Double Tap (12 page)
I could tell him that I know how he feels, but I don’t. I don’t think anyone could unless they’ve been through Kaprosky’s particular wringer.
“What else do you want to know?” he asks.
“Maybe you could tell me a little about how the software works,” I suggest.
“Why not? Paradize, or Primis—whatever you want to call it—is what they call an all-inclusive relational database. The end user defines parameters and the software searches through massive amounts of digitized information, finding anything that falls within the stated boundaries. It can sort through oceans of information looking for certain predefined transactions. For example, maybe you want to know whether anybody purchasing airline tickets to specified destinations purchased certain chemicals, or transferred sums of money between certain banks. Paradize would tell you. The theory is that the software, if properly programmed, can identify patterns of activity that are likely to reveal criminal acts that are being planned or are in progress.”
“Predicting terrorist activities?” asks Harry.
“Not just predicting,” Kaprosky replies, “but providing information as to who, when, and possibly where. If you can believe the government, at the moment the program is functioning at a minimal level because they don’t have access to all the data. I don’t happen to believe them, but then, I suppose I’m jaded.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“In order to function at full efficiency, the software requires access to as much data as possible. Mountains of it. An ocean of digitized information. That’s what IFS, Information for Security, was supposed to provide. Congress was supposed to pass legislation that required every private, commercial, and government database in the country to hook up to a bank of supercomputers in the Pentagon and to feed everything they had into the Defense Department computers so they could process it with the software.”
Harry is visibly surprised. “No search warrants?”
“Minor details,” says Kaprosky. “They wanted everything: medical records, banking and financial transactions, addresses, telephone records, lists of all the property you own, the names of your children and the schools they attend, whether they are in day care and where, their grades, all of your e-mail transactions, including the content of the messages, the sites you visit on the Internet, all of your credit-card purchases. Anything and everything in a computer database anywhere in the country was supposed to be available. If it was digitized, they wanted it.”
“I thought Echelon was bad.” Harry is referring to the feds’ party line in the sky. “If the British prime minister sneezes during a phone call with the French president, Uncle Sam says ‘Gesundheit.”’
“I never intended that my software be used in that way,” Kaprosky says, shaking his head. “In the end it didn’t matter, since they had one major problem: Congress refused to pass the legislation forcing everybody to hook up to their system. They couldn’t get the data.”
I remember seeing the story in the newspaper, but I hadn’t followed the details.
“They did have an interesting pitch to sell the plan politically,” he points out. “What they proposed was to slap one more Band-Aid over the software so that everything they looked at from the massive data feed would be anonymous. They would have access to all of the information on three hundred and fifty million Americans, but if you believed them, they wouldn’t be able to tie any of it to a specific individual unless they got a search warrant.”
“How would they do that?” I ask.
“That was the creative part,” says Kaprosky. “It was supposed to be guaranteed by a separate system of software that Chapman’s company was going to write. I suspect that was one of the reasons they needed my source codes: so they could filter this in. The add-on was called Protector. If the government’s computers detected a pattern of activity that raised suspicion—enough to convince a court to give them a search warrant—Protector was supposed to be written in a way that, by keying in the number on the warrant, the filter that masked out the individual’s identity would fall and they’d get the name, address, everything.”
“Pretty ingenious when you think about it,” Harry observes. “It’s hard to argue you’re invading somebody’s privacy or infringing on their Fourth Amendment rights when you don’t know who they are. The government could rummage around in everybody’s digital trash to their heart’s content. Then if a pattern pops up on the screen, they run to a judge and get a search warrant.”
“But Congress didn’t buy it,” I say.
“No.” From the look on his face, this is the only silver lining in Kaprosky’s dark cloud. “And for good reason. I am told that programmers who delve in the dark arts were already at work devising ways to get around the identity filter. Anything devised by man can be circumvented by him. Show me a lock and I’ll show you a pick.
