Tyranny of Secrets

by John Statton

  John Statton

  Tyranny Of Secrets

  Dedicated to my parents,

  Bev and Gerry, who always believed,

  and to Anne who supports with grace and love.

  If you like the story, please tell others and leave an honest review on the system where you bought it. It helps build an audience and is deeply appreciated!

  Cover design by the award-winning Nick Lowndes (nicklowndes.com)

  Copyright © 2017 by John William Statton.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portions in any form.

  Contact: johnwilliamstatton@gmail.com

  With grateful acknowledgement to Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Requiem; and Walt Whitman’s poem O Me! O Life!

  This is a work of fiction, it’s make-believe. Names, characters, businesses, products, places, events and incidents are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and unintentional. Remember, it’s fiction, for fun. Don’t be so serious.

  ISBN 978-0-9992050-0-6

  Thomas Jefferson, United States Co-Founder, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

  Barack Obama, Former President of the United States, “You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy.”

  Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Co-Founder, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 - Auto-de-fe

  Chapter 2 - Lever of Control

  Chapter 3 - Corporate Games

  Chapter 4 - Rookie Tryouts

  Chapter 5 - The Major Leagues

  Chapter 6 - The Set Up

  Chapter 7 - Regime Change

  Chapter 8 - First Kill

  Chapter 9 - Still Crazy

  Chapter 10 - Striking Out

  Chapter 11 - Bad Medicine

  Chapter 12 - Hacking Mansfield

  Chapter 13 - Glorious Feeling

  Chapter 14 - A Private Varnish

  Chapter 15 - Nomination Night

  Chapter 16 - On the Rails

  Chapter 17 - Custody Comes Calling

  Chapter 18 - Election Night

  Chapter 19 - Truth Shall Set You Free

  Author’s Note

  #

  Chapter 1

  Auto-de-fe

  May 2015

  “This is some deep government spy shit man, that's what it is.”

  To punctuate his point, Paul Blake leaned into the bar, picked up his Anchor Steam beer and took a long swallow, nearly draining the glass.

  His best friend, Sander Bonham, watched him in the mirror behind the bar and just shook his head. He had been listening to Paul's global conspiracy theories since they were UC Berkeley roommates, just as long as he’d been seeing him wear eye-searing Hawaiian shirts like the green and pink flowered one tonight.

  He remembered what was supposed to be a trip to the bright lights and easy virtue of Las Vegas and instead Paul had turned his big Cadillac east and hijacked them eight hundred miles on a pilgrimage to the alien conspiracies swirling around Roswell, New Mexico. He still had the “I WANT TO BELIEVE” T-shirt. Now, fifteen years later, Sander felt impervious to his conversational bait.

  Paul placed the pint back on the bar with a touch too much force and concentration. He thought he had a great reason for starting to drink before their standing Wednesday night dinner at The Ramp. He was lit by an effusive beer buzz and wanted to share this weird week. Fortunately, the glass landed successfully, permitting him to launch the story.

  “OK, I show up to work last Sunday morning real early because I had some tests to run on the network and traffic is lightest around 3:00 a.m., it gets kind of dead around there.”

  “Damn, Paul. It’s dead everywhere at that hour because humans are supposed to be asleep. You are getting awfully dedicated after getting promoted; you must be reliving your coding days back at school. It's a geek's paradise, right?” Sander observed.

  A couple of months ago, Paul had been promoted to be a key system operator on Shasta Bell's network; a job overseeing the operation of Northern California's primary voice and data systems. “Yeah, I've been digging it, it's pretty sweet.” Paul's voice trailed off, and he took another swallow of beer. "But I've found some scary stuff."

  He took a moment to drain the remainder of the glass and turned his eyes towards Sander. His next words came in a rush. “What would you think if I told you the government siphoned off all of the Internet's traffic for some secret purpose?”

  That earned a pause in the conversation.

  “What the hell? That's a pretty tall accusation, partner,” Sander replied in his best John Wayne voice. “You got anything to back it up?”

  Sander signaled for two more beers. He had to admit he was intrigued. As the Executive Director of the Computer Privacy Foundation, a struggling nonprofit working to keep Orwell's 1984 from being more than a bleak novel, he was always interested in egregious government privacy violations.

  Paul continued, “You are not going to believe the week I've had since last Sunday. How about a couple of burgers while I'm telling the tale?”

  “So long as you are buying, Mr. Corporate Salary. The Foundation missed getting a grant this week, and things are tight at the ranch. Survival rations actually.”

  Their orders in and beers recharged, Paul finally launched into his story. “You know how I've been working in the Operations Center and have access to the hardware systems on the Machine Floor? Well, I needed to go onto the Floor to check some hard settings. I get to the Ops entrance—we’ve got this cool biometric sensor that requires hand and eye scanning—and, no problem, it lets me in just like all of the times before. But I went down the hall to the Floor entrance, and I could not get in. No go.”

  “What do you mean? No access?”

  “Exactly. The system worked a few minutes before when I went into Ops. Not much chance someone switched my fingerprints or retinal patterns without me knowing. The Floor’s panel just read ‘Access denied’.”

