Listen to Jenny and you might be forgiven for thinking me some sort of hoary old technophobe, or too aloof from such matters to grubby my hands with the tedious intricacies of her work. To be honest, the characterization is not that far from the truth.
But this doesn't mean I'm completely ignorant of what she does. How did she track down the hacker, given that he had taken such elegant precautions not to be tracked? It went like this:
Taking a punt on Travis's surmise that the lead hacker would be the child of a Valley millionaire, she sifted the public records for likely candidates, producing a list of several thousand who matched the profile she had devised. This she augmented with another list of her own, gleaned from the Agency's database of discontents. Having collated her long list, she set about using the resources at her disposal to sift it down to more manageable proportions, excluding those whose career paths made them unlikely revolutionaries and ranking the rest by likelihood based on techniques such as stylometry, which attempts to identify people from their web posting style, using the hacker's known social media activity as a template. Next she launched a program that worked through this ranked list from the top, cross-referencing the timing of hacker posts with the metadata records of the suspects. Metadata doesn't record the content of people's net traffic, which would likely be encrypted in any case, but it does record the time of sending. The hackers use anonymizing servers located outside our jurisdiction to prevent their posts from being backtracked. But it hadn't occurred to them to hide the correlation between the time they send a post and the time it is received on the social media server.
It took a while – the culprit was ranked number 213 on the list – but we got the bastard. He was still making the occasional post, even after the Travis incident, presumably to disguise his being co-opted by the Yakuza. There was no doubt we had the right man.
See, pretty simple really. Even an old Luddite like me can understand.
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The Actor
Science FictionJenny has grown up being told by everyone how clever she is, how she will go on to do great things one day. So when a man with an audacious plan enters her life, Jenny needs to decide not only whether he's for real, but just how real she is herself...
