nothing more than unauthorized penetration of computer systems. It was an action, not an attribute that could be spotted across a room at a party, and thus, like the group he sometimes worked with, he remained anonymous. The same skills he employed as a hacker were in great demand in his work as a computer technician, and thus he commanded a significant salary from Boeing, complete with a secret security clearance.
His initial foray into government employment had been with the CIA, where he’d applied to work in a cell developing some decidedly nefarious computer applications, something at the time he’d thought would be right up his alley, using his skills for the greater good in defense of the nation and gaining a sense of self-worth he couldn’t obtain by writing code designed to increase advertising sales. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pass the lifestyle polygraph test, which was designed to determine if there was a risk in exposing an applicant to national secrets. Apparently, he had been deemed risky and had been denied employment. Luckily for him, there was no such thing as cross talk among the divisions of the government, and Boeing didn’t require anything more than a background check, which had come up pristine.
Booth finished the initial survey for his shift and sat down, exhaling hard in an attempt to see his breath in the cold air but coming up empty. Having nothing else to do, he turned on his personal laptop after inserting a thumb drive with a boot segment that would control the laptop’s operating system. He placed his thumb on a small biometric scanner at the base of the keyboard and unlocked the system. Wading through various partitions, he pulled up an executable file called POLARIS.
He absently tapped the interface, checking for any glitches from his programming the night before, proud of his chosen name. Polaris was the North Star, which was the old-school, analog GPS that had guided navigation for centuries. He thought the name very apt, as the program would revert the world back to using it.
The executable file seemed to work fine and, in truth, would have worked fine a week ago. All he was doing now was refining the aesthetics of the interface while he waited to inject it into the GPS constellation, changing it from code only a computer maven could understand into an intuitive screen that anybody could use.
Booth hadn’t come into Boeing with any intent to harm. He wasn’t a mole who had spent decades wheedling his way into the inner circle. He was just a guy with expertise in computers who needed a day job so that he could execute his night activities and still eat. He worked so that he could
work,
righting the wrongs of the world as he saw them. That notion had changed as he became aware of the extent to which the GPS system controlled government and corporate actions. The satellite constellation was a sterile machine that did nothing but send out streams of ones and zeros. But the people who used the signals did some pretty nasty things.
Booth had worked with the hacktivist group Anonymous on multiple occasions and had even taken leave to protest Wall Street during the heady days of the Occupy movement—wearing the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask that was an Anonymous hallmark—but those had always been separate and distinct from his work at Boeing. It wasn’t until the United States government began killing its own citizens in Predator drone strikes that he decided to act.
The solution had been elegant in its simplicity, and he’d often wondered why he didn’t think of it before. He’d marched on Wall Street using analog methods when the digital destruction of that enterprise was staring him in the face the entire time.
GPS had been created solely as a military application, and as such it had been designed with safeguards in mind. Since the satellites blindly launched signals continuously, the military was worried that the very position, navigation, and timing features that would
His initial foray into government employment had been with the CIA, where he’d applied to work in a cell developing some decidedly nefarious computer applications, something at the time he’d thought would be right up his alley, using his skills for the greater good in defense of the nation and gaining a sense of self-worth he couldn’t obtain by writing code designed to increase advertising sales. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pass the lifestyle polygraph test, which was designed to determine if there was a risk in exposing an applicant to national secrets. Apparently, he had been deemed risky and had been denied employment. Luckily for him, there was no such thing as cross talk among the divisions of the government, and Boeing didn’t require anything more than a background check, which had come up pristine.
Booth finished the initial survey for his shift and sat down, exhaling hard in an attempt to see his breath in the cold air but coming up empty. Having nothing else to do, he turned on his personal laptop after inserting a thumb drive with a boot segment that would control the laptop’s operating system. He placed his thumb on a small biometric scanner at the base of the keyboard and unlocked the system. Wading through various partitions, he pulled up an executable file called POLARIS.
He absently tapped the interface, checking for any glitches from his programming the night before, proud of his chosen name. Polaris was the North Star, which was the old-school, analog GPS that had guided navigation for centuries. He thought the name very apt, as the program would revert the world back to using it.
The executable file seemed to work fine and, in truth, would have worked fine a week ago. All he was doing now was refining the aesthetics of the interface while he waited to inject it into the GPS constellation, changing it from code only a computer maven could understand into an intuitive screen that anybody could use.
Booth hadn’t come into Boeing with any intent to harm. He wasn’t a mole who had spent decades wheedling his way into the inner circle. He was just a guy with expertise in computers who needed a day job so that he could execute his night activities and still eat. He worked so that he could
work,
righting the wrongs of the world as he saw them. That notion had changed as he became aware of the extent to which the GPS system controlled government and corporate actions. The satellite constellation was a sterile machine that did nothing but send out streams of ones and zeros. But the people who used the signals did some pretty nasty things.
Booth had worked with the hacktivist group Anonymous on multiple occasions and had even taken leave to protest Wall Street during the heady days of the Occupy movement—wearing the ubiquitous Guy Fawkes mask that was an Anonymous hallmark—but those had always been separate and distinct from his work at Boeing. It wasn’t until the United States government began killing its own citizens in Predator drone strikes that he decided to act.
The solution had been elegant in its simplicity, and he’d often wondered why he didn’t think of it before. He’d marched on Wall Street using analog methods when the digital destruction of that enterprise was staring him in the face the entire time.
GPS had been created solely as a military application, and as such it had been designed with safeguards in mind. Since the satellites blindly launched signals continuously, the military was worried that the very position, navigation, and timing features that would
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