line from Ramstein Air Base.
“Intolerably,” she sang, a mix of exaggeration and honesty. “Everything good?”
“You know the drill. FBI is running it. They still hate me but they need me. And Geeseman’s still two parts asshole, one part haircut.”
“He’s probably monitoring all comm, FYI,” she told him. Gersten still lived with her mother, but stayed most nights at Sutton Place, even when Fisk was gone. “Wish I was in on it. That is some hot shit, you lucky dog. OBL. I’m walking around picking up trash dropped by snotty NYU Muslim kids again tomorrow.”
Fisk smiled. “Muslim beards are the new hipster goatee. You fix the faucet?”
“Nope. Couldn’t get it. Dropped a note to the super.”
“Lazy,” he said, stifling a yawn.
“It’s not my sink,” she said, and he could tell she was smiling. “All right, I can hear the exhaustion in your voice, and that you want to get back to it. Find something big, will you, hero?”
“I’m trying.”
“When you get home, I’ll properly debrief you.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling. “Do me one little favor. Say that again in a German accent.”
Chapter 12
F isk pulled on sanitary garb again and moved through the air lock, returning to the bunker and the forensic search. Pearl and Rosofsky had never left, a quad montage of pornographic movies on the screens in front of them. A dizzying exhibition of the twenty-first-century incarnation of the human reproductive imperative, flickering past them at four frames per second.
“Learning anything, boys?” Fisk asked, watching over Pearl’s shoulder.
Pearl said, “I got numb to this stuff years ago.”
“Do you think you’re about ready to try it with a real human woman?”
“Someday maybe,” joked Pearl, sitting back, arms crossed, his eyes never leaving the skin game before him.
“Patterns, anything?”
“Definitely some random movies in here. A pattern, I don’t know. It would take a psychologist to say with authority what the big Laden got off on, and what was sent his way with messages encrypted. But I’m happy to report that sniffing OBL’s underwear ain’t part of my job description.”
“Just sniffing hard drives.”
“Exactly.” Pearl pointed off to the right. “Hard copies are on Geeseman’s table. The big beard was definitely using steg for moving info.”
“Thought so,” said Fisk.
Steganography means “hidden writing.” An old example from tradecraft would be a message written in lemon juice in between the lines of an innocuous letter; the lemon juice would turn brown when the paper was heated. In the digital age, a computer deconstructs the binary code for an image, translating symbols into complex images. A message may be embedded in such a file by adjusting the color of, say, every one thousandth pixel to correspond to a particular letter in the alphabet, and then transmit it. The alteration of the image is so minuscule as to be invisible to the human eye. If the viewer did not know the message was there, finding it among countless images on a person’s computer was virtually impossible.
Four years after 9/11, a twenty-five-year-old named Devon Pearl, newly hired by the National Security Agency after being caught hacking into their system, read a terrorist training manual recovered from a Taliban safe house in Afghanistan. It contained a section entitled “Covert Communications and Hiding Secrets Inside Images.”
Pearl found that no one at NSA was an expert on digital steganography, and so he became one himself. By late 2006, he developed the first practical search engine for ferreting out digital images that contained code anomalies indicating the presence of embedded steganographic messages. Pearl’s sniffer program—he was now on version seven—could fingerwalk through roughly one thousand still images per minute. For video, depending on the level of complexity, it could process five minutes in one. The program spit out a list of corrupt files with
“Intolerably,” she sang, a mix of exaggeration and honesty. “Everything good?”
“You know the drill. FBI is running it. They still hate me but they need me. And Geeseman’s still two parts asshole, one part haircut.”
“He’s probably monitoring all comm, FYI,” she told him. Gersten still lived with her mother, but stayed most nights at Sutton Place, even when Fisk was gone. “Wish I was in on it. That is some hot shit, you lucky dog. OBL. I’m walking around picking up trash dropped by snotty NYU Muslim kids again tomorrow.”
Fisk smiled. “Muslim beards are the new hipster goatee. You fix the faucet?”
“Nope. Couldn’t get it. Dropped a note to the super.”
“Lazy,” he said, stifling a yawn.
“It’s not my sink,” she said, and he could tell she was smiling. “All right, I can hear the exhaustion in your voice, and that you want to get back to it. Find something big, will you, hero?”
“I’m trying.”
“When you get home, I’ll properly debrief you.”
“Ah,” he said, smiling. “Do me one little favor. Say that again in a German accent.”
Chapter 12
F isk pulled on sanitary garb again and moved through the air lock, returning to the bunker and the forensic search. Pearl and Rosofsky had never left, a quad montage of pornographic movies on the screens in front of them. A dizzying exhibition of the twenty-first-century incarnation of the human reproductive imperative, flickering past them at four frames per second.
“Learning anything, boys?” Fisk asked, watching over Pearl’s shoulder.
Pearl said, “I got numb to this stuff years ago.”
“Do you think you’re about ready to try it with a real human woman?”
“Someday maybe,” joked Pearl, sitting back, arms crossed, his eyes never leaving the skin game before him.
“Patterns, anything?”
“Definitely some random movies in here. A pattern, I don’t know. It would take a psychologist to say with authority what the big Laden got off on, and what was sent his way with messages encrypted. But I’m happy to report that sniffing OBL’s underwear ain’t part of my job description.”
“Just sniffing hard drives.”
“Exactly.” Pearl pointed off to the right. “Hard copies are on Geeseman’s table. The big beard was definitely using steg for moving info.”
“Thought so,” said Fisk.
Steganography means “hidden writing.” An old example from tradecraft would be a message written in lemon juice in between the lines of an innocuous letter; the lemon juice would turn brown when the paper was heated. In the digital age, a computer deconstructs the binary code for an image, translating symbols into complex images. A message may be embedded in such a file by adjusting the color of, say, every one thousandth pixel to correspond to a particular letter in the alphabet, and then transmit it. The alteration of the image is so minuscule as to be invisible to the human eye. If the viewer did not know the message was there, finding it among countless images on a person’s computer was virtually impossible.
Four years after 9/11, a twenty-five-year-old named Devon Pearl, newly hired by the National Security Agency after being caught hacking into their system, read a terrorist training manual recovered from a Taliban safe house in Afghanistan. It contained a section entitled “Covert Communications and Hiding Secrets Inside Images.”
Pearl found that no one at NSA was an expert on digital steganography, and so he became one himself. By late 2006, he developed the first practical search engine for ferreting out digital images that contained code anomalies indicating the presence of embedded steganographic messages. Pearl’s sniffer program—he was now on version seven—could fingerwalk through roughly one thousand still images per minute. For video, depending on the level of complexity, it could process five minutes in one. The program spit out a list of corrupt files with
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