“Not recently.” He gave me a look to check if I was joking. I let him know I wasn’t.
“The kids don’t have much by way of operational security. Loads of ’em use the same chat software they use with their mates, all in the clear, all ingested and indexed on Xkeyscore. Reading the intercepts is like being forced to listen to teenagers gossiping on a crowded bus: dirty jokes about mullahs whose dicks are so short they break their nose when they walk into a wall with a stiffie; trash talk about who’s real hard jihadi, who’s a jihobbyist, complaints about their parents and lovesick notes about their girlfriends and boyfriends, and loads of flirting. It’s no different to what we talked about when I was a boy, all bravado and rubbish.”
“When you were a boy, you presumably didn’t talk about the necessity of wiping out all the kaffirs and establishing a caliphate, though.”
“Fair point. Plenty of times, though, we fantasized about blowing up the old Comprehensive, especially come exams, and some of my mates would honestly have left a pipe-bomb under the stands when their teams were playing their arch-rivals, if they thought they’d have got away with it. Reading those transcripts, all I can think is, ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’
“But they’re them and I’m me, and maybe one of ’em will get some truly bad ideas in his foolish head, and if I can catch him before then—” My visitor broke off then, staring at the fire. He opened and shut his mouth several times, clearly unable to find the words.
I gave him a moment and then prompted, “But you found something?”
He returned from whatever distant mental plain he’d been slogging over. “They wanted a big corpus to do information cascade analysis on. Part of a research project with one of the big unis, I won’t say which, but you can guess, I’m sure. They’d done a new rev on the stream analysis, they were able to detect a single user across multiple streams and signals from the upstream intercepts—I mean to say, they could tell which clicks and messages on the fiber-taps came from a given user, even if he was switching computers or IP addresses—they had a new tool for linking mobile data-streams to intercepts from laptops, which gives us location. They were marking it for long-term retention, indefinite retention, really.
“I—”
Here the fellow had to stop and look away again, and it was plain that he was reliving some difficult issue that he’d wrestled with his conscience over. “I was in charge of reviewing the truthed social graphs, sanity-checking the way that the algorithm believed their chain of command went against what I could see in the intercepts. But the reality is that those intercepts came from teenagers in a chat room. They didn’t have a chain of command—what the algorithm fingered as a command structure was really just the fact that some of them were better at arguing than others. One supposed lieutenant in the bunch was really the best comedian, the one who told the jokes they all repeated. To the algorithm, though, it looked like a command structure: subject emits a comm, timing shows that the comm cascades through an inner circle—his mates—to a wider circle. To a half-smart computer, this teenager in Leeds looked like Osama Junior.
“I told them, of course. These were children with some bad ideas and too much braggadocio. Wannabes. If they were guilty of something, it was of being idiots. But for the researchers, this was even more exciting. The fact that their algorithm had detected an information cascade where there was no actual command structure meant that it had found a latent structure. It was like they set out knowing what they were going to find, and then whatever they found, they twisted until it fit their expectations.