The Teeth of the Tiger - Tom Clancy [70]
and what, exactly, would happen when he did turn up something useful?
Back to Otto Weber
They couldn't stay in their room all day without having people wonder why. Mustafa and Abdullah left just after eating a light lunch in the coffee shop, and took a walk. Three blocks away they found an art museum. Admission was free, but inside they found out why. It was a museum of modern art and its painting and sculpture were well beyond their comprehension. They wandered through it over a period of two hours, and both of them concluded that paint must be cheap in Mexico. Nevertheless, it gave them the chance to burnish their covers, as they pretended to appreciate the garbage hanging on the walls and sitting on the floors.
Then they strolled back to their hotel. The one good thing was the weather. It was warm to those of European extraction, but quite pleasant to the visiting Arabs, gray haze and all. Tomorrow they would see desert again. One last time, perhaps.
It was impossible, even for a well-supported government agency, to search all the messages that flew through cyberspace every night, and so the NSA used computer programs to screen for key phrases. The electronic addresses of some known or suspected terrorists or suspected stringers had been identified over the years, and these were watched, as were the server computers of Internet Service Providers, or ISPs. All in all, it used up vast amounts of storage space, and as a result delivery trucks were constantly bringing new disk storage devices to Fort Meade, Maryland, where they were hooked up to the mainframe computers so that if a target person was identified, then his e-mails dating back for months or even years could be screened. If there were ever a game of falcon and mouse, this was it. The bad guys, of course, knew that the screening program looked for specific words or phrases, and so they had taken to using their own code words-which was another trap in itself, since codes gave a false sense of security, one that was easily exploited by an agency with seventy years of experience reading the minds of America's enemies.
The process had its limits. Too free a use of signal-intelligence information revealed its existence, causing the targets to change their methods of encryption, and so compromising the source. Using it too little, on the other hand, was as bad as not having it at all. Unfortunately, the intelligence services leaned more to the latter than the former. The creation of a new Department of Homeland Security had, theoretically, set up a central clearinghouse for all threat-related information, but the size of the new superagency had crippled it from the get-go. The information was all there, but in too great a quantity to be processed, and with too many processors to turn out a viable product.
But old habits died hard. The intelligence community remained intact, a super-agency overtop its own bureaucracy or not, and its segments talked to each other. As always, they savored what the insiders knew as opposed to those who knew it not and wished to keep it that way.
The National Security Agency's principal means of communication with the Central Intelligence Agency was essentially to say This is interesting, what do you think? That was because each of the two agencies held a different corporate ethos. They talked differently. They thought differently. And insofar as they acted at all, they acted differently.
But at least they thought in parallel directions, not divergent ones. On the whole, CIA had the better analysts, and NSA was better at gathering information. There were exceptions to both general rules; and in both cases, the really talented individuals knew one another, and, among themselves, they mostly spoke the same language.
That became clear the next morning with the interagency cable traffic. A senior analyst at Fort Meade headed it as FLASH-traffic to his counterpart at Langley. That ensured that it would be noticed at The Campus. Jerry Rounds saw it