Death of Secrets (18 page)

"What is the central motif of this progression of input
devices?" Jakarta asked. "Faster transfer of information. A more
direct line between the human brain and the computer. Technology's big
achievement has been to make it easier and easier to move your thoughts into
the computer. It’s become as simple as to see what you want and point."

Colleen now leaned forward in her chair. She ate this stuff up,
Kathy noted.

Jakarta slapped his hands together in mimicry of prayer, and
then rubbed them back and forth as if for warmth. "Think it through, and
the next step will be obvious. Direct transmission of our thoughts to the
computer."

Michael snorted, earning an indulgent smile from Jakarta.
"You're rolling your eyes, scoffing. But give it a bit more thought.
Remember that the human brain is a bio
electrical
system. Electricity
involves the flow of electrons. And that means, on some level, radiation. What
radiates can be detected. And read.

"Yes, read. Of course the technology seems farfetched. But
never forget: in 1950, the technology didn't exist for a computer to recognize
a human voice. We in the industry call this new technology TR, for Thought
Recognition, and it would be the Holy Grail of human-computer interaction."

Colleen nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, everyone knows it’s
coming – well, everyone in the industry. But we also know it’s whole decades
away. No one seriously thinks about it now."

 "No," Jakarta replied, "very few people
do, or they’d be more worried. The implications for the information industry
are almost unimaginable. Once we make the leap to computers that read minds,
how does anyone keep anything to himself? An author need do no more than
conceive a plot, and a greedy audience could already be reading it. The garage
band your brother plays in? Your memory of that song could be downloaded by
anyone with that kind of taste.

"Those who earn their living by exacting a fee for
providing information are in for a bad century. Will creative art still advance
when no one can gain anything by creating it? Will the frontiers of knowledge
expand when ideas are shared so instantaneously no one even notices whose idea
it was?"

He looked at Mike. "Congressman Vincent, you know how
politics has been roiled by the idea that the government reads all of our
e-mail. What happens when the government reads our minds?

"The real shocker, ladies and gentleman, is that this has
already been done. A defense contractor has built for the NSA a device designed
to pick up and interpret the radiation from a thinking human brain. They call
it GigaStar."

That brought Michael out of his seat. "That’s crazy!"
he scoffed. "I’ve been briefed on the GigaStar. I just had a hearing on
putting it in the NSA’s budget. It’s just a high tech device to monitor
computer traffic!"

Jakarta eyed him carefully. "You say you were briefed on
the GigaStar, Congressman. But have you ever physically seen one? Has the NSA
or the contractor ever demonstrated one?"

Mike shook his head.

"Why not, do you suppose?"

"I’m sure because it’s classified."

"Well, if they briefed you on capabilities it has, then
they must trust you not to sell that information to the commies, or terrorists,
or whoever it is we fear these days. So if they’re willing to tell you, why
aren’t they willing to show you?" When Mike was slow responding, Jakarta
went on. "Because the real device has capabilities far beyond those you
were briefed to expect."

Colleen spoke up. "It’s not like I doubt that the
government would lie to us. But come on, I at least have some background in
this. That level of thought recognition technology is supposed to be more than
twenty years away!"

Jakarta looked at her and nodded. "For public use, it
probably is. But how long do you suppose the government had voice recognition
technology before Dragon started making software for doctors to dictate their
notes? How long, for example, was the Government traveling into space before
they opened the technology up to private companies to use? And speaking of
space, Colleen, did you know NASA already has a system that will interpret
nerve impulses to control an aircraft? Fully tested and works like a charm.
Other scientists have monkeys playing video games using only electrical
impulses from their brain. They’ve
already
done the theoretical work on
this. Don’t kid yourself. However fantastic you think it sounds, thought
recognition is more than possible. It’s here. The only problem is that no one
has considered the possible side effects."

