Mad Dog - First Strike Ch. 03

3 - Dirty Pictures:

"What the fuck!" VJ spat. "Paper jam? PAPER JAM! What's it mean paper jam? There's no paper jam because there's no sodding paper in sodding machine! I mean, that's what I was trying to do, load the bloody paper."

"You all right?" I ambled over to him.

"I swear, one of these days I'm gonna smash this load of shite to pieces!" He snarled through his clenched teeth.

"You and me both sunshine," I told him.

Forbes, a refugee from a Buckingham Palace garden party saw the commotion and sensing an excuse to avoid work joined us.

"You know it's just lucky I'm not armed," the posh boy aimed his forefinger like a pistol and mimed double tapping the printer. "Last week I was trying to print something, and this printer error message kept coming up: 'printing is not supported on this printer'. I mean c'mon, it's a freaking printer, if it doesn't support printing what does it do, play the grand piano?"

I took the documents that I'd eventually printed and shuffled off. VJ followed me and cornered me in my cubicle. He looked troubled.

"Dude, we're going to have to go to Bletchley," he said urgently, "I took another look at the stuff on that iPhone, I can't show you on a monitor out here it's nasty, I mean really nasty..."

"OK," I nodded, "let's go"

Bletchley, short for Bletchley Park, - the British World War two code breaking centre is a small meeting room that has one thing going for it. No windows. Not that anywhere else in an underground bunker complex has windows onto the world outside. Other meeting rooms down here, however, have interior glass walls, the small meeting room had once been a store room in the original ROTOR Bunker, hence no windows to permit the bored and curious in the Bunker's open plan office gawking in at us.

VJ inserted a USB drive into his laptop. A big flat screen monitor on the wall behind him flickered into life.

"Anya's starting bid is set at US$3,000," Vik read the listing out loud, "it's like something from eBay."

"If this sort of thing starts popping up on the world's favourite online auction site the world has officially turned to shit," I growled. "And three grands a piss poor price to pay. You'd think a human being would be worth more than that."

The girl was young, blonde, oh, and stark naked. She was also tied up.

"You can see why we couldn't look at this in the office," VJ said. "I mean dude! Look at the images, bondage, torture, even a golden shower..."

His words tailed of. VJ shook his head saddly.

"Yeah, you are right old son, this is nasty," I paused and then added cautiously, "and it came off the iPhone I gave you?"

"Yeah," he nodded. "This is an advert that's been downloaded, but there's other stuff too. That video you told me about - and a couple of others where he really seems to be getting off on physically abusing women. There wasn't anything about insider trading, but this... it's backed up with a link to a site on the dark web."

"Is it the real deal?" I asked, "as in a proper slave auction."

Vik was silent for a long moment. He looked at me, there was the briefest flicker of uncertainty in his eyes.

"I suspect so," he said cautiously.

"You suspect so?" I replied. "Mate, we'd better have something more certain than suspicions before we go to Dirty Harriet."

"I did some basic checking on the images," he said, "they contained no identifying metadata, and a reverse image search didn't come up with any results. I can't guarantee that it's not just some random porn pic, you know. But based on what I've done so far, I doubt it."

I looked away from the screen and focussed on the A3 poster on the opposite wall. It had once been a motivational poster, but somebody had replaced it with a demotivational version. It featured an image of a line of four Emperor Penguins against a frigid backdrop. Three were trudging along upright, one was on its stomach.

The caption read: "MEDIOCRITY - Just because we accept you as you are doesn't mean we've abandoned hope that you'll improve."

Nobody was certain who'd put it on the wall, but suspicion fell on VJ. It always would, he was the Bunker's resident prankster.

"What about the website?" I asked, "I suppose you can't track who's behind it because it's on the dark web."

"The dark web," VJ chuckled as he prepared to lecture me on a subject close to his heart. "I love the way you non-technical types talk about the dark web like it's something secret, unpenetrable. What you really mean is hidden services or dot-onion sites. They're SUPPOSED to allow both the website's developer and user remain anonymous."

"Supposed to?" I asked, "meaning you can find out who posted the site, right?"

"Of course I can, it's what I do all day here," his grin became wider still. "Most, if not all, dark web servers use Tor, ah, that's software for enabling anonymous communication."

He was effortlessly patronising me. When talking about IT Vik often fell into a trap shared by other nerdy types; he assumed that the person he was talking to was technologically illiterate and pitched his conversation at the same level as a grandmother reading a storybook to a three-year-old. I opted to ignore his tone and nodded to encourage him to keep talking.

"Interestingly Tor stands for The Onion Router," he mused. "Anyhow, Tor directs internet traffic through a worldwide overlay network to conceal a user's location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis. Well, that's what it's supposed to do."

He gave a smirk and raised his little finger to his lips and pouted.

I'd had enough. All I wanted was a simple yes or no answer to my question. I was about to have a serious sense of humour failure.

"Just bloody tell me, can you find out who's behind this website?"

VJ smiled slowly. If I wanted my answer, I was going to have to suffer. I'd have to bite down on my impatience and hear him out.

"I'm coming to that," he said. "Tor uses Hidden Service Directories or HiS Dirs. These are nodes in the Tor network that are, essentially, the first point of contact for the site and its users. Now a dot onion site is assigned six HiS Dir nodes. And therein lies the problem. See, the algorithm that assigns HiS Dirs is predictable and can be exploited."

"So, the answer's yes then..."

VJ interrupted me by holding up his hand.

"Be patience Grasshopper, and all will be explained by the master," he smirked again. "It's really easy, well, for someone like me, to become the dot onion HiS Dir. At that point I can see the whole network and I'm able to correlate the time a user connects to it and the time he or she - in this case he - connects to the dot onion site. This effectively deanonymizes the user."

"Deanonymizes?" I raised an eyebrow questioningly, "are you sure that's a real word?"

My only retaliation was to take a pot shot at his crappy grammar. Petty isn't it?

"The answer to your questions are, yes, I can find out who posted that website," he said, "and I haven't got the foggiest if deanonymizes is a real word. More to the point, I don't care whether it's a real word or not."

"That's all you had to say mate," I stood up, "you'd have had me at yes."

I left the meeting room.