Steve Martini - Double Tap

“Let me guess who wrote the changes,” I say.

“Madelyn Chapman.” Kaprosky says it before I can. “So now you know why I called, why I talked to your partner. Back then she hadn’t formed her corporation yet. But she was outside the fold. She’d left the Pentagon. She had two or three people plus herself working in a small office in Virginia, spitting distance from the Pentagon.”

“Gerald Satz steered the software to her company. Gave it to her.” This comes from Jean Kaprosky, who until now has sat silently at the other end of the table, across from her husband. She can no longer contain herself.

“What he got in return we don’t know,” says Kaprosky.

“You can bet it was plenty,” Jean says.

“They changed the name of the program from Paradize to Primis.”

“They just took it?” says Harry.

“I know: people don’t believe me when I tell them,” says Kaprosky. “They think I’m crazy. But that’s what happened.”

“And you sued them?” I ask.

He nods. “I sued the government. Secretary of defense. I named Satz and several others.”

“Did you sue Chapman?”

“Once, but it was dismissed,” he replies.

“Why was that?” Jean asks, scratching her head. “I can’t remember anymore.”

“She wasn’t a party to the original contract,” Kaprosky says. “Unless we could prove that the government had done something wrong, we couldn’t reach Chapman or her company.”

“Yeah. Now I remember.”

“And you couldn’t get traction against the government because of national security,” I say. I have read this travail of tears in the news accounts.

He nods slowly, his shoulders slumping. “We’ve been in and out of the courts for twelve years,” he sighs. “Closest we got was a judgment from the district court telling them to surrender the source codes from Primis so they could compare them to mine. That decision was blocked and overturned by the court of appeal on grounds that the Primis program constituted-how did they put it? — a fundamental national-security asset. My lawyers tell me that politicians have used national security in the past to cover up crimes. That’s supposed to make me feel better, since in this case they’ve only committed civil fraud.”

I could tell him that I know how he feels, but I don’t. I don’t think anyone could unless they’ve been through Kaprosky’s particular wringer.

“What else do you want to know?” he asks.

“Maybe you could tell me a little about how the software works,” I suggest.

“Why not? Paradize, or Primis-whatever you want to call it-is what they call an all-inclusive relational database. The end user defines parameters and the software searches through massive amounts of digitized information, finding anything that falls within the stated boundaries. It can sort through oceans of information looking for certain predefined transactions. For example, maybe you want to know whether anybody purchasing airline tickets to specified destinations purchased certain chemicals, or transferred sums of money between certain banks. Paradize would tell you. The theory is that the software, if properly programmed, can identify patterns of activity that are likely to reveal criminal acts that are being planned or are in progress.”

“Predicting terrorist activities?” asks Harry.

“Not just predicting,” Kaprosky replies, “but providing information as to who, when, and possibly where. If you can believe the government, at the moment the program is functioning at a minimal level because they don’t have access to all the data. I don’t happen to believe them, but then, I suppose I’m jaded.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“In order to function at full efficiency, the software requires access to as much data as possible. Mountains of it. An ocean of digitized information. That’s what IFS, Information for Security, was supposed to provide. Congress was supposed to pass legislation that required every private, commercial, and government database in the country to hook up to a bank of supercomputers in the Pentagon and to feed everything they had into the Defense Department computers so they could process it with the software.”

Harry is visibly surprised. “No search warrants?”

“Minor details,” says Kaprosky. “They wanted everything: medical records, banking and financial transactions, addresses, telephone records, lists of all the property you own, the names of your children and the schools they attend, whether they are in day care and where, their grades, all of your e-mail transactions, including the content of the messages, the sites you visit on the Internet, all of your credit-card purchases. Anything and everything in a computer database anywhere in the country was supposed to be available. If it was digitized, they wanted it.”

“I thought Echelon was bad.” Harry is referring to the feds’ party line in the sky. “If the British prime minister sneezes during a phone call with the French president, Uncle Sam says ‘Gesundheit.”’

“I never intended that my software be used in that way,” Kaprosky says, shaking his head. “In the end it didn’t matter, since they had one major problem: Congress refused to pass the legislation forcing everybody to hook up to their system. They couldn’t get the data.”

I remember seeing the story in the newspaper, but I hadn’t followed the details.

“They did have an interesting pitch to sell the plan politically,” he points out. “What they proposed was to slap one more Band-Aid over the software so that everything they looked at from the massive data feed would be anonymous. They would have access to all of the information on three hundred and fifty million Americans, but if you believed them, they wouldn’t be able to tie any of it to a specific individual unless they got a search warrant.”

“How would they do that?” I ask.

“That was the creative part,” says Kaprosky. “It was supposed to be guaranteed by a separate system of software that Chapman’s company was going to write. I suspect that was one of the reasons they needed my source codes: so they could filter this in. The add-on was called Protector. If the government’s computers detected a pattern of activity that raised suspicion-enough to convince a court to give them a search warrant-Protector was supposed to be written in a way that, by keying in the number on the warrant, the filter that masked out the individual’s identity would fall and they’d get the name, address, everything.”

“Pretty ingenious when you think about it,” Harry observes. “It’s hard to argue you’re invading somebody’s privacy or infringing on their Fourth Amendment rights when you don’t know who they are. The government could rummage around in everybody’s digital trash to their heart’s content. Then if a pattern pops up on the screen, they run to a judge and get a search warrant.”

“But Congress didn’t buy it,” I say.

“No.” From the look on his face, this is the only silver lining in Kaprosky’s dark cloud. “And for good reason. I am told that programmers who delve in the dark arts were already at work devising ways to get around the identity filter. Anything devised by man can be circumvented by him. Show me a lock and I’ll show you a pick.

“In this case it was called a trapdoor. They’d used it before. I can’t prove it, but I’m told by people who would know that Chapman wrote one for them years earlier. According to the information, the federal government had licensed Pentagon-inspired software to some of our allies, early versions of the altered Paradize program. What they didn’t tell our foreign friends was that Isotenics had installed a trapdoor in the system allowing the U.S. to monitor the activities of these foreign intelligence services without their knowing it. The U.S. was able to look over their shoulder as they used the software.”