Yesterday morning at nine, I was visited by Harold Scheisskopf, Political Strategy Coordinator with the National Republican Congressional Committee. He projected his usual veneer of smug, supercilious Skull and Bones pretension, but beneath it, I readily detected a current of distinct unease.
“Nice [expletive]-kicking we gave the Democrats, huh?” Scheisskopf opened as he assumed the seat directly to the right of my desk and leaned in. “By now, I bet your left-wing buddies have been crying in their beer for three solid weeks.”
“Not only that,” I chuckled, “they have been expecting me to buy the next round after they are done.”
“Typical cheapskate liberals,” he snorted. “Get any good dirt on them while they [expletive] and moaned about us handing Obama his sorry black mulatto [expletive]?”
“Not really,” I lied. “It seems all Democrats want to do after a nasty election defeat is sit around wondering how people who are clearly getting screwed by the Republicans nevertheless manage to vote against not only their own interests, but those of their children and grandchildren; and so on and so forth.”
“Idiot [expletives] who worry about what their children and grandchildren will think of them not only don’t understand history,” he scoffed, “they also obviously haven’t gotten a rusty trombone and a dirty Sanchez from a world-class five-thousand-dollar-an-hour call girl in a ten-thousand-dollar-a-night five star luxury hotel suite.”
“Point taken,” I allowed, “but it might just be the case that getting a rusty trombone and a dirty Sanchez from a world-class five-thousand-dollar-an-hour call girl in a ten-thousand-dollar-a-night five star luxury hotel suite might not exactly be the thing that validates a liberal, left-wing Democrat. I mean, sure, for guys like you, afterwards you’re one hundred percent validated – what just happened is complete and total proof that your world view, philosophy, attitudes and behavior are the most absolutely correct and powerful paradigms of existence that have ever been practiced in the entire compass of human experience. However, I suspect that not only would a liberal, left-wing Democrat be validated by an entirely different situation, it would also be an act of self-actualization, rather than the mere vapid and superficial expression of naked domination and power of which you conservative Republicans are so fond.”
“Such as what?” Scheisskopf sneered. “Having an orgasm while hugging a giant redwood tree?”
“Maybe,” I conceded. “But more likely, they would be validated by seeing an inner-city kid from a poor neighborhood graduate from high school with sufficient test scores to enter an accredited institution of higher learning.”
“You know, Collins,” he imperiously barked, “I bet a bunch of spineless, simpering, deluded one-worlder, do-gooder wimps like Obama’s core constituency not only get excited by concepts like that, I bet they [expletive] love that [expletive] like junkies love China white. Well [expletive] them and the rest of the ninety-nine percent, I say. And anybody who looks at your hourly rates can tell you’re not about to leave the One Percent Club yourself, now are you, Collins?”
“No way,” I smirked back at him. “So what can I do for the Republican National Congressional Committee today?”
“This lame [expletive] about Twitter,” he groused. “Somebody at CNN wrote this [expletive] story. Have you seen it?”
“Oh, sure,” I confirmed. “It says that Republicans and what CNN calls ‘outside groups’ used anonymous Twitter accounts to share internal polling data ahead of the midterm elections, and that doing so raises questions about whether they violated campaign finance laws which prohibit coordination between official Republican political campaigns and other groups, such as, say, your garden-variety Super-PAC, like American Crossroads or the American Action Network, who, thanks to the landmark Supreme Court decision, Citizens United versus the Federal Elections Commission, are now perfectly free to collect millions, billions, hell, even trillions of dollars, I suppose, from our respected cohort here in the One Percent, to fund television, radio and Internet advertisements in support of their ah… philosophy… but not, and I repeat… not... to endorse, in any way, the election of any particular political candidate to public office; and that, furthermore, no such advertisement is to encourage anyone to vote for an American politician of any sort, of any party – Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Constitution, Whig, Federalist, Socialist, Communist, Know-Nothing, Free Silver, Progressive, Populist, Justice, Workers, Citizens, Patriot, Green, Bull Moose, Ku Klux Klan, Nazi, or Anti-Masonic – and, moreover, that any kind of communication concerning the state or progress of election campaigns of said politicians between their respective political parties or any of its organs and the aforesaid Super-PACs is strictly forbidden. Then the story goes on to say that the RNCC and the Republican mega-money billionaire-backed Super-PACs have been caught using Twitter to make an end run around the law as it is currently interpreted by those illustrious and esteemed holy manifestations of legal wisdom, none other than Their Infallible Excellencies, the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States of America.”
