Insider X (23 page)

“I wonder what Joe will write next month?” Mei said.  “Will he like the Chinese SUV?  Or will he just say more hate stuff?  Either way works for the PLA to meet their objectives.”

“Got to hand it to ‘em,” Lip said.  “These guys don’t play around.”  He sifted for other samples.  There was a website for gun enthusiasts, a website titled “Grandmothers for America”, an Episcopalian dating website, a steel workers’ blog with “Americans” bemoaning the unfair tariffs and crooked politicians that were killing America, posts being done on a VA hospital website…

“Look at that post,” Lip said.

Marks read what
John T. McMillian
from
Herndon, Virginia
had posted.  It wasn’t flattering.  He claimed to be a Vietnam vet and spoke of the terrible treatment he’d had; how the doctors were disrespectful, the nurses wouldn’t give him the time of day.  How he got a urinary infection because of the unsanitary conditions at the hospital.  “It’s a disgrace,” John T. McMillian wrote.  “I served my Country and this is how they repay me?”

“Stop there,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “Let’s check something.  Do a search.   Type in these keywords: John T McMillian Herndon Virginia.”

“Gotcha,” Lip said.

Lip brought up another portal on a monitor and typed in a search query.  In less than thirty seconds he pulled up information on John T. McMillian from Herndon, Virginia.  He was legit.  A real guy.  And there was only one that lived in Herndon, Virginia.  His age and other particulars displayed on the screen.  He was a member of Vietnam Veterans of America.  There was his photo.  A nice looking older guy, smiling in his photo.  He had a Facebook page that showed his grandkids.  Eight grandkids.  Two girls, six boys.  “Proud grandpa!” said one post.

“Is that Facebook stuff real?” Marks said.

“I think so,” Lip said.  “This guy is in the database.  Real.  Pays taxes.  If we visited that address, I’d expect we’d find him.”

“Well…” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “At the moment, John T. McMillian is visiting Facility 67096.”

“Right,” Lip said.  “And he’s finally getting around to sharing his fun experience at his local VA hospital.”

Mei laughed.  “What if he really was there… inside the facility?”

“Guess we’ll find out soon,” Marks said.

Johnny Two-cakes looked at his timepiece.  “Speaking… we should curtail this.  You three need to get ready.”

“Just a little more,” Mei said.  “This is too much fun… too interesting.”

“Agree with you there,” Lip said.  “Look at this one.”

He pulled up a website that claimed to be the homepage for the
Syrian Electronic Army
. 

Johnny Two-cakes nodded again.  “Playing the puppet masters,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “That simple ruse might have gotten us several years ago.”

The ‘Syrian Electronic Army’ was claiming responsibility for the latest hack of the White House’s website.  “Die Infidels!” was being typed as Marks, Mei, Johnny Two-cakes and Lip watched.

“Those guys never have a dull day, do they?” Lip said.

“Who?” Mei said.  “Syrian Electronic Army or Online Blue Army?”

“What’s the difference?” Marks said.

“Exactly,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “The sad thing is the media picks this up and does the PLA’s job for them.  And then the hawks start beating the drums for another war.”

“But you guys know,” Mei said.  “You know the truth.  You can see it here.”

“Yes,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “But we’ve known for a while.  The NSA briefs the powers that be that we have almost absolute confirmation the Syrian Electronic Army is not the Syrians.  And you know what happens?”

Lip nodded.  “They don’t listen.”

“They listen,” Johnny Two-cakes said, “when it fits their agenda.”

“That’s paper men for you,” Marks said.  “Way it’s always been.”

“So all this by the PLA,” Mei said, “is helping not just their agenda, but also the agendas of your ‘paper men’?”

“In this particular case, yes,” Johnny Two-cakes said.

“Not if we can help it,” Marks said.

40

Center

NA SET DOWN her cappuccino next to her keyboard.  Crush took a seat beside her.  Crush hadn’t been kidding.  This place had an Ice Cream Shop that served “floats” and “banana-split sundaes” and there were three “Firenze Cafes” that were dispensing espressos, coffee, coffee lattes, cappuccinos, and other caffeinated beverages.

“They let us drink at our desks?” Na said.