“In this case it was called a trapdoor. They’d used it before. I can’t prove it, but I’m told by people who would know that Chapman wrote one for them years earlier. According to the information, the federal government had licensed Pentagon-inspired software to some of our allies, early versions of the altered Paradize program. What they didn’t tell our foreign friends was that Isotenics had installed a trapdoor in the system allowing the U.S. to monitor the activities of these foreign intelligence services without their knowing it. The U.S. was able to look over their shoulder as they used the software.”
“All’s fair in love and war,” says Harry.
“But here’s the part that will interest you,” says Kaprosky. “Apparently there was a major argument brewing between Chapman and the Pentagon at the time she was killed.”
“Over what?” I ask.
“That’s the question.” Kaprosky shrugs. “I don’t know. What I do know is that it was getting very ugly. The word is that General Satz was making noises that if she didn’t get in line, he might have to go to the Justice Department to have them take the program away from Isotenics. Out of Chapman’s hands.”
“Maybe she refused to go along with them on the trapdoor thing?” says Harry.
“No,” Kaprosky says. “They couldn’t very well go to Justice and tell the lawyers that Chapman wasn’t playing fair because she refused to allow them to violate the law. Besides, the trapdoor would only be useful if Congress allowed the Pentagon to wire up all the computers in the country to get the raw data. Only then could they mine it for information, and if they found something—say, a pattern of conduct—they could slip through the floor without a search warrant to identify the party involved to put them under surveillance, arrest them, or do whatever else it is that they do.” It is obvious that Kaprosky has darker thoughts about the government than most people.
“Without some source or raw data, the trapdoor was useless,” he goes on. “It was premature. If they approached Chapman on it, it’s possible she said no, simply because it was too risky. If they got caught, she and her company would have been toast. But Isotenics wasn’t the only shop that could engineer something like that. I think it was something else.”
“What then?” I ask.
“According to some of the data junkies in D.C.—people working for other government agencies, and I know a lot of them—the word is that Defense is already running Primis to mine data. They’re getting massive amounts of digitized information somewhere. Maybe it’s only beta testing. Maybe they’re only working out the wrinkles hoping that Congress will ultimately come along. But what if they’re not? What if they found some other way to get inside, to tap into the databases? What if Chapman wasn’t involved? What if she found out? She couldn’t afford to just sit by and watch.
“The government tapping into private information on three hundred and fifty million Americans in violation of federal law,” Kaprosky continues. “If that kind of a web started to come unwound, you’d have a scandal that would make Watergate look like child’s play. If that’s what it was, Isotenics would have been at risk. The company would have been ground into dust by the lawsuits and congressional investigations that would have followed. My battles with the government would have been a virtual paradise compared to what she would have had waiting for her.”
If it is true, Kaprosky is right. Chapman would have been in a bind, caught between loyalty to old friends; Gerald Satz, her mentor; and the continued existence of her own company. If she started making disagreeable noises, it would explain why she was feuding with the Pentagon. And if they suspected that she might go public—or, worse, engage in the favored political pastime by leaking the information to congressional staff or the press—the anxiety that might grip those in high places would provide a mountain of motive for murder.
“How do we prove it?” Harry asks. “Can you give us names? Your sources inside the data Beltway in Washington: will they testify?”
“Not in this lifetime,” Kaprosky replies. “Their jobs would vaporize. Trust me. After more than a decade fighting with the government in and out of court, there is one thing I do know with certainty: whistle-blowing on that level is bureaucratic suicide. Besides, even if you got close—assuming you could find somebody willing to testify under oath—I guarantee you, before you could get them on the stand, the Justice Department would have them bundled up and shipped off to Anchorage in a box marked Top Secret. The old national-security defense,” he says.
We sit around the table in silence. Jean seems to be studying the grain of wood in the shimmering surface, lost in her own thoughts, security in their old age slipping way.
“You look puzzled, my friend.” Kaprosky is looking at me.
“What I don’t understand is that if they’re cut off from getting the data by Congress, which refuses to compel business to allow them to tap in, how are they getting the information?”
