Chapter 58. ALPHABET TALK pages 256 - 258
"The pilot followed the highways."
Chapter 58. ALPHABET TALK
Somewhere over a Nebraska highway, Tito overhears the old man and Garreth discussing FastC2AP [a DARPA R&D program designed for IXO: the Information Exchange Office] and PANDA [Predictive Analysis for Naval Deployment Activities], both technologies that help make "locating some ships as easy as checking an online stock price."Bobby seems to have accessed a beta version of PANDA and the old man wonders if they are "facilitating" a genius or "really, at the end of the day, just a talented and audacious burglar" [the difference tied to predictability]. [556 characters]
One could make the same comment about "genius" or "burglar" regarding the old man's profession of being a spook or intelligence agent.
FastC2AP stands for Fast Connectivity for Coalitions and Agents Project, and involves, God help us, "autonomous software agents".
These could be as simple as macro routines to run database queries at regular intervals, but since they are intended to be distributed throughout a network, and to run without human intervention, they represent a big potential security threat to any computer system, especially military ones. This project, as with so many others, relegates "hardening" i.e. security and scalability, to the later, as yet unimplemented phases of the project.
Bobby Chombo's access to a "beta version of PANDA", is probably more important for the hard coded back end database access codes embedded within the software, which would allow him, perhaps, to access the US Navy shipping target databases with his own software , than any use he might make of it directly yo highlight "anomalous" shipping movement behaviour.
Tracking the location of a ship, is not quite the same as tracking a particular shipping container directly, especially if the shipping documentation is being changed or forged.