Frank surfaced dumbly out of his reverie, and realized with surprise that three deer were staring at him, not thirty feet away: a young buck, its spike antlers still in velvet, accompanied by two does. Only their heads and necks were clearly visible; their bodies were hidden by the underbrush surrounding his campsite.
Fully aware now, he froze, fascinated, waiting to see what they would do. For two long minutes the answer was nothing but stare back. Finally, one doe, and then the other, briefly and nervously looked away and then turned back. Then the first one snorted, turned, and gracefully bounded away, as if bouncing on an invisible trampoline that was being towed off to the side. One after the other, the remaining doe, and then the buck, gave an identical snort, turned, and followed with equal dignity.
Raising himself slowly from his chair, he wondered if he would be able to still see them.
And indeed, there they were, only another fifty yards away, browsing peacefully, their heads disappearing to take another bite of vegetation and then rising again while they chewed, like a trio of ether filled dippy birds. From time to time, the buck turned to stare at Frank.
All the tension now drained from his body, Frank sat back down and contemplated the peaceful scene, suddenly aware of the sounds and smells that he’d been ignoring for hours. Overhead, he heard an indescribable sound, somewhere between a beep! and a cheep! But why did it sound so oddly familiar?
He looked up, searching for the source. Finally he spied the bird, and then a second, that seemed to be emitting the strange calls. They looked like too-large swallows, or perhaps small hawks, with long, pointed wings fluttering rapidly, each with a white bar on its underside. They made quick dips and jags as they flew, like bats. He guessed they must be catching insects.
Then he remembered. When he was in grade school, his parents would sit on the front stoop of their tenement in Brooklyn on hot summer nights. Like everyone else, they were waiting for some of the sun’s heat to seep out of the walls of their apartments and for the cooling night air to seep in through wide open windows. As it got dark, he and the other kids would run around and scream in the street until even their crewcuts were soaked with sweat.
Eventually their parents would call them, and they’d join their families on the stoops, and everything would become peaceful and quiet. That’s when he would hear those strange sounds from above, coming from the flitting shadows that appeared and disappeared in the faintly glowing patch of sky between the black silhouettes of the buildings. It was a mysterious sound that overlay the murmur of his parents and their neighbors, chatting and laughing quietly in the deepening darkness as the noise, commotion and anxieties of the day dissipated along with the heat.
His childhood had not, for the most part, been a happy one, but there had been something wonderful about those hot summer nights. Perhaps it was because he and the other children were still so young – too young to know that some of them would be jocks and others nerds, or that it would matter. Or maybe it was the anonymity and freedom of the darkness. He didn’t know. But in his memory, something about those evenings had been magic.
His work forgotten, Frank listened to the nighthawks and watched the last colors of the sunset fade until there were no colors left in the sky at all.
* * *
The buzzing of a mobile phone woke him the next day. It was the one that only Josette would be using, and he decided to ignore it. For once, he’d had a blissfully peaceful night’s sleep, and it was pleasantly cool in his camper. She must be anxious to know the results of his last poll station invasion. He peered out the window by his bunk and saw that it was gray and damp from an overnight rain shower. Well, let her wait.
But moments after that phone stopped, his other one started! Damn the woman! Not only was she badgering him, but she was using a phone that might be tapped as well. He ignored the ringing phone, grabbed the disposable one, and only just remembered to turn on the white noise generator before dialing.
“What?!” he barked as soon as she picked up.
“I have just sent you a link! You must look at it and call me right back!”
“Why? What is it?”
“No need to explain – you will understand as soon as you watch it! Call me back as soon as you’re done.” She hung up.
The hell if he would “call as soon as he was done,” he grumbled. And he wouldn’t be done for a while, either. Not till I’ve brushed my teeth and made coffee and maybe gone for a nice long run.
But half way through brushing his teeth he started to wonder what she had found. He assumed it might be just something from the day’s news, but what if she had figured out something that he hadn’t? He rinsed his mouth and turned on his laptop.
When he clicked on the link, he was surprised to see that he was watching a public service video about voting. A stereotypically bland, smiling actor was standing in a mock voting station, talking to the camera and pointing at things around her, explaining for first-time voters how they would check in and then vote on Election Day.
He turned the sound up as she began to explain how a voting unit worked.
When you enter the polling booth in your own community you’ll find a machine that allows you to cast your vote. What model device you see will depend on where you live, and how recently your community bought its machines.
At one time, voting machines were very large and mechanical…
The camera cut to black and white archival footage, showing another bland, smiling woman, this time in a mid-calf dress, stepping into what looked like a double-wide phone booth, and then pulling a black curtain closed behind her. Impatient, Frank moved the slider on the video forward to take him back to the present.
