Trojan Horse: A Novel by Mark Russinovich

Author:Mark Russinovich [Russinovich, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thrillers, Technological, Fiction
ISBN: 9781250010490
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-09-04T17:01:25+00:00

29

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND

RUE DE LAUSANNE

HÔTEL MON-REPOS

4:39 P.M. CET

The e-mail chime woke Jeff. There from a Hotmail account was the response from Bridget, Daryl’s NSA friend, containing the access information he’d asked for. “Be discreet,” she had cautioned.

When the Internet first became a reality, politicians insisted on calling it the Information Super Highway. The phrase had quickly turned into a joke. Though it was accurate it scarcely grasped the true scope of the digital world that now seemed to run or monitor almost everything in the West. Entire airplanes, office towers, bridges, even ocean liners were designed by computer and constructed based on their designs. All but totally automated factories run by computers were commonplace worldwide. Any nation with the right natural and labor resources could have a predesigned factory dropped into place and fully operational in record time, all made possible because of computers.

And because of the Internet, distance largely meant nothing. These factories and nearly everything in between were digitally connected. American company call centers located in India and elsewhere were scarcely the tip of the iceberg. The only place where physical distance was meaningful was when it came to shipping and there were more than enough freight forwarders for that. If the right balance of resources, labor, and production costs was made against the cost of shipping, factories in the most remote corners of the world were profitable.

And there were other tasks that computers did very well indeed and at extraordinary speed. Databases were one of them. It wasn’t just that the entire Library of Congress could fit on a single chip, it could as well be generally accessed and rapidly searched for specific information. A wealth of knowledge was readily available to anyone with a computing device who wanted to bother.

And now with scanners, even from a distance, certain types of data could be collected and stored automatically and remotely. In Western Europe and North America, police cars were increasingly equipped with an automobile license plate reader, which acquired every car license plate it encountered at lightning speed then ran it through a computer to see if the vehicle was reported stolen. The same system allowed officers to run plates of cars even before they pulled the vehicles over. The officer could run a driver’s-license check of the registered owner or he could program the system to do that for him automatically. What this meant was that the officer, in most cases, knew as much as he wanted about the operator of the vehicle before he ever stopped the car.

The previous year, Jeff had worked on a portion of the European Union’s TALOS system, Transportable Adaptable Patrol for Land Border Surveillance. Largely robotic, it was designed to handle surveillance and was becoming the EU’s primary border-control monitoring system. The entire network was meant to be automated in the extreme. Conventional border-protection systems are based on expensive ground facilities installed along the entire length of the border complemented by human patrols. TALOS was meant to be more efficient and flexible.

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