Free Huston, James W. -2003- Secret Justice (com v4.0)(html) by Secret Justice (com v4.0)

recognize a student’s work.
    Johnson read quickly. Nothing interesting or suspicious. He directed a recording device that copied the chat room’s writing onto a separate hard drive and went to Pornography Site Number Five on his list, his list of fifty. He recalled this site clearly as it was here he had found evidence of Wahamed Duar’s operation. Two people communicated repeatedly with different screen names, and hinted at dates that started lining up with other things he knew about Duar’s operation. It made him sufficiently suspicious that he passed his tentative beliefs uphill where his superiors had agreed with him. They had been impressed and told him so. It had given him a renewed sense of mission that was now starting to wane.
    He leaned forward and rested his head on his hand as he looked at the comments in the chat room. He tried to envision the people on the other side of the screen typing these words. Probably mostly single men sitting in dark rooms desperate for affection, recognition, or companionship, who had twisted their idea of a relationship into what was before them. Johnson read on, his eyes drifting from one obscene comment to another when he noticed a couple of remarks that seemed out of keeping with the rest.
    He concentrated on two who seemed to be having their own implicit subconversation. He quickly captured the usernames and began working backward to find their Internet addresses and the ISP—the Internet Service Provider—through which they were working.
    The NSA’s ability to work with ISPs in other countries was little known. In fact the NSA had created a list of every single ISP in the world by country or area, four hundred eighty of them around the globe. No one knew the NSA could target an ISP by country. Many people believed e-mail to be anonymous, not so much in content, which they suspected might be intercepted, but anonymous in location. But the NSA had been busy. Pakistan, for example, only had fifty-five ISP address ranges registered to the country. The smaller the country, the smaller the pond he had to explore compared to the giant ocean of the Internet. If they wanted to know exactly how the routing worked, they would send someone to one of the numerous Internet cafés in, say, Pakistan, who would send an e-mail that could be easily traced. From then on, the NSA could track any e-mail coming from that block in Islamabad, or Karachi. And that wasn’t their only tool.
    Johnson began his most recent exploration with a frown. He had heard that Rat, a good friend of his, had captured Wahamed Duar. Everyone had assumed Duar’s organization must be crippled. Yet from his recollection, the traffic he was now seeing on Pornography Site Number Five was strikingly similar to that he had seen from Duar’s organization before the attack in Sudan. Johnson began making electronic notes in a file on a pop-up window on his computer.
    He dumped them into an electronic folder that was part of the NSA’s top-secret system for tracking Internet traffic, CARNIVORE, an electronic monitoring system that straddled virtually all the important ISP servers in the world and allowed the United States to monitor Internet traffic. When it was in the TCP full mode, it collected every word of every communication that passed through the server. The NSA could then use its supercomputers to monitor the words themselves for patterns, particular words such as “bomb,” or anything else they were looking for. They could even store the data and come back to analyze it later. They could track where it came from, and where it went. But they never acknowledged the ability to do either, even though CARNIVORE itself was being replaced by an upgraded system called DCS 1000, or as it was fondly known, ENHANCED CARNIVORE.
    Johnson watched as CARNIVORE went to work. He drank his cooling coffee and wrinkled his nose at the staleness. He put the cup down. Shit, he thought. Duar’s organization was still kicking, still