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“They call it Project Whammy? Who came up with that name?”
“Bodin.”
“I think he broke his imaginator.”
The two IT experts, a woman and a man, sat at a conference table scattered with hand-drawn flow charts and spec sheets. The woman said, “If we keep everything encrypted and hidden behind multiple layers of anonymizers, the communications should be okay.”
“We should rotate the anonymizers frequently.”
“Good idea. But what really worries me isn’t the hardware or software. It’s the jellyware. How do we protect ourselves from a mole?”
The man said, “I don’t think anyone’s ever figured out a workable firewall for that.”
“Maybe not. But I think we need to try. For example, how would you protect the system from me if I were a mole?”
“That’s been tried. System isolation. Hardwired realtime logging. And strip-searches going in and out. But we can’t isolate this system. It has to connect to the internet. And the logging files will be massive. We can’t spend all our time reviewing logs. By the time we see an anomaly, we’ll be dead.”
They were both quiet for about thirty seconds.
The woman said, “Has anyone ever trained an AI to monitor the logs in real time, to flag a possible breach? Or a trend toward a breach?”
The man said, “That’s a real interesting idea. I know of two ... no ... three expert systems that might be trained for that. Maybe play one against another to train them.”
“I like it.”
“You ever work on anything like this?” asked the man.
“I worked on Top Secret spy satellite feeds for the CIA. But nothing like this. Make a mistake at the CIA and the worst they could do to me was toss me in prison and throw away the key.”
The man said, “Here, we make a mistake, and our targets will kill us and everyone on the project. We’re going to truly piss off the worst people on the planet.”
“Yeah,” said the woman. “Interesting design spec.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”