Notes-review “The Watchmen” Brian Freemantle 7/15/14A high suspense conspiracy novel with a great deal of intricate actions by a large cast of characters divided between the good guys attempting to find and corral a large cast of bad guys who must first be identified and have their actions predicted.The threat posed here is one paralleling the 9/11 type of international terrorist attack where as much damage as possible will be specifically directed at high value high visibility targets, in this case the UN building, and later Washington D.C. with the objective of disrupting civilizations' common functioning in critical choke points, ie. NY city and Washington. This book was written prior to the 9/11 attack, so it was predictive in goals and effects, but varied on the means and constituency of the attackers.The author uses interspersed action sequences to build the suspense, and provide the sensation of the reader being interjected into plot sequences. This however requires the reader to keep track of a large set of difficult Russian names associated with the large cast of characters, and to keep track of which character attributes are assigned to each player in the plot. Russia is used as the source of biological and tactical weapons, and most of the action or suspense is focused on finding leaks in the source of weapons and determining the trail of responsibility to find stolen weapons, trace back to who paid for them, how they were stolen, who intends to use them, how they will be transported, and what the target is for their use.Political alignments and ramifications provide a background of support for the suspense of consequences of failure to perform for both the good guys and the bad guys. Most of the characters involved could be real people with regular human frailties, attitudes, and capabilities for performance under duress.I thought that the author was weak in his use of assumed hacker capabilities, personality, and the ability to find and nullify site intrusions. One basic premise was that the central hacker here worked in a bank, and had escalated his privileges to be able to “raid” accounts by transactional withdrawals. The premise was that the transactional amounts were less than a dollar so would be ignored and difficult to trace. I thought this to be a weak point, since relational databases and accounting procedures in effect in the late 90's would have been able to fairly easily point to specific transactions in question. From there, the accounts used for transfer should have been obvious as either having a large balance with numerous very small deposit transactions, or many small transfer accounts used to extradite funds. The owner credentials of a large number of these types of accounts wouldn't hold up to scrutiny if instigated by one person. The author was using the situation of using a large number of less than 1 dollar transactions to accumulate over 2 million dollars. Any given user questioning a transaction, particularly a transfer of this type, should have been able to pinpoint the target account, even if it were directed to another banking institution. Even lazy and inept auditors should have easily been able to suspect fraudulent activity, and the net amount was enough to be classed as a major felony.There were security intrusions into the pentagon, NASA, and several other defense machines. Even using keyloggers on old Windows systems, one person wouldn't have been able to access all those systems at will, and even less likely to be able to perform file manipulation remotely, to the extent of machine take overs of entire high level networks. This kind of activity takes time, dedicated effort, and usually involves a coordinated team using specific intrusion techniques that other hackers have found and published. It also generally requires high bandwidth and dedicated effort at specific times while bypassing normal security issues, such as password resets, executable code checksum analysis, network logging, etc. The author didn't detail any of the background for the capabilities exhibited in this book, except that the pentagon access seemed to be attributed to anti-static bands attached on monitors (CRTs) and acting as effective key-loggers. He also didn't expound on how a NASA intrusion could be extended across systems to be able to modify the flight parameters of the space shuttle.In the end, the main hacker appear to be an individual with a normal enough personality to be able to perform normal cubicle type operations in a bank, and not be seen as a nefarious system hacker with the stereotypical antisocial attitude. At the end of the book, even this hacker had a sudden revelation as to who the “General” was. This was not clear to me, so someone may can explain whether he suddenly recognized that this was a slang character assignment being use to characterize him by the loose organization of field agents who perpetrated the terrorism, or if there were other hackers coordinating efforts. As a final warning for readers, the main hacker has been left undetected, and is gathering a new force on the last lines of the book.
