They alternated between writing semi-legit code, dubious pop-up ads for penis enlargement pills, and outright hacks.
Even with the deadline looming, Brian decided to spend an hour documenting what he’d done. At least if he found something in the last few minutes, he could prove it hadn’t been luck. The contest famously ended exactly on time. Coders had to file their work by midnight; TAO would not accept late submissions. The rules don’t have to be fair, they just have to be the rules, the final paragraph of the challenge warned. We don’t want you wasting more than one day a year on this. (If you could have figured it out you’d already work for us.)
But as Brian explained his steps, he couldn’t help feeling like a fraud. Really all he’d done was guess, because he didn’t have the skills to code a direct attack on the encryption—
Wait.
He’d looked for the companies. And they were gone. But he hadn’t chased down the developers themselves. He’d forgotten—as the NSA sometimes seemed to—that programs didn’t fall from the sky, that people had to write them. Maybe he could find traces of the coders.
Wasn’t much, but he’d spent more than twenty-one hours on this stupid contest. Might as well finish strong. For once in his life he’d go to the limit.
He went back to the cached pages of the now-defunct developers, plugged the names on them he found into both the public Internet and the agency’s database.
The name searches led everywhere and nowhere. The common ones pulled up hundreds of thousands of results, mostly in foreign languages. When Brian translated them, they were useless, random web pages for Moscow car dealerships or Bulgarian dating sites. The torrent of information on the Internet was its own best defense. He tried again, this time adding corporate names.
Again the results overwhelmed him. He could have wasted days looking through them. In pure desperation, he started to add search terms almost at random: spying, espionage, secret, agency, encryption—
There. The conference was called “Better Than Pretty Good Encryption.” It had taken place at a Radisson in Jaipur, India, two years before.
“This two-day event will get you up to speed on the newest public key software!” A list of presentations was included. And—at the bottom, the lousy end-of-second-day slot—Brian found Vijay Patel, director of engineering at IRGG Services Limited, speaking about “Adding Public Encryption Layers to Instant Messaging Services.”
Brian hadn’t heard of IRGG Services. He searched for it along with Mumbai Communications Pvt Ltd, the company that had created the Indian instant messenger. Lucky him, the Indian software industry ran mostly in English. He found a two-line announcement on an Indian software blog: IRGG Services has purchased Mumbai Communications, terms undisclosed.
There. At last, a link between a third-tier messenger service and the encryption.
Eleven twenty-six. He couldn’t risk missing the deadline. Still, he had to find out more about IRGG. He went back to the NSA’s main database and found the very first hit for IRGG was a file called Indian Army Software Suppliers. A military application made perfect sense for a messaging service like this one, with decent but not top-rank encryption.
Brian looked everything over. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he’d made some mistake so obvious that the Tailored Access guys would laugh at him and put up his submission as an example of what not to do. But if he had, he couldn’t see it.
He wrote up what he’d found, included the links. And at 11:55 p.m. he sent it off.
* * *
He drove home that night as excited as he’d ever been. His mood didn’t survive thirty seconds with Becks. Who was sitting on the couch by herself, watching Saturday Night Live.
“I did it, Becks.”
“Did what?”
“Solved it.”
“That’s amazing.” She couldn’t have sounded less amazed if he’d told her he’d stopped on the way home to buy Cheerios. “When will you know for sure?” Her way of saying, Yeah, right.
“It was intense.”
“I can smell that.” She wrinkled her nose. “You should take a shower.”
She was mad that he’d worked all day and not called, he saw. Did she have any idea what a hypocrite she was? Their entire marriage she’d worked this way, left him with the kids. He almost said something like, I thought you’d be happy for me, but screw it, he wasn’t showing her any weakness. Let her sit there watching Kate McKinnon.
* * *
When he got in on Monday morning a short black guy was waiting at his desk.