Mike still sat with his arms crossed over his chest. He leaned
back, away from the conversation. But at least his head was no longer shaking.
Jakarta stared at him. "Do you know much about computers? I could easily
prove it to you. You see, that flash drive you brought me contains the
programming that makes GigaStar possible – the code that tells the hardware how
to read and interpret the radiation from a thinking human brain."

Colleen was on her feet immediately. "Show me. I could understand
it."

Jakarta eyed her for a moment. "Perhaps. Can you write
Assembly Language?" he asked, referring to one of the more advanced
computer languages.

She nodded. "And how. Trust me, I can keep up."

"Very well, then. Follow me." He waved at their driver
and then turned to exit the room.

"They're not suspected of any crime. But we suspect they
may be in some danger. Please, you can come along if you like. I just need to
check their room to see if there's any sign of where they've gone."

Nathan left his NSA identification on the desk as he held the
young woman's eyes with his own. He didn't even need to act sincere – he was
every bit really worried about his friend.

Seeing the ID card, the clerk at the Holiday Inn relented.
"Let me go get the manager," she said.

The manager turned out to be a young African-American man,
wearing a collar and red tie but no jacket. "Can I help you?" he
asked.

"Nathan Jacobs. I work for the National Security Agency.
We’re concerned for the safety of one of your guests, and I need to see her
room." He repeated the name on Kathy’s fake ID, then laid his business
card on the desk. As he did it, he assumed he’d have no trouble with someone
random like this realizing that the NSA wasn’t supposed to do human intelligence
gathering. He was, however, acutely conscious of the fact that he worked for an
agency supposed to work
foreign
intelligence, and he was using his
official authority in a situation on American soil. If the NSA looked bad
already in the political press, he was putting the reputation at much greater
risk.

"Very well. I can show you up to their room. Please come
with me." The manager accepted the card and turned away. First he looked
at the computer briefly. Then he reached under the counter. When he returned
his attention to Nate, he held two key cards. "They came down and rented a
second room last night," he said. "The second key is for that."

Jacobs thanked him profusely and followed him to the elevator.
The manager led him to Mike and Kathy's original room and followed him inside.

Hearing about the recently-acquired second room, Nathan
wondered what it was for. He grimaced. Everything unexpected in this situation
was making him realize how serious it was.

In the first room, though, he found things in order. Their beds
had been made, and any empty glasses or room-service plates had been cleaned
up. They hadn't had more than the clothes on their backs, he remembered, so
that explained the lack of anything hanging on the coat rack.

Mike's laptop. There it sat on the room's desk.

Discovering it was such a surprise Nathan swore aloud. How did
I not know Mike had his computer with him? When you're trying to stay hidden,
turning this on is the worst thing you can do.

As he thought that, the same old nagging questions about
working at the NSA came to mind.
Is it really healthy that people can't even
turn on a computer in privacy?

He pushed it away for later. Mike's computer  had not only
been turned on, but left on.

Nathan seized on that. Was it a sign they had left in a hurry?

No, not by itself, he forced himself to admit. But what he saw
next was. An instant messaging program was running, with several messages
flashing, waiting to be read. Jacobs frowned. Mike didn't use software like
that – in fact he'd always made fun of Nate's on-line social life.

Curious, he sat down at the desk and clicked on the program as
the manager looked on silently. He wondered who "KH12" was. Probably
Mike's girlfriend, he figured. Her name was Kathy, right? That starts with a K.

>Yo, KH, you ever find Jakarta?

>KH?

>Huh, you fall asleep at the keyboard again? Well, drop me a
line when you wake up.

All those messages were from someone called 133tluser. The
third message was a very good sign that they'd left here unexpectedly, and that
had Nathan really worried. But his worry was temporarily overridden by
curiosity at the first message.

Jakarta? Jakarta the hacker? Was Mike looking for him? Why
would they be doing that? They had that mysterious flash drive, after all.
Could it be tied up with that hacker?

Nate leaned back in the chair, forgetting about the manager
behind him completely. This was an interesting line of thought indeed.

