“Why?”
“We need unrestricted international communications-intelligence reach, the kind of air sniffing that only NSA can provide.” I gave him the details and answered his many questions. Each time we spoke I could see more clearly that working with him was going to be a world of difference from having David as my boss. He had a way of firing questions at me that sometimes made me feel as if I were performing under the baleful eye of a strict but very cordial schoolteacher.
After he exhaustively interrogated me, he agreed to see what he could do.
The following morning Bob called. “OK, an NSA connection is established. You’ll be picked up tomorrow at nine a.m. from your London hotel.” He gave me the details. “We expect a nice and sunny day.”
The journey to London was fast. Bob was wrong on the weather. The next day brought us the typical English weather of rain and fog, and a new friend: a slim African-American woman in a black pantsuit. “Hi, I’m Pamela Johnson. I’ll be taking you to Menwith Hill.”
“What’s in Menwith Hill?” I asked.
“That’s the major station of NSA, operated jointly with the British Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ.”
“And what about the sunny weather you promised?” I asked. “Well, you know. Weather forecasts are horoscopes with numbers.”
After a three-hour drive ending amid the green meadows of Yorkshire, we arrived at a heavily fenced and guarded area. Following thorough security screening, we were brought to a round, windowless building.
“Welcome to NSA,” said a man with an accent that smacked of the American South, as we entered his small office. “I’m Dr. Ted Feldman, and I’ll do my best to help you. What’s going on here?”
He and Pamela took notes as Nicole quickly explained.
“I see,” Feldman said. “We’ll try to do what we can, once formalities are satisfied.”
The NSA picked up where others were bound by legal restrictions. As I well knew, they operated in cyberspace, where there were few rules, breaking encrypted communications and transferring the messages to linguists to analyze the messages in more than 110 languages.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked.
“We can engage Echelon, our global surveillance network,” he said briskly. “It’s the most comprehensive and sophisticated signals intelligence ever made. It can monitor every communication transmitted through satellite, micro wave, cellular, and fiber optics. That includes communications to and from North America.”
“How much does that all add up to?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We estimate it at five billion telephone calls, e-mail messages, faxes, and broadcasts daily.”
“Any communication?” I asked with concern, thinking about some private conversations I’d held with several women I’d dated.
He smiled. “Not to worry.” He must have heard that anxious question many times.
“How do you do it?”
“Echelon collects data through a variety of methods, including through radio antennae at listening stations located in key areas around the world. We scan the enormous amount of data through filtering software using a computer network hosted by the UK’s GCHQ, Canada’s CSE, Australia’s DSD, and New Zealand’s GCSB.” The torrent of acronyms could make you dizzy. Only insiders knew and cared that they stood for Communications Security Establishment, the Defense Signals Directorate, and the Government Communications Security Bureau. We needed little explication.
“The filtering software flags messages containing any of a set of key words, such as bomb or nuclear,” Feldman continued.
“How does the actual process of data sifting work?” asked Nicole.
“We’ve got word-pattern recognition technologies, plus advanced technology in speech recognition and optical character recognition. See, the computers convert sound gleaned from intercepted telephone conversations and text images from fax transmissions, and store them in a searchable database.”
“What about foreign languages?”
“Translation software recognizes many languages and can translate them into English. Once text is stored in the database, our analysts engage data-mining software that searches data to identify relationships based on similarities and patterns.”
“What about help in our operation, including getting access to enemy computers?”
“We’ve developed new tools to assist in covert-surveillance operations. One example is Tempest, a surveillance technology that captures data displayed on computer monitors by collecting electromagnetic emissions from the internal electron beams that create the images.” Had he avoided answering my question on computer hacking?
“So much has changed since I last had contact with the NSA,” said Nicole.
He smiled. “We’ve additional developments: Fluent and Oasis. Fluent does computer searches of documents written in various languages. Our analysts put in queries in English, just as if they were using any Internet search engine. Those results that come up in any foreign languages are translated.” He paused. “Oasis picks up audio from television and radio broadcasts, and keeps them as text. The software is very sophisticated. It can identify the gender of the speaker, and if that audio has already been previously captured, our analysts can obtain a digital transcript of the data and compare. Oasis is limited to English, but the CIA is adapting it to understand additional languages.”
“What about recordings from the past?” That’s what I wanted to know.
“We occasionally have that, if what you’re looking for was already captured for other purposes,” he answered.
“It all sounds like omnipotence,” I said.
“Hell no, far from it,” he said. “Sure, we’re the largest intelligence service in the world. We employ more mathematicians than anyone else, and we’ve got the strongest team of code makers and code breakers ever assembled. But the volume of information generated every day exceeds the capacity of our technologies to process it. Not to mention the encryption technologies that can give you a look at what turns out to be gibberish, without any possibility of breaking the code. We know, for example, that Osama bin Laden and other terrorists are using steganography: hiding data within a benign-looking file, such as a picture of a sunset in the South Pacific. Can you imagine the computing power necessary to detect it? And I’m not even talking about breaking it, which is even more complex.
“But why go that far? Even simple tricks can slow us down, and sometimes even derail us. That happens when messages are ciphered in a simple method that substitutes letters for other letters. Let’s go to an even lower level of sophistication, to elementary school games, and create messages that substitute the word football for bomb and baseball for American president. Do you set the software to alert us each time it recognizes these words? We would drown under the sheer volume.”
“I see,” said Nicole.
“So you see why there’s no assurance that any of these systems will be fail-safe and provide the kind of intelligence that you want.”
I nodded. “I get it. Knowing those caveats, all I need to do is provide you with key words?”
“It’s not that simple, but essentially, yes. Once a key word included in the Echelon dictionary is captured, it flags the entire message. After decryption, our analysts forward the data to the client intelligence agency that requested the intercept of the key word. We pass the signals through SILKWORTH, our supercomputer system where voice recognition, optical character recognition, and other analytical tools dissect the prey. Although five billion messages pass through the system every day, we actually transcribe and record only very few text messages and phone calls. Only those messages that produce keyword ‘hits’ are tagged for future analysis.”
“Can I give you the key words now?”
“No. We must first start an IDP, an intercept deployment plan. I’ll also need your agency’s formal request. I was asked to give you only a presentation. But tell me more about the case.”
I ran quickly by him the leads we had. The run was long, but the list of solid leads disturbingly short. We had a dozen aliases that the Chameleon had used.
“We don’t know for sure if it’s one person, or eleven, or twelve. So far Ward has been my prime target. He
