“Can’t tell yet, Commander. Too much smoke.”
Another five painful seconds ticked by.
“Uh…Captain, we’ve got…”
“What is it, Sykes?”
“A mighty fine-looking young woman just came running outside. And she’s…well, let’s just say she’s not armed. Wait…he’s coming out now…”
Pause.
“Doesn’t look like he’s armed,” Sykes reported.
The eye in the sky agreed: “Delta Four, confirming visual on a white male coming out the north exit. The suspect is unarmed. Repeat: unarmed. Over.”
“This is Whitcomb. I want one member from each team to move in. Everyone else, sit tight and stay alert.”
TARGET LOCATION NOTIFICATION
TARGET: ALAN BATEMAN, scam artist, USA
BOUNTY: $632,604
News reports confirm that the FBI has determined that Alan Bateman faked his own death and is now considered a fugitive by the US government. We are committed to justice and fairness to our patrons. To that end, the address submitted with the fraudulent proof of claim is being publicly posted to assist all concerned parties in determining Alan Bateman’s whereabouts. Click this link to view the address and an interactive map:
http://www.bounty4justice.com/ALAN.BATEMAN/tracker
Thank you for your patronage.
# 32.01
@ London, England
10:01:54 BST
Deputy Director Charles Burls clipped the wireless microphone to his lapel and strode to the front of the meeting hall, hands folded behind his back, his years of military service manifest in his trim physique, buzz-cut hair, razor-crisp suit lines, and ramrod posture. Certainly, he had no trouble commanding the immediate attention of the four dozen cybersecurity delegates seated around the horseshoe-shaped table facing him. He’d summoned them from all over the European Union to this emergency meeting at the National Crime Agency headquarters in London. An alliance needed to be formed. A war alliance.
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” he said, then cut straight to the matter: “Ladies and gentlemen, Europe is under attack.” He paused and raked his eyes over the assemblage. “The world is under attack. Our common enemy wears no uniform. It has spies and sympathizers and allies. It is invisible. It is insidious. And without ever launching drones or warships or ground troops, it can put an end to the world as we know it. If you’re thinking of radical jihadists or an aspiring czar, think again. Because suicide bombers and those who nostalgically maneuver to reclaim old-world empires are obsolete on the new battlefront. Why? The answer is simple, my friends. It is because the cyberwar has evolved. Data and those who control it are the new gods of war. We’ve all dealt with aspects of this contest and have glimpsed what the future of warfare might look like. In the past few days, I’m afraid, we’ve moved significantly closer to that future.”
The Bounty4Justice home page flashed up on the huge viewing screen behind him. He gestured toward it.
“To some, this vigilante website is viewed as a dodgy matter, a nuisance best left to police and criminal investigators, who will sort through the carnage in its wake. Here in the U.K., it is not ranked as a Tier One national security priority, even as its ambitions aim higher and higher, and even though its insidious host remains a ghost, free to operate at will beyond the reach of any laws or nations. It boggles the mind, frankly. Today I hope to convince you that we must commit, together, to stop it in its tracks. Because this”—he jabbed a finger at the screen—“is only the beginning. This, I fear, is a beta test of something much bigger yet to come. Now more than ever, I believe it is imperative that we unite against the forces that attack our common interests in the cyber realm to undermine peace, democracy, and commerce.”
He went over the housekeeping rules, then laid out the day’s agenda of eight intelligence presentations and an intra-agency e-portal tutorial, broken up into three sessions with a generous lunch break and afternoon tea. After that, he introduced his colleagues, who were seated at a table at the front of the room: a Europol liaison, an MI5 strategist, and half a dozen cryptanalysts and technical officers from the agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit. He took his place at the table, and the presentations commenced.
The first speaker was Senior Analytics Officer Rushmi Ambani, an ultrapetite Indian woman with exquisite features, impeccable in a navy pantsuit. She scrolled through the targets on the Bounty4Justice home page, as if shopping online.
