Kevin Cleary finally spoke, “Here’s what we do know. A woman very much like Aaffia bought a computer with voice over the Internet technology. The one number she gave was Aaffia’s; the other, if Aaffia was the buyer, was probably her phone too. The landline is still active. We know it is listed to a fictional name, Abdel Feil, so whoever had that line brought in is at least hiding something.” Stopping for a moment to give effect to his conclusion, Kevin finally said, “And I also did a DMV check for vehicles and Abdel Feil purchased a light blue 1992 Acura two years back. It was never registered. The records don’t show that car under the Vehicle Identification Number, the VIN, as being resold. It was bought right here in New York.” Everyone smiled at the discovery of this important new information.
The conversation went on for over an hour, and finally Jack Mason put Team 1 in gear. “Nicky, start the affidavit for the search warrant. Kevin, you do one too. Kristin and Al, go over to the satellite and talk to Andy Fischer, the lead IA, and see what they may know about the area, maybe even the building, but send another EC and set any other leads you can think of before you go, and oh, advise them about the warrant before you head over to the satellite. Give them a heads up. I am going upstairs to talk to the attorneys.”
Bob Phillips patiently waited for his assignment as Jack, thoughtfully squinting, began to sort out the operation on a yellow pad and in his head. “Bob, you and Larry have to get us everything you can on VoIP. Can we intercept a communication? Can it transmit digital data? Can we tell who was contacted? Anything like that and anything we can use to support an application for surreptitious entry. Also get a subpoena out for all the telephone toll records on that landline.”
****
Andy Fischer was waiting in his corner cubicle when Kristin and Al arrived. Andy, at age thirty-five, brought special talents to his job as the first among equals. He was an attorney and former criminal analyst with the FBI. He moved into the role of intelligence officer when the FBI began to evolve away from general crime fighting and into a counterterrorism intelligence agency. While the Broadway FBI office worked closely with the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office, Fischer was liaison to the Brooklyn US Attorney. Like the Yankees and the Mets, New York was such a large town that it required two federal prosecution teams.
Kristin walked up to Fischer with her hand outstretched. “Andy, you guys did a great job researching that apartment on Dean Street. What do think about the lead?”
“I think it looks good. From what we can tell, the basement floor is presently unoccupied, but I do have some interesting news.” He reached down and picked up a white packet of papers. Holding them up in the air, he said, “At Atlantic and Underhill Avenues, about two blocks away, there is a series of cameras installed by merchants running along Atlantic moving west toward the big transportation hub at Atlantic, Flatbush and Fourth Avenues. If anyone was walking to 734 Dean Street or in an area that is sometimes now called ‘Prospect Heights,’ it is extremely likely they would pass the CCTV installations. I don’t know if old video footage is stored, but we are making an effort to find out.”
Al Ford suggested, “Our targets were pretty crafty; I think they’d watch for the cameras.”
Andy jumped in, “This may be different!”
“But no matter,” ignoring Fisher’s admonition, Ford continued, “we can still try to search for video records for the time periods right around the attempted bombing. We will have to have Jack get some agents over there to see what is available.”
“Al, there is a shit load of CCTV units in the area and some aren’t very obvious at all. And a couple of my analysts already talked to the merchants on Atlantic Avenue and they are going to secure any images they have.”
“Can you view them efficiently?” Kristin asked.
“We will probably have to go through the pictures frame by frame, but we will start with facial recognition. The comparative image we have of Aaffia Khan is grainy. Kristin, Al, do you guys have something better?”
“Yeah, Andy, I have a pristine image if you don’t mind a death mask. I will have it emailed to you forthwith,” Kristin said as she dialed her office on her cell phone.
Nick answered the phone, “Team 1. OS Brennan.”
“Nicky, it’s Kristin. Can you go up to the photo unit and have them shop out the bullet holes in Aaffia’s head in the death record image and email it to Andy Fischer?”
“I’ll take care of it. How are you making out?”
“Good. There are CCTV cameras all over the area around Dean Street and maybe we can find a match to Khan. Andy’s IAs are going to use facial recognition software and do visual inspections, so cross your fingers.”
“If they get a hit, have them notify us right away. I’d like to put that in my affidavit.”
****
Later that afternoon, about two miles west of the Brooklyn satellite, Jack Mason was sitting at his desk in Manhattan reviewing the computer file for the whole case so far. Staring at the screen, he knew the lawyers weren’t confident they could get a judge to sign off on surreptitious entry without something more. This plan, though possibly promising, was still a shot in the dark, Mason thought. There were lots of potential problems ahead.
****
The next morning, Brennan and Cleary were sitting in Kevin’s cube working on their affidavits. As a lawyer, Nicky knew the repetitive and cumulative evidence submitted by two separate intelligence officers was no more valuable to a judge than a single report, but he also knew a bureaucracy liked paper, and the distinct inferences drawn by two individual investigators in their own words was sometimes favored by those up the chain. Paperwork equaled activity.
Suddenly Bob Phillips and Larry appeared in the doorway of the cube.
“You both ready for a tutorial on VoIP?” Ford asked.
