Patriot Act

by James Phelan

  “Makes the concept of Total Information Awareness not as impressive as it sounds,” McCorkell said.

  “We’ll get there.” Dunn sat down behind his desk, an old relic of a thing from the seventies. The chairs were new, though, upgraded every twelve months as part of an occupational health and safety measure in all government agencies and departments.

  “Thing is,” Dunn said, “as we get better, and as we get more results in the field, more military strikes and grabs of key assets, the sons of bitches are getting smarter. Used to be the terrorists would use disposable mobiles, use them once and chuck them out. Didn’t worry us too much, as we’d then go hunt their voice pattern. We’ve taken out half the al Qaeda leadership through that. The smart ones that are left know this, and they don’t use phones at all any more. We joke about bombing places like ’stan and Iraq ‘back into the Stone Age.’ But that’s the hardest place for us to find anyone. Put them in a first-world city, with modern communications, and we have control. We hear and see everything they do. Give them carrier pigeons and human messengers, and we’re lost.”

  The pair sat silent for a moment, thinking about the gravity of it all.

  “Cooper was a great loss,” Dunn said. “Who’s handling the investigation?”

  “Moscow CIA Station Chief and the local FBI attaché,” McCorkell said. “And the FSB are pulling St Petersburg apart for leads.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t have much faith in the FSB,” Dunn said. “When they were the KGB, they had reach. Damn, they were fuck’n good, and they worked in numbers. Something to be said for having no gloves to take off. Now, as none of the poor sons of bitches are getting regular paycheques from their half-assed government, they stick their hands out to the local business oligarchs. But of course, you know that as well as I do.”

  “That I do. Just don’t piss the FSB off—a sprinkling of polonium or dioxin in your dinner is not a nice way to go,” McCorkell said.

  “Litvinenko and Yushchenko certainly proved the FSB still has some reach, and a long memory—if it was our Russian friends, of course,” Dunn commented with a wry smile.

  “Of course…” McCorkell said. “Ira, there’s an investigative journalist on this Cooper thing, Lachlan Fox. Good guy, ex Aussie Navy. He might pop by soon.”

  “He’s not a spook?” Dunn said, jotting down the name.

  “No, Wallace’s GSR. He was in St Petersburg when this went down, almost in time to save Cooper, he took out the assassins in the process.”

  “Okay, I’m impressed,” Dunn said. “How is Tas? Haven’t heard much about him for some time.”

  “Great,” McCorkell replied, happy to be thinking about his old friend. “Still taking on the world, going where news corporations with shareholders and commercial interests dare not tread. Just has his own little army of reporters to do the dirty work now.”

  “Fuck’n’ admirable, some of the stuff he’s championed,” Dunn said. “You two old boys still go rowing?”

  “When we can.” McCorkell checked his watch. “And while I like to pretend I didn’t hear you mentioning ‘old boy,’ I’m afraid my knees are finally putting an end to running.”

  “Know how that feels,” Dunn sympathised.

  “Ira, we’ll need to put our heads together for a replacement for Cooper,” McCorkell said as he stood to leave. “I’ve asked Treasury to compile a short list by tomorrow, and I want your approval before I take it to the President and Cabinet.”

  “Let’s do it after we switch over to this next-gen encryption,” Dunn said, coming from around his desk to walk his guest out. “The economy can handle the Advocacy Center being run by the deputy for a couple of weeks.”

  “Fair enough,” McCorkell replied. “So, when does your Quantum baby come online?”

  “Friday. A week from now there’s not a person on earth who will be able to hack our secure information. We even quietly put a challenge out there to some allied agencies, the Brits, the French, the Ruskies: go try and hack into our government computers a week from now. Can’t wait to hear back from them! In a few days time, we flick the switch and nobody, ever, will be peeking in our window. The walls are going up.”

  19

  NEW YORK CITY

  Fox and Gammaldi had just finished their debrief to Wallace in his office. Faith Williams sat to the side of Wallace’s big oak desk, intently listening in on this pair of investigators who for the past year had made a game of making her life harder.

