THE FIRST TIME, without an official escort, Rashid found the NSA’s security inspection qualified as a serious invasion of privacy verging on sexual harassment. He expected the full body scan, endured an intensive pat down, complained about the need to strip some of his clothes off, rendering him damn near naked, and refused an invasion of his ‘cavities’.
When the security official balked, Rashid fished his phone out of his pants, lost in a crumpled pile on the floor, and called Norman Miller, Chief of the Signal Intelligence Unit. Released five minutes later, he dressed and took the elevator to the fifth floor.
Like most Federal offices, that floor had five-foot high partitions sectioned off into small cubicles. Each contained a desk, chair, bookcase, computer, and a worker hunched in front of a glowing monitor.
"Sorry about that security check," Chief Miller said as Rashid entered his private office which had a door and a window, amenities reserved for executive status in Federal service. "Since this is your first time unescorted, security can get overly protective," Miller pointed to a chair in front of his desk. "Get comfortable, Doctor Youris."
Rashid decided not to comment on the security debacle. He sat.
Miller continued. "I'm pleased our two agencies agreed to this experiment. It will be interesting to see if you can help us crack a few coconuts and milk them." He grinned at his coconut milk joke and Rashid supported it with a nod. "I'm going to pair you with our top cryptologist, Isaac Gunner. He will fill you in on our operation. Mr. Gunner is your primary contact here in the Signal Intel Unit, as well as myself."
"That’ll keep our liaison uncomplicated."
"Yes. We have enough complications in this business without creating new ones." Miller gave his mustache a quick brush with his finger and stood. "Follow me. Mr. Gunner has his own workspace separate from the other members of his team."
As Rashid walked beside Miller, he learned more about the Intel Unit. "Gunner is a cyber specialist. You might say he is our Top Gun," Miller’s lips curled up at his aviation analogy. "He deals with our advanced decryption. I think you’ll find him bright and colorful." They arrived at a metal door with a digital keypad. Miller swiped his ID card, and the lock clicked open. They entered.
The dimly lit room had no windows. It pulsed with blinking red, yellow and green LED lights. Rashid noticed the back of a huge man in an office chair. He heard him tapping furiously on a keyboard. The man stopped, twirled his chair around and faced them. Even in the lowlight, Rashid saw he had no legs.
"Doctor Youris, this is Chief Cryptologist Isaac Gunner."
Gunner broke into a cordial smile showing white teeth that contrasted against his black skin. "Heard about you, man." He raised a hand for a high-five. "Don't want to hear any of that Isaac crap. Call me Ike, Okay?"
Rashid high-fived him back. "Good to meet you, Ike."
"Excuse me if I don't get up," said Ike, with another grin. "Mr. Miller, here, told me all about you." He worked the lever on his electric scooter and zipped over to a leather chair with rollers, pulled it back next to his desk, and gestured to Rashid. “Have a seat right here.”
Miller turned, "I'll leave you two. Don't work him too hard, Ike." He closed the door behind him. The lock snapped shut.
"So you a college professor?”
"Yes, Middle Eastern Studies, but I work for the FBI now."
"I'm gonna call you Prof, okay?"
"My name is Rashid, but you can call me Prof, if you want to."
"Good, I like it that way–nothin’ fancy."
Rashid studied this big man. Above his waist he could be a center on any NFL football team. Still, he seemed content in his own skin. "Miller said you would brief me on the operation here."
"Yea, man. I can do that." Ike's expression grew serious. "We got a hell of a set-up here. I call it the big sieve." He flashed a smile, then continued. "We deal with billions of information exchanges from all kind a communication sources from around the world. Ain't possible to actually read 'em, so we screen 'em with filters and keywords."
"Miller touched on that before."