“It was perfectly legal,” Scheisskopf insisted. “The RNCC used Twitter to put those messages out there for anyone to read.”
“Messages,” I pointed out, “which said things like ‘CA-40/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/16/14-52–>49/476-10s,’” I intoned, reading from my computer screen, making sure to properly insert “slash,” “dash,” and “right caret” in the appropriate parts of the cryptograph. “It’s code, obviously. Your claim that you ‘published’ it is only something loyal conservative Republicans could possibly believe. Unless someone had a key, a method and/or an algorithm to decode it, it’s as meaningless as Ronald Reagan at the height of his Alzheimer’s-induced gibberish.”
“That gibberish,” Scheisskopf haughtily reminded me, “got that airport over there,” he turned, pointing out the picture window to the left of the White House, south, down the Potomac River, “named after him! Along with about a thousand other public buildings. Let’s see how many airports Barack Obama gets named after him! You think anybody’s going to name anything besides a municipal landfill after that [expletive] black [expletive] [expletive] [expletive], huh?”
“The fact remains,” I pressed, steering the conversation back toward the subject at hand, “that in order to understand that gibberish you folks at the RNCC tweeted meant “California, 40th congressional district – 43 percent in favor of the Republican candidate, 44 percent in favor of the Democratic candidate overall; 49 percent of male voters in favor of the Republican, 44 percent in favor of the Democrat; 44 percent of female voters in favor of the Republican, fifty percent in favor of the Democrat; 36 percent…”
“Who told you that?” Scheisskopf demanded. “I’ll cut their [expletive] [expletive] off!
“My girlfriend, Cerise,” I confessed. “She used to work for the NSA. And it’s my sad duty to inform you that she has no [expletive] for you to cut off. In any case, what I was trying to say is, in order to know what that gibberish actually means, there had to be some kind of exchange of information between the NRCC and the Republican Super PACs prior to the election, which is clearly…”
“Aha!” Scheisskopf exclaimed. “Got you there, Collins! You just told me your girlfriend figured out what it means, and nobody told her anything!”
“And I just got through telling you she used to work for the NSA,” I reiterated. “And what’s more, no reasonable person would believe some ordinary guy or gal working for a Republican Super-PAC could possibly figure out a puzzle like that unless somebody at the RNCC told them how. And telling them how constitutes the forbidden fruit – contact between an official Republican Party organization and a conservative Republican Super-PAC. And so, I suppose I know why you’re here.”
“No you don’t,” he confidently proclaimed. “You think I’m here because I’m afraid Obama’s Justice Department is going to investigate us, and I want you to tell me how to get out of that. And you’re wrong, Collins, absolutely wrong!”
“I would be if I believed that,” I agreed. “But I don’t, because I know Republicans better than you think. It’s like Ma Barker and her kids.”
“Ma Barker?” Scheisskopf shot me a quizzical look. “Who the [expletive] is she?”
“Arizona Donnie ‘Kate’ Barker was the mother of Herman, Arthur, Lloyd and Fred Barker, infamous criminals of the 1930’s. When the boys were children, she would punish them severely when the police caught them stealing, shoplifting or purse-snatching, but not for committing the crime. No, she punished them severely for getting caught. So in many ways, Ma Barker was considerably ahead of her time, because that’s what you’re here for. You’re not here because you’re worried about an investigation – you’re here because you want to know how to get away with it the next time.”
Scheisskopf blushed deep purple, then heaved that phony sigh one hears from Ivy League snots when they wish to signify entreaty of a dignified surrender. “Okay, Collins. We got away with it for years, ever since Twitter was invented, actually, but yeah, when the top brass at the RNCC chickened out and pulled the accounts the same [expletive] day, it was a dead giveaway. Well, let me make one thing very clear – there’s no way we’re making the same mistake twice. So, how do we transmit poll data, oh, [expletive] it, Collins – how do we transmit any [expletive] information we want – between the RNCC and the Super-PACs, and do it so we never, ever get [expletive] caught again?”
“’Never, ever get caught again,’” I observed, “is a pretty stiff requirement. How about reducing your chances of getting caught to less than the probability of the District of Columbia becoming the fifty-fourth state, right after Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Silicon Valley?”
“Close enough,” Scheisskopf shrugged. “Shoot.”
“Use steganography,” I recommended.