  “I spoke to Bill McCorkell about an hour ago,” Fox said. “I’ve got a meeting time set up to speak to Ira Dunn tomorrow evening.”

  “Sounds good,” Wallace said, noting down the meeting. “Nice to hear we still have some people putting in the hours down in Washington.”

  “Who’s Ira Dunn?” Faith asked.

  “The last thing Cooper said to me was to speak to an Ira Dunn,” Fox told her. “He’s a deputy director at NSA, in charge of their Communications Intelligence Directorate.”

  “Well, I want you to talk to the shrink before you go,” Faith said. Having personnel authority over all GSR employees, most had learned early on that it was wiser to follow her directive to the letter than be on the receiving end of her usually well-hidden wrath. “If for nothing else, to make sure you’re on the ball enough to keep putting in the hours.”

  “Okay, you don’t need to justify it to me,” Fox said. “I’m understanding this American preoccupation with psychiatrists more and more each day.” He gave her his most charming smile and she looked back down at her notes.

  “Do I have to see the shrink too?” Gammaldi asked.

  “I don’t know, Alister, do you?” Faith retorted.

  “I think I’m okay,” Gammaldi said. “Bit homesick, though, missing Vegemite, that’s for sure.”

  “Well why don’t you tell Dr Bender all about it then,” Faith said. “I’m sure you don’t have to hold Fox’s hand on his trip to Washington.”

  Gammaldi made a mock gesture of stretching out his arm and offering his hand to Fox, sitting in the chair beside him.

  “Lachlan, I take it you’re not planning on getting involved in any assassinations on this trip?” Faith asked, her thinly sculpted eyebrows raised. “No showdowns with madmen who have their fingers on WMD launch buttons?”

  “Nah, WMD-wielding madmen were so last year,” Fox said. He was fast adding to his unenviable record in the building for being caught in hot spots, not exactly being a magnet for trouble but often putting his nose a little too deep into a story.

  “You’ll have to take a commercial bird,” Wallace said, bringing the meeting back on track. “Both Gulfstreams are out at the moment.”

  “Okay,” Fox said, standing up. “If that’s it, I’m going down to have a chat to Ben Beasley.”

  “Hey, Lachlan, check this out,” Ben Beasley said, looking up from his MacBook. The comms expert in the small GSR security team, Beasley had spent the first ten years of his career working for the FBI in their Baltimore office, specialising in communications interception. More listening in on small- to large-scale crime than what the NSA was tasked with, but for Fox it was a level of expertise into a world he felt he knew too little about, considering he was about to head down to NSA headquarters itself.

  Fox looked over Beasley’s shoulder, at what was an image of a city, zooming in.

  “Google Earth, seen it some time back,” Fox said.

  “Not quite, my learned Aussie friend,” Beasley said, zooming in even further.

  “Good res—holy shit!” Fox said, reading a newspaper, watching as the person sitting in the open café turned the pages.

  “DoD Earth,” Beasley said. “Not much of it is real-time footage like this, but in a nutshell it’s as sexy as the world mapping images of the Department of Defense get.”

  “Nice,” Fox said. “Don’t suppose I should ask how you’ve got access to it?”

  “I access it through a NIPRNet emergency C
AVNET gateway in their SIPRNet Intellipedia network…” Beasley slid his glasses higher onto his nose. “Lost you, haven’t I?”

  “Lost me at NIP-something,” Fox said.

  “Well I’ll explain it in layman’s detail sometime, if I ever see you logging in to play Warcraft online.”

  “Dude, I so don’t have time for computer games,” Fox said.

  “Anyway, I’m here because of your time with the feds.”

  “Oh?”

  “You were in their communication division, right?” Fox asked.

  “So you know a fair bit about phone and email intercepting?”

