When they reached the main level, Yousseff and Vince bid goodbye to Omar and walked up to the bridge.
“Are you ready for this, Yousseff?” Vince asked as they watched the other man walk away.
“Yes, I am,” Yousseff responded. He noticed the other crewmembers eyeing him suspiciously, and quickly retreated to his normal silence. It wouldn’t serve the plan to have outside interference, and the crew was already wondering why a greasy, dirty 50-year-old should be standing on the bridge of the Haramosh Star, let alone touring the ship with Omar Jhananda, who some of them recognized as the owner of the very successful, rapidly expanding Karachi Star Line.
“He’s a relative,” said Vince, responding to the looks of his men. “He’s a bit, you know,” he added, tapping his forehead demonstratively. “He needs a job, and he’s pretty much unemployable. I thought I could have him along for the trip to clean floors and decks. Give him something to do.”
For his part, Yousseff had already found a mop and bucket, and commenced working. Over the next 32 hours, he hardly said a word to anyone.
13
The National Security Agency held the dubious honor of being the largest and most secretive organization in the Intelligence Community. More than 35,000 people worked there, and every one of them was sworn to absolute secrecy. Because the principal occupation of the NSA was to solve intercepted but encrypted electronic signals (“Sigint”), and because cryptologists, computer scientists, and mathematicians were the main inhabitants of its corridors and buildings, the agency’s headquarters and the surrounding community came to be known as Crypto City. It was, in fact, a city unto itself — 5,415 acres, with 65.5 miles of paved roads, 3.3 miles of secondary roads, and about 60 buildings. Within its fences were a modern mall, banks, credit union, post office, chapels, a police station, and many other facilities. There were a number of restaurants and, inside its main building, a 45,000-square-foot cafeteria. Also present were numerous recreational spots, including eight gyms, a number of theaters, and many large childcare facilities. The area even contained its own institute of higher learning — the National Cryptological Center.
The recent terrorist attacks on American soil, and the destruction and tragedy they had brought about, had served as a wake-up call. The sudden need for the ability to access and process communications, especially in the Middle East, became painfully apparent, and the NSA budget was increased dramatically. The organization was once again busy interpreting the billions of snippets of information vacuumed up by its many satellites and listening stations around the world. The need for translators was now great, and American citizens with proficiencies in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi, and other Middle Eastern languages became acute.
The NSA used many different methods to gather information. Microwave towers were monitored, and the delicate art of splicing into fiber optic cables was now one of the skills taught in NSA classrooms at Fort Meade. Priority was given to monitoring Internet traffic, and many of the NSA programmers learned the stealthy skill of depositing bits of monitoring code onto the hard drives of suspicious servers or websites. Many a terrorist ploy had been foiled in its infancy by the developing stealth and skill of Crypto City’s investigative capabilities. These programmers were so skilled that they could, if so inclined, crash the Internet, possibly permanently.
Information poured into Crypto City in vast torrents; trillions of megabytes of information cascaded through its electronic portals. If human hands were being used to parse and analyze all of it, a workforce of one million people still could not have handled the flood. Hence, the initial stage of processing the information was always handled by computers. And such computers they were.
Only a small percentage of all information intercepted by the NSA was passed up the chain for a higher level of analysis. The first level of filtering was performed exclusively by computer, and specifically by the squadron of Blue Gene/M’s at the Bunker, through a program called ECHELON. These first-level searches hunted for a predefined set of “keywords,” which were either verbal or written. They could be in the form of faxes, images, or even collections of pixels. With the newest modifications, they could even be found in faces or sequences of sounds. The streams of data being searched were microwave, cellular, fax, TV or closed circuit camera, Internet email, and even data on private intranets. The immeasurably vast fields of data, and the complexity of the keywords, created the need for huge amounts of processing power.
The keywords were collated and kept on a series of smaller computers tied into the Blue Genes at Crypto City. These computers were collectively named the “Dictionary,” and hundreds of employees at Crypto City were charged with the task of keeping them current. The smaller computers tied into the Dictionary were each home to a different language or function. For instance, there was an “English Dictionary” cluster of computers, a “French Dictionary” cluster of computers, and so on. The Dictionary computers were continuously updated. If a certain telephone number was fed into the Dictionary, or the name of an individual, or a face, or a grouping of pixels of any sort, the specific Dictionary computer for the particular language affected was immediately updated.
Khasha Jamila’s job at the NSA had been to ensure that the Urdu Dictionary remained updated. She had, in the space of three short years, become the head of the Urdu Dictionary group, which included some 15 or 16 employees. Khasha had been born in Pakistan to an American father and an American-born Pakistani mother. She had moved to America at age 17, when her parents got tired of working abroad and started to long for the comforts of home. Like most of the TTIC employees, she was very bright, and had attended UCLA, majoring in Middle East Studies. She graduated with honors, and had applied to the CIA and been accepted into the Middle East Bureau. There she distinguished herself in analysis of news and events in Pakistan. She had an uncanny ability for picking up languages and was well acquainted with many Pakistani dialects — Urdu, Pashto, and Wahki, among others. She was an omnivorous reader of all things Pakistani and visited many chat rooms and websites daily. Because of her familiarity with Pakistan, she had ended up working with the Intelligence Directorate, and the American Embassy in Islamabad. While she had no formal training in computer science, she intuitively understood how to use the ECHELON program. She was in constant communication with crews at the satellite download stations in Waihopia, New Zealand, Diego Garcia, Morwenstow, and England. She had an always-open line to the Misawaw Cryptologic Operations Center in Misawaw, Japan. She became a key player in uncovering the various terrorist plots that originated in Pakistan and Iran, and played a roll in identifying the location of the terrorists responsible for the attacks on the USA, by picking up significant keywords within Urdu chatter emanating from Jalalabad.
Khasha also had excellent personal communication skills, and it was difficult for anyone to dislike her. When she was seconded to TTIC, she maintained almost constant communication with her work group in Crypto City, and even telephoned or emailed crews at the various download stations she’d worked with from around the globe. Even when she moved to TTIC, she maintained more familiarity with the Urdu Dictionary than most of her former work group.
At the moment, she was watching the three large digital displays in front of her with rapt attention. Eventually, she circled around the various workstations, and pulled up a chair next to Dan.