“Listen, you guys talk to me like I’m in the fifth grade. This computer stuff gets confusing,” Nick replied.
Bob Phillips started the lesson, “The voice over Internet protocol VoIP is still in its developmental stages but it is moving forward rapidly. Imagine if you will a telephone receiver plugged into a computer in the US and another computer with another handset somewhere in Europe or Asia. As they talk to each other the computer digitizes the voice, an analog signal, it breaks it up and puts it in a bunch of little digital packets and sends those packets out over the Internet. At the other end the computer takes the little packets and converts them back into analog, and the speaker’s voice is heard as it is spoken.”
Ford went on from there, “If there is a direct connection between the two operators, that is they use the same server for the VoIP service, they are connected person to person, called P2P or peer to peer. There is no stop at or movement through a server switch like when we use a telephone or even if we send an email.” Stopping to reflect for a moment and to allow Nick to digest the technical information, he went on, “Now, as each party speaks into his computer the message is encrypted before it goes out and then obviously decrypted at the other end. So now imagine this data is passing through space at the speed of light in an encrypted format. It really can’t be intercepted as a practical matter.”
“Explain this single server thing for me,” Nicky said.
“Okay,” Bob said. “When they both use the same service and they are P2P, it is a direct line. If, however, they use two different VoIP services or connect a VoIP transmission to a regular telephone switch by trying to call a regular telephone overseas for example, it can be intercepted because it must go through a central point, or let’s call it a switch.”
“How many VoIP services are there?”
“Perhaps many, but there are two principal ones: the big one ‘SPIDER’ and the slightly smaller ‘MADLINE.’ If a Spider user calls a Madline registrant there is a switch and we can intercept the communication with the right legal process. But Spider to Spider or Madline to Madline, each company will say it can’t be intercepted.”
“You mean the company doesn’t have
the ability to intercept the message?”
“Well, yes, sort of. Let me see if I can explain it a little better. I’ll use Spider as an example. Give me some latitude on this, Nicky,” Ford begged.
“Spider will claim for public consumption that it doesn’t know the encryption keys and registrant information—only the users have that—but I think there is some bullshit in that public statement. Say for example a user forgets or loses his password. Spider is not going to say ‘too bad, now all your data is lost because only you had it.’ They would lose customers wholesale. No, they will email a temporary password and let the user reset his password. So following on that thought, I think we can assume two things: Spider would have the user information like passwords, email address, IP address, registration information, calls to a public network or another VoIP service AND I think they actually have the encryption keys.”
“Alright, say we get all that info and encryption keys. How does that help if it is P2P anyway?” Nick asked with a befuddled look.
“Well, maybe we can impersonate one end of the conversation by playing monkey in the middle—you know, impersonation, the voice quality is often poor. Besides, it also could give us a lot of other information: the registrant, the IP, the email address and the billing data, maybe even bank accounts, credit cards. And Nicky, if we locate the actual computer on one end or the other we can do a ‘black bag job’ and have a device hidden on the machine to capture or record lots of other information, including the actual voice communications.”
“Whoa, so in a sense we may be able to intercept while Spider can’t or doesn’t. This VoIP shit can get complicated. Does the FBI have much experience with this stuff?”
Bob Phillips took the question. “Not really a lot of experience. We have the Carnivore Program, which is basically a packet sniffer—you know, like the packets of data we were just talking about, Well, it sniffs email and excludes data that does not fit the warrant the judge signed. It is installed at the Internet Service Provider, it intercepts authorized stuff only. Carnivore in many ways is low tech. The VoIP problem is high order.”
“Suppose we get an overseas telephone from a VoIP switch. Can we track that?”
“I think so,” said Ford. “We have the Echelon Program, also called 5 Eyes. NSA in concert with Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand collect a lot of satellite and ground information, and we have access to that data. Your pal John Planner is an important contact with my old employer NSA. By the way, SMS short message service, basically text messaging, is not presently included in VoIP, but it probably will be soon— however, likely limited geographically. Maybe US to Canada and Canada to US. We’ll see.”
Phillips then added, “We are going in to see Jack and give him our VoIP update. Got anything you think we should add?”
“Yeah, ask him whatever happened to manual typewriters?” Nicky said, smiling.
****
As Nick Brennan left the building deep in thought that late afternoon, while retrieving his pistol from his gun locker he looked over at the security checkpoint at the front door and noticed the mechanical way the guards moved visitors through the metal detectors. They moved the people through quickly depending almost entirely on the meter attached to the large archway. The technology was far better than the old “pat down,” Nick reasoned, but as he looked down at the KelTec pistol in his hand he realized that it was almost completely plastic and composite material. Once an evildoer aided by technology creates a completely nonmetallic gun and bullets, that enormous magnetometer is immediately obsolete. We are chasing technology. Maybe the cell phone is already a terrorist’s tool of the past, he mused.
Chapter 12
As Andy Fischer’s squad went through an endless number of facial images captured from the many cameras along Atlantic Avenue, they knew that most of the merchants had discarded or taped over the activities occurring around the date of the Grand Terminus attempted bombing. The warrant application was pending, and federal lawyers had asked the US District Court judge in Brooklyn for the right to enter the premises at 734 Dean Street secretly and then asked for a delay for a day or so pending a review of the tapes.
