The God's Eye View

by Barry Eisler

  She opened her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just been . . . an unbelievable day.”

  “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  She managed a weak laugh. “So what do we do, Ryan?”

  There was a pause. Then he said, “If you can get the thumb drive to Betsy Leed, I’ll give the passphrase to her.”

  “Betsy Leed?”

  “My editor at the Intercept. I trust her. But I don’t have any Internet access and I’ve been afraid to call her. She’s monitored. We’re all monitored. I’ve been afraid to call anyone. I know they’re looking for me. I can’t believe I’m talking to you.”

  She felt her spirits sag. “Ryan . . . I can’t. That drive is all the leverage I have.”

  “Yeah, well, the passphrase is all the leverage I have. You ask me to trust you, but you won’t trust me?”

  “What about . . . before you left, you didn’t tell anyone else at your organization the passphrase? Just in case. Leed? Anyone?”

  “I’m the only one who knows it.”

  Maybe he was telling her the truth. Maybe not. No way to know, and in the end it didn’t matter.

  She closed her eyes again and tried to see another way. She couldn’t.

  “All right,” she said after a moment. “How do I contact Leed?”

  “Do you know about SecureDrop?”

  “Of course. NSA hates it.”

  “That’s good to hear. That’s how you contact her. Buy a new computer. For cash. Download the Tails operating system. It comes with the Tor browser. You know what they are?”

  He was sounding more confident than he had at the beginning of the call. She supposed that was good. It suggested he was beginning to trust her, at least a little.

  “Of course. NSA spends half its time trying to subvert them.”

  “I’ll bet they do. Well, that’s the way you do it. You get a message to Leed and arrange a meeting. You’re both going to have to be extremely careful about being followed. No cell phones, no personal vehicles, nothing. And watch out for foot surveillance. It’s easy to forget about the old-fashioned stuff when you have to be so obsessive about electronic bread crumbs. Speaking of which, how the hell did you find out about Perkins and me? He was beyond paranoid, and I’m no security slouch myself. You wouldn’t believe the protocols we use at the Intercept.”

  She hesitated for a moment, the old reflex against sharing anything with outsiders, especially anything about a top-secret program, still strong. Then she thought, Fuck it.

  “I run an initiative that pulls footage from Internet-linked camera networks all over the world and runs it through a biometric match program, including facial recognition. There’s a list of top-secret-cleared personnel, on the one hand, and of known subversives, on the other.”

  “You include journalists among those subversives?”

  “I don’t know everyone who’s on it. But there are reporters, yes.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway. Beats any other award I can imagine.”

  She gave him a weak laugh. “Yes, I suppose it does. Well, my system threw up a red flag when it spotted you and Perkins together in Istanbul. After that, we started looking more closely. And my system is also why I know the director was behind the DC bombing. The man who abducted me and threatened to do all those horrible things to me and my son? I saw him plant the bomb.”

  “Then you’re in as much trouble as I am.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “NSA is monitoring camera networks in Turkey? I mean, DC I might have imagined. But this thing is global?”

  “I thought I knew how global it was. But apparently Perkins got a hold of something even bigger.”

  “Yeah, he did. You want to know what your director calls it?”

  “Tell me.”

  “God’s Eye. You guys sure have a knack for creepy names. Carnivore, Total Information Awareness, Boundless Informant . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “That I’m not telling you. Get that thumb drive to Leed and I’ll give her the passphrase. You’ll be able to read all about it in the Intercept for the next year at least. I’m telling you, it’s bigger than Snowden.”

  For a moment, she wondered if he was exaggerating to reinforce her commitment to get his editor the thumb drive. Then she remembered what the director had done to try to contain this God’s Eye, and she decided Hamilton was probably just being accurate.

  “Listen,” she said. “Not to be morbid, but if anything were to happen to you . . .”

  “Or to you.”

  “Yes, or to me. The point is, maybe it would be safer for you to get the passphrase to your editor right away. So she’ll already have it when I get her the thumb drive.”

  “All that would do is put her in danger. Besides, I don’t have any secure means of getting it to her. I’m not going to say it over an open line where you people could just vacuum it up. Not until she confirms she has the drive.”

  She thought of Marvin, how he had switched drives with Delgado. “But if I weren’t who I claim to be, what would stop me from just handing over any old thumb drive, then intercepting your transmission of the passphrase?”

  “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know what the hell to do. At this point I’m just trying to stay alive.”

  All the stress and fear was back in his voice. She needed to get him to dial it down.

  “I’m sorry for pushing,” she said. “But we just . . . I want to make sure we have a plan that’ll work, okay?”

  He sighed. “You need to meet Leed. If she trusts you, I’ll trust you. Contact her with SecureDrop and tell her I’m going to find a way to call her cell phone in twelve hours. I want to hear her voice. I want to hear her tell me she’s got the thumb drive. And that she trusts you. When I hear that, I’ll give her the passphrase.”

  “Okay. Okay, I’ll contact her. But is she going to believe me?”

