Devil's Fork (24 page)

Anderson turned around. He took a deep
breath as he put his hands on his hips. Sara saw the NSA analysts
in the back of the room had broke into a sweat but were now
recovering.

“
John, Sara we found
something,” Mark quietly announced. Anderson and Sara walked over
to the back of the room where Mark and J.D were sitting. Mr. Park
also turned to his side to focus his attention on them.

Mark continued, “This cyberwarfare boss we
told you about just did something not too long ago you should know
about. NATPAC made a phone call to the same number in Beijing he
had called before. Then the person in Beijing made a call right
afterwards to Pyongyang. The same phone he had called several days
ago. What was strange is that the number in Pyongyang then made a
call through China to a phone in Seoul”

“
Really?” Sara
asked.

“
What did they talk about?”
Anderson asked.

“
I don’t know. J.D. was not
listening to the call. He was tracing the activity on the phone
lines after-the-fact. All we know is that this chain of calls was
made within the last hour,” Mark said.

Mr. Park got up and left the room. Sara took
a look at his face. He was knitting his eyebrows.

“
Does this mean that this
NATPAC could have figured something else out? Could he have hacked
us again?” Anderson said.

“
No,” Mark said in a
comfortingly firm way. “Although his lieutenant SLOTHMAN thinks he
just hacked you, they have no additional information.”

“
What do you mean
SLOTHMAN
thinks
he
hacked us.” Sara demanded.

Mark leaned back, “SLOTHMAN just tried to
install a rootkit onto the SAD servers.”

“
Rootkit? What’s a
rootkit?” Anderson asked.

“
A rootkit is something a
hacker will try to install on a computer to give him access to the
files and programs on that computer and servers. It would give him
access
as if
he
were a user or administrator. A rootkit also protects the hacker by
modifying the code in the operating system so that his
movements—what he’s looking at—goes undetected. The worst level of
a rootkit is known as Ring 0, which means that the hacker has
complete access to everything on a computer or network. We think
that’s what SLOTHMAN was trying to get on your systems.”

“
But what? He did not?”
Sara asked.

“
No. J.D had been
monitoring your systems since we got here and—“

“
Wait – how? Did we ever
give you our Wi-Fi passwords or access to our server?”

“
Uh –you don’t need to
worry about that.” Mark said as he blushed.

“
OK so you were saying that
J.D.—“ Anderson said hurriedly.

“
J.D. redirected SLOTHMAN
to a honeypot.” Mark finished.

“
What’s that?” Anderson
asked.

“
A honeypot is a computer
that appears to be part of a network. It typically looks easily
hackable. The hacker gets inside and starts looking around,
thinking he’s hacking the network he was targeting. However he
actually hacked a “fake computer” set up by someone as a trap. J.D.
set up a honeypot that looks like a computer within your SAD
network. But it’s really our trap, and SLOTHMAN is inside. J.D.
will keep SLOTHMAN occupied for some time. The honeypot can also
help us learn more about them. Once we do, we can figure out what
they are doing. Maybe we can help you with that facility
too.”

Sara turned to Anderson,
“John—if you think about it, this doesn’t make sense. Why are they
so focused on learning about us? Fine - Tom is in there, but if you
take a step back, why us? First of all, China has nuclear weapons.
If they want to help North Korea, why not just
help them
build those weapons? Or if
they wanted to learn more about our nuclear weapons program, why
aren’t they hacking Los Alamos?”

Sara had been thinking about this for a
while. Los Alamos was where the US performed its classified
scientific research.

Anderson looked at Mark, “Are they trying to
get into Los Alamos?”

Mark shook his head slowly “No. We monitor
it closely.”

Anderson looked down and
said while in thought, “It’s true. It does not really make sense
that this Cyberwarfare group is
so
protective of the North Koreans in general. Maybe
you guys can figure that out.”

“
That’s what we’re working
on.” Mark said with a smile.

“
I’ll be right back. I want
to get some coffee,” Sara said. She was tired already from the
day’s events.

“
I’ll go with you,” Mark
said as he got up.

Anderson turned around and went back to the
middle of the room, staring at the screen that was jogging through
dark woodlands.

Sara and Mark walked through the bright
hallways towards the kitchen.

“
I bet you didn’t expect to
have such an exciting day when you woke up this morning,” she said
to Mark.

“
I did not. But I bet you
didn’t either,” he replied.

Sara looked down as they walked.

“
The one who really walked
into something completely unexpected was Tom,” she said.

They both remained quiet until they arrived
at the kitchen. Inside, Sara started filling up a cup for
herself.

“
J.D. seems to be
unstoppable on his computer. He’s doing all of these things I never
even knew you could do before,” Sara said.

“
Yeah. He’s
good.”

“
Who is this NATPAC anyway?
Do you think he can figure that out?”

“
That’s what I’m working
on.”

Sara paused. Mark was staring at the far
wall in the kitchen.

“
Why do they use usernames
like that?”

“
It helps protect their
identities. If we knew who NATPAC was we would have an easier time
dealing with him. We could watch him more closely.”

“
Or do you think he’s
helping protect others in the Chinese government?”

Mark paused. “You’re sharp. That could be a
possibility too, now that I think about it.”

Suddenly J.D. appeared in the kitchen.

“
Sorry guys. I wanted to
take a break too.”

“
No problem. Join us.” Mark
said.

Sara continued her thought. “Mark, do you
use a username or handle like NATPAC does?”

“
I actually do.”

“
You really have one
too?”

“
Everyone wears a mask out
in the world, and some even like it. In our line of work, it is
essential.”

“
What is your
handle?”

“
DEMOCRITUS.”

“
Where did you get
that?”

