The Enigma Ignite

“Quip, do we want to try out our new Big Data sifting system with enhanced facial recognition? I’m kinda anxious to see how you pull in all that dissimilar data like news articles, blog postings, social media activity, Internet chatter, emails, and SMS texts and distill it down to relevant useful chunks before running it again. Where do you introduce the facial recognition results in this process? Or better still, HOW do you introduce the facial recognition results?”

Quip grinned like he’d just won a prize as he educated, “I thought you would never ask! So, the Facial Recognition of Multitudes Software or the FROM-ware program, as it is now called, takes the contextual clues from the Big Data results and uses them to hunt for photos or videos where the highest likelihood of finding key individuals that have a close affinity to the topic being worked. As we continue to sift the information the closer we get to match a picture to the bad guy or guys. Once we have those highly relevant pictures we can then compare them to what may be on file with the usual law enforcement agencies. If we get a hit with a law enforcement agency, then we have not only current events but history on the bad guys as well.

“The more we know about them the easier it is to predict where they are and where they might go. Then, at that point, we can start tapping into street cameras for more sifting. The challenge of doing it this way is the handling and sorting of Bizzillo-bytes of information fast enough to operate on. For answers in our world to be useful, information must be promptly evaluated. The best example I can give you is a stock market broker trying to make money day trading using month old financial information: he’ll never be successful.”

“You made up that word Bizzillo-bytes, didn’t you?”

“You know life is more fun when you have someone to tease a little bit. You are fun to tease and you do tease back.”

“Why would the al-Qaeda want this kind of technology? They don’t have a conventional army. The professional troops they do have continually fall prey to the hitting power of the long range drones like the Global Hawk that can stay airborne for days. I don’t see how any battlefield communications solution, or BFC, would do them much good against remote control air power.”

“Ok, Jacob, let me pose a question to you. Suppose you lived somewhere that taught you all your life that your way of living was superior to anything else to be had. Some foreign government keeps reminding you that your thinking was wrong and to prove it keeps hitting you, friends of yours, and your lifestyle with long range weapons that you simply cannot match. How would you feel about that and what would you do?”

Jacob nodded thoughtfully as he digested the proposed scenario. “I would fight back with anything at my disposal. I would use any unfair tactic to strike back with to get even with the foreign aggressors.”

Quip nodded in agreement as he continued, “Exactly. So the al-Qaeda hit back electronically and tried to extract revenge by taking value and wrecking necessary electronic infrastructure that hurts their enemies. So that is the why they hit at the West. But the why they could use the BFC solution is that they have in the past fielded fairly substantial armies to fight among themselves. Remember the Iranians and the Iraqis fought from September of nineteen-eighty through August of nineteen-eighty-eight between themselves, before the situation threatened to spill over into other countries. It was touted as one of the longest traditionally fought wars of the century. That part of the world has a long proud history of using ground troops for kingdoms and territory. Air power, for all of its abilities to deliver harm to the enemy remotely, still cannot conquer territory without ground troops.

“The Americans proved you could hurt the enemy in World War Two, but nothing could be settled until the American and Russian troops finally crushed the Germans. So the al-Qaeda factions may be hurt by remote power, but they cannot be beaten without ground assault, and the forces with the best battlefield communications are better equipped to win. They understand the value of the BFC solution and taking that advanced research from the West not only hurts financially but also allows for better troop communications in the next conflict.”

“Makes sense in that context. So, their best attack vector is electronic assault which is basically their armed response to the Western firepower?

“Hmmm, that reminds me of the old engineering joke about the difference between a mechanical engineer and a civil engineer. The mechanical engineer builds weapons and the civil engineer builds targets.”

Quip nodded as he emphasized, “That is what they are doing. Instead of arming their troops with RPG’s and automatic weapons, they are arming their troops with computers and virus generating code and using electronic communications as their remote weapon of choice.