capturing Alignment agents

n7axw wrote:I doubt that any of the agents would be aware of either the rf or wormhole. You would only need a very small group of people to communicate with agent handlers and not even these people would need to be fully briefed beyond what is needed to accomplish objective.

Don

-

The agents wouldn't know and their handlers might not either. But their handlers' superiors need to be getting the information from somewhere. The problem here is not the information itself, it's the flow of information. Given enough data, the intelligence services may be able to trace back where the information is coming from.

That's why counter-intelligence doesn't shut down a known spy channel, they manage it. Similarly, if you detect an enemy spy, you trace up the chain. Conversely, every time you use an asset, you risk losing it. The MAlign is aware that the intelligence services must have some of their agents under surveillance (and they can't know which ones), so they have to be careful on how and when they send the instructions.

At the moment (end of Uncompromising Honor) at least the SLN, SEM and probably Grayson are rolling up all sorts of Alignment agents Well, having then die when confronted isn't the best way to catch agents but it does have the effect of both cutting off those points of information flow and cleaning house.
Nobody is talking about Haven though we should suspect that they are doing or are about to do the same thing. Then there is Beowulf and we already know the the people in Maya are looking, quite probably in Erwhon as well. The IAE we don't know about yet.

There are a lot of intelligence people as well as varioius branches of Law Enforcement in the several Star Nations that are going to be really really busy running down leads as to who may or may not have been potential handlers for the people who up and die when they face an interview.
We have been told that SEM has captured a bunch of people (apparently in government and possibly in business) that didn't have the nanite death switch but that they aren't providing too much information to track back....either they don't know enough or the methods of moving information were sufficent to keep them in the dark as far as who they were dealing with.

Your right though, the information has to move somehow and that is a key thread in finding out who handles it and where it goes. You follow the trail and see. In the meantime, the Alignment -at the close of the book- only knows that it has been loosing, if not just actual Alignment models, but people who have been passing information for what ever reason which moves through various conduits to Alignment assets and flows .....somewhere. We know it's ultimatly going to Darius but the SEM doesn't.

Amoung the things the investigators need to keep in mind is that, even for the people who just die, where the information is being passed from is important. If nothing more than to get an idea of what information the other side is looking for and how broad is/was their penetration.
At what point is the SEM (or anybody else) going to run investigators -or Tree Cats- through places like the civilian law firms that handle the personal buiness of various people?

One of the things that can cloud the tracking of information flow is that is can be compressed and sent through regular interstellar transit on freighters, DBs and Liners. All you have to do is encrypt the message and package it with an address- and those can be almost anywhere and don't have to go by the same route each time. Like using a one-time-pad, the information isn't going to show a pattern if it doesn't go the same place (the way off the planet) each time. This is going to take research and patience.

Eventually the Alighment is going to get some idea of what is happening to their networks but in the short term the flow of information is way down.

Brigade XO wrote:At the moment (end of Uncompromising Honor) at least the SLN, SEM and probably Grayson are rolling up all sorts of Alignment agents Well, having then die when confronted isn't the best way to catch agents but it does have the effect of both cutting off those points of information flow and cleaning house.
Nobody is talking about Haven though we should suspect that they are doing or are about to do the same thing. Then there is Beowulf and we already know the the people in Maya are looking, quite probably in Erwhon as well. The IAE we don't know about yet.

There are a lot of intelligence people as well as varioius branches of Law Enforcement in the several Star Nations that are going to be really really busy running down leads as to who may or may not have been potential handlers for the people who up and die when they face an interview.
We have been told that SEM has captured a bunch of people (apparently in government and possibly in business) that didn't have the nanite death switch but that they aren't providing too much information to track back....either they don't know enough or the methods of moving information were sufficent to keep them in the dark as far as who they were dealing with.

Your right though, the information has to move somehow and that is a key thread in finding out who handles it and where it goes. You follow the trail and see. In the meantime, the Alignment -at the close of the book- only knows that it has been loosing, if not just actual Alignment models, but people who have been passing information for what ever reason which moves through various conduits to Alignment assets and flows .....somewhere. We know it's ultimatly going to Darius but the SEM doesn't.

Amoung the things the investigators need to keep in mind is that, even for the people who just die, where the information is being passed from is important. If nothing more than to get an idea of what information the other side is looking for and how broad is/was their penetration.
At what point is the SEM (or anybody else) going to run investigators -or Tree Cats- through places like the civilian law firms that handle the personal buiness of various people?

One of the things that can cloud the tracking of information flow is that is can be compressed and sent through regular interstellar transit on freighters, DBs and Liners. All you have to do is encrypt the message and package it with an address- and those can be almost anywhere and don't have to go by the same route each time. Like using a one-time-pad, the information isn't going to show a pattern if it doesn't go the same place (the way off the planet) each time. This is going to take research and patience.

