Breaking and Entering Read online

  “I could create a new tool to analyze the traffic and display stats,” she said.

  She just needed a little help.

  First, there was Flick with the flow records. He was happy to share, he said, but he suggested he and Alien meet for drinks to discuss the matter first.

  “Night is highly preferable,” Flick wrote. “I only get smashed early on weekends and national holidays.”

  They met at John Harvard’s Brewery in Harvard Square. In exchange for an hour of smiles on top of explaining what she wanted to do, Alien had her data.

  Now to interpret it. Next poker night, while her friends bet and bantered, Alien searched the wood-and-cement-block bookshelves in the Somerville apartment living room, flipping past The Feynman Lectures on Physics, The Procedure Handbook of Arc Welding, and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes to grab TCP/IP Illustrated, volume one, the standard reference on Internet communications protocol, in front of a tank of gaping clownfish.

  She started coding on what she was calling NetVision. Senior House was too distracting. SIPB was too bright. The Building 66 basement Athena cluster was just right, but there was no one there to hit up for help if she had questions. One midnight in mid-October, the last warm week of fall, Alien swallowed a microdose of LSD emblazoned with the Senior House logo—a grinning red, white, and blue skull—and Rollerbladed across the river to a century-old five-story brownstone on Commonwealth Avenue, Tau Epsilon Phi.

  “François?” she yelled, left and right. Her old Fifth East hallmate had recently reenrolled at MIT and Alien had used her f script to locate him here.

  A voice came from the first-floor lounge. “He’s in twenty-two,” a slouched figure on a beat-up couch answered.

  Alien climbed a flight and entered 22. It was a four-person room that was pure MIT. In order to use space efficiently, the TEP brothers had used metal rods to bolt the room’s beds, feet detached, to the ceiling. Also hanging from the ceiling—in this case from metal chains rather than rods, so that it could swing—was a legless leather couch that looked like it had been rescued from the curb on the night before garbage pickup.

  One reached the beds and couch via narrow wooden stepladders. This left most of the floor available for four large metal desks, two more battered couches, a black refrigerator, and a mirrored cabinet topped by empty Jack Daniel’s bottles. The bottles themselves were illuminated in ever-changing colors by computer-controlled LED lights running behind them, a legacy of Frostbyte, who had lived at TEP as an undergraduate. Mounted on the walls were a blackboard, pirate flag, and various band posters and purloined street signs. The final touch was a functioning four-signal traffic light.

  “Hey,” Alien said, waving to the room’s residents—all sophomores—one in bed, reading, one at a desk, tooling, and two on the floor-level couches, talking about tooling—i.e., punting. François, she saw, had dropped his straight-edge stance on never smoking. He was on the hanging couch, passing a bong to Eddie, from the Warehouse party.

  Alien unstrapped her Rollerblades, took her laptop from her backpack, and climbed the ladder to join them.

  “Hit?” Eddie asked, giggling.

  “No thanks,” Alien said. Pot made her inefficient. “Do you have a minute?” she asked François.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Alien grabbed a long purple Ethernet cable dangling helpfully from the ceiling, logged into Athena, and loaded NetVision.

  Nothing happened.

  “See?” Alien asked. “It’s taking so long to get through all the data, I have to kill the process”—force quit the program—“before I get results.”

  “Show me your code,” said François.

  Alien did. The screen filled with Perl programming language algorithms and instructions.

  “There’s your problem,” François said. “Why did you use Perl?”

  “Pattern matching,” said Alien. Perl was designed to make extracting individual elements from long files—like every Internet address, and only Internet addresses—easy.

  “Database and query in Python”—another programming language—“will be much faster,” François told her.

  Alien nodded, tight-lipped. Computer science classes at MIT emphasized conceptual principles over practicality. They didn’t teach programming languages people actually used.

  “Do you know Python?” François asked after several seconds of silence.

  Alien shrugged. “Not yet,” she said.

  Two a.m., three weeks later, music played in the Senior House courtyard, and parties beckoned from all directions, but Alien had barricaded herself in her room to debug her program—finding and fixing the tiny flaws that could open it up to unexpected failure. Getting up to stretch her legs, she found Jake, the visiting scientist at the Center for Space Research, taking up her open invitation to bed down on a common area lounge couch.

  “I’m graduating,” Alien told him. “Remind me to introduce you around so you’ll be able to crash here next semester.”

  Jake sat up on his elbows, curious. “What are you going to do, kid?” he asked.

  “Escape MIT,” Alien said. “Maybe move west.” Her parents were pushing grad school, of course, but she wanted to travel, not tool, stare at canyon walls, not computer screens. It had been right to return and finish her degree, Alien believed, but now she was eager again for something completely different. All she had to do was get NetVision working first.

  “Hey,” Jake said. “You should move to Santa Fe.”

  “Yeah?” Alien smiled. “Sunny Santa Fe!” they sang in the musical Rent, she remembered. “Yeah,” she repeated.

  Jake continued. “You could work for me at Los Alamos,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Alien, less deliberation than impulse, like all her best ideas. She had no idea what Jake really did. As far she was concerned, if he ran a pizza place, that would be fine. As long as it was a change.

