The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [64]
Van knew that the CCIAB had many pressing problems on its agenda. These were serious political challenges innate to any reform in computer security: the distribution of security-certification logos, the establishment of baseline security standards, a wise judgment of the regulatory costs of compliance, the daunting difficulties of online patch distribution, the rating of potential flaws and vulnerabilities, even the awful discovery of certain flaws “too expensive to fix” . . . The list went on and on. Basically, these problems had one commonality: they couldn’t be programmed away or fixed by engineers. They could only be solved through sincere, extensive, fully briefed bargaining and negotiation among the power players. That was why nothing much had ever happened to resolve those problems.
This whole situation was the very opposite of his grandfather’s rules for technical progress—especially, that burning need to stay close to the machinery.
The KH-13 was machinery. Van thought that he could shine there.
Van knew that fixing a spy satellite was a long-shot. Realistically speaking, how could one computer-science professor cure an ailing multibillion-dollar spacecraft? But Van also knew that the job was not hopeless. Such things sometimes happened in real life. For instance: Richard Feynman was just a physicist. But Feynman had dropped a chunk of rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water, and he had shown the whole world, on TV, how a space shuttle could blow up.
If Van somehow solved Hickok’s zillion-dollar problem, that would prove that he, Derek Vandeveer, had a top-notch, Richard Feynman kind of class.
Van had sacrificed a lot to get his role in public service. He’d given up his happy home, his family life, his civilian career, his peace of mind, and a whole, whole lot of his money. Van wanted to see real results from all that sacrifice. He wanted to do something vital.
The KH-13 was probably the grandest and most secret gizmo that the USA possessed. If Van somehow found the KH-13’s busted O-ring, then he would be giving America the ability to photograph the entire planet, in visible and infrared, day and night, digitally, repeatedly, on a three-inch scale. Yes, that really mattered.
Careful not to mention the advice he had gotten from Tony, Van broached the matter with Jeb. Jeb quickly understood the implications. Yes, it would obviously get the CCIAB a lot of kudos if they could technically outsmart the Air Force, the Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, and the host of federal contractors who had been working on satellites since the days of the V-2 rocket. It would make the CCIAB look like geniuses and it was just the kind of stunt that really impressed congressmen. Weighed against that was the scary prospect of getting in over their heads, then getting blamed for it.
So Jeb, in his own turn, talked the matter over with some old-school technical buddies from DARPA and the Defense Department’s Office of Special Projects.
A plan emerged: a firewall strategy. Jeb would protect the CCIAB by moving Van one step out from the organization. For satellite work, Jeb had Van “loaned out” from the CCIAB to the “Transformational Communications Architecture Office.” The TCAO was a joint effort of the Defense Information Systems Agency, and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence.
The “Transformational Communications Architecture Office” was an easy outfit for Van to work for, because, basically, the Office did not exist. The Office was just an empty box in one of Donald Rumsfeld’s ambitious DoD “Transformation” schemes. And even the NRO and NSA were terrified of Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld had once been the boss of the futurists at RAND. Rumsfeld had a horrible knack for asking simple, embarrassing questions that nobody had ever thought about before. Nobody wanted to cross him.
Rumsfeld seemed kind of okay about cyberwar issues. Whenever computer