impossibility of filtering the few true evil-doers from the millions of simply-curious.
Nevertheless, you’d be naïve to think that your ‘e-activity’ is entirely anonymous and unmonitored. So, I can’t be too careful. As an example of the lengths I have to go to, consider the problem of me wanting to keep tabs on anything – or anyone – known to be associated with me. Bearing in mind that the people I’m hiding from are very resourceful.
For this task I have a mechanism. I employ custom-written data-mining agents: harmless software viruses that replicate themselves across the net, sniffing out information of interest to me. They go to places far beyond the reach of your favourite search engine, sneaking past firewalls, proxies and gateways to reach potentially any resource hooked up to the internet. They can’t defeat all security measures but they come pretty close. And being benign they survive longer than malicious viruses. But they don’t go undetected forever. After a while virus scanners will learn their signature and kill them as soon as they are detected. So from time to time I have to release new ones.
An irksome but clearly necessary restriction of agents is that they can hold no detail pertaining to their owner, such as an email address or a phone number. So when they find stuff that might be of interest, they post snippets of information on public web forums containing innocuous code words that I can look out for. I can hit these forums along with the million other users that day and suddenly I’m a leaf hidden in a forest. This was the mechanism that alerted me to Pearle’s death a year ago; and to Burch’s arrest more recently.
This path to information that I must follow is not entirely undetectable; the trail is still there. But it adds enough layers of indirection to be good enough, for long enough. Long enough to finish up in whatever internet café I am visiting on that occasion and move on.
But it’s not just the web where we leave our signature. You can barely take a piss these days without leaving your watermark in the matrix . Every step you take through life you leave behind an electronic breadcrumb trail for anyone to follow: hard disks, cell phones, credit cards, surveillance cameras. And this trail does not get gobbled up by the animals of the woods. It stays.
Considering how heavily the law enforcement agencies rely on these sources for their investigations, it’s hard to imagine how detectives solved any crimes fifty years ago. Take away forensics too and I just don’t know where they’d begin.
This e-trail everyone leaves behind is not an issue for the average person on the street. Only those who are particularly paranoid, or are a criminal, or just plain have something to hide. I have something to hide. Me. So it can be hard work sometimes.
But, today, technology was on my side. Today, I was the detective.
From my meeting with Jackson Burch earlier I learned that he had not been involved with Pearle Jenkins’ death. He was quite confident on this issue – I could tell. Which unfortunately meant it was true. After all, he would have remembered. Worse still, he didn’t even know Pearle, or her mother. He had been framed for the whole thing.
I really wasn’t expecting this. People get framed for things all the time in TV shows. But it’s really not that easy, especially considering all of the aforementioned techie stuff. It would only be possible by someone intimately acquainted with the details of the crime and the person being framed. Burch was quite nonplussed by the situation. He didn’t seem to have a clue who this might be.
If I’d known beforehand that he was going to be so clueless, I wouldn’t have made contact. But it was too late once I had. I couldn’t really continue following him around. Plus, that’s another thing that happens a lot on TV, which is logistically non-practical. Try it sometime.
There was one other thing I picked up from
Nevertheless, you’d be naïve to think that your ‘e-activity’ is entirely anonymous and unmonitored. So, I can’t be too careful. As an example of the lengths I have to go to, consider the problem of me wanting to keep tabs on anything – or anyone – known to be associated with me. Bearing in mind that the people I’m hiding from are very resourceful.
For this task I have a mechanism. I employ custom-written data-mining agents: harmless software viruses that replicate themselves across the net, sniffing out information of interest to me. They go to places far beyond the reach of your favourite search engine, sneaking past firewalls, proxies and gateways to reach potentially any resource hooked up to the internet. They can’t defeat all security measures but they come pretty close. And being benign they survive longer than malicious viruses. But they don’t go undetected forever. After a while virus scanners will learn their signature and kill them as soon as they are detected. So from time to time I have to release new ones.
An irksome but clearly necessary restriction of agents is that they can hold no detail pertaining to their owner, such as an email address or a phone number. So when they find stuff that might be of interest, they post snippets of information on public web forums containing innocuous code words that I can look out for. I can hit these forums along with the million other users that day and suddenly I’m a leaf hidden in a forest. This was the mechanism that alerted me to Pearle’s death a year ago; and to Burch’s arrest more recently.
This path to information that I must follow is not entirely undetectable; the trail is still there. But it adds enough layers of indirection to be good enough, for long enough. Long enough to finish up in whatever internet café I am visiting on that occasion and move on.
But it’s not just the web where we leave our signature. You can barely take a piss these days without leaving your watermark in the matrix . Every step you take through life you leave behind an electronic breadcrumb trail for anyone to follow: hard disks, cell phones, credit cards, surveillance cameras. And this trail does not get gobbled up by the animals of the woods. It stays.
Considering how heavily the law enforcement agencies rely on these sources for their investigations, it’s hard to imagine how detectives solved any crimes fifty years ago. Take away forensics too and I just don’t know where they’d begin.
This e-trail everyone leaves behind is not an issue for the average person on the street. Only those who are particularly paranoid, or are a criminal, or just plain have something to hide. I have something to hide. Me. So it can be hard work sometimes.
But, today, technology was on my side. Today, I was the detective.
From my meeting with Jackson Burch earlier I learned that he had not been involved with Pearle Jenkins’ death. He was quite confident on this issue – I could tell. Which unfortunately meant it was true. After all, he would have remembered. Worse still, he didn’t even know Pearle, or her mother. He had been framed for the whole thing.
I really wasn’t expecting this. People get framed for things all the time in TV shows. But it’s really not that easy, especially considering all of the aforementioned techie stuff. It would only be possible by someone intimately acquainted with the details of the crime and the person being framed. Burch was quite nonplussed by the situation. He didn’t seem to have a clue who this might be.
If I’d known beforehand that he was going to be so clueless, I wouldn’t have made contact. But it was too late once I had. I couldn’t really continue following him around. Plus, that’s another thing that happens a lot on TV, which is logistically non-practical. Try it sometime.
There was one other thing I picked up from
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