“Again with the grandmother.”
She had met Woodcock at a conference in San Francisco some years ago, she told him, before he’d been invited to join the National Security Council. He’d come up to her after she’d given a talk and he’d asked her to Friend him. At first she had thought he was kidding, but he kept insisting. Throughout the whole conference, whenever she saw him, he kept dropping these silly little hints.
“But, for some stupid reason,” said Lulu, “I never got around to it. There was always some new session to go to, some panel to attend. I wasn’t intentionally snubbing him.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Well, maybe a little. He was Chairman of ADS at the time. I hate ADS. If someone’s caught looking into your window, you can have him arrested for being a Peeping Tom. If someone follows you around all day, just won’t leave you alone, you can bust him for stalking. If someone says or writes horrible things about you, makes public claims that are patently false, you can sue him for slander or liable. You might even send him to jail. But data companies sweep up and store, trade and sell all kinds of personal information about you each day, derived from thousands of sources — from subscriptions to warranty data to online behaviors, often wildly inaccurate or wrong — and there’s no legislation in place to protect you. Not really. Data companies like ADS are for the most part unregulated. Let’s face it, in the information age, anyone who tries to tax, limit or throttle the unbridled exploitation of data becomes the target of every tech lobbyist in D.C. The emperors of the cloud rule the world.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a progressive. And you work for the NSA!”
“Part time and only on projects. You can talk. As if the FBI and NCTC are known for protecting privacy rights.”
“So what happened with Woodstock. You never finished your story.”
“On the last day of the conference,” said Lulu, “I got a surprise call from my Agency sponsor. I’d been planning on leaving early because I had an assignment due for the Fort but he told me not to bother rushing home. ‘Enjoy the conference. Take a vacation. The assignment can wait. In fact, they all can,’ he told me. ‘Why didn’t you Friend Rory Woodcock?’”
Needless to say, she concluded, she had gone out of her way to run into Woodcock at another conference two weeks later in Denver and — with a lot of drama — sent a Friend request to him through her smartphone as he watched. “And, sure enough, he Friended me back,” Lulu said. “Later, the work for the NSA started flowing again. But I always felt kind of creeped out by that incident, like I’d been forced to put out for the high school football captain at the homecoming party after the game.”
The door to the Conference Room suddenly opened. Some of the more junior staff members were being invited to join the meeting already underway in the PEOC, including Lulu and Decker, a young analyst told them. Decker and Lulu stood up. They looked at each other for a moment and then made their way into the hallway where they were joined by a pair of Secret Service agents. Seconds later, they stepped up through the vault-like steel doorway and entered the Center.
CHAPTER 54
Decker and Lulu were ushered by the Secret Service agents into the main PEOC meeting room. At the head of the central table sat the President. Beside him, Decker recognized White House Chief of Staff Jack Lamb, National Security Advisor Tom Dolan, Defense Secretary Leo Pancetta, National Security Director General Jim Flapper, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Flannery, NSC Member Rory Woodcock, Homeland Security Director Gianetta Pignateli, and NSA Director General Alexander Darius. Darius was also responsible for heading up the new Cyber Command, combining both offensive and defensive U.S. military cyber operations. A few others had been scheduled to join the meeting — including General Darius’ boss, General Bob Keebler, head of U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom), plus the Secretary of State, Allison Lukas — but after some discussion about linking them in via teleconference, it was decided the risks were too great. Around these central players at the table was a ring of secondary staff members lined up along the wall, including Hellard and a host of other NSA, CIA and FBI analysts.
“How do you fight something that knows everything you want to do as soon as you formulate plans to do it?” said General Darius as Decker and Lulu milled about for a seat.
This was the first time Decker was seeing the President in person. He seemed surprisingly youthful, despite the gray hair that had started to appear at the end of his first term. It had been a brutal election and yet now he seemed mostly recovered, athletic and fit, not at all puffy or fat like most of his predecessors. Lithe as a basketball player. How did he do it? Perhaps he was still smoking cigarettes on the roof of the White House.
Decker shimmied in behind Dr. Woodcock, in an open seat next to Hellard. It was difficult to sit down with his hands handcuffed behind him and he fumbled about for a moment. The seat was a beat-up metal and leather affair with one wobbly wheel and he found himself oddly comforted by the fact that even in the White House, things eventually wore out and needed replacing. This was the East Wing, after all. The swanky new seats were in the upgraded West Wing, which they had judiciously avoided.
All the scenario-planning and logistics software, General Darius continued, all the communications systems were either linked somehow to the Net or to assorted IC networks which had already been infiltrated. Not just the unclassified intranet, NIPRNET. And not just the classified SIPRNET, used to pass secret-level information. Even the top secret JWICS network had been compromised.
“I thought DoD and the intelligence agencies had their own channels in cyberspace,” said the President.
“They do but the traffic is carried on the same fiber optic cables, the same routers as the Net.”
“And, besides,” General Flapper cut in. “How do you kill something that isn’t alive?”
Nor could HAL2 be bribed, he continued. They’d put their best minds to studying Zimmerman but they hadn’t found anything in his profile to help. HAL2 was not part of any traditional political group, movement or party, and he was more than an independent, non-state actor; he was not even human. Sectarian passions didn’t drive him, at least not traditional ones.
“Can’t we just figure out where he is, in which systems, and shut them all down,” said the President. “Isolate him somehow?”
“That’s not how it works, sir,” said General Darius. “While HAL2 may have been initially created in our Oak Ridge facility, it’s not like he lives there anymore. The lines of code which make up his essence are spread out across Net. Think of him as an ant nest rather than an individual insect. To kill the nest, you have to kill all of the ants. But they’re spread out across the world, on hundreds of millions of different computers. How do you shut them all down simultaneously? Even if you could get everyone to turn off their PCs and servers at once, HAL2 has already pre-populated the systems with software designed to reconstitute who he is when the systems re-boot. So, even if you turned off all the juice at once — in and of itself a virtually impossible logistical feat — as soon as it came back on again, HAL2 would resuscitate, like a binary Lazarus.”
“Do we even know why he’s doing these things?” asked National Security Advisor Dolan.
Defense Secretary Pancetta leaned forward and said, “I’m afraid not. We’ve not been able to communicate with him directly since this whole affair started. We’ve tried to reach out but…” The short, bushy-eyebrowed Defense Secretary shrugged. “Nothing, Mister President. It’s as if we don’t even exist to him, not in any real sense.”