The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 5

The Urim monitoring station in Israel was the equivalent of the US National Security Agency in Maryland or Britain’s GCHQ in Cheltenham. That is to say, it was a vast, all-seeing electronic eye where they monitored vast swathes of telephone, mobile phone and data traffic. It was estimated that they monitored pretty much all transmitted information that went over the air waves whether by satellite or ground station. Even most of the traffic that went by land line could be monitored through a variety of technologies.

But most of this voice traffic never reached a human ear, nor the data traffic a human eye. There was simply too much of it for human analysis. Such information only came before a human being if it fulfilled one of two criteria. The first of these was the keyword test. Both text and speech were analysed by sophisticated algorithms for identifying key words that would flag up the content and trigger human intervention. Contra to what people thought, one couldn’t just rattle off a list of words to force the recording to be brought to the attention of a human analyst. The algorithms were actually quite sophisticated.

But there was another parallel criterion that could take such material from the realm of SigInt into the realm of HumInt. And that was the source or destination of the specific traffic that was being monitored. Certain people’s phone and internet communications were singled out for human monitoring because the people in question were themselves already under suspicion.

And one of these people was a man who called himself “HaTzadik” — The Righteous One. He was on the permanent surveillance list and under the monitoring criteria, all voice and data traffic to and from him, his home, his mobile and his IP address were to be referred automatically to Israel’s Sherutei Bitachon Klali — SHaBaK — or General Security Services. This was the equivalent of Britain’s Security Service — MI5.

And so an encrypted recording of HaTzadik’s nocturnal phone conversation with Sam Morgan was sent to SHaBaK to be analyzed by a human being.