“Tim’s very idealistic,” Marla interrupted. “So before you get all grumpy and cynical, keep in mind that some people actually think they can make a difference.”
“Okay, granted. But do you think it’s even possible for things to get better these days? Look at all the polarization and gridlock. If you wanted to push for any sort of reform, how would you ever get it through Congress?”
“So? Does that mean everybody should just shrug their shoulders and do nothing?” Marla said, turning to Tim. “See? I warned you what a downer he can be.”
“Not at all,” Frank replied. “I’m just pragmatic. Can you name one person in the last ten years who’s actually been able to change anything in Washington in a meaningful way? No? I thought not.”
“Well, there’s Edward Snowden,” Tim interjected.
“Thank you!” Marla said. “There. How about Edward Snowden?”
“Okay, I’ll give you that. He really did upset a lot of apple carts when he started releasing secret State Department materials. But did he actually change anything? Not that I’m aware of, and he’s been paying for it ever since. I don’t imagine that Russia is where he planned to spend the rest of his life when he decided to become a whistle-blower.”
Marla realized, too late, that her father was headed down one of his favorite argumentative rat holes, and she wanted to change the subject, but Tim leaned forward and spoke before she could intervene.
“True, but if you want to make a difference, sometimes you have to be willing to make real sacrifices. Otherwise, like you said, things will never change.”
“I grant you the guy has a lot of moral courage. But who elected him to decide what to expose to the world?”
“Nobody. But if he didn’t let the public know what was happening, who would?”
“Maybe nobody again. And maybe it should have stayed that way for some of what he leaked. Before you put him on too high a pedestal, don’t forget that he’s no Daniel Ellsberg—the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times back in 1971. Ellsberg kept to just one topic, exposing how the government was misleading the public about the Vietnam War. Snowden’s been leaking information about all kinds of government activities all over the world. And he didn’t stick around to see whether the courts would vindicate him, either, the way Ellsberg did.”
“Sure. But why limit yourself to one topic, if the public is being misled on other ones as well?”
“But I say again—who was he to decide what to keep secret and what not? He was just an analyst who didn’t know everything important. How could he know for sure that he wasn’t causing real damage, or even putting peoples’ lives at risk?”
“Because he didn’t just release things willy-nilly. He enlisted two journalists to help him review the materials first, and then he released the ones they collectively believed needed to be revealed.”
Marla tried again. “How about we call this one a draw and look at the menus?”
“Well, okay,” Tim said, “but I still think people need to be willing to stand up for what they believe.”
“Of course they do,” she said, taking his hand. “See, Dad? I told you Tim is very idealistic. That’s one of the things I love about him.” She turned to Tim and continued. “And don’t let my father’s old codger act convince you. He’s really a closet idealist himself.”
* * *
Frank was walking home when his phone rang.
“Hey, Kid. What’s up?”
“Like you can’t guess,” Marla said. “So what did you think of Tim, now that you’ve finally met him?”
He should have already thought of a good answer to that inevitable question, but he hadn’t. “Uh, he seems like a very nice young man.”
“Uhuh. ‘A very nice young man.’ Is that it?”
“I thought that was pretty positive, coming from me. Wasn’t it?”
“I guess; I mean, no. I was hoping you’d say that you really enjoyed talking to him or maybe that you thought we made a cute couple—no, scratch that one.”
“I’m sorry; yes, I did enjoy talking to him. And I liked watching the two of you together. Does that help?”
Silence.
“Look, I’m sorry,” he added. “I don’t want to disappoint you; I just don’t know what you want me to say?”
“No, I’m sorry. It’s just that I think he’s pretty special, and I was really hoping you’d think so, too. Look, I’ve gotta go. Love you.”
He stared at his phone and wondered whether he should call back. He decided he shouldn’t and wondered whether he was just being a coward.
* * *
The next day, it was back to business as usual.
“How about we settle in over there?” Tim pointed toward a couple of empty couches facing each other at the CIA/Cloud Data office.
Frank nodded and followed him, looking vainly for anyone close to his age among the sixty or so people typing on laptops and engaged in conversation across the wide expanse of open office space.
Tim sent off a quick text when he sat down, and a minute later, a young woman stood up across the room and walked in their direction. Frank stood up to meet her, noting the small diamond piercing on the side of her nose and the magenta stripe that divided her black bangs, complementing her Kelly green blouse, albeit in a rather jarring way. She wore clunky, high-heeled boots.
“Pleased to meet you,” Frank said, shaking her hand. She gave him a small smile that was somewhere between polite and “whatever” and sat down.
“I’ve already given Keri a high-level overview of what we’re working on, Frank, so you can dive right in,” Tim said.