  “Some kind of machine problem? Someone playing a joke on you?”

  “That's what I thought, until the door opened and I met this very average-looking guy who had one ice blue eye and one black.”

  “That is weird. Eyes of different colors, how scary,” Sander joked and dug into the fries, which had just arrived.

  “Yeah, well he had an intense way of staring. He informed me he was with security and the Floor was closed.”

  “Well, what's so strange about that? Probably lots of reasons why you'd close off access to your computer hardware. Can you pass the ketchup?”

  With a haughty tone, Paul replied, “You don't understand who I am, little man. I'm a sysop; it's kind of like being a minor god. Around there, we can go where we want, when we want, because we keep that little thing known as a dial tone available. It's not easy with dozens of different systems, spanning fifty plus years of telecommunications history, all conspiring to rob me of 99.999% network reliability. There’s no way I'm ever locked off the Floor.”

  “He had an intense way of staring?” Sander wanted to deflect his friend's rant and get him focused back on the story.

  “Like being pinned down and dissected,” Paul responded. “I can't remember much about him, but he’d some unnerving presence.” Paul bit into his burger and thoughtfully chewed. “I could see people in the back installing some new equipment. Folks I've never seen around before, like the freaky guard.”

  His eyes darted up to his left as he recalled the night. “That's unusual, since I know all of the hardware vendors. I was a little pissed off and wondering at the
same time what the hell was going on. I didn't push it and went back to Ops. But I looked up all of the changes we were documenting to the systems on the Floor and found nothing scheduled that morning.”

  Sander took a pull on his beer. “That's a little strange. Are you just being paranoid again?”

  “No way, I went back in Monday morning and thought I'd get to the bottom of it. I visited my boss.”

  “That would be a major deity in the Shasta Bell pantheon,” Sander snidely interjected.

  “He’d no idea what I was talking about. I could see it on his face, a total surprise. Twenty minutes after meeting with him, he calls and says it’s all just a routine upgrade and security must have got carried away.” Paul delivered this with an exaggerated eye roll. “Well, I finally went on the Floor and saw that someone installed a locked cabinet. A little sleuthing, some conversations with a friend, Steve Riggio, over on the international fiber side of the house, and I found its wiring ran next door into Room 101, the submarine cable terminus.”

  “So what?” came Sander's reply as he used some of his fries to scoop the pool of ketchup up off his plate.

  Paul's eyes slid from side to side, assessing the other bar patrons. He dropped his voice, “I think they installed a beam splitter.”

  “That would be what?”

  “I thought you knew something about the Internet and modern technology? We operate the primary underwater fiber-optic cables between the US and small unimportant places like China, Japan, Korea, and Australia. Most of the digital traffic moving across the Pacific Rim travels through this glass on laser light. Your banking records and porn searches are two examples. The data flows from Google, Apple, and every other tech company down in the Valley are a few others.”

  Paul continued, “Let me try and make what is amazingly complicated very simple: a splitter is like a prism at the end of the cable allowing them to copy the beam carrying the data; one side goes off to its usual customers, the other into a new secret router on the Machine Floor. I'm not sure, but I think our government has just tapped into every single bit and byte sent over those cables. This is an enormously big deal.”

  “Every email?” came the quiet question. Sander was trying to take in the implications of what Paul had just revealed.

  “Every sweaty, petty thing you do online basically routes across those fibers. Come on, you call yourself a computer privacy kind of guy?” came Paul's somewhat incredulous response.

  “Yeah, well maybe I wasn't thinking about what you can do when you duplicate the plumbing. How do you know it’s the government?” was the glib retort.

  Paul made a show of an exaggerated wince. “I'm hurt. I know, I’m basically a glorified digital plumber keeping the lines open because shit happens. We’re moving trillions of bits a day through our pipe, and each one siphoned off is a betrayal of trust.”

  His voice ticked up a notch to be sure Sander heard him over the increasingly crowded and noisy bar, “It's a communications dragnet of epic proportions. I'm telling you, this is fucking unprecedented!”

  Paul's voice then dropped to almost a whisper and Sander had to lean in, “But you want to know why this is scary? By the end of my shift, I had a call from our General Counsel who told me to stop investigating the new equipment, that it’s a national security matter, falling under my nondisclosure agreement. Which was his nice way of saying we will litigate you into the ground if you tell a soul about this.”

  He sipped his beer and slumped on his barstool. “Jesus, you think I’m being shut down or what?”

  He got a shoulder squeeze in sympathy. Sander added it up, “You've got some scary security guy with weird eyes, secret copying of massive amounts of Internet traffic, and oh yeah, you aren't supposed to be discussing this with me because they've let you know it's in violation of your NDA.”

  “About the size of it,” came Paul's reply. “But, Jesus, this is huge; it's mammoth digital spying.”

  Sander's lawyer-mind retreated from the seriousness and scope of Paul's disclosure. He needed time to assimilate this in light of the fact his professional career may have just been handed a significant step forward; this had privacy implications exceeding anything else he’d worked on to date. Such a data breach fell deep into the criminal realm.