“I don’t know,” says Kaprosky. “But I can tell you one thing. They’re running Primis, and they’re doing it around the clock.”
CHAPTER NINE
O
f late I find myself reading into the wee hours, reviewing evidence, forensic and police reports from the crime scene at Chapman’s house, taking notes and scouring new appellate cases that may have a bearing on Ruiz’s trial—everything spread out over the empty half of my king-size bed in stacks.
Usually I am so weary that each morning as the alarm on my nightstand emits its dreaded buzz, I swim toward the headboard and reach for the snooze button. Invariably I sink back into a half hour of deep slumber that is often rich with dreams. Lately it seems that these moments of subconscious thought brim with visions of my uncle.
As a child I had only vague notions of what Evo had been through. The war in which he had suffered was long over before I could harbor any memories. In the little free time that I can steal from the trial, I have turned to a short stack of published journals and military histories to capture in detail just a glimmer of the horror that was Korea those many years ago, the first of two forgotten wars of a century littered with violence on a scale not seen since.
On the twenty-second of November 1950, unknown to U.S. intelligence, 250,000 Chinese regulars crossed the Yalu River into North Korea under cover of darkness. According to later reports an equal number were encamped on the other side, held in reserve in the event that they might be needed.
At night over a period of five days the Chinese infiltrated American lines, isolating and encircling entire units, including Evo’s.
The Chinese separated the UN forces from support on their flanks. With quiet efficiency they set up barricades and fire blocks cutting off roads of escape to the south. They played havoc with UN communication lines. Allied forces, unable to reach headquarter units by radio because of the mountainous terrain, were forced to rely on miles of hastily strung field telephone wire. When the field phones failed, officers at the front had to figure it was due to the rapidly deteriorating winter weather. Scouts and repair parties sent out to fix them never returned.
The U.S. soldiers lacked tents, warm footwear, and long winter coats. Nighttime temperatures dropped to sixty below zero, driven by a wind chill off the steppes of Manchuria that froze everything they had, including the saliva in their mouths and the bolts on their weapons.
Just before midnight on the twenty-seventh, to the blare of bugles and whistles, under the flare and hiss of colored rockets, tens of thousands of Chinese troops rose up like a tidal wave. U.S. sentries, pickets asleep in their foxholes, were killed before they could reach for their rifles. Waves of Chinese troops washed over isolated American and UN forces. What little I gleaned from my uncle, listening to the accounts he told my father, was this: His unit was attacked from the side when the forces protecting their flank collapsed in chaos. They never knew what hit them.
Hundreds of soldiers were caught; many of them lying out on open ground in sleeping bags were killed in place by Chinese using Thompson submachine guns, part of the lend-lease given to them by the Allies during World War II.
UN forces scattered over hundreds of square miles were suddenly confronted by Chinese regulars in numbers that overwhelmed them. That anyone survived was a miracle.
The Chinese stormed into rear areas, overrunning supply and headquarter units, killing clerks and officers by the score, shooting cooks and GIs on kitchen patrol in mess tents, cutting down anyone wearing an olive-drab uniform.
The Chinese tore up motor pools, shooting mechanics and drivers. They stormed through a tented field hospital, shooting and bayoneting the wounded in their beds, and killed every doctor and nurse on duty. Thousands of American soldiers died in the remote frozen wastes of North Korea that winter, many of them with expressions of shock etched into what would soon become frozen, ice-covered faces.
According to what I was told later by my father, my uncle saw only small slivers of this horror, but it was enough.
In the forward areas, in the chaos and darkness, a few here and there survived. Some made it out of the killing zone before the enemy could close its grip. Others lay wounded or unconscious and were left for dead. They crawled behind snowbanks, scurried into the shadows, and waited for the opportunity to escape when the enemy was busy elsewhere. Some made it. Others were killed or captured in the attempt. Many wandered aimlessly in the mountains, leaderless and alone, where they froze or stumbled into Chinese units and were killed or captured, sometimes within sight or hearing of other American soldiers on the lam.