  New home, new job, new life.

  Alien clapped to herself when she got back to her computer screen. And then she began to type again.

  NetVision went live in December. It was Monday of finals week, and a rare hush covered Senior House when Alien lowered her laptop screen shortly after eight a.m., surprised when invading daylight broke her concentration. Her room was stripped and empty, her belongings packed beneath a mural she’d painted of a lush wildflower garden. Now, with snoring classmates surrounding her, her code worked, and she couldn’t wait to show it off.

  Alien walked out to a balcony overlooking the Senior House courtyard to get dressed. The air was freezing, but she stripped first, enjoying the sun on her bare skin and the panoramic view of the Charles River and Boston. Totally naked, she saw sudden movement in a window of the only building between her perch and the water, a three-story white stone villa, the house of the MIT president.

  Two wide eyes stared at her. The window shade slowly lowered.

  Alien laughed. I just flashed Chuck Vest, she thought, putting on her pants.

  Thirty minutes later she was outside again, grateful at least that the strong wind was at her back as she skated to work.

  Only a handful of other I/S cubicles were occupied at this hour. Alien logged on at her desktop machine, and then rolled into Marie’s office and asked through chattering teeth if she would join her.

  “You remember how long NetVision was taking?” Alien said, warming herself by talking. “Then how it was fast enough but kept crashing?”

  Marie nodded.

  “Well, I rewrote it all—twice,” Alien said. “See . . .” She typed a moment and then pointed excitedly at the monitor. “Now it responds in real time.”

  The screen filled. In a neat all-text grid, it listed the top ten Internet addresses on the MIT network, ranked in order of the amount of data transferred to and from them. Its latest update was 9:07 a.m.—just four minutes earlier—the program said.

  “Not bad,” said Marie. She reached around Alien, took the keyboard, and hit the up arrow and Return key to
repeat the command. A moment later, a new list appeared. Six of the top ten “talkers” had fluctuated, NetVision showed, while the others—including three of the top four—held steady.

  “Can you make it visual?” said a male voice.

  Alien and Marie turned to see the I/S network manager, Jeff, standing six inches away, smiling behind a bushy brown mustache. Jeff was only in his mid-forties but already a legend to Internet geeks on campus, who spoke of his contributions to Athena and the MIT computer network the same way, and for similar reasons, architecture buffs did Louis Sullivan (“form follows function”) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (“less is more”). He had honored Alien and appeased the computer science department by agreeing to serve as her AUP adviser, though actual oversight, up to this moment, had been Marie’s.

  “One minute,” Alien responded, loading her source code in the same terminal window as Jeff and Marie caught up on other matters.

  NetVision worked by inputting Flick’s flow records to a database. Sorting Internet addresses by the size of their uploads and downloads was one function. With a few more lines of code in two spots, Alien quickly added other functions to calculate each listed address’s percentage of the total network load and create a Web page displaying the results.

  “How does this look?” she asked when she had finished.

  Jeff turned. “You did it already?” he asked.

  Alien pointed proudly onscreen at a blue horizontal bar chart. The top address was responsible for just under 15 percent of total traffic at MIT, the Web page showed. The next address was responsible for just over 10 percent. Every other address on the list had a much smaller fraction of the total—1 percent or less.

  “Are you kidding?” Marie asked, scrutinizing the findings. “That’s got to be a mistake.” The MIT network had 25,000 active Internet addresses. But if what they were seeing was accurate, a full quarter of the total traffic came from just two computers.

  Jeff moved closer. “Whose addresses are they?”

  Whenever someone at MIT brought a new machine online, he or she was supposed to register it with the name, phone number, and email address of a human contact. No one verified the accuracy of this information, and once established, a machine’s records were rarely updated, but the registry was the first thing Information Systems checked when investigating a potential problem. Alien had configured NetVision to pull the registered hostname and details when displaying results.

  Alien glanced at the readout and laughed. “It’s us,” she said. “The top talker on the MIT network is a server here at I/S.”

  “Mail?” Marie asked.

  “Web.” Jeff scooted around Marie’s desk to see his own name listed under the point-of-contact field. He nodded. It made sense that MIT’s public website would top NetVision’s list.

  “What about number two?” he asked.

  Alien frowned. “Funny, it didn’t resolve.” She manually typed the second address into MIT’s system registry.

  “No machine(s) found matching query in the database,” the program returned.

  Marie frowned. “Try again,” she said.

  Just in case, Alien retyped the numbers, double-checking for any typos. The directory results were identical, however. No computer with that address had been registered at MIT.

  Alien turned. “It’s an unregistered system.”

  Silence.

  “Are you sure this is right?” Jeff said. “There’s an unregistered computer responsible for ten percent of all of MIT’s network traffic?”

  “It’s right,” said Alien.

  No one spoke for a long moment. The computer in question could be a virus launch point, a new software piracy server, a secret military installation, or something else altogether, good or bad.

  Alien refreshed NetVision. A new blue bar chart appeared. In the last couple of minutes, it showed, the percentage of traffic from the mysterious site had actually increased, going from 10.1 to 10.7 percent.

