Terminal Compromise, Winn Schwartau [sight word books txt] 📗

ached.

Another 50,000 Japanese died from the effects of radiation within

days while Taki continued to heal physically. On August 17, 9

days after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and 2 days after Emper-

or Hirohito’s broadcast announcing Japan’s surrender, a typhoon

swamped Hiroshima and killed thousands more. Taki blamed the

Americans for the typhoon, too.

Taki was alone for the first time in his life. His family dead,

even his little sister. Taki Homosoto was now a hibakusha, a

survivor of Hiroshima, an embarrassing and dishonorable fact he

would desperately try to conceal for the rest of his life.

* Forty Years Later . . . January, 1985, Gaithersburg, Maryland.

A pristine layer of thick soft snow covered the sprawling office

and laboratory filled campus where the National Bureau of Stand-

ards sets standards for the country. The NBS establishes exactly

what the time is, to the nearest millionth of a millionth of a

second. They make sure that we weigh things to the accuracy of

the weight of an individual atom. The NBS is a veritable techno-

logical benchmark to which everyone agrees, if for no other

reason than convenience.

It was the NBS’s turn to host the National Computer Security

Conference where the Federal government was ostensibly supposed

to interface with academia and the business world. At this

exclusive symposium, only two years before, the Department of

Defense introduced a set of guidelines which detailed security

specifications to be used by the Federal agencies and recommended

for the private sector.

A very dry group of techno-wizards and techno-managers and tech-

no-bureaucrats assemble for several days, twice a year, to dis-

cuss the latest developments in biometric identifications tech-

niques, neural based cryptographic analysis, exponential factor-

ing in public key management, the subtleties of discretionary

access control and formalization of verification models.

The National Computer Security Center is a Department of Defense

working group substantially managed by the super secret National

Security Agency. The NCSC’s charter in life is to establish

standards and procedures for securing the US Government’s comput-

ers from compromise.

1985’s high point was an award banquet with slightly ribald

speeches. Otherwise the conference was essentially a maze of

highly complex presentations, meaningless to anyone not well

versed in computers, security and government-speak. An attend-

ee’s competence could be well gauged by his use of acronyms. “If

the IRS had DAC across its X.25 gateways, it could integrate

X9.17 management, DES, MAC and X9.9 could be used throughout.

Save the government a bunch!” “Yeah, but the DoD had an RFI for

an RFQ that became a RFP, specced by NSA and based upon TD-80-81.

It was isolated, environmentally speaking.” Boring, thought

Miles Foster. Incredibly boring, but it was his job to sit,

listen and learn.

Miles Foster was a security and communications analyst with the

National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was part of

the regimen to attend such functions to stay on top of the latest

developments from elsewhere in the government and from university

and private research programs.

Out of the 30 or so panels that Miles Foster had to attend, pro

forma, only one held any real interest for him. It was a mathe-

matical presentation entitled, “Propagation Tendencies in Self

Replicating Software”. It was the one subject title from the

conference guide about which he knew nothing. He tried to figure

out what the talk was going to be about, but the answer escaped

him until he heard what Dr. Les Brown had to say.

Miles Foster wrote an encapsulated report of Dr. Brown’s presen-

tation with the 23 other synopses he was required to generate for

the NSA. Proof of Attendance.

SUBJECT:

Dr. Les Brown – Professor of Computer Science, Sheffield Univer-

sity. Dr. Brown presented an updated version of his PhD thesis.

CONTENTS:

Dr. Brown spoke about unique characteristics of certain software

that can be written to be self-replicating. He examined the

properties of software code in terms of set theory and adequately

demonstrated that software can be written with the sole purpose

of disguising its true intents, and then replicate or clone

itself throughout a computer system without the knowledge of the

computer’s operators.

He further described classes of software that, if designed for

specific purposes, would have undetectable characteristics. In

the self replicating class, some would have crystalline behav-

iors, others mutating behaviors, and others random behaviors.

