Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

José Splith worshiped the Echelon system. Sipping at his coffee as he sat in the windowless basement of a National Security Agency building outside Baltimore, Splith watched the world. Three computer screens, filled with colorful graphics, kept him abreast of the millions of transmissions being captured every minute.

Using satellites, taps on undersea cables, and giant dish farms to capture radio waves out of the ether, Echelon captured every cell call, every satellite transmission, every e-mail, every web request; in short, every electronic communication sent anywhere outside the United States. Federal law prohibited listening to transmissions within the United States and curiously enough, despite the paranoia of the conspiracy-obsessed fringe, the NSA used to actually follow the law to the letter.

Nineteen hijackers on 9/11 changed everything. The legal barriers fell down and information flowed. A libertarian fringe of computer aficionados had always argued that information wanted to be free, that software should be free, and that there should no restrictions on who could know what; at the NSA, information was free.

A massive farm of computers culled through the transmissions, flagging messages of interest and sending them to other computers for automated translation. The results flowed automatically to the screens of intelligence analysts, where they decided if something was worthwhile or just chatter by normal people. Despite the best efforts of the computer programmers, the NSA functioned in a constant state of information overload.

Splith’s job was to keep Echelon running, and that required spot checks—the best part of the job. He liked to listen, rather than read e-mail or instant messages, and so he preferred English. Earlier in the evening, a man and woman had argued on a transatlantic phone call about his affair with a waitress in Ireland. An hour later he found two lovers, parted by distance, having phone sex. He really liked that.

An alert window popped up on his computer screen, accompanied by a demanding beep. Splith sat down his coffee and peered closer. An e-mail sent from a computer in New Mexico to a computer in Scotland had been intercepted on a fiber optic cable stretched across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. The analysis program had caught some keywords in the e-mail and prompted the alert.

Splith tapped a key and was surprised to see instructions scroll onto his screen. Normally an intercept was simply sent to the appropriate analyst, closeted in some other NSA building. These instructions told him to do three things: forward the e-mail to an outside e-mail account; print it out and fax it to a number in Indiana; and then make a phone call to another number and read the contents of the message into the answering machine at the other end.

He swallowed and blinked furiously. Those were phone numbers outside the NSA. He was being instructed to send top-secret data to outside numbers without a warrant or any form of oversight. He tried to wrap his brain around what this meant.

He did as he was told.