Terminal Compromise

"You've got to be kidding," laughed Martin Royce holding up his file. "This stuff will be in today's morning paper and you cla.s.sify it?"

"There are guidelines for cla.s.sification," Marvin insisted. "We follow them to the letter."

"And every letter gets cla.s.sified." muttered Royce under his breath. The pragmatist in him saw the lunacy of the cla.s.sifica- tion process, but the civil servant in him recognized the impos- sibility of changing it. Marv ignored the comment and opened his folder.

"Thanks, Phil," began Marv. "Well, I'll give it to him, Foster that is. If what he says is accurate, we have our work cut out for us, and in many cases all we can do is board up our windows before the hurricane hits."

"For purposes of this discussion, a.s.sume, as we will, that the Spook, Foster, is telling the truth. Do we have any reason to disbelieve him?"

"Other than attacking his own country? No, no reason at all."

Marvin showed total disdain for Foster. His vehemence quieted the room, so he picked up where he left off.

"The first thing he did was establish a communications network, courtesy of AT&T. If Foster is right, then his boys have more doors and windows in and out of the phone company computers than AT&T knows exist. For all intents and purposes, they can do anything with the phone system that they want.

"They a.s.sign their own numbers, tap into digital transmissions, reprogram the main switches, create drop-dead billings, keep unlimited access lines and Operator Control. If we do locate a conversation, they're using a very sophisticated encryption scheme to disguise their communications. They're using the same bag of tricks we tried to cla.s.sify over 20 years ago, and if anyone had listened..."

"We get the point, Marv," Phil said just before Henry was about to say the same thing.

"We can triangulate the cell phone location, but it takes time.

Perhaps the smartest thing Foster did was recognize the need for an efficient distribution system. In order for his plan to work, he had to insure that every computer in the country was infected."

"Thus the dGraph situation?" Quinton Chambers finally began to look awake.

"And the Lotus Viruses, and the Freedom software," Henry said.

"What about FTS-2000?" He was asking about the new multi-billion dollar voice and data communications network. FTS stands for Federal Telecommunications System.

"I have no doubt that it's in the same boat," suggested Marv.

"But we have no sure data yet. We should ask Scott to ask Fos- ter."

"What could happen?"

"Worst case? The government shuts down for lack of interest and no dial tone."

"And these viruses?"

"According to Foster, they designed over 8,000 viruses and he a.s.sumes that all or most of them have been released over the last several years," Marv said to a room full of raised eyebrows.

"How bad is that?" asked Chambers.

"Let's put it this way," said Marv. "In the last

"I've heard that every computer is infected?"

"At the minimum, yes." Jacobs turned the pages of his dossier.

"To continue, one of Foster's most important tools was the con- struction of road maps."

"Road maps?" questioned Phil.

"Connections, how it all ties together. How MILNET ties to INTERNET to DARPANET to DockMaster, then to the Universities."

Marv wove a complex picture of how millions of computers are all interconnected. "Foster knew what he was doing. He called this group Mappers. The maps included the private nets, CompuServe, The Source, Gemini, Prodigy...BBS's to Tymenet...the lists go on forever. The road maps, according to Foster, were very detailed. The kind of computer, the operating system, what kind of security if any. They apparently raked through the hacker bulletin boards and complied ma.s.sive lists of pa.s.swords for computers..."

"Including ours?" asked Quinton Chambers.

"Quite definitely. They kept files on the back doors, the trap doors and the system holes so they could enter computers unde- tected, or infect the files or erase them...take a look at Social Security and the IRS. Martin?"

Treasury Secretary Royce nodded in strong agreement. "We got hit but good. We still have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of tax records are gone forever, if they were ever there. So far it's been kept under wraps, but I don't know how long that can continue. The CDN has been nothing but trouble. We're actually worse off with it than without it."

"How can one person do all of that?" Chambers had little knowl- edge of computers, but he was getting a pretty good feel for the potential political fallout.

"One person! Ha!" exclaimed Jacobs. "Look at Page 16." He pointed at his copy of the Secret doc.u.ments. "According to Foster he told h.o.m.osoto he needed hundreds of full time mappers to draw an accurate and worthwhile picture of the communications and networks in the U.S.."

"That's a lot of money right there," added Royce.

"It's obvious that money wasn't a consideration." Phil spouted the current political party line as well as it was understood.

"Retaliation against the United States was the motivation, and to h.e.l.l with the cost."

"h.o.m.osoto obviously took Foster's advice when it came to Propa- ganda," Marv continued. "The FBI, I believe, saw the results of a concentrated effort at creating distrust in computers. We've got a team working on just finding the blackmailers. Their version of a disinformation campaign was to spread the truth, the secret undeniable truths of those who most want to keep their secrets a secret."

"That's also where the banks got hit so hard," offered Henry Kennedy. "Tens of thousands of credit card numbers were spirited away from bank computers everywhere. You can imagine the shock when tens of millions of dollars of purchases were contested by the legitimate credit card holders."

"It's bad," agreed Royce.

"And we haven't even seen the beginning yet, if we believe Fos- ter. There were other groups. Some specialized in Tempest-Bust- ing..."

"Excuse me?" asked Quinton Chambers.

"Reading the signals broadcast by computers," Marv said with some derision. The Secretary of State should know better, he thought.

"It's a cla.s.sified Defense program." He paused while Chambers made a note. "Others used stolen EMP-T bomb technology to blow up the Stock Exchange and they even had antennas to focus HERF..."

"HERF?" laughed Phil.

"HERF," said Marv defensively. "High Energy Radiated Fields.

Pick a frequency, add an antenna, point and shoot. Poof! Your computer's history."

"You're kidding me..."

"No joke. We and the Soviets did it for years; Cold War Games,"

said Kennedy. "Pretty hush-hush stuff. We have hand held electric guns that will stop a car cold at a thousand yards."

"Phasers?" asked Chambers.

"Sort of, Quinton," chimed in Phil.

"Foster's plan also called for moles to be placed within strate- gic organizations, civilian and government." Marv continued.

"They were to design and release malicious software from inside the company. Powerful technique if you can find enough bodies for the dirty work."

"Again, according to Foster, h.o.m.osoto said that there was never a manpower problem," Marv said. "He's confident that an Arab group is involved somewhere. The MacDonald's accident was caused by Arabs who..."

"And we still can't get s.h.i.+t out of the one who we're holding.