  “I’m your man,” Beasley said, clearing some of the clutter off his desk. It wasn’t that the room was small, it was simply full of tech gear. Radios, LCD screens and computer terminals were stacked everywhere. “What’s it to ya? Want me to bug someone? An ex-girlfriend perhaps? Ex-boyfriend even, I’ve often wondered about you and that Gammaldi character…”

  Fox humoured him with a laugh, before slapping a strong hand on Beasley’s shoulder.

  “What do you know about the NSA?” Fox asked.

  “Ah, the holy grail of the intelligence community,” Beasley said, then turned more serious. “How long you got?”

  Fox gave him a look that said as long as it takes, minus the wisecracks. He took a seat on the swivel chair next to Beasley.

  “Well,” Beasley began, “they’re our biggest intelligence agency by far. Comes under the umbrella of the sixteen-member National Intelligence Community, and it’s a part of the DoD. Tasked with protecting US communications and intercepting those of others.”

  “What do you know about their intercept programs?” Fox asked, taking an Oreo from the open pack on Beasley’s desk.

  “Well, they’ve got the best gear out there by far—help yourself by the way,” Beasley said, stuffing a cookie in his mouth before continuing. “They’ve got hardware and software that other intelligence agencies won’t get access to for years and the public sector will probably never see. Supercomputing power that NASA would cream their pants over. In terms of intercept programs, they’re part of the biggest global network of spying the world has ever seen, thanks to the UKUSA Treaty.”

  “The Anglo alliance?” Fox asked.

  “Yeah, the US and UK are the main players, along with Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A few other allies have stations on their soil too, although they don’t get to play the game like the UKUSA countries. It all came together after the Second World War as a way to keep tabs on the Ruskies and the new international body, the UN. In a nutshell, by having such a spread-out range of sensors and satellite dishes across the globe, they can get it all. Anything said or written that travels via satellite, radio, microwave, cable, fibre-optic—you name it, they can intercept it.”

  “And Echelon?” Fox asked, circling ‘UKUSA’ in his Moleskin notebook.

  “Don’t know if Echelon is still a code name they’d use, as it’s pretty commonplace in the thriller genre now,” Beasley said, taking a sip on his 7-Eleven Big Gulp. “You know, shows like Alias, 24, NCIS, you hear Echelon mentioned there and in espionage novels and stuff all the time. Of course, most of the references to it could not be more wrong.”

  “What’s its purpose?” Fox asked.

  “I’m not sure of its official mandate, but basically it’s a program used by the UKUSA countries, mainly driven by the NSA, that hunts for data.”

  “Their spying capabilities,” Fox said.

  “Yeah. Punch into a specially programmed supercomputer—they call them Dictionaries—some keyword or phrase, like ‘nuclear bomb’ or ‘hijack,’ and it will record every conversation, fax, email, whatever containing that word. Eventually, an analyst or linguist at NSA or another UKUSA country will go through the communication and see if it’s a threat. I’m sure it’s more refined than that but that’s the gist of it.”

  “How many keywords can the system track?”

  “Theoretically, these days it’s limitless,” Beasley said. “Any word, phrase, whatever, the computers can handle it. The weak link in the chain is the human time it takes to establish if it’s a credible threat. This leads to failures such as with 9/11, where the terrorists’ calls were intercepted prior to the attacks but not translated and analysed until after the event.”

  “That would come down to a shortage of manpower?”

  “Fuck’n’ A. The intelligence community have got themselves plenty on the payroll who can convert Russian. But all the Middle Eastern languages? Those linguists are not exactly the nationality of civil servant the intelligence agencies jump over themselves to recruit, if you know what I mean.”

  Fox nodded and made more notes, crossing off his list of questions. “How about the Advocacy Center?”

  “Never heard of it,” Beasley replied, shaking his head.

  “It’s a DC-based outfit that disseminates NSA-collected industrial espionage of foreign companies and governments,” Fox explained, “and passes it on to US businesses, to help them abroad.”