The NSA had been well aware of Jakarta's existence and
reputation for quite some time. He’d managed to gain unauthorized access to
their own servers, and almost no one did that to the NSA. It was quite
legitimate to call him the most famous hacker in the world.
The Post
had
even carried an interview with him – the questions had been asked entirely over
the Internet.

The flash drive was obviously something illegal. There was no
other explanation for the excessive force that had been employed to try to take
it away from Kathy. So what if the world's greatest hacker was behind it all?

It made little sense to Jacobs. Hackers were generally
non-violent people. Nonetheless, there was the name on Mike's laptop computer.
So what was going on?

***

Jakarta led them in a single file procession through a hallway
and up a flight of stairs. The long room into which they emerged took up the
whole upper floor. Windows admitted sunlight at regular intervals, and the
walls were lined with computers, six of them in all.

"Inasmuch as I have a command post, this is it," the
hacker said. "I and anyone working with me operate out of this place. If
you'll grab some chairs from the other computers, I'll go through the contents
of the flash drive with you."

As Kathy and Michael pulled found places to sit, Colleen
warned, "I've been at that thing with every different decryption program I
can find, and the most I could do is decode the file names. This may not be as
easy as you think."

"Ah, but what's impossible to decode on your own becomes
nothing more than a few keystrokes when you've stolen the password,"
Jakarta said. "I grabbed that when I was rooting around their system,
trying to find the code. Their security was too tight for me to download the
code, but I did get the decryption key before they noticed the intrusion and I
had to leave."

As Colleen watched, he ran the files on what she had come to
think of as "her" flash drive through a decoding program. He entered
a few simple keystrokes as she watched, and it was that easy.

One at a time, he began sending the files to his printer.
Colleen's jaw dropped. "I wasted hours on that thing! Days,
practically!"

The hacker patted her hand. "And you made remarkable
progress, decrypting the file names. In itself that’s a very impressive
achievement. I just have an unfair advantage."

The others looked on as Jakarta sifted through the files on the
flash drive, scanning the contents. He printed up lists of files, some of the
content, and the diagram file. The nearby laser printer whirred to life,
spitting out page after page from the stolen flash drive.

He tapped a button on a little intercom box near his PC and
said, "Got some stuff for you."

Almost right away their driver appeared in the door and walked
up to Jakarta, grabbing the printout from the printer.

"You all met Jerry on the drive over here," Jakarta
said.

Then he turned directly to the newcomer and said, "I
skimmed over those and I don't think you should have any trouble interpreting
them."

The driver walked out of the room and Kathy asked, "What's
he up to?"

Jakarta shrugged, looking at his screen rather than anyone else
in the room. "I need him to analyze that stuff," he said. "It
should… you know, help us interpret the code." He went back to work,
opening one of the main files.

Before their eyes, a long list of source code swam up on
screen.

"I don’t believe it," Colleen breathed.

Jakarta scrolled down a little ways through the text.
"They're good corporate coders over there at EG," he said. "I'm
sure they've commented the thing to death."

Colleen nodded. Comments were an indispensable feature of
programming. They were little lines of text that were marked for the program to
ignore. But when a human read through the code, they would tell the reader what
the program was doing. Computer programs could be many hundreds of thousands of
lines of language designed to be read by machines, not people. When a new
programmer other than the one who originally wrote it looked at the work, it
was often very difficult to tell what the author had been thinking. By
inserting regular comments, the author ensured that anyone else who worked on
the project would be able to understand what the program was supposed to do at
every single step.

"There!" Jakarta exclaimed. "There we go. Read
at will, Colleen."

She leaned in toward the screen, with Kathy and Michael craning
to get a look over her shoulder. She reached for the mouse and scrolled down
just a bit, her jaw dropping open as she did. Finally she pushed the mouse away
and thumped back into her chair.

"I can’t believe it."

"What is it, Colleen?" Kathy asked.

"It's all written right there, you guys don't need me to
interpret this for you. I guess the only good I can do is authenticate that
yes, those are real comments written by the coders, and yes, they do accurately
reflect the intention of the programming language they’re wrapped around."