“Great. Happy to have you on the team, Keri, because we want to come up with some new ways to look for useful information. I’m betting there are clues hiding in the data about Foobar that everyone’s missing because they’ve already made up their mind what to look for. I want to figure out a way to analyze all the data from a fresh perspective, with no preconceived ideas about what might be important. Any suggestions about how to do that?”
“Well, I’ve got all kinds of data filters. Do you want me to focus on location? Subject? Relation to prior events? I can do pretty much whatever you want.”
He shook his head. “No—that’s the point. I don’t want to tell you what I want, because I don’t know yet what I’m looking for. What I want is to make it easy for something—anything—to jump out at me that I might never have thought was important or never even thought of at all. Can you do that?”
“Uh, like I said, I can do anything you want.”
“How about this,” Tim interrupted. “Why don’t we start by listing all the different categories of data we have and then ask the same question again? Even if it doesn’t suggest something immediately, it will at least help us figure out whether we need to use different techniques for different types of data.”
“Good point,” Frank agreed. “So what do we have?”
Half an hour later, they had a list of categories of data, each with subcategories— sometimes dozens of them. There were geolocations, personnel backgrounds, attack types and outcomes, communication relationships between individuals and between groups, educational vitae, travel histories, and much more.
Frank studied the list, trying to figure out whether there was a relatively simple way to address all of them. He picked one at random as a trial.
“So how about geolocation? How should we tackle that one?”
“How about a heat map,” Tim asked. “We can use colors to show where the largest numbers of Foobar’s people are. And we could do another map with colors showing where they travel and how often. That would make it easy to see something that might be significant, like whether there was a correlation between travel and the frequency and location of attacks.”
“I like that,” Frank said. “Why don’t you make visuals as well as tables of information whenever you can. That will make significant data stand out so we can spot it more quickly and easily.”
“I can do that,” Keri agreed. “And do maps of other stuff, too. Where supplies are moving, and how much by type, linkages of his people abroad by their assumed role in the organization, and so on.”
“Good. Let’s try and map as many types of relationships as possible, and especially between data types that haven’t been mapped and compared before.”
An hour later, Keri and Tim had their marching orders, and Frank was on his way home, already impatient to see what Keri’s maps and reports might reveal.
* * *
He had just unlocked his front door when the phone rang. It was Marla. He juggled keys, phone, and groceries as he walked toward the kitchen. “Hi, Kid. How’re you doing?”
“I’m fine, but I just realized that I forgot to ask you something last night at dinner. How’s Thor?”
Confused, he set the bag of groceries on the table. “Thor?” The name did ring some sort of bell, besides the mythically obvious one. Then his eyelids shot up. Of course! That damned tortoise!
“Oh, he’s fine!” Frank skipped into his living room and got down on his hands and knees to look below the couch, trying to cradle the phone between his shoulder and face without dropping it. He was greeted by a number of sausage-shaped objects and a distinctly unpleasant odor but not by a tortoise.
“That’s great! And are you two boys starting to bond?”
Frank was looking in the closet now, pushing the boxes around with his foot.
“Oh, you know, I guess as much as middle-aged men and tortoises are likely to. But hey, you caught me at a bad time—I was just about to send something off.”
“Okay,” she laughed. “You give Thor a big kiss for me, okay?”
“Very funny. Later.”
He hung up the phone and stared at the small apartment. It was almost empty now. Where could the perverse creature be hiding?
He started by looking under the bed. No Thor. He tried the bathroom next, to no avail. It took hardly any time to check everywhere he could think of, and there was still no tortoise to be found. He tapped his foot on the floor and tried to reason it out, but he couldn’t get anywhere. Where could a ten-pound reptile be when it was nowhere at all?
He gave up. The animal had been missing for a few days already and would just have to stay missing for another few hours. He had work to do, and anyway, maybe if he just sat still, it would get thirsty and come out of hiding on its own.
But it didn’t.
* * *
He slept poorly that night, troubled by disturbing, improbable dreams. He imagined he was chained to the wall of a dungeon, imprisoned for a crime he didn’t think he’d committed, and in any event didn’t understand; he was haunted by strange scraping sounds that might have been rats or perhaps the chains of another prisoner fettered to the other side of the same wall.
When his alarm woke him, he felt dazed and grouchy. He swung his legs out of bed and began work on a serious yawn. But partway through his first step to the bathroom, he threw his hands up in the air and himself backward on to bed with a startled “Whoa!” He had placed his foot on something large, foreign, and cold that was moving to boot. He pushed himself back up to a sitting position and stared down into the critical, frosty eyes of Thor.
“You! You almost killed me! And where have you been?”
But the tortoise just stared back.
“Okay, Okay!” He got out of bed and headed for the kitchen but then caught himself.
