Black List

CHAPTER 19

It was unlike any drive he had ever seen before. The amount of data it contained was staggering. There were literally thousands of files stored on it and room for multiple terabytes more. Nicholas had heard about theoretical jumps in microstorage capability using discs coated in protein from salt marsh microbes, but he had never interacted with one until now.

“What’s all this?” Nina asked.

Nicholas scrolled through the directory. “I’m not sure.”

“Caroline said you’d know what to do. Whatever’s on that drive, she said they were going to kill her over it. You have to figure it out.”

“I’m trying, but it’s like being given a puzzle without the top of the box.”

“So start lining up the edges,” replied Nina. “Do what you have to do to work your way in. I need to know what happened to my sister.”

“I want to understand all of this as well, but deciphering what we’re looking at is not that easy.”

“Neither was figuring out how to unlock the drive, but you did it,” she said, placing her hand again on his shoulder. “You can do this too.”

Nicholas liked the confidence she had in him.

“What can I do to help you?” she asked. “I’m not a computer person, but there must be something. Just name it.”

“How about some coffee? I think our long night is about to get much longer.”

When Nina returned with a pot and two mugs, she asked, “What have you found?”

He had been chewing on the top of a pen, an exercise that sometimes helped him focus. “Are you familiar with filter bubbles?”

“No.”

“It’s a term used to describe how search engines, Google in particular, are studying every online move you make and then tailoring what results get returned in response to your search queries. You and I could both conduct the exact same search and Google would kick back completely different results. If we each typed in ‘Egypt,’ you might get sightseeing and travel information, while I get information about politics and the Arab Spring. Everyone is being placed in their own bubble online.”

“But they’re not getting the same information,” Nina stated.

“Exactly. By controlling what you see, they can reinforce, or even shape, how you think. It’s like going to the library only to have the librarian hide half the card catalog when she sees you coming. Information is being filtered based on what computer algorithms think you want to read. The problem is you have no idea what’s being left out. However you see the world, whatever your politics or belief system is, you have to work to uncover any contradictory information.”

“So much for the Internet existing to bring people together,” she replied.

“Actually,” said Nicholas, “the Internet was created to be a military communications network that could withstand a nuclear first strike. It was developed in the 1950s, but didn’t transmit its first message until October 29, 1969. It was supposed to be the word login, but only the l and the o were transmitted and the system abruptly crashed.”

“How ironic.”

“Indeed,” he replied as he exited out of an article and scrolled through the other files. “Filter bubbles are only one kind of issue Caroline saved articles on. There’s a bunch of material on Internet legislation as well, Net neutrality, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act—”

“Why would she have saved all of those?” Nina wondered aloud.

“I can’t tell.”

“It must mean something. What’s Net neutrality?”

“Basically, it’s a move by elements within the government who want to have authority to censor the Internet,” replied Nicholas.

“That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not, and the PCNA Act is even worse.”

“I haven’t heard of that one either.”

“The PCNAA is also called the Internet ‘kill switch.’”

“That, I have heard of,” replied Nina. “That’s the law that would place a giant off button in the President’s office, right?”

Nicholas nodded. “And if there’s ever some sort of mega cyber attack, the President would have the ability and sole discretion to shut the Internet down.”

“Until the attack was gone?”

“For as long as the President saw fit. All he or she would have to do is keep renewing the state of cyber emergency.”

“You act like it’s that simple,” Nina said as she raised her hand and snapped her fingers. “Once the threat’s gone, the President would have to turn the Net back on. You can’t just continue to say there’s a state of emergency when there isn’t one.”

Nicholas raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think so?”

“Lobbying for the ability to censor the Web isn’t good in my opinion. I don’t like censorship of any kind, anywhere. I want the Net to be free and open. But I find it hard to believe that a U.S. President would claim there was an ongoing emergency and use it to keep people off the Internet when there really was no emergency at all.”

“Three days after the 9/11 attacks,” said Nicholas, “the President of the United States declared a national state of emergency. Over a decade later, it’s still in effect.”

“What?”

“The United States has been under a continuous state of emergency since 9/11.”

“And Congress just allows that?” asked Nina.

“It’s not something Congress votes on. Under the National Emergencies Act, the President is required only to inform them of his decision. The act was created so the President couldn’t establish a never-ending situation. A state of national emergency is only supposed to last for two years. The 9/11 state of emergency has been renewed repeatedly since it was established.”

“On what justification?”

Nicholas looked at her. “Terrorism.”