From everything I have heard or read, it was horror on the scale of the surreal. There are accounts of dazed American soldiers wandering among rampaging Chinese whose bloodlust was momentarily chilled as they scavenged for food, weapons, watches, or clothing. Some of these GIs actually walked within a few feet of scores of armed Chinese soldiers who didn’t lift their rifles. The Chinese seemed not to notice as the GIs wandered off into the snow, some of them actually finding their way back to American lines. Others lying on the ground wounded were shot or bayoneted when they groaned in pain. From the written reports, neither logic nor the conventions of humanity seemed to have played any part in this. Years later, historians would conclude that many of the Chinese troops were themselves starving to death.
A few GIs, navigating by the stars at night, hunkering down by day, gradually moved south, found buddies along the way, and formed small groups. These survivors stumbled, crawled, and ran for days without rations or water over barren, rock-strewn mountain passes covered by snow, across frozen valleys, and through rivers of icy slush. Largely unarmed, always just ahead of the Chinese, dragging frostbitten limbs through the snow, these half-dead soldiers stumbled toward the first pickets outside the defense perimeter of the Marine compound at Chosin. On their fixed faces was the thousand-yard stare that in later years I would come to know as my uncle’s undeviating expression, the haunted look that for decades was Evo’s deathlike gaze.
I spend the morning in the office going over some ancient history. Janice, my secretary, has been culling old news articles from Nexis as well as material off of the Internet, items providing detailed background on General Gerald Satz. She has downloaded them onto the office network and this morning I go over them on the computer in my office.
Like Haldeman and Erlichman, hot dogs and mustard, Gerald Satz and the word
scandal
go together, etched on my mind by the salty tang of southern politicians digging through the national trash on live prime-time television on hot summer evenings a decade ago.
General Gerald Satz’s picture had been plastered on every front page in America for more than a month. The old newsprint photographs, digitized and coming alive on the screen of my computer, revive all the memories of what I had watched on television.
It was the kind of fame you might reserve for your most despised enemy. Satz’s name had been mentioned by a legion of witnesses, all under oath at the bar of politics, a Senate investigative hearing. By the time Satz got to the green felt table and raised his right hand, the spit was already sharpened, hot and ready for the roasting.
It was one of those scandals, the details of which no one is able to remember a week after they’re over, but that invariably enter history with -
gate
attached as their defining suffix.
As a soldier, Satz had seen combat. Cast by the press in the role of an idiot, burdened by a zealot’s wealth of initiative and a fanatic’s dearth of judgment, he won that year’s Tony as the administration’s military court jester in the timeless Washington melodrama
Plausible Deniability
. He became a political bullet magnet, absorbing every shot aimed at his prince, devouring the scenery and stepping out even to grab a few ricochets lest they wing some minor functionary or a janitor in the White House. When it was over, the only group still scribbling notes was the White House Secret Service detail, all taking pointers on how to provide executive body protection.
Of course, all of this left the multiheaded senatorial hydra seated at the committee dais writhing in anger, furious that none of their needle-like teeth had passed through the general’s body to nail the President. As a measure of satisfaction they took Satz down for perjury.
Most people of sound judgment have long since concluded that any time mouths move among the members of Congress, they are either eating or lying, sometimes both simultaneously. Uttering lies from the floor of the Senate is one of those functions processed by the autonomous part of the brain, like breathing. Even when caught in a falsehood, it is thought to be a social lapse no worse than passing gas during a dramatic pause at the opera. But for outsiders who are testifying under oath before a Senate investigating committee to slip up, to say “Yes” when they meant “No,” or “Maybe” when they should have said “I don’t remember,” is viewed as an unforgivable and deadly sin. The fossilized serpents of the Senate went after Satz tooth and tong.
He was convicted on two counts of lying under oath to a committee of practiced and confirmed liars who knew the product well when they saw and heard it. He was sentenced to six years in a federal penitentiary.
