Steal this data: Volunteer spies in the night

There I was, sneaking into a dark office with a flashlight and a backup disk. No, it wasn’t a movie — just one very surreal day at work.

Enough years ago that I can share this story, I was employed at a company that contracted out support staff to various organizations. I was assigned to a military location, along with a handful of other techs.

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The day began as most any other. My company’s VP called my team leader, “Sally,” promptly at 10 a.m., as he did every day. During these phone conversations, she would give a brief status report and they’d review the progress on various projects. The call usually took five minutes.

But this one was different. At the end of the conversation, the VP asked Sally to call him back from a location outside of the office building.

Worried, she briefly told us the VP wanted to talk to her privately — then she vanished. This was ominous. Was someone about to be fired? Had our contract been terminated? We tensely awaited Sally’s return.

When she got back, we were told there would be a face-to-face meeting with the VP that afternoon. All of us must report. In the meantime we were not to discuss it at all. We were brimming with questions, but there was nothing more. Sally was stern and tight-lipped.

That was the longest five hours of my life as I tried to go about my work acting like nothing was wrong and watching the seconds and minutes inch along. Finally, the wait was over.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

We gathered in the operations room at at the appointed time. Sally met us there, and we were in for another turn in the unfolding drama: We were to meet the VP at the loading dock. We were also ordered to take separate routes and elevators.

We must have looked a bit like mice in a maze as we tried to find our separate paths through the large building. When we’d all made our way to the location, we stood in a circle facing each other and were told to watch for people in our line of sight. The security cameras, we were told, had been turned off. The VP spoke in hushed tones and told us to keep our voices down.

“During a routine oversight committee hearing recently,” the VP said, “the admirals were questioned about a discrepancy in a budget for one of their commands. They were unable to answer the questions put to them. The captain responsible for that part of the budget was not immediately available for questioning. But the admirals identified for the committee all the people responsible for preparing that part of the budget report.”

As soon as we learned the name of the captain, we groaned. That captain? The demanding, deal-making, obfuscating, aloof captain? The one with the incredibly surly senior aide? The one who could do no wrong? We all dreaded our encounters with him.

The committee had contacted the president of our consulting company and asked for help. We were to provide the committee with disk images of all the machines that belonged to people who worked for the captain. Of course, disk images of the captain’s machines were to be provided as well. He had three. Nobody knew why he needed three PCs — he never let support people touch them.

One of us asked why backup tapes were not sufficient. For one thing, we were told, the committee did not trust the office’s network administrator. That raised the hair on the back of my head — I relied on that admin frequently and had assumed complete honesty. Second, we were reminded that the tapes would not contain deleted files. That made sense. The disk images would be analyzed for file fragments and should be able to recover deleted files. And third, the captain must not know that any information was flowing to the committee and we were not to tell anyone about it while the investigation was going on.

We were asked to volunteer. It had to happen tonight. Two employees from our company had been borrowed from other projects and were already in the building, waiting, with transit cases containing empty hard disks. We were not allowed to call home using the landlines in the building. The VP offered his cellphone, so we could call to make arrangements for late dinners. One of us declined further involvement and was promptly sent home “sick” for the rest of the day, with pay.

We were given an itinerary: where to go, what to do, and when. We had to leave the office at the normal time and meet up at another location in the building at a set time.

Arrangements were made with the officer in charge of base security, so we could be in the building after-hours. The security cameras would be turned off in the area we were visiting and the office unlocked. There would be no record of our presence. We were issued several sets of gloves and told to keep them on at all times. We all had clearances and our prints were on file. We had to be careful. And we had to avoid any people working in the building after-hours.

Tech-turned-spy

We all made it to the rendezvous point without incident and started our trek up to the captain’s floor, our hearts pounding, yet remaining amazingly quiet and sneaky, despite our status as rookies. The lights were off as we skulked into the captain’s office.

By flashlight, we took apart machines, so we could mirror their hard drives. We set up the equipment, then tried to quiet our nerves as the data transferred oh so slowly. Never before have I wished so hard that making backups was an instant process.

Several hours later we had packed up the transit cases and restored everything to look as we had found it. We left the building without ever being discovered.

The next morning those on our team were tense, daring to only quietly discuss the occasional question or rumor. Someone shared a partial transcript of the recent hearing, and we found out a few more details than the VP had shared. Millions of dollars were unaccounted for — all in the captain’s budget. The line items in his budget did not add up to the total. Yet, according to audit reports, the total amount budgeted had been spent. How? Where did the money go? We had no answers.

In the afternoon of the second day, we heard that the captain and two of his assistants had been called to testify before the oversight committee the next morning. It did not bode well for them.

Some of us saw their grim faces as they walked out of the building to go to the meeting. The surly senior aide was visibly sweating.

By the next morning, all of us had already searched the newspapers in case the hearing got coverage. It didn’t. After the VP called Sally at the usual time, she quietly shared what she knew with us. The VP had said the committee was not satisfied with what they had heard from the captain and action would be taken. Nothing would affect our team. We would be informed when there was more information.

The fall

A few days later, the verdict: The budget for the one project that justified the jobs in the captain’s command was to be reduced by half the following year. Afterward, it would hit zero. He would be marked for the rest of his career.

“They suggested he retire,” said the VP. He had been defiant. The admirals passed word that we were not to do anything further in support of that command unless we obtained specific prior authorization. They planned to audit his department daily. His PCs were removed from the network and while connected to each other, were only allowed to talk with the rest of the LAN in the building through an audited gateway.

We no longer had to have any encounters with the captain or his staff — which had always been unpleasant anyway.

We all went back to work and tried to forget they were up there — the crew of a sinking ship. They were still there by the time some of us had moved on to other jobs. But I still think of that day as being one of the most bizarre I’ve ever had.

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