Insider X (12 page)

Na glanced at the big gray wall that was visible just beyond a cove of trees.  It was just like Huiliang said.

The rest you’ll figure out by yourself.

18

Undisclosed location / Chengdu

THE APARTMENT WAS fast approaching its spoilage date.  Marks saw Mei look at her timepiece.

“We need to leave soon,” Mei said.

It was heavy stuff Johnny Two-cakes had just dumped on them. 
Everything we thought we knew, we now realize is a lie.

Man hadn’t been kidding.  Marks thought he’d seen it all in this world of shadows.  He’d had his eyes opened when he joined Lip at the SCS after his time in the Marines.  Marks had done three tours as a member of FORECON, the United States Marine Corps Force Reconnaissance detachment.  He’d seen enough for a lifetime doing what Force Recon does best: silence and stealth and being first eyes to observe the enemy and paint targets.  He’d seen his share of the ugly when things went sideways.  He’d also seen his share of the big weird.

This was definitely in that second camp.  The SCS had given him a bellyful of this kind of stuff.  The ‘Special Collection Service’ was the NSA’s go-to unit when they wanted boots on the ground.  They’d recruited Marks, even though he wasn’t your conventional “shadow warrior”.  Not like Lip, at least, master of the dark cyber arts.  Marks’s talents lay elsewhere.  He’d had his unique place in the SCS.  Just like Lip had. 

Past tense, of course.  Marks kept forgetting that little detail.  Lip and he were “consultants” now.  Don’t ask him the difference—not much had changed.  Uncle Sammy still picked up the tab, and they still did the same old same old.

Being in the SCS on the grade and step program or being paid as a consultant (whatever ‘job descriptor’ floated the boat) was a direct window into the big weird. 
No Such Agency
was known for it.  They were the holder of all those dirty little secrets the world never saw.

But this, Marks had to admit, was a new one.  He hadn’t seen this one coming.  But it made perfect sense now.  Explained a lot of things.  Like all those whackos out there for one.

Johnny Two-cakes closed the laptop.  He had gone to several sites that covered the news online.  Sites like MSN.com, Yahoo, the websites for The New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, NBC News; he’d hit a bunch of the majors.  He’d also hit sites like Wired.com, Fortune.com, Reddit, and a few blogs Marks had never heard of.  But it wasn’t the articles or topic discussions on those sites that he was interested in.  It was the ‘comments’ sections of those articles, the chatter by the readers, those piping in to give their opinions.

He’d had Marks and Lip read a few.  Some of the comments were normal.  What you’d expect, if you asked a cross section of folks to give their take on those particular articles.  But within that mix of folks there was a large percentage of hot heads, whackos, racists, hardliners, and other chumps who only seemed to see things in black and white or oxygenated red.  Normal fare for the Internet, where everyone seemed to be a nut job spouting their hate.

“Looking at it now, it should have been obvious to us years ago,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “Simply from a mathematical standpoint.  Median ratios and statistical percentages.  An article gets posted and within an hour it gets over one thousand comments.  While the article next to it gets three comments or none in the same time frame.  Those variances, ratios, were not organic.  They were unnatural.  In a normal pool, looking at reader responses, we’d expect to see closer ratios across the spectrum.

“Take two articles on the same exact topic.  If all else was even—readership numbers, article length, tone and slant of the writing, ease of posting a comment—we should see close to the same number of comments for those articles.  Same or similar ratios.  So many readers will yield so many comments.”  Johnny Two-cakes took out a pen and scribbled on a scrap of paper:

x comment(s) / 20,000x readers

“Just an example,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “One comment for every twenty thousand readers.  If that was the normal average, we would expect an article that had five comments to have had about one hundred thousand readers, give or take.  Now that’s just positing what the average ratio might be.  Like scientists sometimes do before experiments.  Set hypotheses of what to expect, which they seek to prove or disprove.