  Then every spy movie he’d ever watched clicked into place, and he started eyeing the other patrons. They all could be in on it, any one of them tracking Paul, watching who he talked to.

  “Well, damnation brother.” In the face of a bad situation, Sander punted the conversation out of its depressing track. “You know, maybe it wasn't the government, smells more like aliens to me. Did you get a good look at this guy’s eyes? Did he ever blink in your presence?”

  Paul's bad mood capitulated under a two-pronged attack from the beer and Sander's upbeat nature. “Hell, you're right. I bet I narrowly missed being anally probed.” He broke up laughing. “You didn't see him. I'm all in on a theory of weird-eyed, nondescript, scary little fuckers from outer space.”

  “Then again, this could have been nefarious international Illuminati activity. They can be bad ass,” speculated Sander.

  “Those inner circle secret society bastards? Aren't they responsible for the weird floating eye on our money?” Paul fumbled for his wallet and pulled out a dollar. Pointing to the back, he said, “There’s the government connection right there, they run everything from behind the scenes.”

  Sander thumped his friend's back. “Another mystery solved. Brilliant, Sherlock!”

  Paul replied a bit wistfully, “Have been since college man, we had us some times.” Paul swiveled his head to look at Sander. “You see Mariana lately?”

  “Not for years. You know how I feel, let's not go there.”

  “Just saying, it’s a long time. I occasionally see her, but I know you miss her. I miss the three of us hanging out. Those were good days.”

  With a touch of anger in his voice, Sander turned to lock eyes with Paul. “Come on, brother. We've got other problems.” Then, restoring his usual warm, friendly baritone, he continued, “Government spy shit, anal-probing space aliens, or those who secretly govern; all leading candidates for unlawful data collectors in the first degree. Which gets you a little bad press, and perhaps a small slap on the wrist penalty. As your attorney, I suggest you sleep it off and don't immediately tangle with a wealthy corporation over matters of confidentiality. We’re out of beer. Let us retire, Mr. Holmes, to reflect on this further.”

  Paul got the check, and the old friends stepped into the cold, clear night air rolling in from the San Francisco Bay. The Ramp was a local dive bar institution set next to long-abandoned shipbuilding docks. It was one of the few spots where you could eat on the water, and prized by locals fearful of the city's tourists learning about its existence. They walked through the parking lot nestled between a small yacht shipyard, and a storage facility, forming a short alley to Mission Bay Avenue.

  During their dinner, they could not see a man with two different colored eyes, dressed in dark blue sweats, out for a run along the Avenue. He pulled up alongside Paul's classic red 1980 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, parked on the street.

  As he approached the back of the car, no one noticed him stop, glance around to check for observers, and kneel down as if to tie his shoe. He swiftly pulled out a small plastic box, about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and magnetically attached it to the twenty-five-gallon fuel tank that supplied the car's thirsty V8 engine. The box contained a small radio receiver, and its contents were designed to melt away in case of fire. Tightening his laces, the man stood up and resumed his brisk pace; another runner in the night.

  Navigating the alley, Sander and Paul emerged onto the Avenue. Paul's car parked carefully about half a block down. Spotting it across the street, Sander nudged Paul's ribs and playfully asked, “Hey, you ever going to get rid of that Caddy?”

  This was well-trodden comedic ground. Paul had owned the car from high school, and it wasn’t new then. They bot
h smiled: the Cadillac had been the foundation of many a memorable road trip.

  “Lucille? How can you say that, man? Not as long as there is a rebuilt part available for all of her machine goodness.” Paul was a lifelong fan of B.B. King's music, and Mr. King's name for his prized guitar had rubbed off on the Cadillac sometime in the distant past.

  “I have to admit, she is looking better than ever.” Sander offered up the praise because Paul kept her gleaming. Even at night the car reflected the streetlight highlights.

  “You know it. Just got her back from my very expensive mechanic yesterday and he thinks she's better than new after a lot of recent investment. Want a lift home so you can hear her sing for yourself?” Paul's pride in his well-maintained ride showed in his voice.

  Sander lived just up the hill, and, while tempted, Paul's talk about Mariana had him a little stirred up and wanting to dwell in the past feeling sorry for himself. “No, I think I'll walk this one off. You OK to drive?” The cool, slightly salty air started to clear their heads and dispel the beer buzz.

  “Yeah, I'm a classic, just like Lucille; all my parts are running great.”

  “Classic, yeah, I know. Be seeing you, buddy. Drive safe.” Sander stood on the sidewalk and watched a man who was like a brother walk into the night.

  Paul stepped across the deserted road and down to the car. Unlocking the door triggered interior lights, illuminating the white leather and chrome interior. He slid behind the wheel, reached out and pulled the door closed.

  The light went out at the same time he fumbled the key into the ignition. He turned it one click to engage the battery and rolled down the window.

  Paul shouted his parting shot across the quiet night air, “Hey, almost forgot, did I mention Mariana is in town this week? She’s staying at her company’s apartment. Thought you might like to know.”

  “Go on, you lousy drunk. I got a life,” came Sander's shouted response.