"Sure he did. Well everything gets run though our system or as I said, the big sieve. It's like a pyramid. On the bottom, ninety-nine percent of what we process is chitchat. Just folks a talking to each other. We see it as a bunch of contact points. We calls it metadata. But it's that one percent at the top of the pyramid what keep us busy. Most of those still get processed by the math wizards. Real smart guys and gals that have created code that sifts through all the known ways to screw up the meaning of somethin’ on purpose so it don't make no sense. Well that catches most of it. When it gets to the ones the wiz-kids can't crack, they send ‘em to me and my team. The coconuts. That's the tip-pity-top of the pyramid. They say, hey Ike, we can't crack these nuts. So I get my nutcrackers out and go to work."
"You practice your special skills?"
"That I do, man. Might take a while, but I git’er done–mostly. The ones I don't get...well that's why you is here, right, Prof?"
"I hope I can add a useful perspective. How many coconuts do you have and how old are they?"
"I only got six now, and they is real new. Oldest is less than a couple a weeks old. So far my software ain't hard enough to make a dent in 'em." He grinned. "Get that, Prof? Software…not hard?" He laughed and slapped the table.
Rashid marveled at the disparity between the simplicity of this man, and the sophistication of the environment he worked in. He noticed Ike looking at him and figured he was reading his thoughts.
"I bet you wonder what the likes of me is doin here?"
"I have the feeling I'm not the first person to wonder that."
"Happens all the time. Don't bother me none. I kind a like it," he laughed, again. "So let's get this outa the way right now. You might a noticed I got no legs. Kind a hard to miss. Afghanistan, that where I left ‘em. Weren't my idea, but it happened. Got mustered out the army and had no job, so I learned computers. Kind a home schooled myself with help from some not so honest guys. Hacked into about anything that made me money. Shut down the power grid one time. Pissed everybody off. Got me caught and sent to jail. Then along comes this Admiral guy. Gave me a job soon as I got out a prison. He said he heard bout me and that I had a gift and should serve my country. Damn, I tried that once in the army and it didn't turn out so good, but I say okay. Now I'm makin a difference and a few honest bucks, too."
Rashid stared at Ike. After a long pause, he extended his hand. "That's a hell of a story." They high-fived again. Even though they were different people, Rashid knew he could work with this man.
Gunner explained the ground rules; the parameters that would limit the scope of their work. "We are searching for what the average person would call a password, except it's not a word or a combination of words. The math guys have ruled out those possibilities already. You might say it's a coded key. A key made up of unknown symbols in a unique sequence. That's a mouthful of marbles, ain’t it Prof?"
Rashid nodded and shrugged his shoulders.
"By symbol, I mean any letter in all the modern languages on earth, every number or group of numbers in all numbering systems, and any picture image–hieroglyphics. We call it the key-space universe, and it's a big mother-fucker. Real big."
Rashid shifted in his chair. "That's almost an infinite number of combinations."
"You got it, Prof," Ike said as he made a wry face. "The tool we use to find this coded sequence is called a Brute Force Attack."
"A Brute Force Attack - sounds fearsome."
"The NSA has the most powerful super computer in the world. At least we don't know of one bigger. It's half a billion dollar baby. I call this contraption Big Mamma. We feed Mamma all the time, so she gets bigger and more powerful by the day. She can process a billion bits of data in a nanosecond. At that rate it would take her about 20,000 years to exhaust the key-space universe using Brute Force, our most advanced software tool.
"I don't think we have that much time."
"You got that right, Prof." Ike clasped his hands in front of him. "The NSA has a policy. Even Big Mamma has limits, when you think about the workload placed on her. If Brute Force can't break a code in two days, we terminate the search. That action creates an official coconut." Ike raised his shoulders, threw his hands into the air as if to say–so there you have it.
Rashid scratched his chin. “What’s your gut tell you about these encryptions? Are they separate and unique or do you see similarities?
“The only thing not unique about these coconuts is their style.”
“Style?”
Ike’s eyes lit up. “It’s like Hemingway, the writer. He got a style to his way a writing. Well cryptologists have a style, too. I been in this game enough to know a style when I sees it. The same guy or team of guys built these nuts.”
“So the chances are if we crack one, we crack them all?”
“Better hope so, Prof.”