“Maybe the average ratio is actually one comment for every ten thousand readers.  Or one comment for every one hundred thousand readers.  Whatever the true number—whatever the correct ‘normal’ average ratio is—that average ratio should remain consistent and be easy to determine.

“It would prove itself out as we enlarged the sample pool.  The bigger the sample pool we examined, looking at dozens or hundreds of those types of identical scenarios, that range should narrow into a ‘normal’ median band.  A normal ratio.  A consistent ratio.  But that is certainly not the case.

“The same AP article posted on MSN.com might spark three thousand comments; while the identical article on Yahoo.com will have no comments.  Even compensating for the variance in readership between those sites, those disparate ratios shout out one thing… and one thing only.  Manipulation.”  Johnny Two-cakes scribbled some more on his scrap of paper:

1/167 vs. 0/500,000

“Now those ratios show that example, I just mentioned.  I’ll explain.  On MSN.com, if we assume half a million readers see that article, the ratio works out to be about one comment for every one hundred and sixty-seven readers.  That’s the math.  Half a million divided by three thousand is one sixty seven, when rounded up.”  He pointed at the scrap of paper.

1/167

“While on Yahoo we have no comments, and the same number of readers.”  He pointed again at the scrap of paper.

0/500,000

“Doesn’t compute.  I equate it to walking into a casino, and there are one or two slot machines constantly going bing bing bing, dumping out coins, while all the other slot machines are staying silent.  And that scenario repeats itself.  Those two slot machines constantly paying out—churning out comments—at a disproportionate rate compared to all the other slot machines.

“From a forensic accounting standpoint it’s obvious that those two machines have been tampered with.  This is what we’ve been seeing.  Everywhere we look on the Web.  Any site we begin to monitor, we see the same signs of gross manipulation.  Red flags in regards to ratios between the same kinds of articles, or red flags in other areas, like in frequency and timing.  Batches of comments, for example.  Where they all come in a row, during a short window of time, and then stop, even though the article is still in the news circuit and still getting plenty of readers.”

Lip moved forward on his chair.  “This is just like the Twitter and Facebook explosion during the Arab Spring,” Lip said.  “But you’re saying this is going on all the time?”

“Tweet tweet and like like,” Mei said.  “By the way, that was you guys, wasn’t it?”

Marks smirked.  Couldn’t slip much past Mei. 

The Arab Spring.  Lip had yapped his ear off about it.  Big ‘ol thing that started in December of 2010 and carried on into 2011.

Watershed time.  When the role of social networking sites really came to a head.  Showed the power of “being connected”.  How tweets and posts could rally whole nations and start revolutions.  The media unwittingly helped propagate the myth with all their photos of demonstrators holding up their cell phones in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, or wherever the next uprising was being held.  All those “wired freedom fighters” taking part in the Twitter Revolution.

The way the spin docs spun it, you’d think Twitter alone was what caused those revolutions.  It hadn’t dawned on any those reporters, or the folks reading the articles, that most people in Tunisia made less than $400 a month, and that’s only if they were lucky enough to be employed.  Few of the general population could afford smartphones.  Let alone a cell phone service plan that had Internet access.  But all it took was those photos of people—just a handful of them—holding their phones to add credence to the story.

To make people believe.  Buy into it.

Millions of tweets by “freedom fighters” had flooded the Web.  All those people in Tunisia were connected.  Part of the online community.  They had Twitter handles.  Facebook pages.  Their voices would not be denied.

“It was mostly the Israelis,” Lip said.

“Not you guys?” Mei said.  “Don’t fib me now.”

“Maybe a little us,” Lip said.

The ugly truth was it was all a big snow job.  Those tweets with their “geotags” that appeared to all be coming from ground zero were mostly being orchestrated by a massive machine coming from several key players far removed from the action.

That machine was attempting to move the collective consciousness.  Augment the desired message.  Magnify small fragmented isolated voices in those regions ten-hundred fold.  Make that one guy with a cell phone who was actually part of the fight into an army.  His one tweet became ten thousand.  Ten tweets became one-hundred thousand.