“At first glance,” she said, “it appears that these hundreds of miscreants from all over the world have nothing in common. Bankers, child molesters, oil moguls, politicians, human rights violators…none of whom know one another or have acted together in some grand conspiracy. We’re left to wonder: What is the logic of it all? Exactly how has Bounty4Justice selected its targets? Is it all simply a random game, or is it a shot over the bow? What we have found is that there is, in fact, a very logical method to the process.”
She used a remote to cue a PowerPoint slide showing a simple graph: a virtually flat line meandering along a horizontal axis that suddenly and dramatically spiked upward to a short plateau before reversing trend just as dramatically.
“This chart demonstrates Internet search analytics within the U.K., specific to a recent target selected by Bounty4Justice, Jonathan Bishop.”
She explained that Bishop, a corrupt oil executive who’d been accused of illegally selling British deep-water oil rights to the Russians, compromising thousands of jobs, had been added to Bounty4Justice just two days ago, when the website’s target list began its upward march. He’d been abducted outside his Edinburgh office and brought to a remote village in northern England, where his captors had proceeded to work on him with power tools before drowning him in a vat of motor oil. The video of the murder fetched his killers £523,000 on Bounty4Justice.
“The horizontal axis measures time, and the vertical axis measures a sentiment coefficient based on search frequency and negative phrasing. Think of it as a ‘public outrage meter.’ Here is the date when Bishop’s profile first appeared on Bounty4Justice.” She clicked a button, and a vertical green line sliced through the chart at a point just before the blue trend line’s terminal apex. It was the first of many graphs, all plotting Internet search analytics for a sampling of targets from each country represented by the delegation, each eerily similar in their spiky shapes.
Rushmi said, “As these graphs clearly demonstrate, targets are not selected at random. It appears that they are fished out from the Web using a highly sophisticated algorithm that gauges public outrage. Scanning social media sites, news feeds, Web searches, and more, Bounty4Justice spots patterns in human behavior. It measures social mood and identifies tipping points—triggers that will cause a more, shall we say, ‘visceral’ response. This sentient machine quite literally listens to the people. As we’ve seen, however, its cold calculations are in no way synonymous with what the civilized world would define as ‘justice.’ ” She let that point sink in, then continued: “Cybervigilantism is one thing…undercutting centuries of legal process. But imagine. What if this same algorithm were reconfigured to systematically identify not miscreants but political dissidents? And what if those political dissidents were added to a kill list on a website that could not be censored or taken down? How about other groups that might be targeted based on ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual preferences? Take your pick. It’s a logical next step. The dangers of this technology are readily apparent.”
The next speaker was Burls’s senior intelligence officer, Harry Watson, a bespectacled, lanky young lad with red hair. “So why not just shut it down?” he asked rhetorically. “If a threat of this magnitude comes about, why not just deal with it—squash it, if you will? Again: old-world thinking. In the past few days, we’ve received disturbing reports from major institutions—banks and insurance companies, manufacturing concerns, defense contractors, government agencies, and many more—that attempted to do j
ust that: to block access to Bounty4Justice’s public domain URL. These actions triggered some very nasty reprisals.”
Watson described in detail how the website had responded to these defensive measures by initiating even more potent counterattacks that crippled the aggressors’ network infrastructure—full lockdown—using encrypted malware the likes of which had never been seen before. He told his audience that British intelligence had yet to determine how Bounty4Justice had permeated the Web like an invisible cancer.
Burls sensed that the delegates weren’t grasping the full impact of Watson’s message. Perhaps it sounded too fantastical, like some bit of cyberfiction or even simple scare tactics. This denial, this groupthink paralysis, was precisely what he feared most.