Mike and Kathy pushed their way in closer to the screen and
read the comments there.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

//Following is the library of known recognizable

//emotive and thought codes. Function

//CompareInput()

//searches this library to translate received

//radiation into

//recognizable thought."

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

When he'd finished reading, Mike eased himself away from the
screen. "Colleen, are you absolutely certain that's an accurate reflection
of what the program does?"

"Yeah. I can't believe it either. Let me check one more
thing to be sure."

She grabbed for the mouse again and scrolled through some more
text.

"Yeah, that's what it is. The whole section that follows
is a pattern matching library. I don't recognize what the patterns are, but
then I've never seen a Thought Recognition system before. I've seen and even
written about every other kind of pattern matching library there is, and never
seen this one before. It's got to be TR. Do you guys have any idea what this
means?"

Mike sighed. When he spoke, his voice was very low. "It
means two guys I consider my best friends lied to me. Jeez, I've known D.W. for
almost ten years. He taught me what real politics is. Without him, I never
would have gotten elected to office. And it’s not just me; he lied to a lot of
other Congressmen."

Jakarta said, "I'm sure you're not naive enough to think
no one has ever lied to Congress before."

Mike shook his head. "I know, I know. But these are my
friends."

Jakarta nodded and fell silent.

Kathy spoke up. "This kind of creeps me out. It’s bad
enough when you read in the papers that they’re reading all our e-mails and
phone calls. Mike… you seem to know something about this. Can you do anything
about it? I don’t like it."

Colleen shook her head. "It doesn't work like that, Kathy.
Science isn't something you can just stop. Now that the theory has been tested
and proven, you can't just make it go away."

Jakarta smiled a thin smile. "Well, perhaps that's not
quite accurate, Colleen. I plan to put an end to this little Machiavellian
scheme."

"How?" all three of them asked simultaneously.

He bared his teeth. "Simple. Now that I've seen their code
I'll get back in their server. A little tweak here, a small modification there,
and suddenly the program doesn't work anymore."

Colleen shook her head. "They may be corporate morons, but
they're not stupid. They'll definitely back up their stuff. When they see the
code doesn't work anymore, they'll just restore the backup."

Now Jakarta burst into laughter. He tapped the drive where
their flash drive sat. "And just where do you think that came from, huh?
Their backup is already in my hands."

Colleen's jaw dropped. "I never thought of that."

He stood up. "They won't either. I'm not stupid, Colleen.
It won't be immediately obvious to them that their code is sabotaged. I'll make
subtle changes, things that make it seem like the code still works. But it
won't. And when they ship the product to the NSA, they'll be shipping something
that doesn't work. Our thoughts will remain safely secret."

"You really think it'll work?"

Jakarta nodded. "I'm practically certain of it. Colleen,
if someone went in and tweaked code of yours, so it still kicked out
recognizable results but not the results you thought, would you know it?"

After a moment she shook her head. "You're right, I
wouldn't know unless I went specifically looking for it."

"Neither will they. And with the backup drive in our
hands, we can stop this thing before it's too late."

"Now wait just a minute here." Mike got out of his
chair, and began to pace. "This is the federal government we’re talking
about here, I’m not so sure we should be messing with this."

From his seat, Jakarta eyed the Congressman. "Actually, I
understand how you feel. You’re thinking of me as a hacker, just some kid who
breaks the rules for his own fun and profit. And yes, I have been known to have
a bit of fun now and then. But that’s not the only reason I do it. There’s
something seriously wrong here, seriously wrong. Reading people’s minds is a
ridiculous violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable
searches. I’m sure you can see that."

Mike turned away, then turned back. He clenched and unclenched
his fists, then blew out a sigh. "Maybe. But maybe there’s a system in
place for dealing with things like that – a Congressional hearing, or any number
of other ways. That’s why we have checks and balances in the government, so the
system can be sorted out without resorting to vigilantism."