We Are All Targets by Matt Potter

Author:Matt Potter [POTTER, MATT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2023-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

The Cyber Mercenaries

On the other side of the Atlantic, it seemed America was finally catching on.

The floundering of my MI5 team and NATO’s response to Anti-Smyser-1 was how it had entered the new century. It was not until after the seismic shock of 9/11 that America began to understand the value—not to mention the threat—locked up in dark, distributed networks online. And when it did, it would not be Western military or intel organizations that would start probing the global hacker underworld. It would be the dot-com giants of Silicon Valley themselves. In the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of 9/11, America’s funding for defense, homeland security, and combating terrorism rocketed, rising by between $145 billion and $160 billion in the fiscal years 2001–2003 alone. The shock had been so vast, so deep, that money was easy, if your pitch was in homeland security or the combating of terrorists on American soil or against American interests. As America convulsed, it asked itself one big chilling question.

How the hell did we miss this?

But at last Swallow, Knesek, and the rest of the cyber-intelligence community could get traction for their hobbyhorse: that dark networks existed and their superpower was the undetectable crowdsourcing of hostility and violence against the United States itself.

For the US cyber spooks, they were finally able to show an upside for America’s intelligence capability to all this illicit internet activity. And it came from what they were doing right at that moment in Belgrade to track down and neutralize hackers, using one of the CIA’s and NSA’s own new toys.

The war in Kosovo might have led to a whole bunch of cyberattacks, but it had also led to a whole lot more internet usage period. The FBI had found the additional volume helpful. Not only did it mean more clues about what was happening, but it meant more users leaving more trails to more connections. The joint CIA-NSA grant for computer scientists at Caltech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and Stanford that had funded Google was known as the MDDS, short for the Massive Digital Data Systems project. “Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online,” Jeff Nesbit, the former director of legislative and public affairs at the National Science Foundation, would recall of the project later.

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.

For a US government still struggling to incorporate the

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