right, and center, as well as being handed over to the government on demand with little or no recourse. Many Americans were either unaware or unconcerned that GPS had been developed and was maintained by the Department of Defense, the organization under which the National Security Agency fell. There wasn’t a single GPS device the NSA couldn’t locate at a moment’s notice if it wanted to. And when the NSA did go searching for particular GPS devices, it didn’t have to report to anyone why it was doing so, what information it was gathering, or for what reason.
The same was true, Caroline noted, of the FBI. Not only did the Bureau maintain a database in a secure vault on the fourth floor of its headquarters building in D.C., code-named Guardian, which held files on tens of thousands of Americans never accused or suspected of any crimes, but who had simply acted “suspiciously” at some point in their lives in the eyes of a local law enforcement officer, but the FBI was regularly placing GPS tracking devices under suspects’ vehicles without ever appearing in front of a judge and obtaining a warrant. They had also fielded “Stingrays” without warrants—new devices that could track suspects’ cell phones even when they were not being used to make a call. Even DHS had jumped on the surveillance bandwagon.
In fact, DHS had gone so far as to outfit unmarked vans with large X-ray machines and was driving them around every major American city X-raying whatever and whomever they wanted—families in minivans, bakery trucks, school buses—all of it was fair game and none of it was being done with a warrant.
Inspired by “intelligent” streetlights in the Netherlands and the UK, DHS had also gotten behind another ATS surveillance project and was already testing it in a small U.S. city. The streetlights not only provided light but also included tiny, remotely controlled functions like audio recording, video recording, and the ability to X-ray anyone who passed by.
Even though Nicholas considered himself a political agnostic and had admittedly made his living as a thief, he was stunned that there was no outrage, no hue and cry from the day-to-day citizens who were being spied upon. The only peopl
e screaming bloody murder were the usual handful of privacy advocates. The majority of people seemed to have bought into the fallacy of believing that if they hadn’t done anything wrong, there was nothing for them to worry about.
They had no idea of the likelihood that these technologies would one day be used against them. Like the tax code, the body of laws that governed national security would eventually make everyone a criminal, no matter how honest they were or how hard they tried to abide by the letter of those laws. It was only a matter of having attention turned on you. Those same measures that kept “you and your family safe” today could be used to track down and imprison anyone tomorrow.
Were Americans more concerned with having the latest and greatest app than in fighting how those apps kept track of their every move, their every communication, and even, via their search queries, their every thought?
People’s thoughts, and the invasion of them, was another disturbing development that Nicholas had heard whispered about only to find confirmation of in Caroline’s notes. In addition to algorithm developers trying to use data to anticipate customer behavior, the NSA and Google were using the millions upon millions of Tweets, Facebook entries, E-Z Pass toll records, Amazon purchases, cell phone data, GPS information, search engine queries, and other digital bread crumbs generated each day to build the most sophisticated artificial intelligence system the world had ever seen. Code-named AQUAINT—Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence—the system was not only being taught to think like a human being, but it was also being groomed to predict the way people think and act.
The technology was terrifying, but there was more. Caroline had included an article about a company secretly owned by ATS, which had recently completed phase one testing under a DHS financial grant and was now working on phase two. Called the Future Attribute Screening Technology program, or simply FAST, it was a device that could be secretly deployed at stadiums, airports, malls, and other public locations, and was designed to “identify terrorist activity before it took place.”
Without permission, the device scanned the physiology of each person who unknowingly passed by its sensor array, recording, storing, and analyzing their respiration, pheromone secretion, “electrodermal” activity, and cardiovascular signature, in an attempt to recognize “malintent” and alert authorities. A secondary “tagging” system worked to establish the subject’s identity via the FBI’s new NGI, or Next Generation Identification, database. It was like iPhoto tagging on steroids.
NGI was an all-encompassing, billion-dollar upgrade of the Bureau’s fingerprint database, which contained records for more than a hundred million people and had been known as the “largest biometric database in the world.” Instead of just fingerprints and mug shots, NGI contained searchable photos with face-recognition technology, iris scans, fingerprints, palm prints, DNA, voice-print recordings, measures of gait, and detailed analysis of scars and tattoos. It was beyond “next generation” and the perfect pairing for the FAST technology. Tagging by the FAST devices, though, didn’t end simply with running unsuspecting passersby through NGI.
With no concern paid to unreasonable searches, FAST also scanned your person to ascertain whether you were carrying any mobile devices. If you were, the FAST machine would establish a “handshake” with your devices and copy whatever readily available data they contained. FAST also looked for any RFID tags you might be carrying and copied the information from those as well.
All of it was then fed into a larger database maintained by DHS and NSA, and a file was created for each person who walked by.