Arthur Banke was a slightly built specialist with big eyeglasses. He was considered by his colleagues a bit of a perceptive and yet eccentric guy. As one of the newer FBI analysts, he often came to Andy with clever ideas or information captured from his former craft as a creative writer for a small monthly magazine.
“Andy, bear with me on this. I decided to just run through the tapes we had quickly instead of looking at particular people. I looked for suspicious or maybe furtive moves by the pedestrians walking by or pictured in the frames.”
“Did you find something?”
“Maybe. There is a camera that is discreetly installed right by the Pacific Street BMT station way up high near the exit onto Atlantic. The merchant, a check-cashing place, changes the tapes regularly but stores the old tapes for a year or more. Three days before the attempt at Grand Terminus a woman fitting Aaffia Khan’s general description comes up the stairway into the bright daylight looking around in an overtly deliberate manner, expecting attention sort of like a diva walking the red carpet—strange, real strange.” Banke, exhibiting one of his affectations, cleared his throat and continued, “Anyway, she is wearing a dark scarf over her hair, walking slowly and as she reaches the very top step she looked over at the check place. We got a full face image. She obviously didn’t see the camera and made an abrupt right on Atlantic away from the shortest route to Dean Street.”
“Does the facial recognition software give us a hit?”
“A possible hit. Here, look at it on your computer.” As Andy pulled up the program, Arthur continued, “When we photoshopped the wounds out,” he said, pointing to the forehead on the computer image, “the forehead is slightly distorted,” he continued, now pointing to the original picture. “But look, when I have the software compare the untouched picture to our possible target, the likelihood goes way up, way up! I got no hit with the touched-up version but a possible hit with the original.”
Andy quietly studied all the frames for a moment. “Arty, that is a hit. That is tradecraft; she was aware of all the cameras on Atlantic she made a right on Atlantic Avenue and probably a left on 3rd Avenue and a left on Dean Street to avoid the concentration of cameras on Atlantic. She went the long way. Do we have any CCTV cameras on third?”
“No luck, Andy. Nothing was saved.”
“Send this to the photo unit for a confirmation, and I’m going to call Jack Mason and tell him what we have. Good job, Arty!”
Fischer immediately called Mason and spoke in absolute terms, something analysts were trained not to do, “Jack, this is it! We have Khan coming out of the subway five blocks from 734 Dean Street. I’m telling you I looked at the images. Aaffia is walking out of the subway. After a digital confirmation, add it to the application and we have what we need.”
Fischer was right. When the analysts used eighty nodal points on the face, essentially a face print, they concluded Aaffia Khan came out of the NYC subway system some three thousand feet from the target building only three days before the attempted bombing. The judge has to be impressed, Jack Mason thought.
****
As the four agents in heavy military gear quietly entered the basement floor front doorway at 2:00 a.m. on the moonless night, they were prepared for almost anything: booby traps, explosive devices, alarms, animals, or even occupants. To their general relief the clandestine operation was without complications. A thorough search of the basement took more than two hours, and by 4:15 a.m. Kristin Roberts was inside 734 Dean Street.
She quickly surveyed the darkened area with a flashlight. The basement was configured with what was once sometimes called a “club room.” A clubroom is a confined space inserted in a mostly unfinished area of the basement. It commonly has a doorway into the single walled-in room. This one had an interior improved area with dimensions measured at twenty feet by twen
ty feet. There were no cellar windows or other portals where one could look in or even natural light could enter. In the middle of the clubroom was a four-legged table similar to what a small kitchen might have with a chair neatly tucked against and under it. On top of the table was a black Dell computer model 8250 with a full duplex sound card to hear and speak at the same time, a monitor and keyboard all connected to a computer cable. Also on the tabletop was a black AT&T landline telephone. Kristin did not touch the computer or pick up the phone in deference to the fingerprint people, who began dusting the whole area.
At 5:00 a.m. Jack Mason and Nick Brennan arrived and took a look around.
“Kristin, what do you think?” Jack asked.
“Well, Jack, this place hasn’t been used for a very long time. If you want to just bug the joint and leave it intact after the fingerprint guys clean up we probably can, but honestly I think it is useless.”
“Maybe we should just exploit the computer and leave it. It probably contains emails, contacts, downloaded files and a browsing history. We get to go back to the office, cull through the data, and see if anyone bites later,” said Jack, thinking out loud.
“Jack, I think we should seize the computer, take prints and photos, and alarm and bug the place in case someone returns. If someone does come back, he or she might think a burglary occurred. Anyway, we need to talk to the landlord. Somebody must have paid the rent, probably in advance.”
Nick, listening carefully, agreed. “Look at the dust around here,” he said while running his finger on the table. “No one has visited or at least cleaned this place in a long time. Expecting someone to show up is probably a dead end. When we exploit the machine we will know when it was last used and we can study the VoIP records too. I agree with Kristin, let’s take all this stuff and get the hell out of here.”
Once a Noble Endeavor Page 18