  “Gotcha, I know they’ve been doing that sort of thing for a while, particularly since the end of the Cold War when globalisation filled the vacuum. Spending time chasing economic shit like that is why they were caught with their pants down on 9/11.”

  “But to be fair, the whole world has gone that way with their communications intelligence?” Fox said. “Everyone’s now after the economic advantage.”

  “True, but we were the ones that paid the ultimate price, and, given the capabilities we have, there’s no excuse it panned out like it did.”

  Fox felt for the former lawman. He could sense the raft of emotions headed by anger and frustration shared by so many of his countrymen, particularly those in his adopted city of New York where 2001 was still so raw.

  Fox raised his fist and had it punched in a friendly little salute.

  “Thanks for that, Benno,” Fox said.

  “Go get ’em, Lach.”

  20

  FRANCE

  Sianne Cassel looked out the floor-to-ceiling tinted windows of her coastal villa. The headland of Mogiou was buffeted by a white foam of crashing surf as the sun shone upon the southeastern cliff face. The brilliant summer rays of light twinkled across the choppy Mediterranean and gleamed in Cassel’s eyes. Hearing the last person entering and taking a seat, she turned around to face the board table.

  “Thank you for being here,” Cassel said to the assembled foreign guests and handful of French military leaders. Their cover for the meeting was a regular briefing for the Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty political group of the European Parliament. Not that word would get out. These were allies. Leaders and potential leaders who she could depend on for immediate support. “We are now taking the final steps in the operation.”

  She smiled, and nodded to Danton.

  He flicked the digital projector on, showing a map of the world.

  “Within the next twenty-four hours we have teams infiltrating two American spy bases, in New Zealand and Greenland,” she said, the spots lighting up on the map. “Both teams will be delivered by the French Navy—” a nod from the chief of the navy “—and executed by special-operations forces.”

  “Why wait until now to place these hacking devices?” This came from an airforce general.

  “To best avoid detection,” Cassel said. “The longer our intercept devices are there, the more chance we run of being discovered. This way, they will be in place for less than forty-eight hours by the time they are activated.”

  “Why this local connection?” the chief of the French Navy asked.

  “We need these planted so that we can piggyback onto the American satellite feed,” Danton fielded the question. “As these will be locally attached to the computers at the two stations, they run the risk of discovery, as Mademoiselle Cassel has explained. That is why the final steps are happening so close together.”

  “And once you’re con
nected, how long do you need the window to be open?”

  “An hour at the most.” The chief of the navy looked impressed at this.

  “That’s enough time to get all the information you need? All the inside information on competing American businesses? The dirt on our political opponents?” the ex Prime Minister of Italy said. He was clearly desperate to resume power and avoid his pending legal wrangle.

  “We now have a gathering of linked supercomputers set up to rival the Americans’ NSA headquarters,” Danton said. “We are well up to the task. Inside of an hour we can download all the stored information in NSA’s databanks.”

  “And if they detect these devices, before or after the data download?” the foreign minister of Sweden said, ready to assume power once he had the dirt he needed to overthrow the incumbent Prime Minister.

  “We are targeting the two locations to safeguard against that—we only need the one uplink to succeed,” Danton said. “And I’m sure they will discover the devices afterwards, but they will be untraceable and meaningless by then.”

  “And, needless to say, it will be too late by then,” Cassel added. She smiled, pleased to see the assembly were now at ease.

  “Where is our computer facility, at Domme?”

  “No, we could not have increased our facilities there as it is watched by foreign satellites,” Cassel said. “We have been procuring supercomputers through back channels for the past twelve months. The networked system has been set up at Fort Gaucher.”

  There was surprise on the faces of the military men present.

  “You should step up heavier security there,” the French chief of the navy said. “Air cover at least.”

  “No, we cannot arouse suspicion by overt actions,” Danton said. “The fort cannot be observed from satellites or spy planes. It is well guarded by a company of commandos, and it’s practically impenetrable because of its location.”

  “If I had known you were running this from Gaucher, I would have allocated some resources there,” a French Army general said.