When his trial ended, committee staff collared Satz before he was hardly out of the courtroom and tried to roll him to turn state’s evidence against his political handlers. Satz refused. Like a soldier tied to the stake and refusing a blindfold, Satz told them to go screw themselves, and he did it on live TV, replete with images of Senate staffers skulking away from the camera lights into the dim shadows of the courthouse. By then most of the members of the committee who had brought the hammer and nails to this particular crucifixion were disclaiming any responsibility. They had read the tea leaves in the polls, and voters back home weren’t particularly happy.
In the end, Satz never served a day. Like most of everything that comes out of a Congress laden with partisan poison, Satz’s conviction was flawed, overturned by the court of appeals on what critics called a technicality, the fact that members of the committee couldn’t stop talking and fawning for the cameras long enough for their attorney to establish the predicate.
In order to convict for perjury, it is necessary to establish with precision the questions posed to the accused and in response to which he was supposed to have lied. This would seem straightforward to the average person.
The problem with Satz came about as a result of one of the more august members of the committee, an octogenarian who couldn’t move without being carried, and whose mental as well as other bodily functions had last operated in a normal fashion several decades earlier. The man had been propped up at the committee table by staff who took turns kicking the back of his chair with their foot every so often in order to jar him back to reality. This presented some difficulty for a committee in which the live microphone moved around the table. Sooner or later this doyen of the Senate would be expected to produce something beyond a muted snore. As it turned out, he produced a reversal on appeal.
On cue, when his turn came, staff kicked him awake and handed him a list of typed questions carefully prepared by committee counsel and printed out in sixty-four-point type. The man stumbled and stuttered, the single sheet of paper moving like a hummingbird’s wing in his palsied grip.
In the end the senator managed to turn each of the two critical questions posed to Satz into a double negative. This left the court of appeals to conclude that while Satz may have said one thing at one time, in answer to the two questions for which he was convicted—though he may not have intended it—on the recorded transcript of the committee hearing General Satz had actually answered both questions truthfully.
The fact is that in the last three decades congressional committees in political war paint have ruined enough Justice Department prosecutions to cause one to wonder if this is not intentional. Skulk around Washington too long and you’ll find the bones of Diogenes—frustrated in his lamp-lit quest for the last honest man in the American Athens—piled up somewhere in the Senate cloakroom.
After the court hammered them in the decision in Satz’s appeal, the Senate investigating committee stumbled around, bumping into one another for a while until they decided some other burning issue from the previous Sunday’s
60 Minutes
required their immediate attention.
As for Satz, while his name was indelibly stamped with scandal, his reputation carried the Good Housekeeping Seal of Fidelity. The general was now known to the world as a man who would keep his mouth shut and do time if he had to. Whether it’s the mob or the White House, friends in high places usually appreciate this and can often be counted on to find positions in their regimes for these qualities.
When it was all over, Satz found a dark corner of government in which he hoped no doubt to quietly serve out a few more years before merging his military pension with a fresh one from civil service and then disappear from the partisan hell that is the nation’s capital.
Satz was given a job overseeing an obscure computer project at Defense, some pie-in-the-sky spy-wars project intended to create a massive computer database: Big Brother’s ultimate clearinghouse, Information for Security, or IFS, and the Primis software program.
According to the news articles culled by Janice and downloaded to my computer, everyone knew that the IFS proposal was dead on arrival. The ACLU and opponents in Congress didn’t even bother to center it in their sights, as the project was already down on its knees, gripping its chest, when it was first proposed by someone at Central Intelligence. They would spend federal pocket change—forty or fifty million dollars—on feasibility studies, then the program would go the way of the dodo. General Satz would lose himself on some river in Oregon, where he could spend his retirement perfecting fly-casting techniques. That was the plan.
All of this changed when two airplanes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Like a wilted dragon who inadvertently squatted over an oil-field fire, Satz suddenly found his project aflame with political vitality. The whacko theory of some intelligence analyst at the CIA all of a sudden looked both politically compelling and technologically feasible.