He studied the faces in the assemblage: the pair of unreadable Germans in severe suits from the Cyber Defense Center; the prim woman from France’s Network and Information Security Agency; the stoic envoy from the National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental Crime in Norway. His gaze lingered longest on the gaunt man from Sweden’s National Bureau of Investigation, the most uncooperative bugger of the lot. All it took for this alliance to fail was one dissenter, and surely he’d be the one. If even a single country provided refuge for Bounty4Justice, any action plan would amount to little more than trying to insulate a house against a brutal winter while leaving its front door wide open. This would need to be an all-or-nothing effort.
But Asia wasn’t represented here, he recognized. Nor was the Eastern bloc. Burls tried not to let that discourage him. He hoped that, collectively, these intelligence agencies might at least figure out how to build a firewall against Bounty4Justice and any other outside aggressors. Buy some time to design a more permanent fix.
What the group hadn’t been told was that buried in Bounty4Justice’s coding, Her Majesty’s Government Communications Headquarters—their preeminent intelligence bureau—had found the telltale “fingerprints” of Japan, China, Russia, the United States, Germany, and, of course, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, where the world’s preeminent hackers cut their teeth. They had also found refined code fragments eerily reminiscent of GCHQ’s proprietary Tempora Internet scrubber. Whether this code was intended as a decoy, or the rest of the world had simply gone raving mad, thought Burls, the fact of the matter was that trust was in very short supply.
Secretly, in other rooms on Tinworth Street, cyber war games were being played out—simulations in which the United Kingdom severed its landline Internet from the rest of the world and put itself on communications quarantine, an island in the digital sea. Even then, the chilling reality remained that little could be done to prevent network infiltrations via a domestic spy or sympathizer using rudimentary tactics to hack the network, such as linking to a satellite to download malicious code to a laptop, then introducing it into the walled-off network via Structured Query Language, or SQL, injection.
The very nature of the Internet was to interconnect computers and allow them to talk to one another and swap data, while the only surefire way to protect data was to completely remove it from any network. Quite the paradox. Cyberprotectionism posed nasty risks and trade-offs that could set the world back three decades. And there was simply no way to seal off telecommunications, whose very existence relied upon open networks. The strategists’ early conclusions had only reaffirmed that the Digital Age could not be put back in its box, that any notion of absolute cybersecurity was fantasy, and that the only good defense was a good offense.
The more Burls studied his peers—the complacency, the aura of self-interest—the more he felt a growing distrust. There was precious little time to faff about, treating Bounty4Justice like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Something needed to be done to infiltrate and mortally cripple the enemy now, before the situation went completely off the rails.
His countrymen excelled at devious counterwarfare. It was high time to get clever about this.
PCMag @PCMag • 7m
@Bounty4Justice: Learn how a “killer” video library has been eluding authorities the world over.
bit.ly/1OsRv924t
# 33.01
@ Virginia
Commander Whitcomb’s tactical team had proficiently apprehended the twenty-eight-year-old male target, who’d put up little resistance, spare some choice expletives. Furlong’s bleached-blond lady friend had raced outside ahead of him, sporting Botoxed lips, plus-sized breast implants, and a lacy lavender thong. She claimed to be an exotic dancer from a local strip club and said that she’d slept over at Furlong’s house after her shift had ended the previous night. Given the glitter-dusted “body of evidence,” Whitcomb was inclined to believe her. He had his men cover her up with a jacket, cuff her, and sit her in the Humvee that faced the rear of the house with its headlights on.
Furlong, clad only in boxer briefs, sat cross-legged in the tall grass, reeking like a Jack Daniel’s distillery. The raid had roused him from a deep, whiskey-induced sleep. The caustic nonivamide gas had swelled his eyes shut and flipped his mucous glands into hyperdrive. His arms were crossed behind his back, flex cuffs strapped tight at the wrists. Like most former marines, he’d stuck with his hair cropped high and tight, and he looked fit and wiry enough to compete in a triathlon, by Whitcomb’s estimation.
