By David Gewirtz
So, what happens when one of your favorite submarine novelists misses the boat when it comes to describing technology? When it's a summer and you're moving and it's sunny outside, you grab onto his error with all your might, because otherwise you'd need to think up another story idea. In this eventually useful article, we tell you what the writer got wrong and what it might mean for your own secret dealings.
And thus, we have begun another deeply informative article in OutlookPower.
The favorite submarine novelist I'm going to pick on this week is named Joe Buff. Really. Or at least that's the name he and his publishers use on the cover of his books. Personally, I suspect his real name is secretly something like Morris Finklestein and his agent did a Hail Mary to save the guy's career.
But I digress.
Buff, regardless of whatever his real name might be, writes really good submarine battle books, a genre I like more than chocolate. In his most recent book, Straights of Power, there's some bad guys and a sub and some secret agents going behind enemy lines. At one point, one of the main characters has to communicate secretly from an Axis-of-Evil country using what Buff describes as a modern-day dead drop.
Here's how Buff writes it:
Felix found an unoccupied pay terminal, and inserted his calling card. He went to an email account whose ISP code, account name, and password he'd memorized. The account had been created by an in-country, CIA-connected agent whom Parker told Felix he had no need to know more about. He didn't check for emails, but went directly to the drafts folder. It was empty. None of his two other teams, the men who'd hailed a taxi or the men who'd taken a bus, had checked in yet. Felix changed the account password to something only the SEAL team knew, to prevent unwanted intrusion if the in-country agent was compromised. Felix walked back to his car.
Different people accessing the same email account and leaving messages for each other as unsent drafts was the latest version of an age-old spycraft tool: the dead drop, a place no snooping third party would think to look. Because the drafts were never sent, they were never scrutinized by the government's software that monitored email content -- and they couldn't be intercepted in transit by covert adversaries either. The messages are never in transit.
Felix, by the way, is a bad-ass Navy SEAL type. Unfortunately, Felix, his spy-bosses, and Joe Buff himself are all wrong. The messages are definitely in transit.
