All the stress and fear was back in his voice. She needed to get him to dial it down.
“I’m sorry for pushing,” she said. “But we just… I want to make sure we have a plan that’ll work, okay?”
He sighed. “You need to meet Leed. If she trusts you, I’ll trust you. Contact her with SecureDrop and tell her I’m going to find a way to call her cell phone in twelve hours. I want to hear her voice. I want to hear her tell me she’s got the thumb drive. And that she trusts you. When I hear that, I’ll give her the passphrase.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll contact her. But is she going to believe me?”
There was a pause. He said, “Tell her… tell her I said the first time I met her, her six-year-old daughter, Brett, hid behind her leg. We laughed about it. No one else was there. No one else would know.”
“Okay. Good. But look, tell me something about this program. I told you about my camera networks. Is what I do part of God’s Eye?”
“It’s all part of it.”
She waited, but he didn’t go on.
“Give me some context,” she said. “Isn’t that why you and Perkins took a chance on a face-to-face meeting to begin with? So you could make better sense of whatever documents he was providing?”
“I told you, I’m not going to—”
“Why? I was abducted tonight, I have people trying to kill me, I would really, really like to know what the hell it’s all about. All right? What fucking harm could come from telling me? We’re probably both dead anyway!”
The moment it was out, she kicked herself for saying it. It was going to amp him up again. But there was no way to take it back.
There was a long pause. Then he chuckled and said, “That’s a hell of a way of persuading me. But… okay. In case I don’t make it out of here. At least someone will know some of it. And maybe you can help the Intercept make sense of it, if… if I’m not there to.”
She didn’t respond. She was too afraid he might change his mind.
“All right,” he said. “What does the government want to listen to?”
She considered. “Well, everything.”
“No. Not quite. It wants to be able to listen to everything. But what does it want to focus on?”
“I’m not following you.”
“Let me put it another way. Does the government care what people write on postcards?”
“No. It’s right out in the open.”
“Exactly. People who send postcards aren’t trying to hide anything. It’s the people who use envelopes, and especially the ones who use security envelopes, and put extra tape along the flap to make sure no one can steam it open, that the government is concerned about. Now extrapolate.”
“You’re saying… the government is focusing on, what, people who use encryption?”
“Yes, but that’s only a tiny part of it. The focus is on every form of electronic and other behavior that could be considered an attempt to preserve privacy.”
“What are we talking about specifically?”
“I don’t want to get into it. I’ll just say it started as an antiterror initiative, like every other example of government overreach these days. Terrorists need a way of communicating clandestinely, right? So someone had the insight that your organization could map every way terrorists might go about those clandestine communications. The behaviors involved. And then search for those behaviors wherever they occurred, applying something called Bayesian networks.”
“Of course,” she said, realizing. “It makes perfect sense.”
“You know about it?”
“Bayesian inferences are a kind of probability theory. I’m a computer scientist.”
“Yeah, I’ve got a background myself. Well, the problem—”
“—the problem is that terrorists aren’t the only ones who try to safeguard their privacy.”
“Bingo. Although as far as I’m concerned, whether the broader applications of God’s Eye were a bug or a feature is absolutely an open question. Because one of the ways they use Bayesian inferences to filter data is by a matrix. What do you read? What sites do you visit? Who do you follow on Twitter? And I’ll give you a hint: following the ACLU, or Jacob Appelbaum, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Freedom of the Press Foundation, or WikiLeaks, or donating to organizations like those, might be the kind of thing they like to know about. They don’t like dissent. Whether from the powerless, or the powerful. Dissent is one of those things that’s best nipped in the bud.”
“So you’re saying God’s Eye—”
“God’s Eye only looks at what people are trying to hide. It only listens when people are trying to whisper. Now think about what you would uncover with something like that, what it could be used for, and you’re starting to get the idea.”
“There would be… you’d know everything.”
“Everything worth knowing, if your goal were to control a population. You NSA types must really groove on irony. Because hell yes, as long as you don’t try to protect your privacy, you can still have privacy! Well, at least in theory. I mean, NSA still has access to everything about you. You’ll still be one of the hundreds of millions of volumes in their limitless collection. They just won’t take you down from the shelf to read you. At least until they want something. Or if you misbehave. Then you’re fucked.”
They were quiet for a moment. Her mind was racing with possibilities. The truth was, the concept was ingenious. She wondered who had thought of it. And how they would implement. She knew NSA already focused heavily on collecting encrypted communications, in the hope that at a minimum some decryption breakthrough would allow the communications to be read at a later date. And that they were exceptionally interested in lawyer-client privileged communications, as well. What else would they focus on? Social network accounts with only a pair or at most a handful of users. Email accounts with similarly restricted use. People who cleared their browsers regularly. People who purged emails from their online trash. Hell, you could even get more specific than that. You could focus on which messages got deleted. After all, those would be the interesting ones. The secrets you would uncover… it would be everything. Affairs. Closeted homosexuality. Financial improprieties. Perversions. The most personal aspects of people’s lives. The most shameful secrets.
Look at the way the FBI had nailed General Petraeus when he was director of Central Intelligence, by focusing on the email account he was using with his lover. The two of them had been storing sexual messages as drafts, not sending them. That would be a giant red flag right there. And only one user on the account, logging in from different locations. Another dead giveaway. What if the account hadn’t been uncovered in the course of an FBI investigation? What if instead it had been discovered by the director? In all likelihood, Petraeus would still be DCI. A lot of people had thought he was on the fast track to run for president, for God’s sake. And the director would have owned him.
She suddenly wondered how many other people the director owned. Powerful people. Politicians. Regulators. Judges. Journalists. And how many organizations he had penetrated, subverted. It was almost too big to fathom.
She realized there was another thing they would focus on: prepaid phones. Bought for cash. Who pays cash for a prepaid phone? Poor people, but they don’t matter to you and you quickly screen them out. Everyone else… would be someone trying to hide something. Something you’ve now uncovered.
“Could that be how they caught me?” she said. “I bought a prepaid phone for cash. Is that the kind of thing God’s Eye looks for?”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing.”
It made a horrible kind of sense. She’d thought she was being so clever and careful. But it seemed clever and careful was exactly what drew the attention of God’s Eye.