CHAPTER 35
Later that morning, Decker and Lulu headed north on Route 11, near the Hapgood State Forest, a few miles south of Peru. They had only just made it out of Matt Zimmerman’s house before it had gone up in flames. Now, bloody and exhausted, they were finally approaching their destination: the last known address of Rutger Braun, Matt Zimmerman’s assistant.
Lulu had come across it by chance as she was scouring Zimmerman’s computer network. Apparently, the Net entrepreneur’s 3-D Printing system had been accessed one more time after Zimmerman’s death — by Braun. He had manufactured some sort of glasses or goggles using the device, and the order was linked to a record in a deleted database that also contained a street address deep in the Green Mountain National Forest.
Lulu’s Ford Fusion puttered along the highway. Decker had bandaged the cuts on his back, chest and arm where the Samaras had sliced through the skin. Luckily, the wounds were not deep. But they stung and he found himself unable to get comfortable in his seat.
Lulu had also been wounded. She had misjudged the kick of the Python and it had thrown her across the room to the floor where she had banged her right cheek. It still looked puffy and red. “How’s the cheek?” Decker asked her.
“I’m alright,” she replied, leaning over the steering wheel. Notwithstanding their recent excitement, she was still driving along at a snail’s pace. “As my grandmother always says, ‘As long as you’ve got today, you’ve got everything,’” she continued. “How much further?”
Decker touched the GPS system on the console. “Only a few more miles. We take a left onto Pierce.”
Lulu nodded. She stared up at the sky through the windshield. “It’s clouding up. Looks like snow.”
Decker smiled. “Really? We almost get blown up in Zimmerman’s house and now you’re talking about the weather.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“What you’re thinking!” he answered. “We find out Zimmerman was murdered. We see a video of my assassin killing some hacker in Sweden. Why? What’s the connection?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Other than sending the video, did this Barzani character leave any other message for Zimmerman.”
“He only said that he’d been duped, that some code his group had secured to hack into systems in the creation of botnets had been compromised.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know. And Barzani didn’t know either. That’s why he sent it to Zimmerman, I assume. And I…” Lulu’s voice trailed off.
“I what?”
“Have you ever heard of Total Information Awareness?”
“I’ve heard of it,” he replied. “Back in the ‘90s, right? That program set up by Admiral Poindexter, Reagan’s former national security advisor.”
She nodded. “Poindexter fell from grace after being caught up in the Iran-Contra affair,” Lulu said. “But Bush made him head of DARPA despite that and, after 9/11, he came up with TIA. Put simply, it was a Manhattan-Project-style counterterrorism program. Poindexter wanted to bring together not only intelligence community data streams — the stuff you handle every day — but also private datamarts. You know: voice phone feeds and records; emails; credit card data; airline reservation systems. The works. To avoid privacy problems, Poindexter proposed encrypting personal identifiers on the data until a judge gave the green light. So, if the system were to find suspicious behaviors — let’s say a person on a terrorist watch list suddenly flies to America, takes flying lessons, rents cars, hotel rooms, buys a one-way ticket to NY for—”
“Like the 9/11 hijackers,” said Decker.
“Exactly. The identity of that suspect would be hidden until the suspicious behaviors were identified and a FISA judge said, ‘OK. You can de-encrypt the identity of this profile because he looks suspicious.’ Well, look at that. A Saudi prince!”
“But I thought they scuttled TIA because of these privacy concerns,” Decker said. “And because the vast quantities of data were… well, unmanageable.”
Lulu shook her head. “The program didn’t die. It was just shunted away from Congressional oversight and brought over to NSA.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know,” she said cryptically.
“Well, I don’t buy it,” he countered. “I know something about neural network predictive modeling. That’s what I did my thesis on at Northwestern. It isn’t that easy to feed all that data into one skinny pipe and make sense of it. Not in real time. We’re just not that good at it yet, and—”
“Yet being the operative word. TIA recruited some of the best minds in the business, from both the public and private sectors. Who knows what they’re doing,” said Lulu. “What they’ll be able to do… given time.”
“Maybe in some far distant future,” said Decker. “But, today, I’ve got a half-dozen terminals on my desk, each one designed to access particular data streams. PRISM for telecom. XKeyscore and Pinwale for Internet data. All of that DNI and DNR under Boundless Informant. But they’re not integrated. It would make my job easier if they were, but they’re not — for security, privacy and technical reasons. Maintaining separate databases keeps us less vulnerable to cyber-attack. Plus, people are creeped out by these efforts, especially when the blessing of a secret FISA court is practically guaranteed. Statistically, you have a greater chance of being struck by lightning in your lifetime, about.03 percent, than for a surveillance request to be turned down by FISA, which is.023 percent. I worked it out. And I guess I don’t share your faith in what’s technologically feasible. We’re nowhere near figuring out how to manage such gargantuan data streams in real time. NSA alone captures almost two billion emails and phone calls each day.”
“The man in the street may be leery of it,” said Lulu. “Even Congress may be against it — especially Vermont’s Senator Fuller — but that doesn’t mean TIA wasn’t attempted, or still isn’t being attempted. Somewhere. By someone. And the one part of Poindexter’s program that the NSA didn’t bring over was the privacy protection stuff. Go figure.”
“I think you’ve seen one too many conspiracy movies. Homeland Security runs more than two dozen networks, each managed by very independent agencies, and each network features the intelligence data unique to its host. The CIA generates stuff from their carbon-based sources—”
“Why can’t you simply say people? It’s like you have an aversion. You sound like Data on Star Trek. Or field agents, even? Can you say field agents?”
“Field agents, then. Analysts too. NSA handles signal intercepts — cell phones, email, et cetera. Law enforcement feeds criminal records. State feeds VISA and passport applications. As I said, that’s why I have to do manual searches on a bunch of computers and—”
“But what if — to avoid Congressional scrutiny from the likes of Senator Fuller — NSA chose a new path.”
“What do you mean a new path? What kind of path?”
“Like a Haliburton Blackwater solution. Private enterprise, John. Intelligence groups like Strarfor, recently busted for selling intel about Pakistani involvement in hiding bin Laden, stuff they could only have known if they had access to intelligence garnished from the Seal Team 6 raid. Or folks like ex-CIA spook Dewey Clarridge, and DoD’s Mike Furlong, both running private spy agencies in Afghanistan. Or International Media Ventures, a so-called strategic communication firm run by several former Special Ops officers. Or American International Security Corporation, a Boston-based group run by ex-Green Beret Mike Tay—”