Double Tap

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I have no illusions: My performance with Rufus on cross-examination may have looked good to the audience, but it is likely to have produced more flash than effect when the jury finally locks itself behind closed doors for deliberations.

There is no discounting the fact that the video and photos taken of Ruiz by Rufus were compiled over a period of nearly two weeks. They show a pattern of conduct on the part of the defendant that is entirely consistent with the state’s theory of the case. No matter the tune or the dance as regards mistaken impressions, the contents of the video-the fact that Ruiz was seen surveilling the victim with a pair of field glasses-will not be lost on the jury, especially after this is hammered home by Templeton in his closing argument.

The indisputable fact is that without putting Ruiz on the stand, there is no way that we can explain what he was doing watching Madelyn Chapman. And putting Ruiz on the stand would be like lighting a torch to find your way through a dark powder magazine. Even assuming that the jury would believe him, without knowing what secrets lurk in his background, putting Emiliano up for Templeton to take a shot at is not something I would choose to do. Though the final decision as to whether to testify rests with the defendant, it is not something I can recommend to him. I am fearful that Templeton would take him apart on the stand, especially given Emiliano’s death wish in lieu of life without parole.

Tonight I am huddled over the keyboard of the desktop in my study, doing a Google search online to learn how my computer works.

I am taking Jim Kaprosky’s advice, checking out the nature of spyware and looking for the two items that he mentioned during my visit to his house last night. When I got to the car I scrawled the words mirror software and looking glass on the back of one of my business cards. Tonight the note is sitting on my desk next to the keyboard.

When Harold Klepp mentioned the word spyware that night at the bar, I thought he was using shorthand to describe Chapman’s Primis package, high-level security software intended to allow the government to plumb the depths of personal information. I was wrong. Klepp may have been out of the loop at Isotenics, but he was hearing things from someone closer to the center of the action.

Chapman had been overheard using the term spyware during her argument on the phone with Gerald Satz. Klepp got the word right but, like me, he didn’t understand the context, the fact that the word was being used in the technical sense: as a term of art, not to describe Primis, but something else.

According to the articles online, adware is a computer term used to describe small bits of what is known as “execution programming.” These are used by commercial firms to track information whenever a computer user goes online and visits certain sites. Shop for a pair of running shoes online, and the next thing you know you’ll be getting pop-up screens trying to peddle everything for the foot, from sneakers to slippers. Chances are one or more of the sites you have visited has just attached bits of adware to the hard drive of your computer.

If you have a pop-up blocker-unless you run one or more scanning programs to search out and remove the adware-you’ll never know it is happening, except that over time your machine will slow down as it loads up on the small bits and pieces. Most of it is harmless, though some can transmit viruses, worms, and other odious items that can kill your computer.

From the digital handshake of surfing the Web, you can also pick up the insidious little devil known as spyware. Generally this is a more sophisticated version of looking-over-your-shoulder as you shop. Spyware usually sends more detailed information to the vendor who planted it online. It is designed to track your shopping habits. According to the information, some of it is so sufficiently sophisticated that it can hunt out your mailing address and fill your mailbox with junk mail.

I do a search for the terms mirror software and looking glass. I score pages of hits, including a firm that produces medical software and a project by a large commercial software manufacturer. But none of these are what I am looking for.

Unless I misunderstood him, Jim Kaprosky was not talking about proprietary software manufactured by a private company. He was talking about the software equivalent of aviation’s spy-style Skunk Works, an operation buried in the dark tunnels of government that somehow has crafted a way to tap into home and office computers, anything online, and gather private data so that it can be processed through Primis.

If this is true, it would allow the government to monitor patterns of conduct and individual activity at a depth and in detail that is mind-numbing.

Given the ever-increasing grasp of central governments around the world, the threat of mischief or worse posed by such technology is daunting. True, it could be used to thwart terrorism. But, unchecked and unseen, it could just as easily give rise to tyranny. Private information on a global scale could be used to chill political speech at a monumental level. In the hands of the unscrupulous, it could be harnessed to extort any number of favors from individuals in public office or those who control the economic throttle and pull the levers that make the world go around.

If information is power, access to personal digitized data in a form that is raw and unrestricted-coupled with processing software allowing oceans of it to be mined at the speed of light-is an open and engraved invitation to despotism.

Sitting in the blue haze emitted from the monitor in my darkened study, I am scrolling down the screen when my eye catches something. It’s a tagline near the bottom of the page, a single news item from one of the wire services. In the second line of the description is the abbreviation NSA. I pull it up.

The article is brief and two years old. According to the wire-service story, a spokesman for the National Security Agency has denied reports that his agency has pioneered a computer bug known as “looking glass,” software designed to track and transmit large volumes of digital data in highly compressed microbursts. According to the initial reports, which have now been denied, the software was believed to be intended for use in foreign intelligence gathering and engineered in a form that would be virtually invisible except to the most sophisticated scanning devices.

I print the article out and scroll on. There are two more articles. When I try to pull them up, I find that both have either expired or been removed from the Internet.

Piecing together what Kaprosky told me and from the information on adware and how it works, if the government is using looking glass as a form of spyware at some or all of its online sites, this has ominous implications for anything remotely approaching a free society.

Businesses or individuals going to their computers for tax forms or electronic filing, some of which is now required by law, would have no way of avoiding the attachment of virtually invisible spyware to their computers. Everyone from farmers reporting agricultural production, to banks dealing with the Federal Reserve, to doctors and hospitals using computer uplinks to communicate with government regulatory agencies, could be having their confidential data files scanned at the speed of light with no oversight or restriction on how it is used.

Those possessing the keys to this kingdom would be the ultimate inside dealers. They would know the details of every business transaction before it occurred, like playing Monopoly with loaded dice.

In the area of privacy, everything, from patient medical records to supposedly confidential financial data, from the content of e-mail to personal notes and records maintained on home computers, could be scanned.

If this is true, and if the system is in full bloom, any computer that has ever surfed to a government site is probably already infected. In this case, its data and anything networked to it is being scooped up without notice or benefit of a search warrant. If Kaprosky is right, all of it at this moment could be running through high-speed lines in compressed microbursts to computers running Primis in the basement of the Pentagon.