It didn’t matter if you were intent on carrying out a criminal activity today. You “might” be at some point in the future and therefore the information collected now could serve as a baseline against which all of your behavior going forward could be prepared.
Planting a flag firmly in the realm of thought crime, the U.S. government had created a scene straight out of the film Minority Report or George Orwell’s novel 1984.
Not only would these technologies know exactly where you were at any given moment and what you were doing, they’d be monitoring what you were thinking and calculating what you were about to do next. The same government in charge of running the U.S. Postal Service would be in charge of these technologies. The claim that they would be used only to ensure the safety of U.S. citizens seemed to Nicholas to be far outweighed by the massive potential for their abuse.
And every encroaching piece of technology, every movement to strip away people’s liberty in the name of security, in one way or another could be traced back to Adaptive Technology Solutions.
Nicholas continued moving from file to file, clicking on the links and learning all of the activities that ATS was involved in. It wasn’t until he found a file detailing the organization’s history that he realized he had hit the mother lode, the big picture, the one they had been willing to kill Caroline for.
At the end of World War II, in the waning days of the military’s Office of Strategic Services, the groundwork for the Central Intelligence Agency was being laid. Concerned about the idea of a civilian intelligence agency overseen by politicians, a highly secretive group of OSS members broke off and started their own organization.
They christened it Sentinel and, operating below the radar, pursued one simple mission—safeguarding the United States in the postwar era, no matter what the cost. In the beginning, they were quite successful, but with that success came unwanted notoriety across Washington.
Some saw them as dangerous vigilantes, unanswerable to anyone but themselves, who needed to be stomped out. Others saw them as a useful weapon against the Communists in the deepening Cold War. As investigations were launched by anti-Sentinelists, pro-Sentinelists provided the covert organization with cover and extremely lucrative government contracts.
They were in many respects above the law. In essence, they often broke the law so that certain government agencies didn’t have to. The desired outcome was achieved, security was assured, and their sponsors were able to maintain more than a modicum of plausible deniability.
As happens in many organizations, though, Sentinel experienced “mission creep.” Younger employees, recruited to help assume the burden of an ever-increasing operations tempo, didn’t always share the views of the organization’s founders.
By the 1960s, Sentinel was already moving beyond human intelligence gathering. They saw the future of intelligence in Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT, and began the transition to cutting-edge computers and satellites. By the 1970s, Sentinel had rebranded themselves as Adaptive Technology Solutions. So plugged in were they to the corridors of power, particularly at the NSA, that many believed ATS to actually be a sort of quasigovernmental entity. The organization did little to dispel this notion and in fact promoted and traded on it heavily.
Reading Caroline’s notes, Nicholas learned that ATS gradually became less and less about America and more and more about itself. Everything was about fattening its bottom line. The company was ruthless in cutting out its competitors and grinding down suppliers. They used their ability to harvest data in order to blackmail anyone in the public or private sector who got in their way. This discovery was astounding, but it was nothing compared to what Nicholas found in the next file.
For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the technology hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They created mountains of “black dollars” for themselves, which they washed through various programs they were running under secret contract, far from the prying eyes of financial regulators.
Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around an
d sold to the Pentagon or the CIA.
In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach.
Nicholas felt certain he had finally struck upon why Caroline Romero had feared for her life. Then he opened a file labeled Blue Sand.
Within the first two paragraphs, he realized that everything else ATS had done in its past was nothing compared to what it was preparing to unleash.
He needed to warn people, but he realized that there was only one person who could really do something about it.
CHAPTER 21
BASQUE PYRENEES
SPAIN
THURSDAY
Padre Peio had work to do at the abbey and invited Harvath to join him. It was three hours farther into the mountains by horseback.
Harvath had been there before. It was everything a place of religious refuge should be, beautiful, peaceful, and remote. The problem was, it was a little too remote. The priests had some contact with the outside world, but it was very limited. When Nicholas had stayed there, he had brought most of his own equipment with him. It had been destroyed in a fire, and Peio was back to almost two tin cans and a string. Harvath couldn’t go with him. He needed to stay where he already had a solid connection to Skype. He needed to wait for the Old Man to relay further instructions.
And wait he did. All day, he checked his account on the hour and the half hour, hoping to see a message from Carlton. No message ever came.
Unable to avoid Harvath, as he was parked in the middle of his home, the ETA commander stuck his head inside the room and introduced himself. His name was Tello. He was an enormous man with large, rough hands and stained teeth. He wore a thick handlebar mustache along with several days’ growth of whiskers on his cheeks that suggested he’d been too busy to shave. Harvath had no idea what the man had been up to and he didn’t want to know. Supposedly, ETA had renounced all violence. But judging by the looks of Tello and the heavily armed men on his ranch, this crew hadn’t gotten the memo. The less Harvath knew about his host and his colleagues the better.