The set theory presentations closely paralleled biological trans-

mission characteristics and similar problems with disease detec-

tion and immunization.

It became quite clear from the Dr. Brown’s talk, that surrepti-

tiously placed software with self-replicating properties could

have deleterious effects on the target computing system.

CONCLUSIONS

It appears prudent to further examine this class of software and

the ramifications of its use. Dr. Brown presented convincing

evidence that such propagative effects can bypass existing pro-

tective mechanisms in sensitive data processing environments.

There is indeed reason to believe that software of this nature

might have certain offensive military applications. Dr. Brown

used the term ‘Virus’ to describe such classes of software.

Signed, Miles Foster

Senior Analyst

Y-Group/SF6-143G-1

After he completed his observations of the conference as a whole,

and the seminars in particular, Miles Foster decided to eliminate

Dr. Brown’s findings from the final submission to his superiors.

He wasn’t sure why he left it out, it just seemed like the right

thing to do.

Chapter 1 August, 4 Years Ago. National Security Agency Fort George S. Meade, Maryland.

Thousands of disk drives spun rapidly, at over 3600 rpm. The

massive computer room, Computer Room C-12, gently whirred and

droned with a life of its own. The sublime, light blue walls and

specially fitted blue tint light bulbs added a calming influence

to the constant urgency that drove the computer operators who

pushed buttons, changed tapes and stared at the dozens of amber

screens on the computers.

Racks upon racks of foreboding electronic equipment rung the

walls of Room C-12 with arrays of tape drives interspersed. Rats

nests of wire and cable crept along the floor and in and out of

the control centers for the hundreds of millions of dollars of

the most sophisticated computers in the world. Only five years

ago, computing power of this magnitude, now fit in a room the

size of an average house would have filled the Pentagon. All of

this, all of this power, for one man.

Miles Foster was locked in a room without windows. It contained a

table, 4 chairs, and he was sure a couple of cameras and micro-

phones. He had been held for a least six hours, maybe more; they

had taken his watch to distort his time perception.

Within 2 minutes of the time Miles Foster announced his resigna-

tions as a communications expert with the National Security

Agency, S Group, his office was sealed and guarded by an armed

marine. His computer was disconnected, and he was escorted to a

debriefing room where he had sporadically answered questions

asked by several different Internal Affairs Security Officers.

While Miles Foster was under virtual house arrest, not the pre-

ferred term, but an accurate one, the Agency went to work. From

C-12, a group of IAS officers began to accumulate information

about Miles Foster from a vast array of computer memory banks.

They could dial up any major computer system within the United

States, and most around the world. The purpose, ostensibly, of

having such power was to centralize and make more efficient

security checks on government employees, defense contractors and

others who might have an impact on the country’s national securi-

ty. But, it had other purposes, too.

Computer Room C-12 is classified above Top Secret, it’s very

existence denied by the NSA, the National Security Agency, and

unknown to all but a very few of the nation’s top policy makers.

Congress knows nothing of it and the President was only told

after it had been completed, black funded by a non-line item

accountable budget. Computer Room C-12 is one of only two

electronic doors into the National Data Base – a digital reposi-

tory containing the sum total knowledge and working profiles of

every man, woman and child in the United States. The other

secret door that guards America’s privacy is deep within the

bowels of the Pentagon.

From C-12, IAS accessed every bank record in the country in

Miles’ name, social security number or in that of his immediate

family. Savings, checking, CD’s. They had printouts, within

seconds, of all of their last year’s credit card activity. They

pulled 3 years tax records from the IRS, medical records from the

National Medical Data Base which connects hospitals nationwide,

travel records from American carriers, customs checks, video

rental history, telephone records, stock purchases. Anything that

any computer ever knew about Miles Foster was printed and put

into eleven 6″ thick files within 2 hours of the request from the

DIRNSA, Director,