The suspect’s bland any-guy face was a perfect match to the photo that accompanied the marine’s profile in Quantico’s federal personnel database, and it jibed with the DMV photo matching the driver’s license number that had been documented by the Avis car rental agency in Lynchburg. The same license had been run by D.C. Metro during a minor traffic incident just hours after Chase Lombardi had been murdered. Inside the pickup parked under the tree, Whitcomb’s men had recovered a wallet that contained said license, as well as the Visa credit card used to secure the car rental. Definitely their man.
Whitcomb asked the suspect to confirm his name and his rank, and in a thick Virginia accent, he responded with “Lance Corporal David Furlong, scout sniper, Afghanistan, Surveillance Target Acquisition Team, First Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, Second Marine Division…sir.”
“How long you been home, Lance Corporal?”
“Six months, maybe seven, sir.”
But then the contradictions began stacking up.
It started with the findings of a careful search of the house, which now was mostly tear gas–free, thanks to the chopper setting down on the overgrown lawn and blowing the smoke out through the doors and windows. There were no booby traps, thankfully, just as Furlong had attested before Whitcomb sent men into the home. There were also no car rental receipts, either inside the home or in the Chevy. No guitar case or rock ’n’ roll costume. Probably destroyed the evidence already, he thought.
No trace of bounty loot anywhere on the property.
A meticulously maintained M40 sniper rifle was recovered from a safe in the basement, along with a commercial version of the 9mm Beretta M9 (the weapons had been properly registered, Furlong’s permits up-to-date), a razor-sharp Ka-Bar with the back end of the blade deeply serrated, and plenty of ammunition, including three boxes of .338 Lapua Magnums—the same round indicated in the NYPD’s ballistics report. But the slug that had drilled through the Wall Street banker’s skull exhibited striations consistent with the rifling of a British Accuracy International AWM—a nimble, streamlined alternative to the beefy American-made Remington M40 long gun. Which made Whitcomb wonder if Furlong had been smart enough to ditch the real murder weapon on his ride home from Manhattan, along with the nifty gun scope used to record the kill video uploaded to Bounty4Justice. And if the sniper had uploaded that video, he more than likely would have done it by transferring the video file to his fancy iPhone and sending it that way. Though the phone did contain plenty of other videos—most immortalizing the bar pranks and jackassery that twenty-something males partake in with their buddies, some showing steamy bedroom scenes with his dancer girlfriend—there were none taken in the past few days, and certainly none m
atching Lombardi’s gory head-shot footage.
With the critical physical evidence now collected, Whitcomb got to the point with his prisoner: “You been to New York City in the past few days, Lance Corporal?”
“No, sir.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You sure you didn’t go up there to do what you do best?” Furlong’s service record did show that he was a true master in the art of killing, with sixty-one confirmed kills during his three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“What’s that, sir?”
“Don’t play with me, Furlong. The question’s simple: did you shoot Chase Lombardi in Manhattan to cash in on half a million dollars?” According to Furlong’s case file, his finances were pitiful, even for a marine. If that bounty was for real, killing Lombardi would have put him on easy street.
It finally clicked with the still-inebriated man. His eyebrows went high and the tight slits around his crusty eyelids pried open to reveal the bloodshot orbs behind them. “Oh, wait…you mean that banker dude on that website? No, sir. That was not me. No way.”
“Then you better be able to tell me where you were on Monday.”
CNET @CNET • 5m
Darknet has its day in the sun as @Bounty4Justice brings anonymity—and POWER—to the masses.
cnet.co/1Tsg23ul.144
# 34.01
@ Jersey City
At precisely 8:00 A.M., a raid team descended on Echelon Fulfillment and Warehousing like a torrent of hellfire: twenty-six armed and Kevlared FBI agents from the Manhattan and Newark offices, twenty-five troopers from the New Jersey State Police Special Operations Section in full SWAT gear, four armed agents from Postal Inspection, plus three from Customs and Border Protection; two police choppers provided aerial surveillance along the Hudson River. Waiting nearby in a white van was a six-person tactical unit flown in from Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, armed with laptops and cloning drives.
Bounty Page 16