Eventually the Alighment is going to get some idea of what is happening to their networks but in the short term the flow of information is way down.

Adding to the level of complexity here, is that Malign isn't necessarily going to have kill switches on all their agents. So having your subjects survive questioning does not mean that they are clear.

Don

-

I think it will be Allison Harrington or Beowulf who will come up with a way to scrub the nannies from affected people's systems, the same way she discovered the gengineering on Grayson to correct the skewed gender birth ratio.

lightningstar519 wrote:I think it will be Allison Harrington or Beowulf who will come up with a way to scrub the nannies from affected people's systems, the same way she discovered the gengineering on Grayson to correct the skewed gender birth ratio.

That would be a game-changer. No longer would agents simply die when interrogated, yielding no direct intel (only, as we discussed, "metadata").

Question: would it be ethical to extract one's nanites against their will? The Beowulf Life Sciences Code could forbid the operation. Does that change when it comes to captured enemy spies?

Given the apparent sophistication of the nanites, isn't it possible that they would have a subroutine if they detected that someone was scrubbing the host for them?
Since they are not dealt with by such normal things as white blood cells, what is going to go after them in a human body? And if something starts killing nanites in a host, isn't there going to be some intermediate period when they start reacting to dying? No, a smallpox infection doesn't just suddenly kill the host of human antibodies start killing part of the smallpox infection. But these things are apparently tied in with the host/target's mind and nervous system and controling muscles and other things like creating aneurysm and heart attacks. I have to belive the Alignment would add a bell or whistle or two such that if nanites were being destroyed then it would trigger a cascade event to kill the host.

Brigade XO wrote:Given the apparent sophistication of the nanites, isn't it possible that they would have a subroutine if they detected that someone was scrubbing the host for them?
Since they are not dealt with by such normal things as white blood cells, what is going to go after them in a human body? And if something starts killing nanites in a host, isn't there going to be some intermediate period when they start reacting to dying? No, a smallpox infection doesn't just suddenly kill the host of human antibodies start killing part of the smallpox infection. But these things are apparently tied in with the host/target's mind and nervous system and controling muscles and other things like creating aneurysm and heart attacks. I have to belive the Alignment would add a bell or whistle or two such that if nanites were being destroyed then it would trigger a cascade event to kill the host.

Actually, I doubt that the nanites are very sophisticated at all. Essentially what they are are programed computers. Organic ones to be sure. But programed computers nonetheless. What this means is that were events start to happen outside the parameters of the programing, they will not react.

The difficulty, of course, is to learn exactly what those parameters are and how to avoid tripping them. That's where we are at this point in the story. Unraveling the computers by being able to detect and disable them is the next step.. My hunch is that the solution will eventually come out of Beowulf. Someone suggested that Alison Harrington might come up with it. Not bad specculation... we'll see.

Don

-

n7axw wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Given the apparent sophistication of the nanites, isn't it possible that they would have a subroutine if they detected that someone was scrubbing the host for them?

Actually, I doubt that the nanites are very sophisticated at all. Essentially what they are are programed computers. Organic ones to be sure. But programed computers nonetheless. What this means is that were events start to happen outside the parameters of the programing, they will not react.

I, on the other hand, agrehe with Brigage XO and do think the nanites have a minimal networking capability and would easily detect if their concentration started to drop too quickly. The good guys need to figure out a way to prevent them from reacting or to counteract their reaction.

Possibilities, from least likely to most, in my mind:

• drain them slowly enough that their reaction isn't triggered;
• create a fact-acting agent (a counter-nanite) that rapidly destroys the nanites before they can react;
• create a dampening field that prevents them from communicating (each individual nanite just thinks it's defective);
• load something into the victim that fools the nanites into thinking its concentration did not drop;
• load something into them victim that counters the nanite's attack vectors when they activate, drain them.

Out-of-left-field answer: cold sleep.

If you suspect someone of being a MAlignment agent (treecat prescreening a bonus) you tranq them and put them in cold sleep. Then you can do whatever process is needed to remove the nano, since the subject's biological processes are slowed to the point where nothing the nano can do can kill them quickly. So if for instance the nano triggers and causes a cerebral bleed, you have time to remove the nano and repair the damage before the subject dies of it.

There would have to be some networking, no doubt. My point would be that what we are facing here is limited rather than infinitely complex. Limited tasks to perform, limited number of tripwires to activate and so on. Think Honor's conversation with Chien Lu in "A Rolling Thunder".

I wonder what a full blood panel on a live subject would look like.

Don

-