“As long as you don’t spill,” Crush said.

“What happens if I spill?” Na said.

“Don’t,” Crush said.

“Is that a rule?” Na said, half joking.

Crush didn’t smile.  “Let’s get back to where we left off.”

“Another training module?” Na said, with zero excitement in her tone.

“This one is a little different,” Crush said.  “It’s a demo showing how to effectively influence and steer the conversation.  You will find some of this useful.  Click on that module.”

“We’re skipping to module number 342?  What about those?” Na said.

“You don’t need those.  I’ve seen some of your work,” Crush said.

“You have?”

Crush nodded.  “What you did at the dens.  You understand the concepts.  We don’t need to cover those sections.  You know how to flesh out a profile, make it seem real.”

“Wait,” Na said.  “Go back.  My work at the dens?  You’ve seen my shotgun specials—what I did there?”

Crush nodded.

Na’s forehead knit.  A bad feeling settled in the pit of her stomach.  She thought about the files she’d stolen surreptitiously from IDF.  “What else do you know about me?”

Crush frowned.  “This is not the time for that.  Click the module.”

Na clicked the module.  A list came on the screen titled ‘Divisions’.  Number one was ‘Race/Ethnicity’.  It had multiple subcategories: Blacks vs. Whites, Amerasians vs. Asians, Blacks vs. Mexicans, Dark-colored blacks (“darkies”) vs. Lighter-colored blacks, “Ghetto” vs. “Oreos”, Both parents “black” vs. Mulattos, and Blacks vs. Asians were a few that were shown.

Na skipped to other headings.  Not all of them had subcategories.  Their headings in cascading order were: Gun Lovers vs. Gun Haters, Liberals vs. Conservatives, Red States vs. Intellectuals,  Unions vs. Republicans, Unions vs. Intellectuals, Tea Partiers vs. Republicans, Blue Collar vs. CEOs, Cubicle Dwellers (“Dilberts”) vs. CEOs, Corporations vs. Climate Change Believers, Corporations vs. Democrats, Corporations vs. Tea Partiers, One Percenters vs. Ninety-nine Percenters, College Students vs. Baby Boomers, College Students vs. Gen X and Y, Welfare Single Moms vs. Working Class, Soccer Moms vs. Working Moms, “Rednecks” vs. “Yankees”, Muslims vs. Christians, Arabs vs. Americans…

“What is this showing me?” Na said.

“Examples to use,” Crush said, “to effectively ‘color in the lines’.”

“What do you mean by ‘color in the lines’?” Na said.  “Are we playing with crayons now?”

Crush didn’t smile.  Na was not getting a fuzzy warm vibe from him.  Crush seemed much more somber now than he was earlier.

“Watch the demo,” Crush said.

Na clicked ‘next’ and the demo started to play.

41

HUILIANG WENT DOWN her list.  Her list today was much longer than usual.  She had the main database open on one of her monitors to help with her list.  The main database contained 927.2 million fake profiles; that number quadrupled, if she were to add the non-English speaking profiles.  Passwords and metadata (log in ‘usernames’, email addresses, names, addresses, etc.) were available for each profile, along with a pool of other ‘searchable’ information (age, ethnicity, religious affiliation, etc.).  The main database was growing each month, as more profiles kept being added.  They were created by this facility, as well as sister facilities that helped with the cause.

Those profiles may have been fake, but over six hundred million of them corresponded with real names and real addresses of Americans or foreign nationals that lived in the US or abroad.  For all of those profiles, email addresses had been created on various platforms: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and other email hosting sites.  Most of that background work was done at one of the sister facilities.  They used stolen databases that had been provided them to plug in the real names and addresses, to establish the accounts, and put them into the system.

Breaches occurred daily at US companies and institutions.  Many of them were hacks—“infiltrations”—carried out by other cyber divisions of the PLA.  Those cyber divisions were sometimes able to obtain large databases from hospitals, retail centers, department stores, credit unions, insurance companies, and other companies they’d breached.  Those pilfered databases were then routed to facilities, like this one, for the cause.

As would be expected, a good number of the profiles in the main database were inactive (and/or expired), having been created for a single purpose, a single “ping”, then never used again.  Some of those were profiles that were created in the early Nineties, back when the Web was still in its infancy. 