“Oh no, you don’t!” he said, returning and scooping up the tortoise. Only after it was back inside its bin did Frank procure several leaves of lettuce and some water for the prodigal reptile.
He stood and watched as Thor consumed the lettuce with deliberation. Frank thought he knew every inch of his small apartment after so many years of residence. How could an almost foot-long animal hide itself where there was no hiding place to be found? He ransacked his apartment again. And once more, he could not find Thor’s secret lair.
Throughout the next day downtown, he found his mind returning to the mystery. Eventually he concluded that the only way to solve it was to release the beast and keep it under surveillance.
That evening, he picked the tortoise up and held it at arm’s length, looking it square in the eye.
“Okay, I’ve had enough. Show me.”
But when he placed the animal on the floor, it promptly scuttled back under the couch again. Frank sat motionless and waited. Then he waited some more.
Clearly, this wasn’t proceeding as planned. It was reptile two, mammal zip at the end of the second round.
Well, Frank wasn’t giving up yet. He opened his laptop, selected the extended version of one of The Lord of the Rings movies, and settled in to wait out the miserable creature. An hour later, he fell asleep with the movie still playing.
The next morning, he awoke with a crick in his neck and no tortoise under the couch. And the odor in his living room had gotten worse.
All that day he worked away uncomfortably on one of his two kitchen chairs, peering from time to time around the doorframe into the living room, in the middle of which were the peanut butter top filled with water and the remnants of the head of lettuce. The stem of the now venerable vegetable was growing soft at its core, exuding what Frank hoped was an ooze irresistible to a tortoise. But Thor proved equal to the challenge, remaining perversely absent notwithstanding his lengthening fast. When Frank gave up and went to bed, the lettuce was still untouched. The next morning, all but the oozing core had disappeared.
* * *
8
Great Expectations
“FYI” was all the email from Roach read. Attached to it was a press release from the Responsible Technology Foundation. Mitty opened it and scanned the contents; the RTF had just announced that it had commissioned the Center for Infrastructure Studies, a respected research institute, to do a detailed report on the probable consequences of the physical destruction of data centers. He pressed his intercom button.
“Sue, get Paul Roach on the phone for me.”
Five minutes later, she buzzed him back and he picked up.
“Paul, I just read that press release. I’m going to want weekly updates on this. I want you to find out everything that’s going to be in that report so you can discredit it before it’s public. And what about the release date they mentioned in the press release—can they really put a report like this together in just a month?”
“Reading between the lines of the press release, it looks like RTF commissioned the research a year ago. My guess is that they didn’t commit to pay for the full, written report until they saw how the research turned out. They’re obviously pleased with the results, so all the institute has to do is formalize what they’ve already summarized for the RTF. So yes, they should be able to release the report within a month.”
“If that’s the case, we’ve got to step things up a notch. I want you to get someone to hack into the RTF system so we don’t get blindsided like this again.”
“We can do that. That shouldn’t be hard to do, if their system security isn’t any better than most non-profits. But it will set you back fifteen or twenty K. We don’t do that sort of thing in-house.”
“Whatever. I want you to see and report to me on every email and draft of that report that passes between RTF and the Center for Infrastructure Studies. And I want to see your proposed talking points debunking it ASAP, as well as a list of who you plan to plant stories with during the couple weeks before the report is released. When can you get those to me?”
“I can get you the placement list this week. No sense working on the talking points until we get hold of a
draft of the report itself, but we can turn those around quick when we do.”
“Okay. And I also want you to send clippings of those articles to everyone on the Hill we care about. In particular, I want every congressman on Steele’s Subcommittee to see a story talking about how all critical infrastructure software and data will be replicated across multiple data centers to ensure that no conceivable attack could take down the Internet in the U.S. or destroy every copy of any important data.”
“Is that true?”
“Of course not. And neither was the claim that smoking doesn’t harm your health. But your firm kept that one alive on the Hill for decades after the medical establishment was in unanimous agreement to the contrary.”
“Just wanted to know where our strengths and weaknesses are. So don’t worry, I’m on it.”
* * *
There was a knock at Roach’s door. He looked up to see Diana Sedgewick, his project coordinator.
“Is this a good time to talk about staffing the DCSA account?”
“Sure. Come on in.”
“Great. What’s the slot you want to fill?”
“I need someone to do deep research on cyber and physical security requirements for critical infrastructure, and in particular on an advocacy group called the Responsible Technology Foundation. No particular background necessary.”
Sedgewick nodded without changing her expression. “Deep research” was the internal code word they used to describe going beyond normally acceptable professional practices.
“Let me see who we’ve got.” She spent half a minute swiping through screens on the tablet she’d brought with her.
“How time consuming will this be?”
“We’ll need most of someone’s time for the next few weeks.”
The Doodlebug War Page 8
