Black List (17 page)
“I don’t understand that, though. Why? What’s the point? What power does it give them?”
“You hit the nail on the head. It’s about power. Supposedly, there are about five hundred legal provisions that can be bent or absolutely thrown out the window under a national state of emergency.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“The most famous are the ability to suspend two major Constitutional rights—the right to habeas corpus, which deals with unlawful detention, and the right of National Guard troops to appear before a grand jury.”
“Why would a National Guard soldier ever need to appear before a grand jury?”
“I’m not an attorney, but I would assume that because they’re citizen soldiers that they have some right to civilian courts and aren’t bound specifically by the military tribunal system,” Nicholas said with a shrug.
“But that doesn’t answer my question.”
“Well, when do charges normally get brought against a member of the military?”
“When they break the law,” Nina replied.
“Or,” Nicholas pointed out after thinking a moment, “when they refuse to obey.”
The look on the young woman’s face immediately changed. “If National Guard troops refuse to carry out actions against their fellow countrymen,
the last thing the government would want is for those issues to be adjudicated in a civilian court.”
“Agreed,” he said. “There’s a school of thought that believes that buried within the Patriot Act are certain additional provisions the government can call upon only in a state of emergency and that is why it has been kept going. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but power is a heady drug. Only the very strong can resist its pull. Those with power tend most often to search out more in order to solidify their positions and prevent themselves from being dislodged. It’s how a republic slips from freedom into soft tyranny and eventually despotism.”
“But I still don’t understand why Caroline would be interested in all of this.”
Nicholas shrugged. “Maybe it had to do with what she was working on at ATS.”
“But all that is policy stuff. I thought she was on the tech end of things, working with Homeland Security and things like that.”
“That’s in here too,” he said as he opened another file, “and it makes a bit more sense, since DHS is responsible for cyber security across the civilian, military, and intelligence communities. Caroline copied truckloads of DHS Web pages and wiki articles. The acronyms for their programs and divisions go on and on—NCCIC, NCSC, NCRCG, NCSD, NPPD, CNCI, CS&C.”
“Still nothing, though, that points specifically to what she was on to.”
“There was an interesting article about the National Operations Center at DHS and something called their Media Monitoring Initiative,” said Nicholas. “Apparently, since 2010, Homeland Security has been gathering personal information on journalists, news anchors, and reporters. Interestingly enough, they consider anyone who uses social media like Twitter, Facebook, or any of those platforms as being in the
media.
”
“So they spy on everyone, all the time. It
is
just like China. How come no one knows about this?” she asked.
“Some do, but I don’t think anyone appreciates the extent to which this goes. Your sister seemed to and that may be what she was warning us about. There’s lots more here, but like any puzzle, we have to take it one piece at a time.”
Nicholas tried to sound confident, but the task was overwhelming. There was no key to why Caroline had archived all of this material. It all dealt with computers or cyber issues in one form or another, but why shouldn’t it? Caroline was an IT specialist. None of this was anything unusual, much less something worth killing over. There had to be a bigger picture.
What was it she wanted me to see?
Nicholas went back to chewing on his pen, pausing only for an occasional sip of coffee.
∗ ∗ ∗
For hours he scrolled through article after article; cached Web page after cached Web page. The whole drive was like some enormous digital scrapbook.
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.
W
hatever 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 people 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
?