Kira and Tony, wouldn’t have traded them for anything. Otherwise what else did he have? He still liked to think of himself as the cool rebel, the guy he’d been back in the nineties, the guy who’d once shared a bottle of Jack with Kurt Cobain.
In reality he was a tiny cog in the world’s largest bureaucracy. He monitored software downloads for a living.
Oh well, whatever, never mind…
Might as well just go home. No shame in joining the quitters. Stop at a titty bar on the way, find a stripper willing to get up close and personal. He had a few more hours of furlough.
But he couldn’t. Some part of him knew he was on the right track, that the mismatch of strong encryption and obvious entry points meant something. He also thought of something McNeil had said, We also serve who remotely shut down…
Despite its culture of secrecy, its internal surveillance, its constant reminders to be careful, the NSA faced a constant drip of lost phones and security breaches. After all, the agency’s employees were only human. And sometimes they cut corners.
What if Brian was right? What if he was looking at a publicly available instant messaging system, nothing proprietary? Like AOL Instant Messenger but developed for a language other than English. Not many people knew how many different messaging systems had been developed over the years—maybe not even inside the agency. They sat on top of browsers, so coding them was straightforward, at least the ones that didn’t have video. They could be optimized for different languages, different levels of user authentication and secrecy.
But the second- and third-tier systems faded away fast. If they didn’t quickly build a big enough installed base to attract advertisers and sponsors, the developers stopped supporting them and they turned into relics. The tech industry had no place for losers, whether the TRS-80, the floppy disk, or AOL Instant Messenger.
Maybe the “Foreign Hostile Entity” had gone after one of those dying systems, repurposed it for its own use. After all, desktop computers were still the main way people outside the West connected to the Web. In developed countries, Internet connections were mostly mobile. Poorer countries still depended on hard lines.
Only a theory, but it made sense. And if it turned out to be right—
He might be able to figure out which system it was.
Back at his desk, he looked up the agency’s files on instant messaging applications. They were solid on mobile messenger apps, thin otherwise. The agency had become so obsessed with smartphones that it no longer spent much time on browser-based services. A classic example of focusing on what was important to you rather than your enemy, Brian thought.
But as a matter of course, the agency did log every messenger application it found. The list totaled more than one hundred. Not good enough. To impress the guys at TAO, he needed more. They might like his theory. They might even use it. But they wouldn’t hire him for coming up with it, not unless he figured out the specific app that the foreign entity had used.
Time for another guess. He eliminated all the apps from in the United States or Western Europe, or any that were too new. He focused on seven systems that dated from the early aughts, four in Russia and Eastern Europe, one in Turkey, one in Pakistan, and one in India. None had caught on.
He pulled the documentation the agency had recorded on the systems. Unfortunately, it was minimal. They had all been built off GPL or Freeware licenses, but the agency had spent almost no time looking at them. As far as Brian could tell, no one had even bothered to download copies of the original system software. A mistake. He wasted a few minutes throwing the names of the messengers at the agency’s database querying system. But each request came back with tens of thousands of answers. He couldn’t figure out a useful way to sort them. He tried to ignore the little digital clock on his computer, but he couldn’t help himself; it was now 8:02 p.m. Less than four hours left.
He tried to find the apps on the Internet to install them on his computer, but they were all gone. The original websites for the developers were gone too. No surprise. Americans thought of technology companies as profitable giants like Apple. In reality, most tech companies, especially in places like India, were often not much more than a few twentysomethings in a room.