Today, of course, everything is very different. As you can see, voting machines are much smaller. And although every manufacturer’s device is different, every one sold in the last five years is now required to have a voter interface that meets new national standards.
The camera zoomed in on the screen and keyboard of the voting machine, as the narrator’s hand pointed out various features. At the moment, she was pointing at a round circle on the control panel that had an icon of a phone in it.
One of the reasons is so that, starting with this election, you can now use your mobile phone to help you vote!
At that, Frank let out a whoop of joy. Of course! That’s why he couldn’t find anything on the voting systems – it was because the malware didn’t have to be there at all – it could be loaded on the phones that a lot of people would use to vote! If he’d paid attention to the appearance of the physical voting machines at any of the locations instead of just focusing on their software he’d have realized that immediately.
His disposable mobile phone was buzzing again, and this time he grabbed it.
“So what do you think?” Josette said. “It must be the mobile phones that they are hacking, yes?”
“It’s possible. I’ll have to find out whether that’s in fact the case.”
“I’ve been thinking about that already. I think they would have used an app.”
“Agreed. But which one? There are millions out there. You’d have to hack one that enough people would download to make a difference, especially since a lot of polling stations probably still use old machines.”
“Yes, of course. But that’s what should make it easy to narrow our search. It would have to be one of the most popular downloads, and of course free and available on every kind of phone as well.”
Frank thought for a moment. “Probably one that could be remotely updated, too. Otherwise they’d have to preset the voting. They’d have to be pretty clever to figure out a way to do that in advance without the results sticking out too obviously.”
“May we do this?” Josette said, “Each of us will look at the top downloads for this year and then we compare our best guesses for which ap
ps to investigate?”
“I can do that. Talk tonight?”
“Yes! Until then.”
He was prepared to believe that Josette might be right, but that didn’t mean that they would solve the hack immediately if she was. He began to consider the possibilities as he laced up his sneakers for his morning run. Could a voting app have been hacked? He doubted that. Too obvious. However low his opinion of security precautions generally might be, he had to believe that a mobile phone voting app would have to have been secured and tested in every way imaginable.
On the other hand, by definition there would have to be a voting app on the phone, or the person couldn’t vote. So somehow the hacked app would have to interfere with the voting one – maybe with how the vote was recorded on the phone or transmitted to the voting machine?
His thoughts continued to flow as he loped off. What kind of app should he look for? Better question: what kind of app would he choose to hack? Hmm. Well, he’d obviously want to target people that were likely to vote, so maybe the app he’d hack – or maybe even develop himself − would have some kind of political theme. If he was right, that would narrow the search a lot.
Then there was his earlier assumption that the app would need to be updated. There were two ways that could be accomplished – it could log-in to the host server every time the phone connected to the Internet, or the app could provide the user with a built-in incentive to connect to the host site. Either would work, but people were sensitive about privacy these days. Tech-savvy users might disable an automatic function like that. So if he were the hacker, he’d give the user a reason to log on to the developer’s site.
What else? Well, on days where primaries would be held in multiple states, and again on the big day in November, a sophisticated hacker would want to know what state you were voting in. That way the algorithm on the host program wouldn’t have to alter more votes than necessary to get the desired result. So the app would also need to know your location.
That brought up privacy again, because phones were preset by the vendor these days to ask for permission before allowing the user’s location to be disclosed. So again a smart hacker would need to provide an incentive for users to say “yes” when the request popped up.
So where did that take him? He mused on that for a while as he pounded along, oblivious to the fact that a cold fog had begun to rise from the wet landscape around him. Despite the fact that he’d made a lot of money out of an app not long before, he didn’t use many and had never followed the app market closely. What besides games would get the most downloads? He didn’t really know, but that would be easy to check.
He glanced at his watch. It wasn’t quite time to turn around yet, but now that he had started to make some plausible guesses he was impatient to see where they might lead. He turned around and picked up his pace.
* * *
Josette pored over the results of an hour spent looking for app download data. There were more categories of apps to consider than she would have thought, but nowhere near enough data. For some categories she could find no rankings at all, and where she could, there was often no information about how many downloads each app had attracted. Nor was there any data about who was doing the downloading. Were they adults or children? Men or women? Midwestern farmers or Brooklyn hipsters? The detailed data seemed to only be available in expensive research reports.
She tapped the end of a pencil against her teeth and considered the options. It seemed that short of spending $1000 her best bet would be to look for high level data and then try and extrapolate from there. But even that kind of information did not seem to be sufficiently useful. Clearly there were a lot of downloads of games and the kind of software you’d want to make a mobile device more useful – map apps, contact managers and the like. But there were dozens, and even thousands of programs in these categories. If she was lucky, the hacker might have tampered with multiple apps in order to be sure that he captured enough phones to swing the election. But what if it was only a single app that had been hacked?