  There was a pause. He said, “Tell her . . . tell her I said the first time I met her, her six-year-old daughter, Brett, hid behind her leg. We laughed about it. No one else was there. No one else would know.”

  “Okay. Good. But look, tell me something about this program. I told you about my camera networks. Is what I do part of God’s Eye?”

  “It’s all part of it.”

  She waited, but he didn’t go on.

  “Give me some context,” she said. “Isn’t that why you and Perkins took a chance on a face-to-face meeting to begin with? So you could make better sense of whatever documents he was providing?”

  “I told you, I’m not going to—”

  “Why? I was abducted tonight, I have people trying to kill me, I would really, really like to know what the hell it’s all about. All right? What fucking harm could come from telling me? We’re probably both dead anyway!”

  The moment it was out, she kicked herself for saying it. It was going to amp him up again. But there was no way to take it back.

  There was a long pause. Then he chuckled and said, “That’s a hell of a way of persuading me. But . . . okay. In case I don’t make it out of here. At least someone will know some of it. And maybe you can help the Intercept make sense of it, if . . . if I’m not there to.”

  She didn’t respond. She was too afraid he might change his mind.

  “All right,” he said. “What does the government want to listen to?”

  She considered. “Well, everything.”

  “No. Not quite. It wants to be able to listen to everything. But what does it want to focus on?”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Let me put it another way. Does the government care what people write on postcards?”

  “No. It’s right out in the open.”

  “Exactly. People who send postcards aren’t trying to hide anything. It’s the people who use envelopes, and especially the ones who use security envelopes, and put extra tape along the flap to make sure no one can steam it open,
that the government is concerned about. Now extrapolate.”

  “You’re saying . . . the government is focusing on, what, people who use encryption?”

  “Yes, but that’s only a tiny part of it. The focus is on every form of electronic and other behavior that could be considered an attempt to preserve privacy.”

  “What are we talking about specifically?”

  “I don’t want to get into it. I’ll just say it started as an antiterror initiative, like every other example of government overreach these days. Terrorists need a way of communicating clandestinely, right? So someone had the insight that your organization could map every way terrorists might go about those clandestine communications. The behaviors involved. And then search for those behaviors wherever they occurred, applying something called Bayesian networks.”

  “Of course,” she said, realizing. “It makes perfect sense.”

  “You know about it?”

  “Bayesian inferences are a kind of probability theory. I’m a computer scientist.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a background myself. Well, the problem—”

  “—the problem is that terrorists aren’t the only ones who try to safeguard their privacy.”

  “Bingo. Although as far as I’m concerned, whether the broader applications of God’s Eye were a bug or a feature is absolutely an open question. Because one of the ways they use Bayesian inferences to filter data is by a matrix. What do you read? What sites do you visit? Who do you follow on Twitter? And I’ll give you a hint: following the ACLU, or Jacob Appelbaum, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Freedom of the Press Foundation, or WikiLeaks, or donating to organizations like those, might be the kind of thing they like to know about. They don’t like dissent. Whether from the powerless, or the powerful. Dissent is one of those things that’s best nipped in the bud.”

  “So you’re saying God’s Eye—”

  “God’s Eye only looks at what people are trying to hide. It only listens when people are trying to whisper. Now think about what you would uncover with something like that, what it could be used for, and you’re starting to get the idea.”

  “There would be . . . you’d know everything.”

  “Everything worth knowing, if your goal were to control a population. You NSA types must really groove on irony. Because hell yes, as long as you don’t try to protect your privacy, you can still have privacy! Well, at least in theory. I mean, NSA still has access to everything about you. You’ll still be one of the hundreds of millions of volumes in their limitless collection. They just won’t take you down from the shelf to read you. At least until they want something. Or if you misbehave. Then you’re fucked.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Her mind was racing with possibilities. The truth was, the concept was ingenious. She wondered who had thought of it. And how they would implement. She knew NSA already focused heavily on collecting encrypted communications, in the hope that at a minimum some decryption breakthrough would allow the communications to be read at a later date. And that they were exceptionally interested in lawyer-client privileged communications, as well. What else would they focus on? Social network accounts with only a pair or at most a handful of users. Email accounts with similarly restricted use. People who cleared their browsers regularly. People who purged emails from their online trash. Hell, you could even get more specific than that. You could focus on which messages got deleted. After all, those would be the interesting ones. The secrets you would uncover . . . it would be everything. Affairs. Closeted homosexuality. Financial improprieties. Perversions. The most personal aspects of people’s lives. The most shameful secrets.

  Look at the way the FBI had nailed General Petraeus when he was director of Central Intelligence, by focusing on the email account he was using with his lover. The two of them had been storing sexual messages as drafts, not sending them. That would be a giant red flag right there. And only one user on the account, logging in from different locations. Another dead giveaway. What if the account hadn’t been uncovered in the course of an FBI investigation? What if instead it had been discovered by the director? In all likelihood, Petraeus would still be DCI. A lot of people had thought he was on the fast track to run for president, for God’s sake. And the director would have owned him.

