The Lost Testament by James Becker Read Free Book Online

almost anywhere in the world. The purpose of Echelon was entirely laudable: the detection of potential terrorist activity before it could be turned into a devastating reality. To achieve this, the security services of the world employed a program known as the Echelon Dictionary, a vast list of words that the monitoring system was created to detect, and that it was hoped would lead to the surveillance, and if necessary the arrest and imprisonment, of potential suicide bombers and members of terrorist groups.
    The Vatican, for all its enormous wealth and influence, possessed neither the resources nor the legal authority to create such a global monitoring system. But some years earlier, as the first handful of computers began to be connected to the fledgling network that would soon begin to grow exponentially into the Internet, a group of far-sighted and technologically literate priests working at the Vatican had seen the potential of the new information resource and also realized that it could be a useful—perhaps even an essential—tool to help guarantee the future of the Church.
    Like every large organization, there were a fair number of skeletons in the Vatican’s closets, documents and objects which, if they ever saw the light of day, would cripple—or at least very severely damage—the Church’s credibility. And it made sense that anyone who discovered even a hint about any such dark secret would very probably use an online search engine to research the topic. A kind of early-warning system was needed.
    So the Vatican approached the emerging companies operating the search engines and explained the concerns the Church had. And, because almost all of the owners of these companies were American, a nation with far more than its fair share of fundamentalist Christians, getting agreement to install monitoring software had proved to be surprisingly easy.
    The result was a loose and informal arrangement with the providers of all of the major search engines on the Internet. Somewhat like the Echelon Dictionary, the Vatican’s monitoring system—known to the handful of indoctrinated senior clerics in the Holy See as “Codex S,” a nod to perhaps the most important single extant book in the Christian world, the fourth-century
Codex Sinaiticus
, a Bible handwritten in Greek—was programmed to detect certain words being entered into the search engines, particularly when two or more of those words were entered together. The date and time would be noted, and the search term recorded, the information then being fed back to the Vatican.
    As a further refinement, when any such search term was entered, the monitoring software would also locate the precise Internet address of the initiating computer. Every computer that accesses the Internet is allocated either a permanent or a temporary address—this is essential to ensure that responses go to the right place—and also geographically locates that computer. So by this fairly simple method, the Vatican was informed every time any search that might be considered dangerous to it was entered on any computer in the world, as long as one of the principal search engines had been used.
    Early that morning, in a large open-plan office in a building in a part of the Vatican to which the public, and almost all of the staff of the Holy See, never had access under any circumstances, a speaker system attached to a desktop computer emitted five short beeps, indicating a hit from the monitoring system. The room was unmanned for most of the time, but a log was maintained at each of the workstations and these were combined into a master electronic document that was inspected at least once a day.
    Late that evening, a senior member of the Vatican staff inspected the log and immediately saw the two words that had triggered the response by the monitoring system. His orders were clear, and he followed them straightaway. He printed a hard copy of the entry and then ran a simple program that identified