The same was true, Caroline noted, of the FBI. Not only did the Bureau maintain a database in a secure vault on the fourth floor of its headquarters building in D.C., code-named Guardian, which held files on tens of thousands of Americans never accused or suspected of any crimes, but who had simply acted “suspiciously” at some point in their lives in the eyes of a local law enforcement officer, but the FBI was regularly placing GPS tracking devices under suspects’ vehicles without ever appearing in front of a judge and obtaining a warrant. They had also fielded “Stingrays” without warrants—new devices that could track suspects’ cell phones even when they were not being used to make a call. Even DHS had jumped on the surveillance bandwagon.
In fact, DHS had gone so far as to outfit unmarked vans with large X-ray machines and was driving them around every major American city X-raying whatever and whomever they wanted—families in minivans, bakery trucks, school buses—all of it was fair game and none of it was being done with a warrant.
Inspired by “intelligent” streetlights in the Netherlands and the UK, DHS had also gotten behind another ATS surveillance project and was already testing it in a small U.S. city. The streetlights not only provided light but also included tiny, remotely controlled functions like audio recording, video recording, and the ability to X-ray anyone who passed by.
Even though Nicholas considered himself a political agnostic and had admittedly made his living as a thief, he was stunned that there was no outrage, no hue and cry from the day-to-day citizens who were being spied upon. The only people screaming bloody murder were the usual handful of privacy advocates. The majority of people seemed to have bought into the fallacy of believing that if they hadn’t done anything wrong, there was nothing for them to worry about.
They had no idea of the likelihood that these technologies would one day be used against them. Like the tax code, the body of laws that governed national security would eventually make everyone a criminal, no matter how honest they were or how hard they tried to abide by the letter of those laws. It was only a matter of having attention turned on you. Those same measures that kept “you and your family safe” today could be used to track down and imprison anyone tomorrow.
Were Americans more concerned with having the latest and greatest app than in fighting how those apps kept track of their every move, their every communication, and even, via their search queries, their every
People’s thoughts, and the invasion of them, was another disturbing development that Nicholas had heard whispered about only to find confirmation of in Caroline’s notes. In addition to algorithm developers trying to use data to anticipate customer behavior, the NSA and Google were using the millions upon millions of Tweets, Facebook entries, E-Z Pass toll records, Amazon purchases, cell phone data, GPS information, search engine queries, and other digital bread crumbs generated each day to build the most sophisticated artificial intelligence system the world had ever seen. Code-named AQUAINT—Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence—the system was not only being taught to think like a human being, but it was also being groomed to predict the way people think and act.
The technology was terrifying, but there was more. Caroline had included an article about a company secretly owned by ATS, which had recently completed phase one testing under a DHS financial grant and was now working on phase two. Called the Future Attribute Screening Technology program, or simply FAST, it was a device that could be secretly deployed at stadiums, airports, malls, and other public locations, and was designed to “identify terrorist activity before it took place.”
Without permission, the device scanned the physiology of each person who unknowingly passed by its sensor array, recording, storing, and analyzing their respiration, pheromone secretion, “electrodermal” activity, and cardiovascular signature, in an attempt to recognize “malintent” and alert authorities. A secondary “tagging” system worked to establish the subject’s identity via the FBI’s new NGI, or Next Generation Identification, database. It was like iPhoto tagging on steroids.
NGI was an all-encompassing, billion-dollar upgrade of the Bureau’s fingerprint database, which contained records for more than a hundred million people and had been known as the “largest biometric database in the world.” Instead of just fingerprints and mug shots, NGI contained searchable photos with face-recognition technology, iris scans, fingerprints, palm prints, DNA, voice-print recordings, measures of gait, and detailed analysis of scars and tattoos. It was beyond “next generation” and the perfect pairing for the FAST technology. Tagging by the FAST devices, though, didn’t end simply with running unsuspecting passersby through NGI.
With no concern paid to unreasonable searches, FAST also scanned your person to ascertain whether you were carrying any mobile devices. If you were, the FAST machine would establish a “handshake” with your devices and copy whatever readily available data they contained. FAST also looked for any RFID tags you might be carrying and copied the information from those as well.
All of it was then fed into a larger database maintained by DHS and NSA, and a file was created for each person who walked by.
It didn’t matter if you were intent on carrying out a criminal activity today. You “might” be at some point in the future and therefore the information collected now could serve as a baseline against which all of your behavior going forward could be prepared.
Planting a flag firmly in the realm of thought crime, the U.S. government had created a scene straight out of the film
Not only would these technologies know exactly where you were at any given moment and what you were doing, they’d be monitoring what you were thinking and calculating what you were about to do next. The same government in charge of running the U.S. Postal Service would be in charge of these technologies. The claim that they would be used only to ensure the safety of U.S. citizens seemed to Nicholas to be far outweighed by the massive potential for their abuse.
And every encroaching piece of technology, every movement to strip away people’s liberty in the name of security, in one way or another could be traced back to Adaptive Technology Solutions.
Nicholas continued moving from file to file, clicking on the links and learning all of the activities that ATS was involved in. It wasn’t until he found a file detailing the organization’s history that he realized he had hit the mother lode, the big picture, the one they had been willing to kill Caroline for.
At the end of World War II, in the waning days of the military’s Office of Strategic Services, the groundwork for the Central Intelligence Agency was being laid. Concerned about the idea of a civilian intelligence agency overseen by politicians, a highly secretive group of OSS members broke off and started their own organization.
They christened it Sentinel and, operating below the radar, pursued one simple mission—safeguarding the United States in the postwar era, no matter what the cost. In the beginning, they were quite successful, but with that success came unwanted notoriety across Washington.
Some saw them as dangerous vigilantes, unanswerable to anyone but themselves, who needed to be stomped out. Others saw them as a useful weapon against the Communists in the deepening Cold War. As investigations were launched by anti-Sentinelists, pro-Sentinelists provided the covert organization with cover and extremely lucrative government contracts.
They were in many respects above the law. In essence, they often broke the law so that certain government agencies didn’t have to. The desired outcome was achieved, security was assured, and their sponsors were able to maintain more than a modicum of plausible deniability.
As happens in many organizations, though, Sentinel experienced “mission creep.” Younger employees, recruited to help assume the burden of an ever-increasing operations tempo, didn’t always share the views of the organization’s founders.
By the 1960s, Sentinel was already moving beyond human intelligence gathering. They saw the future of intelligence in Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT, and began the transition to cutting-edge computers and satellites. By the 1970s, Sentinel had rebranded themselves as Adaptive Technology Solutions. So plugged in were they to the corridors of power, particularly at the NSA, that many believed ATS to actually be a sort of quasigovernmental entity. The organization did little to dispel this notion and in fact promoted and traded on it heavily.
Reading Caroline’s notes, Nicholas learned that ATS gradually became less and less about America and more and more about itself. Everything was about fattening its bottom line. The company was ruthless in cutting out its competitors and grinding down suppliers. They used their ability to harvest data in order to blackmail anyone in the public or private sector who got in their way. This discovery was astounding, but it was nothing compared to what Nicholas found in the next file.
For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early