“But terrorism was around before 9/11,” said Nina, “and it’s going to continue to be around.”

“And so will America’s continuing state of national emergency.”

“I don’t understand that, though. Why? What’s the point? What power does it give them?”

“You hit the nail on the head. It’s about power. Supposedly, there are about five hundred legal provisions that can be bent or absolutely thrown out the window under a national state of emergency.”

“Such as?” she asked.

“The most famous are the ability to suspend two major Constitutional rights—the right to habeas corpus, which deals with unlawful detention, and the right of National Guard troops to appear before a grand jury.”

“Why would a National Guard soldier ever need to appear before a grand jury?”

“I’m not an attorney, but I would assume that because they’re citizen soldiers that they have some right to civilian courts and aren’t bound specifically by the military tribunal system,” Nicholas said with a shrug.

“But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“Well, when do charges normally get brought against a member of the military?”

“When they break the law,” Nina replied.

“Or,” Nicholas pointed out after thinking a moment, “when they refuse to obey.”

The look on the young woman’s face immediately changed. “If National Guard troops refuse to carry out actions against their fellow countrymen, the last thing the government would want is for those issues to be adjudicated in a civilian court.”

“Agreed,” he said. “There’s a school of thought that believes that buried within the Patriot Act are certain additional provisions the government can call upon only in a state of emergency and that is why it has been kept going. Again, I’m not a lawyer, but power is a heady drug. Only the very strong can resist its pull. Those with power tend most often to search out more in order to solidify their positions and prevent themselves from being dislodged. It’s how a republic slips from freedom into soft tyranny and eventually despotism.”

“But I still don’t understand why Caroline would be interested in all of this.”

Nicholas shrugged. “Maybe it had to do with what she was working on at ATS.”

“But all that is policy stuff. I thought she was on the tech end of things, working with Homeland Security and things like that.”

“That’s in here too,” he said as he opened another file, “and it makes a bit more sense, since DHS is responsible for cyber security across the civilian, military, and intelligence communities. Caroline copied truckloads of DHS Web pages and wiki articles. The acronyms for their programs and divisions go on and on—NCCIC, NCSC, NCRCG, NCSD, NPPD, CNCI, CS&C.”

“Still nothing, though, that points specifically to what she was on to.”

“There was an interesting article about the National Operations Center at DHS and something called their Media Monitoring Initiative,” said Nicholas. “Apparently, since 2010, Homeland Security has been gathering personal information on journalists, news anchors, and reporters. Interestingly enough, they consider anyone who uses social media like Twitter, Facebook, or any of those platforms as being in the media.”

“So they spy on everyone, all the time. It is just like China. How come no one knows about this?” she asked.

“Some do, but I don’t think anyone appreciates the extent to which this goes. Your sister seemed to and that may be what she was warning us about. There’s lots more here, but like any puzzle, we have to take it one piece at a time.”

Nicholas tried to sound confident, but the task was overwhelming. There was no key to why Caroline had archived all of this material. It all dealt with computers or cyber issues in one form or another, but why shouldn’t it? Caroline was an IT specialist. None of this was anything unusual, much less something worth killing over. There had to be a bigger picture. What was it she wanted me to see? Nicholas went back to chewing on his pen, pausing only for an occasional sip of coffee.

∗ ∗ ∗

For hours he scrolled through article after article; cached Web page after cached Web page. The whole drive was like some enormous digital scrapbook.

Scrapbook! What if that’s exactly what it was? The articles obviously only told part of the story, like pictures. What if there was something written on the back of them—something that explained why the articles were significant?

Reopening one of the articles he had been reading, he looked at it from a new perspective. Most of the hackers he knew were incredibly bright, and Caroline Romero had been no exception. Many enjoyed the digital art of steganography, disguising messages or information but hiding them right in plain sight. They could be hidden among the millions of pixels in an image or even inside a digital sound file. The possibilities were endless. It was known as security through obscurity.

Caroline, though, was practical. Considering the hoops Nicholas had jumped through to gain access to the drive, he couldn’t believe she would have set up another huge leap of security challenges.

Studying the document in front of him, he realized something. The Web article, like all the others, was the printable version. That meant it didn’t contain pictures, but it did still contain links.

Even though he knew none of his equipment was currently connected to the Internet, he still checked one more time, just to be sure.

Convinced that he was safe, he floated his cursor over the article he was reading and clicked on one of its links.

Instantly he was transported into a whole new area of the drive he hadn’t known existed.