All of the profiles were organized according to their social media platform.  There was a pool of retired profiles (called the “dead pool”) that was considerable in number; those profiles were created for platforms that no longer existed, or had become less relevant.  Those profiles were created for sites such as Friendster, Ping, Gowalia, Dispora, Digg, MySpace, EONS, Orkut, Xanga, MyLife…

Some of the platforms that were still active were rather obscure.  Huiliang, for the most part, kept it simple.  She only used TT profiles, which were profiles for the larger social media sites (TT stood for ‘Top Ten’).

She could access profiles for any of those sites by using one of the ‘pull down’ tabs at the top on the main database.  For instance, if Huiliang wanted to use a new Twitter handle, she could “filter” the main database and have it only pull up Twitter profiles.  And Twitter only.  There were millions to chose from.  Many of those Twitter handles were long inactive (last tweet might have been four months or even years ago), or for a smaller pool of handles, they were “locked” (meaning they were currently in use and had been pulled over to someone’s personal database).  Subsequently, Huiliang didn’t pull new Twitter handles off the main database that often.  When she could, she preferred to try and use one of the Twitter handles in her own personal database.  She always had that database open.  At the moment, it filled up her third monitor’s screen.

Everyone in this building had their own personal database.  Huiliang’s was average sized.  She had just under 10,000 profiles she used regularly in the course of a month.  As long as she used them at least once in the span of three months it kept that profile “locked”, and it wasn’t put back into the system, where it could be pulled off the main database and used by somebody else.

Each day, as Huiliang went through her list, she might use anywhere from 300 to 600 of those fake profiles.  She rotated through them, so that in the course of a month she kept her entire database active.  Each profile would have at least one or two, sometimes as many as ten, new updates, feeds, tweets, threads, posts, reviews, comments, likes, or whatever nomenclature best applied to that action on that particular profile.  Huiliang, of course, had a handful of favorites, which she used more often.  Those might have more than ten posts in the course of a month.  A lot more.  Maybe as many as a hundred new posts each month.

There were no worries with the rotation schedule that Huiliang used—it pretty much guaranteed she wouldn’t lose any of her profiles.  But just in case, Huiliang had also set up a reminder system that let her know of any inactive profiles in her personal database.  Others in the building used the same system.  Best practices were shared on the ‘message boards’, which Huiliang looked at every day.

Huiliang typed rapidly.  She could type over seventy words a minute; ninety when she was going really fast.  She was doing her duty.  She had learned to distance herself from the words she typed.  It wasn’t her hands that were dispensing “grim justice” (or as Huiliang used in her internal thoughts: “the hate”).  It was the hands of The State.  They were making her do this.  Making her take out the targets on her list.

Today she had sixty-five individuals on her list.  Each of them had names that were of Chinese descent.  All of them lived in the US.  Some had recently relocated there, while others had been born there.  Some were successful businessmen or women, scientists, politicians, or ordinary people like IT personnel, technicians, engineers, artists, owners of small businesses… the list went on.

Sixty-five today.  Yesterday the list held fifty-four.  And the days before, the numbers were all in a similar range.  And tomorrow and the tomorrows after would be the same.  Five years and thirty-three days doing this.  How many lives had she tried to destroy?  The number had to be well over 100,000 individuals at this point.

All done before lunch every day.  As a small consolation, her lists did vary.  It wasn’t always “brothers and sisters” she was targeting.  Sometimes it was really unsavory types.  Greedy CEOs that outsourced business to India or other countries (countries other than China).  It was easy to find dirt on those individuals to use in her posts.  She could use real stuff.  Copy-clip text from articles to paint (“color”) those individuals in a bad light.

She sprinkled posts and comments all over the Web, using her different profiles.  She “colored in the lines”.  Today, going through her list, for the mom and pop owners of a dry cleaning business in Delaware she went to Yelp and left two stinker reviews.  Very detailed.  How her husband’s shirt had been burned, and buttons broken. 
They might be cheap, but don’t go there.  Not worth the aggravation.  There are better places to go to get your shirts dry cleaned.
  The second stinker she left, said how she was overcharged the last time she went.  Charged for seven shirts, when she’d just had four shirts laundered. 
Unethical.  Will never go there again.