  She suddenly wondered how many other people the director owned. Powerful people. Politicians. Regulators. Judges. Journalists. And how many organizations he had penetrated, subverted. It was almost too big to fathom.

  She realized there was another thing they would focus on: prepaid phones. Bought for cash. Who pays cash for a prepaid phone? Poor people, but they don’t matter to you and you quickly screen them out. Everyone else . . . would be someone trying to hide something. Something you’ve now uncovered.

  “Could that be how they caught me?” she said. “I bought a prepaid phone for cash. Is that the kind of thing God’s Eye looks for?”

  “It’s exactly the kind of thing.”

  It made a horrible kind of sense. She’d thought she was being so clever and careful. But it seemed clever and careful was exactly what drew the attention of God’s Eye.

  “I think you should change hotels,” she said. “I’m taking every precaution, but obviously there are things they can do neither of us even knows about.”

  Weird to call NSA “they,” and to refer to herself and this journalist as “us.” But that was how it felt at the moment.

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been wanting to move, but . . . I’ve been afraid to. They”—his voice cracked, but he went on—“they did some bad shit to me. Hey, how did you find me, anyway? You didn’t really answer before.”

  “The man who saw you by Lake Tuz a few days ago. He—”

  “Wait a minute. What man?”

  She paused for a moment. What had Marvin been doing there? She’d asked, but he’d refused to say. But he’d looked so racked by guilt. And things were going so fast and it all felt so out of control, she’d barely paused to consider. Had he been sent to kill Hamilton, and then, for some reason, changed his mind? Was that what Manus was? Some kind of NSA assassin?

  “I’m . . . not exactly sure who he is,” she said. “But he told me he saw you at Lake Tuz.”

  “Big guy? Glasses? A beard?”

  “He’s big, yes, but no glasses or beard.”

  “It was a disguise, then. Is he deaf?”

  Alarm bells went off in her mind and she was suddenly unsure how much to say. But if Hamilton knew something about Marvin, she wanted to hear it.

  “Yes.”

  “You know him?”

  “He’s helping me.”

  “Helping you? Oh, fuck, are you serious? You’re being played, lady. Assuming you’re not the one playing me.”

  “What do you—”

  “He’s the guy who fucking abducted me! He’s a sociopath, can’t you see that? I begged him, seriously begged him, and he looked at me like I was, I don’t know, a fly or something. And turned me over to . . . to . . .”

  “To who?”

  “I don’t know. Three sick Turkish assholes straight out of Deliverance. What was the point of that? Why would he do that?”

  “I think the Turks were a cutout. I think they were supposed to get you to some third party, a jihadist group, something like that.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess they were having too much fun to stick with the plan. But your friend got the party going, do you understand? You cannot trust that guy. Is he with you now?”

  “No.” She hadn’t wanted to lie, but technically it was true—Marvin was in the other room. Besides, it was more important to calm Hamilton down.

  “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m talking to you. Oh, my God.”

  “It’s okay. He’s not here. It’s just me. But . . . what happened by Lake Tuz?”

  “Your friend happened. He killed those Turks—I mean, fucking butchered them, I think with this axe he carries, you should have seen their bodies—and then he just left me.”

 
“Why didn’t he kill you, too?”

  “How the hell should I know? Maybe he thought it was funnier to just let me die of thirst next to that goddamned salt lake. The point is, if you think he’s on your side, you’re even stupider than I am.”

  She wondered whether he could be right about Marvin. Three men? With an axe? It sounded completely insane. On the other hand, had those been shots outside her apartment? Had Marvin killed someone there? But the details weren’t what mattered. What mattered was . . . who was he, really? And how could she know?

  “I don’t think that,” she said. “I’m being careful. I promise.”

  “Oh, man,” Hamilton said. “Oh, man.”

  She needed to get him to refocus. “How long before Leed can publish?”

  There was a pause, then, “A while. But that doesn’t matter. Once the drive is decrypted, she’ll upload copies to a dozen mirror sites. I should have done exactly that from Turkey, but Perkins was afraid something could be intercepted and he would be exposed.”

  “I don’t know that he was entirely wrong about that.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think things could have gone a lot worse than they have.”

  “Fair point.”

  “Anyway. Once the contents of that thumb drive are uploaded to mirror sites, the game is over. The cover-up will be useless. It’ll just be a question of spin. And I can’t wait to see these assholes try to spin their way out of what I got from Perkins.”

  “Okay. I’ll contact your editor. But twelve hours . . . can you make it sooner? I don’t know how long I can stay ahead of the people coming after me.”

  “If you think you can make it happen faster, great. I’ll call her in six hours. But if you haven’t closed the loop with her by then, the call is wasted. And every time I get on the phone, it’s exposure none of us wants. We need to make it count.”

  She thought about it. Six hours should be okay. As long as . . .

  “Do your people monitor SecureDrop? Or is something going to sit in there unattended?”

  “Right now? They’re probably monitoring it in real time.”