Social networking sites were a double-edged sword.  They held the power to influence, make nations foam at the mouth for radical change, incite mobs to act.  The NSA had tried to capitalize on such opportunities with mixed success—push the message, tip the scales whatever direction best suited Uncle Sammy’s needs.  But it was obvious now, looking at what Johnny Two-cakes had just shared, that the NSA was being schooled. 

They were thinking small.  These guys, however, were thinking big.  Real big.

Godzilla-size big.

“Take the numbers again,” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “There are slightly more than seven billion humans on the planet.  Facebook reached the one billion mark just last year.  According to that company’s corporate line only 1.5 percent of those accounts are deemed undesirable or spam accounts.  1.5 percent.  That’s what they claim.  Forget the fact that over ten percent of all Facebook’s reported monthly users are non-humans.  Meaning pets, objects or brands.  And also forget the fact that anyone can set up an account.  Or two.  Or a thousand.  This is just a numbers game.  And Twitter is not far behind Facebook in terms of total members.  They doubled their total member count in less than a year.  Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat… I could name dozens of others.  Many of those social networking sites are seeing exponential growth in membership.  More members for all those sites means a bigger more profitable bottom line.  They could delete the fake ones, or at least try to, by why bother?  It doesn’t make good business sense.”

“Not to mention,” Lip said, “it sounds pretty cool to say one in seven folks on the planet are on Facebook.”

Johnny Two-cakes nodded.  “Regardless of the fact that many of the main population centers on earth, like China with their censors, and impoverished areas of Africa, India, and other parts of Asia don’t even have access to Facebook.”

“Not me.  I’m on Facebook,” Mei said.  “Twitter too.”

“Ivona Tinkle,” Lip said.

Ivona Tinkle
, Mei’s tongue-in-cheek online Twitter handle.  Woman had almost as many followers as Lady Gaga.  Marks noticed Mei was looking at her timepiece again.

“Bingo fuel?” Marks said.

“What?” Mei said.

“Do we need to go?” Marks said.

“Unfortunately, yes, in a moment.  I do so enjoy these times with you guys.”

“So, what’s your call?” Lip said to Johnny Two-cakes.  “How much of this is fake?”

“Do you mean what we can verify as being fake?” Johnny Two-cakes said.  “Or what we suspect is fake?”

“Give us both,” Lip said.

“Thirty-two percent and ninety-five percent,” Johnny Two-cakes said.

“That sounds about right,” Marks said.

Lip looked at him and smirked.  “How would you know?”

“I’m not on Facebook, don’t have a Twitter handle, and I’ve never left a comment on any article I’ve ever read,” Marks said.

“That’s because you don’t read,” Lip said.

“Made my point,” Marks said.

Mei laughed.  “Except for ‘Stanley the Caveman’.”  She gave Marks a coy smile.

“So only five percent of what you showed us is probably legit,” Lip said.  “If that’s true, that’s pretty amazing.”

Marks had to agree.  Everyone knew that the Internet was full of crap.  But to think that approximately 95 out of 100 online profiles were just plain fake was definitely out there in the big weird camp.

Not that it should come as any surprise.  You add money, power and greed to the equation and you’ve got the three perfect drivers for exponential growth in the fakery arena.  It was no secret that PACs used fakery to push their political messages.  They created hundreds and thousands of fake online profiles to flood the blogosphere with their spin.  Then there were the organized crime syndicates with their various nefarious operations.  Add the bit players doing their credit card theft, identity theft, fishing scams, trolling, what have you, and all of that added up to a big substantial fakery mess.

But that’s not what Johnny Two-cakes was talking about here.  All of that added up was still chump change in comparison to this.  This facility… this Facility 67096 had effectively taken over the Internet.  They owned it.  Or at least their voice did.  They could drown everything else out.  Push what they wanted pushed.