  Marie looked at Jeff. He picked up a piece of paper and handed it to Alien. “Write down that address for me, okay?”

  “Sure,” she said, scribbling it down.

  As she did, Marie and Jeff consulted about the phantom user, but Alien barely listened. Inventing the tool to facilitate network inspections and investigations had been what excited her. Anything that came out of it—even another federal raid—was ultimately just another step on the CaseTracker treadmill. And that wasn’t her problem anymore.

  “Oh, hey,” Alien asked. “Can you sign off on my project? I need it to graduate.”

  The getaway car was her mother’s old cranberry-colored Volvo, its rear bumper still proudly festooned with stickers advertising her and her sister’s high school honor roll student status. Alien’s accomplice was a fellow off-semester graduate, a guy with thick ringlets of long blond hair, one of her boyfriends of the last year, none serious. They were driving together to Santa Fe. In January, Alien started work for Jake at Los Alamos. Her friend would keep traveling. Who knew what would happen after that?

  Stepping into the car, Alien brushed snow flurries from her eyes and frozen dress, changed out of Rollerblades, and leaned over to embrace him.

  “We’re free!” she exclaimed as they pulled out. Alien rolled down the sunroof, in spite of the winter weather.

  They sped down Memorial Drive as the student center and Killian Court, the Great and Little Domes, Building 54 and Building 66, Fifth East and Senior House all receded in the rearview mirror.

  “Good-bye!” yelled Alien—to MIT and, she thought, to anything to do with security.

  Sixty seconds later, her mind was already shifting to the next adventure. The yellow line of the highway pointed the path ahead.

  07 / /

  Wild Wild Web

  Alien was twenty-two years old when she arrived in Santa Fe in January 2003. After her childhood in suburban New Jersey and college years in urban Cambridge, and even after the rugged green splendor of Ireland, New Mexico’s natural wonders—pink and purple mesas, an infinite landscape washed by golden sunlight as far as the eye could see—astonished her. Just as dramatic were the cultural differences, with café bulletin board notices advertising flute meditation and acroyoga, ecstatic dance and belly dance classes, mindfulness workshops and hydrotherapy. She found a room in a communal living environment residents called “The Island,” a long brown adobe ranch house almost alone on seven acres in southwest Santa Fe, shared with a carpenter, a masseuse, a student of Chinese medicine, an experimental rock duo consisting of a singer and a drummer, and a “fire artist” who juggled blazing clubs and extinguished a torch by putting it in his mouth.

  This was just the kind of setting she’d been looking for, she thought. Artistic. In harmony with nature. Relaxed rather than high-strung. Outside the mainstream. Both destination and escape.

  Then came her first day of work.

  The Island was separated from Los Alamos National Laboratory by about forty miles of highway that wound past a series of small Native American reservations, over the Rio Grande River, and up to a succession of mesas. At the perimeter of the lab, before Alien could glimpse anything inside, she was halted by a tollbooth-like row of seven guard stations, white with blue aluminum roofs.

  “ID?” a man in a brown collared shirt that said SECURITY OFFICER asked her.

  Alien produced her driver’s license for examination and he pointed her up a rise, set against ponderosa pines and the Jemez Mountains, 11,500 feet at their peak.

  Moments later, Alien reached a sign with the words LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY and a logo that was a simple drawing of an atom, with electrons looping around a nucleus. To her left were several blocks of drab, boxy concrete buildings. First was the badge office. Here, Alien presented her passport, which Jake’s office administrator had told her to bring as proof of her identity, and recited her Social Security number.

  “Okay.” The clerk directed her to a side table where a colleague waited with a green-lit glass-topped
electronic fingerprint capture device, like a tiny photocopier, and a separate electronic signature pad, both linked by thin cables to a black laptop.

  “Sign here,” he said, pointing to the signature pad and handing her a stylus.

  Alien signed. With practiced ease, the second clerk grasped Alien’s hand, rolling her right thumb firmly over the fingerprint capture device’s glass. The machine beeped loudly and her thumbprint appeared on the screen of the laptop. He repeated the process with the other nine fingers, and then took separate impressions of the left four fingers together, the right four fingers together, and, again, the left and right thumbs, so that his laptop screen showed twenty black whorled forms—two impressions each of every finger.

  Last, a third clerk took a head shot. “The badge will print in five minutes,” the woman said.

  While Alien waited, she studied a large map of the lab mounted on the wall. It was remarkably vague in detail except for the obvious fact that the place was enormous. In all, there were more than one thousand buildings in forty-seven distinct “technical areas” (“TA-1,” “TA-2,” and so on) dispersed across its remote forty-square-mile plateau.

  When her badge was ready, Alien was handed an eight-paragraph information sheet. “Protect badge against loss, theft, or misuse,” it instructed. “Report a lost, stolen, or misused badge within 24 hours of discovery. . . . Surrender/return the badge when requested. Wear the badge conspicuously, photo side out, in a location above the waist, and on the front of your body.” Whenever she left the lab, it concluded, “protect your badge from view.”

  Where am I? Alien wondered. What the hell does this place do?