Scheisskopf knit his brow into a mystified mosaic of wrinkles and ruptured capillaries. “What the [expletive] can stenographers do for us? And where the [expletive] are we going to find a [expletive] stenographer these days, anyhow?”
“Not stenographers,” I explained. “Steganography. You hide your message inside what appears to be something else – another message, for instance, or something entirely different from a message, even. The way you finally got caught with the coded tweets was, they stood out like paint spatter on a Rembrant, like a numbers station.”
“Numbers?” Scheisskopf replied. “You mean, like the Mafia used to do for illegal gambling before Mega Millions and Powerball put them out of business?”
“No, not that,” I clarified. “A numbers station is a shortwave radio facility hidden in an undisclosed location that intermittently goes on the air and broadcasts a sequence of numbers, either by human voice or in Morse code. Obviously, when that happens, somebody is sending a secret message to somebody else. The CIA might not know who is sending secret messages to whom, but the fact that a secret message is being sent is about as far from a secret as you can get. And that’s a mighty strong incentive for the CIA to start trying to find out where the numbers station is, who’s there sending out the numbers, and who’s somewhere else, listening for them; after which, cracking the code and figuring out the message becomes feasible. See what I mean? The fact that the RNCC tweets were obviously some kind of secret message was bound to attract investigators determined to find out the same things, then find out what the RNCC was saying. After which, figuring out who the recipients actually are was about as tough as disenfranchising minority voters in Texas. Consider the source – who benefits? The Republican Super-PACs, of course.”
“And this steganography [expletive], it’s better than that?” Scheisskopf skeptically challenged. “Okay, then, how the [expletive] does it work?”
“Lots of different ways,” I assured him. “But for your purposes, I’d say use pictures.”
“Pictures?” Scheisskopf growled. “What the [expletive] kind of pictures? You talking about porn or something?”
“I’m talking about digital pictures,” I replied. “The Internet in general, and the World Wide Web in particular, are full of them. And no, I wouldn’t suggest using pornographic pictures, because they attract too much attention. Boring pictures of families standing in front of Niagara Falls or dumpy, slightly ugly middle aged couples strolling hand-in-hand down a mediocre beach in ill-fitting bathing suits would be much better. You see, hidden in such unremarkable digital pictures are literally millions of places to put tiny bits of a secret message – places they will go completely unnoticed, because they don’t change the way the picture looks in the least. That’s because the overall information content of a digital picture is several orders of magnitude greater than that of a text message, even one a hundred times as long as the strings of numbers the RNCC was sending out in those tweets.”
“Okay,” Scheisskopf shrugged, “so how would it work?”
“There are lots of approaches,” I explained. “I assume the RNCC would want a custom-developed solution.”
“We all wear custom-tailored suits,” he replied, “so, yeah, that makes sense.”
“Then, for example,” I continued, “a stuttering diode could be used to generate a completely random set of numbers…”
“But can’t my office computer do that already?” Scheisskopf wondered. “Generate random numbers, I mean.”
“No,” I informed him, “it can produce something very close to a completely random sequence, but not a genuine one. And you’re going to want authentically random numbers for the one-time pad.”
“A pad?” Scheisskopf asked, again clearly mystified.
“It can be proven mathematically,” I told him, “that if Alice encodes her message to Bob…”
“Who the [expletive] are Alice and Bob?” Scheisskopf demanded.
“They’re not real,” I assured him. “They’re just ‘person A,’ the secret message sender, and ‘person B,’ the secret message recipient. I can say ‘person A’ and ‘person B’ if that’s less confusing for you.”
“No, no, I get it,” he grumbled, waving his arms dismissively. “Go ahead.”
“Okay, then,” I continued, “if Alice encodes her message to Bob using a genuinely random sequence of numbers, and both Alice and Bob have that sequence, and, of course, nobody else does, and they start and end in the same places in the random number sequence, only Bob can read Alice’s secret message. The original encryption technique was invented during the Civil War and at that time, they used two actual paper pads with sequences of letters on them, derived from random numbers. Confederate Headquarters would have one copy and the Confederate spy would have the other. Today, a one-time pad would be a huge sequence of ones and zeros stored on a USB drive, but they still call it a ‘pad,’ because conceptually, that’s what it is.”
“All right,” Scheisskopf growled. “So then what?”