For the engineer working at IBM (a “traitor” who had left China just last year) she left anonymous posts on a website popular with professionals in his industry—the site was called ‘Think Engineering’.  Her anonymous posts listed the man’s name and said that he should be ashamed of himself.  She’d researched quickly, looked at his LinkedIn profile to find stuff to use to give “surface details”, which matched her comments; she relayed “work examples” that outed his homosexuality and told how he had had sexual relations with two subordinates; all while living the double life as a married man.  “SHAME!” she wrote, punctuating her last post.

For the politician on her list, the woman running for State Council in her local district, Huiliang had searched the woman’s background.  The woman was a grandmother, and a successful entrepreneur.  She was the owner of several businesses. Huiliang got the grist she needed with a few quick searches.  She left one post on a website that was discussing the woman’s candidacy.  It was a website for a local newspaper.  In her post, Huiliang (using one of her profiles) claimed to have worked at one of the woman’s businesses.  She said how she was made to work off the clock to clean the store, endured countless verbal “dress downs” and “profanity” from the owner, and told a story on how she was fired when she missed work one day to attend to her sick mother.  Huiliang gave other details; the name of that particular business; the year this happened (she made it ten years ago, which dovetailed with some stuff she read online).

Her stories and comments were all made up.  No doubt, the individuals could easily debunk them, if given the opportunity.  How they weren’t there, lived someplace else at the time, didn’t work at that company… or whatever else they could say to help prove their innocence.  But that was not easy to do, Huiliang knew.  Who to believe?  Anonymous posts or that person?

Days later, to make her fake comments stick, Huiliang would leave other posts.  She would use different profiles to leave corroborating comments.  Those new posts would dilute any denials by the individual; make it harder for folks to know who to believe.

He did it to me too… the man is a monster… she is racist… she hit me… he doesn’t pay child support either…

They were just words.  Tossed and bandied about.  Put out there.  But Huiliang didn’t kid herself, she knew their weight.  She was very effective at what she did.  She used to do a follow-up check on certain targets to determine the efficacy of what she had done.  On the Web almost anything could be researched, searched, obtained, if you knew where to look.  And she did.  She knew where to look.

She didn’t do those follow-up checks anymore.  She’d found her answers.  Businesses had failed because of her.  Hard working men and women had suffered because of her.  The “American Dream” had become the “American Lie” for those on her list. 

Just words?  No.  They were not just words.

Words had power.  They could do all sorts of destructive things when used in certain hands.  Words could destroy lives.  Words could divide.  Words could make prisons.

Huiliang didn’t look at her hands.  They weren’t hers now.  She didn’t want to claim them now.  She was angry with them.  Angry they still did what they did.

But what could she do?  The men in Hive (yes, she knew about Hive) could see everything, hear everything, watch her like a hawk.  She was always under surveillance.  Always being watched.  Always being “audited”.

Huiliang came to the sixty-fourth target on her list.  Almost done.  She looked at the clock.  Ten minutes before lunch.  She went to a website.  It was a website she used often.  Very effective for taking out targets.

She found the forum thread where she was going to leave her post.  She skimmed the posts that had just been left.  Five was the number she looked for.

FIVE.

Sometimes it would be “Fives days ago…”.  Or it might be “5 times is…”.  Or it might say “Not not not not not going to do that…”.  ‘Not’ written five times.

Some variation of five.

She found it.  There was a post that started “Fiver, not a ten.  That sucked.  Wanted more jack than that.”

She read the entire post.  Did the math in her head for each sentence.  Okay.  She composed her post.  Made sure her syntax was correct.  Double checked.

She took a deep breath.  Target sixty four was done.  She moved to sixty five and went to another site.

She waited.

Her answer came seconds later.  A post appeared from the handle name “Shawshank”.  She did the math, looking at the syntax, and determined the intended message.

Oh my gosh.

It was happening.

It was really happening.

She closed her eyes.  She wanted to weep.  But she couldn’t.  They would see.  So her tears were dry.  Dry tears of emotion.  A few seconds later, she opened her eyes.

They looked at her screen with resolve.  With strength.  With hope.