“
He was an ancient Greek
philosopher. He united two separate philosophies that had existed
in conflict with each other. Before him a philosopher named
Parmenides argued that nothing around us ever really moved or
changed. His idea sounded something like – if you build a house out
of wood from a tree, that wood is unchanged after you have a house.
It is the same matter, it just used to be a tree and now it’s a
wall in a house. You modified it and it
seems
different to you but you did
not really change the wood. Another philosopher named Heraclitus
believed that everything around us was in a constant state of
change – everything was moving. He famously said you could never
step into the same river twice. Democritus solved the contradiction
between the two philosophies by coming up with the idea of the atom
as we generally know it even today. This idea reconciled the two
philosophies because he argued that atoms do not change but the
matter they created did change. This could explain both the wood in
the house and the water moving around in the river.”

Sara thought about it, “So he brought
together the idea of something moving and something staying
still—“

“
Exactly,” Mark replied
with a smile.

“
How do you know so much
about the ancient Greeks and philosophy?”

“
I studied classics in
college.”

Sara looked at him wide-eyed. “But I thought
you were a mathematics or computer science standout. I thought
that’s what you would have been studying in school.”

J.D. interrupted his sip of coffee, “Mark
could have taught most of the computer science courses in
college.”

Sara froze. She was staring at Mark – trying
to understand with whom she was speaking. He was looking at the
ground. Then he changed the subject,

“
Sara, let me ask you a
question. How is it that countries like North Korea are able to get
so far with their evil? I’m not just talking about nuclear weapons
but also about their gulags, their gangster-style governance, or
the famines they allow to happen in their country. How is it that
we are only now scrambling to figure out what they might do? How is
it that we have not done something before? How have they gotten
this far with their nuclear weapons program and we are only now
dealing with it?”

Sara thought for a moment. “Well I guess
part of it is the issue of whether means justify ends, which we
always need to think about here. Does it make sense to take action
which might be messy in order to get some far out goal we
have?”

“
But if you think about it,
history is filled with cases where evil was somehow allowed to go
too far. The Nazis in World War II were given never-ending
appeasements even though people knew how evil they were. Same with
the Japanese during that time, who committed atrocities in China.
You can keep going farther back in history. But in most cases, what
small harm was permitted took us to terrible consequences, like
World Wars or Cold Wars.”

Sara lowered her eyebrows in thought. “Maybe
it’s related to Zeno’s arrow paradox.”

“
How?”

“
Well we all see time
moving slowly. We live minute by minute. Actually we probably
really live week by week. We view the world in snapshots. We see
the world in a certain state and agree that it is acceptable for
the moment. We thought thirty years ago that North Korea was trying
to get nuclear weapons but was nowhere close, and for the
particular week where that analysis was done, everyone felt
comfortable with doing nothing. Somehow people must have known that
if the North kept working, they would eventually get to the point
where we are now. But the contradiction between the snapshot of
that moment, seemingly frozen in time, and the target in the
distance was so great that it could be ignored. People always look
at Zeno’s arrow, frozen in the air, but don’t really see that it is
flying towards that target. Somehow their not having nuclear
weapons that week, the following week, and the week after led to
them having nuclear weapons today, 1,560 weeks later.”

“
That’s an interesting way
to think about it. Now that you put it that way, it seems similar
to Sorites Paradox.”

“
What’s that?”

“
It’s a paradox, also from
our friends in ancient Greece, that says if you take one grain of
sand, it does not make a heap, or pile, of sand. If you put it on
the ground in front of you and throw another grain of sand on it,
you still will not have a heap of sand. But if you repeated this
process and kept throwing grains on, after a while you will be
standing in front of a heap.”

“
Exactly. That’s how these
totalitarian regimes take advantage of us and their own people. In
the 1930’s Europe thought that if Hitler were allowed to rebuild an
army, that alone would not make him a threat to world peace. But
after allowing him to rebuild an army, annex Czechoslovakia, take
Austria, and rebuild a navy, he eventually became a real threat to
world peace. Just like grains of sand turning into a heap. Each
individual action was too small to threaten world peace, but taken
together, all of those actions did threaten world peace. Few saw it
coming because they were looking at each sequential step as another
snapshot of that arrow. Few saw that it was actually flying at a
target.”

J.D. finally jumped in,
“This reminds me of the British TV series
Yes, Prime Minister
. Do you guys know
what I’m talking about?”

Mark and Sara both gave a simultaneous
“No.”

J.D. went on, “It’s funny –
the Brits make some of the best TV and few people in the US know.
Anyway in the ‘80s there was this comedy series called
Yes, Prime Minister
. The
setup was that it followed a somewhat incompetent prime minister.
He loves to be in front of cameras and he loves to make bold
statements or proclamations, but he is not very bright and often
gets manipulated by the civil servants that work in the government.
In one episode the chief scientific advisor to the Prime Minister
is asking the PM when he would press the nuclear button. The PM
responds that he would do so if Russia attacked. Then this advisor
asks if the PM would press the button if the Russians invaded West
Berlin. The PM hesitates, indicating he would not. Then the advisor
asks if the PM would press the button if Russian tanks accidentally
crossed into West Germany and then stayed there. The PM again
hesitates and says he probably would not. Then the advisor asks if
the PM would press the button if the Russians had similarly taken
over all of Western Europe, through France and Spain. He asks if
the Russians sat at the edge of France ready to invade the UK,
whether the PM would press the button then. Again, the PM hesitates
and now it appears he thinks he would not be able to. That’s either
Zeno’s Arrow or Sorites Paradox at work, right? The advisor in the
show called it
salami
tactics
, in that your opponent takes
advantage of you
slice by
slice
.”