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“Mine.”
Its official name was the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, though it was better known as simply the Utah Data Center. And it sat on 240 acres carved from the hillside directly above Highway 71, between the town of Bluffdale and Salt Lake City.
No measures had been taken to hide the facility. Four data halls measuring 100,000 square feet and built parallel to one another housed the thousands of servers necessary to store the oceans of data it collected. The halls were serviced by a dedicated cooling station. An on-site power plant provided the compound’s electricity. To the naked eye it looked like nothing more glamorous than a giant Walmart or Costco or Target distribution center, the kind of gargantuan bland warehouses that lined highways in rural areas all over the United States.
And it belonged to the National Security Agency, which was to say that it belonged to the combined intelligence establishment of the United States of America.
After the successful demonstration of ONE’s Titan supercomputer, it would belong to Ian Prince.
–
“This is it,” said Bob Goldfarb, the Emperor’s gnomish assistant. “Time to see what all those exaflops get us.”
“Like a hammer on a walnut,” said Ian. “AES doesn’t stand a chance.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Goldfarb, eyes twinkling with dreams of world domination. “And so does the president.”
Not all of the Utah Data Center was visible to the naked eye. The Operations Room sat inside a nuclear-hardened concrete bunker three hundred feet below the surface. It was a SCIF inside a SCIF, with floor-to-ceiling monitors on the walls, rows of analysts’ workstations, flags standing in the corners.
This morning the Operations Room was filled to capacity, seats taken by a mix of government and military personnel, the overflow lining the walls. The briefing was beyond top-secret or ultra top-secret or whatever was the latest term for the highest security clearance in the land. The vice president was present and stood with his coterie next to General Terry Wolfe. Even the president was in attendance, if from two thousand miles away, joining them along with the national security adviser and the director of the CIA from the Situation Room beneath the White House.
Ian stood against the back wall, arms crossed. He’d left Briggs in the visitors’ lounge, along with a dozen other high-ranking officers and officials who did not possess adequate clearance. Ian was part of the brain trust. General Wolfe called him his own Oppenheimer. While others theorized, Ian had built the damned thing.
Seventy years ago a similar group had gathered in the dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, to gaze at a round object perched atop a tall tower and bear witness to the first atomic explosion in the history of mankind. Fat Man and Little Boy were but a black-and-white memory. The new kid on the block was named Titan.
The NSA had purchased it for but one purpose: to decrypt information culled from the deep Web, or Deepnet-the part of the Internet invisible to the common man. The Deepnet included all passwordprotected data, both government and commercial; all U.S. and foreign government communications; and all noncommercial file sharing between trusted peers. The problem had never been collecting the information. With sieves at every transit point in every communications hub on earth, the NSA was capable of collecting all it wanted. The problem was decryption.
All data found on the Deepnet was encrypted according to the Advanced Encryption Standard, or AES, a theoretically unbreakable shell encasing each message to protect it from intruding eyes and to ensure that only the intended recipient read it. To date, no machine had been able to crack the AES in anything close to a quick and efficient manner.
Titan would change that.
Titan, with its enormous processing power, its gargantuan intellect, its unfathomable speed, could break any code within seconds. Titan was the hammer to AES’s shell. One blow, and crack! The shell would disintegrate.
Ian could see by the skeptical expressions that few present this morning believed Titan would work. Ian had no doubt. He knew.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please.” General Terry Wolfe stood at the front of the room, fussing with his eyeglasses. “We’ve gathered here today to witness the first operational test of the new Titan supercomputer. We’re going to start with an intercept we pulled down from our friends in Moscow. Judging from the format, it looks like it’s from FSB director Gromov to a counterpart in Kiev. We’ve been at it for two days now and we can’t crack the shell.” A nod to a technician. “Go ahead. Let’s see what Titan can do.”
The technician fed the intercept into Titan. Lines of encrypted code flooded the main screen: letters, symbols, numerals, a seemingly random mishmash. The word Processing flashed at the bottom as Titan ran the message through multiple decryption programs simultaneously.
“Two days and we can’t make head nor tail of it,” whispered Goldfarb. “Not all the bright Russians are working for Google.”
Ian stared at the screen, hands clasped behind his back, as the seconds ticked by. A minute passed, and then another. Someone cleared his throat. A chair slid across the floor. There was a cough. Reports of Titan’s superpowers had been overrated.
“At least you got the heat issue fixed,” said Goldfarb. “That’s a start.”
Someone said, “Hey!”
A hush swept the room.
“Here we go,” said the Emperor.
Ian didn’t alter his expression as the mishmash of letters, symbols, and numerals was replaced line by line with a message, not only decrypted but translated into flawless English.
From: Yuri Gromov, Director, FSB
Recipient: Boris Klitschko, President, Ukraine
Text: In regards to the premier’s upcoming visit, he has asked that you have ten kilos American dry-aged filet per day on hand to be prepared medium rare, sliced thinly, and served to Ivan at 6 a.m., 1 p.m., and 8 p.m. promptly. There will be an afternoon snack of one kilo steak tartare. Ivan also requires at least five cashmere blankets and two veal shank bones with marrow.
“Who the hell’s Ivan?” It was the president, asking from the Situation Room.
“I believe it’s his dog,” said the CIA director. “An Irish wolfhound.”
Laughter all around.
Ian felt a presence at his side. He looked over to see the vice president glaring at him. “So we built a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar data center employing the world’s most advanced supercomputer to learn what the Russian premier’s dog likes to eat.”
The vice president had long opposed the expansion of the secret state and was a vocal opponent of the Utah Data Center.
The laughter died.
“Happy, Mr. Prince?” he whispered. “Get to add another zero to your fortune. You guys are all snake-oil salesmen. Only your gadget can save the world. Give me a break. What are we supposed to do with all this stuff, anyway?”
“I think you’re missing the point,” said Ian. “It isn’t what’s in the message, it’s the fact that we were able to read it.”
The vice president turned his attention to the Emperor. “Anything else up your sleeve, General Wolfe?” he barked.
The NSA director fidgeted as he adjusted his eyeglasses yet again. “Impress us, Dave,” he said to an air force colonel seated nearby.
“Yessir.” Dave punched away at his keys. Voices played over the loudspeaker. Ian recognized the language as Mandarin, but a northern dialect. A translation of the conversation appeared in real time on the main screen.