[Chapter 2] American Bletchley

Chapter 2: Tickling the Wire

A month later, the schoolhouse buzzed with energy as soon as the sun rose. The structure had been transformed. The walls now gleamed with fresh beige paint. The gymnasium floor was raised in order to lay down power and fiber cables underneath.

The woodshop had been turned into Yu’s workshop and filled with oscilloscopes, soldering irons, and other equipment that she asked for. In fact, whenever she sent a memo to the DoD for something new, it arrived in a box the next day. Her first project was to harden their internal network and experiment with detecting anomalous transmissions across the city’s RF spectrum.

Terry turned the school’s old library into his work space. The oak tables were now full of high-powered workstations plugged into the ethernet network in order to run custom scripts to crawl the Internet and analyze what he found.

The Patriot Act had opened up the gates in terms of what data they could analyze. David was assigned as their liaison from the Pentagon to relay messages and help them navigate bureaucratic hurdles. Terry was able to process metadata from random web forums, archived Usenet groups, and flagged emails. He wanted to seek out patterns, although he wasn’t too sure what he was looking for.