“So then,” I elaborated, “the operative at the RNCC types in a secret message, and custom-designed software scrambles the sequence of letters and symbols according to a formula derived from part of the random sequence, breaks up the scrambled secret message into randomly distributed pixel addresses in a digital file derived from the random sequence, then writes the message into a picture of Ann Romney performing dressage on Rafalca, for instance, also altering the pixels at those addresses by one hexadecimal color code unit in a formula determined by a randomly assigned offset value in the random number sequence. Then he sends the picture to his accomplice and…”
“Watch it!” Scheisskopf interjected.
“…to his… fellow conservative Republican…” I responded, “at a conservative Republican Super-PAC, along with an innocuous decoy message like, ‘Remember the good old days when we used to watch Annie ride her pet horse around wearing that cool outfit?’ Then, when he receives the message, the guy at the Super-PAC uploads the picture into his version of the application. And, then, reading the same sequence of random numbers the fellow at the RNCC used to encode it, the software goes to each pixel, uses the color code there to determine the letter or symbol used in the scrambled secret text message, reassembles the text message, unscrambles it and displays it on the screen for him to read.”
“Okay,” Scheisskopf nodded, “I get it – all anybody else would see is an email or tweet or instant message with a stupid picture of Ann Romney on that [expletive] nag of hers attached to it.”
“Exactly,” I confirmed. “Or, you could even forget about sending anything at all and just post the picture anywhere on the Internet. As long as your… philosophical compatriot… knows where to look, that is.”
Scheisskopf narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “How much would that program cost?”
“What’s it worth to the RNCC not to get caught sending secret encoded messages to Super-PACs during an election?” I inquired.
“Point taken,” he said, emitting another weary and pretentious Ivy League sigh, and stretching it out rather too long. “How much time will it take?”
“About a month,” I estimated. “A couple of hundred hours of development.”
“Are you going to write the [expletive] thing?” Scheisskopf demanded. “Because a couple of hundred hours of your time is… well, it’s too [expletive] much, that’s what it is!”
“No, no,” I assured him, “I’m much too busy for that kind of thing. I’ll have my nephew do it. He could use some extra money.”
“Couldn’t we all?” Scheisskopf sarcastically snarked. “How much is he going to charge?”
“It depends,” I averred. “The design I just described is only an example. The final product might use an entirely different implementation and take significantly less developer labor to produce. If you like, you can name an NTE dollar amount and my nephew will code a solution which fits that budget.”
“Oh [expletive],” Scheisskopf muttered. “Let me think about it. Don’t want to cut corners on something like this. Your nephew – he’s good?”
“More than adequate for a chore like this,” I vouched.
“And he’s going to keep his mouth shut?” Scheisskopf fretted.
“I can arrange it so all he will know,” I shot back, “is that somebody needs a steganographic encryption software package and they are very powerful and vindictive. That will keep him quiet, I guarantee; he knows I don’t kid around about things like that. But if you’d like, I could drop some hints that the Democrats ordered it.”
“[Expletive] yeah!” Scheisskopf exclaimed. “Why don’t you?”
“Okay,” I agreed. “When my nephew is done, I’ll call you and you can come over and pick up a USB drive with everything you need on it. I’ll bill the entire effort to ‘consulting services’ and pay my nephew with a personal check that has ‘Holiday Gift’ in the memo line.”
“It’s a deal,” Scheisskopf declared, rising to shake my hand. “Anything else?”
“You should go out today and buy a couple of dozen terabyte capacity USB drives to contain client versions of the software with individual one-time pads,” I advised. “Then, of course, you will need to clandestinely transfer them to your… like-minded Republican friends at Super-PACs and, I suppose, other organizations the RNCC isn’t supposed to be communicating with.”
Scheisskopf froze. “Transfer it to them? You didn’t say anything about needing to transfer anything to anyone!”
“Of course I did,” I reminded him. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“How the [expletive] am I supposed to do that?” Scheisskopf demanded. “Hand them the [expletive] thing on the golf course?”
“That’s certainly an option,” I confirmed. “A single one-terabyte USB stick the size of your thumb could hold the application client and many years worth of encryption pad sequences.”
“Just one? The size… of… my thumb?” Scheisskopf repeated, thinking. “Okay, I know the perfect person do the transfers, and what’s more, I know just where she’s gonna hide it.”
“You sure?” I called after him as he made for the door.
“Absolutely,” he answered. “Does the phrase ‘rusty trombone and a dirty Sanchez’ mean anything to you?”