Tom Clancy's Net Force 6-10 Read Online Free PDF

do before you could do it. He was getting closer to that, but he was not there yet. He would be, eventually.
    And the money he was making as Field Operations Head of CyberNation’s security force was very good—enough that after a couple more years, he could retire, go back to Rio, and study and teach The Game full-time. Work out all day, screw all night, sleep on the weekends. What more could a man ask for?

    Net Force HQ Quantico, Virginia

    In their third meeting since the electronic attack on the net and web, Alex Michaels and his team had figured out the easy part of the Five-W-and-One-H question: They knew what, when, and how. What they didn’t know was: who, why, and where they were.
    Now in the conference room with Jay Gridley, Lieutenant Julio Fernandez, and Major Joseph Leffel, the acting head of the military arm, Michaels raised his eyebrows at the others. General John Howard would be arriving later in the day. It had taken some talk to get him to agree to come back, and he had to go home and tell his wife face-to-face before he would agree to it. But Michaels had had a bad feeling about this, and he wanted Howard—who had proved himself more than a few times—back on the team, at least until this was cleared up. He had a hunch it might come to guns, and when and if that happened, he wanted his best man leading the troops.
    “Gentlemen?”
    “Nothing new, boss,” Jay said. “My guys are back-walking every trail, but so far the pirates covered their asses pretty good. The regular feebs’ Carnivore and NSA’s snoopware have come up zip. The hackers had to be coordinating stuff on-line, there’s way too much going on, so we’re looking for ways they hid it. We’ve got random sampling of JPEGS, GIFS, TIFFS, PICTS, and all the common sound files attached to e-mail running through the stegaware plexes, but so far, nothing.”
    Fernandez said, “Somebody want to translate that for the computer illiterate among us? Meaning me.”
    Michaels grinned. “Jay is talking about steganography. Hiding things in plain sight.”
    Jay, already tapping away at the keyboard of his flatscreen, said, “Check it out.”
    A holoproj shimmered into view over the flatscreen. It was a picture of the Mona Lisa. “What do you see?”
    “A famous painting of somebody who probably didn’t want to smile too big ’cause she had bad teeth?” Fernandez said.
    “But that’s all,” Jay said. “However, we touch a button, presto! and look again.”
    The image melted, and left several words floating in the air: “Up yours, feds!”
    Fernandez looked at Jay.
    “We got this off a steganography website run by a ten-year-old kid.
    “The word means ‘covered writing.’ It goes back to the Greeks,” Jay said, “though the Chinese and the Egyptians and Native Americans all did variations of it. Since the Greeks gave us the word, here’s how an early release worked: Say Sprio wanted to send a secret message to Zorba, so what he did was, he had a slave’s head shaved, tattooed the message on the scalp, then waited for the slave’s hair to grow back. Then he sent the slave to his bud, who shaved his head again. Slave didn’t even know what it said. Even if he could read, he wouldn’t be able to see it.”
    “Clever. But kind of a slow process,” Fernandez said. “How long it take for the hair to grow back enough to cover it? Five, six weeks?”
    “Those were the good old days. Um. Anyway, you can do much the same with electronic pictures. They are made up of pixels, millions of them in some cases, and some aren’t as important as others. Without getting too technical, you can take a standard RGB—that’s red, green, blue—image and, with a little manipulation, hide all kinds of information bits in it without affecting what a human eye can see. If you run it through the right program, the hidden stuff shows up.
    “So, you send an e-mail addressed to your mother with a picture of your beautiful two-year-old boy, and right