Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [104]
Jack knew about P2P, but something was missing. “I’m still not clear on what your project is,” said Jack.
“Show him,” said Vince.
Chuck nodded readily, as if the initial reluctance to share his work had faded. In fact, he seemed proud of what he was doing, almost eager to be able to demonstrate it. “Keep your eyes on the screen,” he said.
Jack braced himself, fearful that the horrific image of a pedophile’s work might appear. Instead, the image of Chuck’s face blinked off the screen, and it was replaced by a map of south Florida. A red dot appeared over a street on Key Biscayne.
“The dot on the screen marks the address of a convicted sexual predator who traded on the P2P network,” said Chuck.
“That’s less than a mile from my house,” said Jack.
“That’s why I chose it. Kind of brings it home, doesn’t it?”
“He was trading child pornography?” said Jack.
“Not just trading. He created it. What I’m going to show you is the digital version of time-lapsed photography. You’re looking at zero-hour for the launch of one of his video files. The first trade.”
There was a blip on the screen, and the map enlarged from south Florida to the eastern United States. A second dot appeared over Richmond, Virginia.
“Is it that easy to track P2P trades?”
“If you know what you’re looking for. Watch what happens twenty minutes later.”
The map grew again, now showing the entire United States. Jack counted six dots, one as far away as Oregon.
“Two hours later,” said Chuck, and suddenly there were several dozen dots spread across North America. “Four hours,” said Chuck, and the map stretched to the entire Western Hemisphere. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dots from Brazil to Vancouver to Budapest and everywhere in between.
“That’s Project Round Up?”
“No. Project Round Up is the ability to work backward.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at that map,” said Chuck. He continued to advance the timeline—one day, three days, a week—until there were so many dots that virtually every major city on the map was covered in red. “If you didn’t know that the file started in Key Biscayne, could you tell me who created it?”
“No way.”
“Unfortunately, that’s the point where law enforcement—usually undercover agents trading online—gets involved. After the file has been traded around the world. You nail these creeps for possession and trading, but not creation. This is what I want to do. Watch.”
There was another blip on the screen, and the timeline was in reverse—the map shrinking, red dots disappearing. Finally, they were back to the first frame: one red dot over a house on Key Biscayne.
“You can do that?
“I’m almost there. My goal is to be able to work back to the camera that made the video. Like ballistics for a bullet.”
“How does that work?”
The map vanished from the screen, replaced by the image of Chuck’s face. “That’s for me to know and the sick bastards to find out.”
“Is that what Jamal was working on when he disappeared?”
“We were in the very early stages of creating algorithms to unravel trades of encrypted files. Basically he was cataloging the most popular encryption methods used by sexual predators. As I mentioned, some terrorist organizations have essentially borrowed those encryption methods from the pedophiles.”
Jack worked through the implications. “So Jamal was all over the Internet downloading files that were encrypted the same way al-Qaeda files are encrypted.”
“Not necessarily al-Qaeda,” said Chuck, “but yes, known terrorist organizations.”
“Couple that with the fact that he was of Somali descent, his father is a known recruiter for al-Shabaab, and two of his high-school classmates left Minnesota to fight in Somalia, and I can see where he would end up on an antiterrorism watch list.”
“A watch list is one thing,” said Vince. “A secret detention facility in Eastern Europe is another.”
Jack considered it, but he didn’t want to put