Full Black - Brad Thor [108]
“The most amazing part is that it doesn’t just spit out a list of items attached to the name you give it. It develops an entire profile and from there builds a relationship tree of the people associated with your subject.”
“And the Finns gave you access to this?”
“Not exactly,” said Nicholas. “But that’s beside the point. What’s important is that we were able to enter Ayman Hasan Shafik’s name and then watch what TIP came back with.”
“Which was what?” said Harvath.
“Fifteen years ago, Shafik arrived in the United States on the same Egypt Air flight as a man named Mohammed Fahad Nazif.”
“That thing pulls up fifteen-year-old flight manifests?”
Nicholas nodded.
“So who’s Nazif?”
“According to TIP, Nazif is a suspect in a highly classified FBI investigation.”
“Wait a second,” replied Harvath. “How does TIP know about a highly classified FBI investigation?”
Nicholas exhaled the air from his lungs and shook his head. He glanced at Carlton before responding. When the Old Man signaled his approval, the little man began to speak. What he had to say wasn’t good. In fact, it was very, very bad.
CHAPTER 46
“Up until TIP,” said Nicholas, “the gold standard in intelligence software belonged to the United States. An American company called Inslaw manufactured the premier collection, case management, and analysis system, called PROMIS, Prosecutor’s Management Information System.
“It was the precursor to TIP and operated 24/7 looking for nexuses and correlations between people, places, and organizations. It’s brilliantly adept at accessing proprietary corporate databases like those of banks, credit card companies, and electric, water, and gas utilities. Running complex algorithms, it built amazing relationship trees outlining exactly who knows or who interacts with whom.
“For example, if you were the subject of an investigation and you started using more water or electricity, it would suspect you had people staying with you. It would then search through all your phone records and emails, looking for any of your contacts that had suddenly stopped or reduced their usage of specific utilities, and suggest that they might be the ones at your house. This would be backed up with credit card transactions showing train or plane ticket purchases, gasoline, et cetera.
“PROMIS would then focus on these people and pull up all of their records, searching for any criminal history, mentions of them in previous investigations, and any and all hints of a conspiracy that might exist between you two and what it might entail. It was like the Terminator. It never slept. It never stopped. And the U.S. was all too happy to share this software with its allied intelligence partners.
“I say all too happy, because the U.S. had built a backdoor into the system. This door allowed the U.S. to monitor everything the other intelligence agencies were doing with the program and provided Uncle Sam with the same data that foreign intelligence agencies were accumulating.
“Interestingly enough, the Israelis—who conduct relentless espionage against their supposed ally and benefactor, the United States—had also been able to build a trapdoor into the system before America offered it to its intelligence partners. The trapdoor provided the Mossad with a treasure trove of information on Jordanian intelligence operations, in particular their vast dossiers on problematic Palestinians.
“Copies of PROMIS wound up on the black market, and intelligence agencies and governments around the world began using it to track and kill dissidents. The system was incredibly effective and became known as the perfect killing machine.
“PROMIS could tell an intelligence officer or a military commander that a certain