She returned to the best hard data she’d found, which listed the top ten downloads for the prior year. The numbers per app ranged from 29.5 to 86.1 million. Some were simply apps allowing you to access the top social media and financial sites. Two were map programs. Five were from just one mega high tech company. Was this where she should be looking? Those five apps together had probably reached over 100 million users, even if most users had downloaded several of them. But she guessed that these apps would also have the closest ongoing security supervision. Wouldn’t the hacker worry that their malware would be discovered, or perhaps crippled by a software update, before the election?
Wouldn’t it make more sense for the hacker to create his own app? Then they would always be in control of everything. If it were her, she would have launched dozens of apps, hoping that one would take off. Or, if she had enough money, she could buy an already successful one from its developer and then tamper with that.
She looked at her notes on game rankings. Much of the data she had found was global, rather than national, or reported just for a single platform rather than across all types of mobile devices. And since the app they were looking for would have needed to be released the year before so that enough copies would be on phones before the primaries began, the total number of downloads would be spread across two years, diluting its rank for each one.
She had to figure out a way to narrow the choices. She had learned that 59% of Americans supposedly played computer and video games, and that some of the most successful games had been downloaded tens of millions of times. That sounded like it could be enough. But how many users played only on consoles, and not on mobile devices? And what percentage of game players were old enough to vote? It was all such a mess.
She decided to download each of the top games for the last year and hope to stumble on a clue.
* * *
Frank was having a similar experience. After sifting through jumbles of unhelpful data he decided to shift gears, and go back to thinking how he would investigate an app if he did find one that seemed suspicious.
Leaning back to a precarious angle in his chair, he mulled the situation over. What would he do if they couldn’t narrow the suspect app list to fewer than, say, 20 programs? It would take him forever to check that many apps for malware, and he might miss it even if the right app was on the list. There had to be a better way.
Antivirus software wouldn’t help. Those programs only scanned for viruses that had already been identified. He’d have to either scan all of the code of every app using more sophisticated tools, or come up with his own test. And what would that be?
Well of course. Why did that take so long? Why not just buy a bunch of cheap phones, load one app on each phone, and then monitor its core functions while he used it at a voting station? Wouldn’t that do it? He got up and stepped outside, walking rapidly and retracing his steps from his morning run.
It should work in theory, but it might be tricky. There were at least a half dozen different voting machine manufacturers, and even though the voter interface was supposed to be identical for all of them, a lot of the software deeper down would be proprietary, and the security of some machines might be better than others. And more than a handful of voter apps had been approved by the Federal Election Commission. What if the hacked app didn’t work with every voting machine? And the apps were modified for each operating system, too – Apple and Android, and that was before you got to the smaller players, like Microsoft and BlackBerry.
He crammed his hands in his pockets and leaned forward into the wind, shoulders hunched. He’d have to have not just one phone for each app he tested, but multiple voting apps on each phone as well, to be sure he hit the right combination. And if he didn’t luck out at the first voting station, he’d have to go to another electoral district, or even state, to try out their voting
machines, unless he could download their software through Voldemort.
There had to be a better way than that. He bet the voting machine vendors, like most manufacturers, sold through distributors rather than direct to their customers. He’d received a mass of data from Voldemort back when he started on the project, but had never looked at it thoroughly. Maybe he’d be lucky and find a warehouse somewhere where a lot of different voting machines might be found.
* * *
Frank was feeling good when Josette called that evening. He’d confirmed that sure enough, voting machines were mostly sold through state government buying co-ops that pooled their purchasing power to get better deals. Those co-ops received their purchases through eight regional distribution centers that carried all sorts of goods, from paper towels to voting machines. There was one about 250 miles from where he was right now.
But before he could share his news, Josette spoke excitedly.
“I have it, Frank! I’m sure I do!”
“How can you tell?”
“I’m sure you’ll agree. It’s a game app − the fastest rising free mobile game since August of last year. More than 40 million copies have been downloaded so far, and it’s still going up!”
“So that means it could be what we’re looking for, but it certainly doesn’t prove that it is. And what if it’s just kids that are playing it?”
“You must look at it yourself. Then I think you will agree. I’ve sent you the link. Call me when you’ve had a chance to look at it.” She hung up.
Frank sighed. He was too old to cope with youthful enthusiasms. There was no way he could be sure that any particular app was the right one until he visited that warehouse.
The Lafayette Campaign: a Tale of Deception and Elections (Frank Adversego Thrillers Book 2) Page 25
