Matt Potter - We Are All Targets: How Renegade Hackers Invented Cyber War and Unleashed an Age of Global Chaos

London, 2000

I know its them straight away, even from up here on the second floor, looking down through the window onto the hubbub of the crowded Soho street. The two men whose job it is to take me in for questioning stop, look around, and go through what look like previsit ritualschecking their pockets for paperwork, looking at watches, making a last call on the mobile. If their dark-gray suits, mackintoshes, and black brogues didnt scream intelligence services loud enough, their movements do. These are no office workers on lunch break.

They look up toward my corner window.

Now they are threading toward me between tourists and taxis, now standing at the curb outside Planet Hollywood, now crossing Coventry Street, clogged with lunchtime crowds. I twist my neck, look down at an angle. They are directly below my window on Oxendon Street. Now they are entering the dark shadow of my building.

I didnt get much of a warning, only a tip-off from a journalist contact that word had gotten around about the documents on my computer. Oh, he said, almost as an afterthought, and, by the way, MI5 are on their way over to chat to you about that.

In the few seconds left before my world changes, I turn my face from the window and survey the office. Its a normal, busy workplace. My workmates are working, typing, making calls, making tea, having meetings. Nobody else here on the editorial floor of my magazine office knows anything, not yet.

I work for a magazine. Its a branded travel thing for an airline, and Im pretty junior on staff, but its experience, and the free trips are okay, and they help me keep change coming with journalistic side hustles, like some reporting trips Ive taken to Eastern Europe. My employers know whats going on, but so long as I keep it out of their lives and dont start making a spectacle of myself, everyones happy. What I shouldnt do is anything that would embarrass them. Such as, for example, having two men from MI5 come to interrogate me on suspicion of espionage on a Wednesday morning.

As I survey the calm beige-and-gray editorial office, its pods and cubicles, designers in headphones, and slowly dying succulents, one trip I made a couple of years ago is bothering me. Red flags I never saw at the time, unfurling and flapping at the edges of my vision.

I have a minute left, maybe two if the receptionist is on the phone or talking to a motorbike courier when the MI5 men come in.

Some discoveries turn on coincidences, tiny shafts of light, the smallest of accidental details. Something like opening the wrong email. It had begun like any other day in the office. I was on a deadline and at my desk early, and the strip lighting only made the gray outside the windows feel murkier. March was bone-dry, cold, and dark, as if London still hadnt fully recovered from its millennium-night hangover after almost four months. There was the familiar five-note incoming email sound. Id been expecting a load of copy to arrive, so while the name wasnt familiar, that wasnt unusual. Click. Open.

Hello.

I am Anti-Smyser-1.

Weird name. I still wasnt concentrating. Outside, a sweeper truck whirred past the building. Scroll down.

Thus_001

Anti-Smyser

This virus is an alteration of a virus which was designed to delete all files from ones C: drive on Dec 13th.

Application.Options.VirusProtection = False

Shit. Garbled text, reams and reams of the stuff. Then something that stopped me dead:

ANNEX E TO OPLAN 31402 DATED 23 DEC 99: RULES OF ENGAGEMENT FOR LAND OPERATIONS

INTRODUCTION. The Rules of Engagement (ROE) contained in this compendium are for the use of the Kosovo Force (KFOR) land forces, when authorised in accordance with the procedure described in paragraph 3.a. (2). of Annex E.

KFOR: NATOs army in Kosovo.

Scanning down now, faster, words jumping out. Deadly force. Electronic jamming of enemy signals. Military Restricted Areas. War criminals.

I was concentrating now all right. These were military plans, commands issued to NATO troops currently on the ground in Kosovo and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia. The seventy-eight-day bombardment aimed at making Serb forces withdraw might have been over, but the ground occupation, the firefights, the round-ups, the armed peacekeeping, the hunt for war criminals, the shoot-to-kills, the time of sabotage and terror had barely begun.

These documents seemed to cover all that. They contained endless sets of commands, going way beyond the public briefings NATO or the Pentagon had been issuing to the press detailing the terms and goals of the mission, beyond what President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, or Prime Minister Tony Blair had been saying in front of the TV cameras. Even as President Clinton and his aides talked of zero-casualty operations, these plans detailed under what circumstances US and allied soldiers should shoot to kill. In some cases, they seemed to directly undermine the presidents public statements.

The commands came and came and came. Here were the circumstances in which deadly force could be used against unidentified attackers; here were instructions to NATO troops on apprehending suspected war criminals for handover to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; here were specific commands setting out the procedure for riot control to media transmissions; authorizations for attack helicopters, tanks, order on the laying of mines.