Chapter 1
Avi Eitan sat down in the computer room of Tel Aviv Ben Gurion Airport at precisely eight o'clock on October 23rd, 2010, as he had been doing for the past six months. Barely eighteen years old, he was serving his first year in the Israeli Defense Forces and, given his computer study background, he had been assigned to the team that ran the IT systems of the Israel border control.
As he logged into the system, he thought about how dull his job was but decided it was much better than checking endless lines of passengers into the terminal building or standing with an M-16 rifle in his hands at one of the many checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank. Or even worse, at Gaza.
The chances of having to deal with the occasional suicide bomber these days were high enough to make Ben Gurion acceptable.
On top of that, today there were two pleasant surprises to mix up the routine.
The first one was the arrival of new airport security members made up of some Falasha girls - Jews of Ethiopian origin. Their beauty was so stunning that even the unkept border guards could not help giving them attention.
The second surprise was more on the professional side. Avi was asked to start testing a new image match software called “ChronoPic” that had just been installed by the specialists of the Shin Bet, which is the agency with counterespionage and jurisdiction inside Israeli borders.
The origin of the software was hidden. There were rumors circulating that it was joint developed by the CIA and some experts of the web giants, but there were other claims that stated the NSA was responsible, instead.
Avi did not really care. He clicked the new icon on his screen and started running the test. The software would collect all the pictures taken by the security cameras of the airport and search for matches to any particular subject in the photo.
Avi ran the first test on a passenger who had left the day before, choosing one picture taken at the baggage check-in area in the main entrance. After a few seconds, the system returned a set of pictures of the man as he had gone through the security checks. He had spent some time at the coffee shop in the departure hall, loitered a bit in front of a giant chandelier at one of the gift shops, eventually bought a lousy t-shirt and hastily boarded the flight to Paris. The first test had passed.
Avi then went through the menus and launched an extended search over the past ten days, still focused on the airport entrance. This time it took a bit longer, maybe one minute - Avi thought that from now on he should take note of the amount of time it took to search - then eventually the full set of appearances of the person popped up on the screen. And this person’s name was Pierre Malinsky, a French citizen born in 1965 who entered Israel for the first time in 1987 and whose picture records Avi now had in front of him. The software told him that Pierre regularly visited Israel, three to four times a year, and in many of them he was with a woman who was most likely his wife.
For a second, Avi thought about whether to start an investigation on the woman or continue with Pierre. He chose to finish what he had already started, and expanded the search from the airport to the whole Shin Bet database, which basically contained footage from all the surveillance cameras of Israel.
After exactly fourteen minutes and fifty-seven seconds, in which Avi let his thoughts drift again to the Falasha girls, the system returned the full set of images and pictures. There were thousands of them, but it was possible to sort them by time or place, to make it more manageable.
About twenty of them (roughly one percent) were flagged with a yellow tab indicating that either the system was not sure the subject was the same or there were some discrepancies worth checking. And here was where the real work began.
Avi started browsing through what he called the “suspect set”, starting from the pictures taken at sensitive locations like border checkpoints, Palestinian authority buildings, military locations, and so on.
The conclusion was that in all cases the system had raised a false alarm. The picture quality was so poor that the software could not gather enough points to call a match and stated it as a false result. This was a function built into the software design, because the consequences of missing a real danger were far worse than stating a false one. Especially in a country like Israel.
Before setting the system in automatic search mode, Avi went to the “Morph Search” menu. The software could match the picture of any given subject against an arbitrary set of creations that a malicious agent trying to enter the land of honey and milk could have adopted, such as changing the color and style of their hair, or undergoing plastic surgery, or simply playing with age.
He ran another test on Pierre, programming the system to look for similar morphs only in the airport area. This time, the search needed ten minutes and seventeen seconds, but Avi noticed that at least at the airport the search did not report any results. He reviewed his options.
The longer the test lasted, the less chances there were that he would be moved to another task, like for example, God forbids, at the Patriarch Tombs in Hebron to protect his ultraorthodox fellow citizens from Palestinian hate. And by that time he might have gotten to know a Falasha girl. So he selected the full morphing mode on more than one thousand members of the Shin Bet’s most wanted list and put “moderate morphing” to all the rest, with images going back as far as ten years.
The system started its search, downloading the results into a special file. Avi decided to make a separate file for each image scanned. It was already twelve now, time for the lunch break. He got back to work in the late afternoon.
ChronoPic had already created more than twenty-three files, some of which were large enough to contain hundreds of pictures. He checked if any of the files contained images of members from the most-wanted list. Seeing no results, Avi decided to go home and continue the next day.
The following morning the number of files had grown to fifty-one. He had to start his analysis work, otherwise the backlog would become unmanageable and he did not want to lose this job.
Many logs were inconsistencies due to poor image quality, like the case of Pierre the day before, but there were seven possible crossings with members of the most-wanted list, all under some form of morphing. He checked the dates and the identities. The most recent one had taken place two years ago, and in no case did the declared name matched the one of the suspect.
This deserved more investigation, so he dutifully followed the Shin Bet instructions and he created a report file for each of the cases and sent it to a secure email address. On the receiving side, an officer would take care of the next level of investigation. It was quite a burdensome process, and in the meantime thirty-four new logs had been produced by ChronoPic. Avi nicknamed it ‘Crony’, considering he was going to spend a lot of time with it.
On the evening of the second day, he was grateful that his Crony friend allowed him to spend the rest of his shift in the comfortable airport security room.
And even better, during the afternoon coffee break he had managed to break the ice with Rachel Terwago, one of the most beautiful girls of the Falasha group.
A few days later, he started analyzing file number 178, which was a strange one. Crony had come upon a morphing correlation between twenty-six different picture sequences, all of which were good quality as they had been taken by the airport security cameras.
The sequences started in 2001 and finished the week before, on October 16th, 2010. The subject had flown back home on the afternoon Delta Air Lines flight to New York. The problem was, the sequences belonged to two different people. One of the first twenty was apparently George McKilroy, a US citizen. The last six instead belonged to Sean Ewals, an American as well.
Avi scrutinized the pictures. Indeed, there was some resemblance. The morphing controller stated that George could have morphed into Sean by applying eye and nose surgery, plus some lifting, as Sean looked significantly younger. Then Avi also checked in the border control file. In both cases, there was nothing suspicious.
Nothing to report during t
heir stay in Israel, and nothing connecting either one to the Shin Bet database of foreign suspects.
Avi launched a search on the whole Israel territory on both subjects. After one hour, he figured out that neither George nor Sean went near any sensitive military site. They both appeared in some parking lot and traffic light footage in the Petah Tikvah area. The hotel videos showed that they stayed at different places, while George’s pictures had been taken in the Jerusalem area, Sean always stayed in the surroundings of Tel Aviv. Looking at their customs interview reports, they both declared to be technology entrepreneurs and their whereabouts confirmed that. They were born about thirty years away from each other and this was in line with the images.
There was still a strange resemblance flagged by the system, as if George and Sean could be the same person. But then why did Sean look so much younger than George? The opposite would have made sense.
Avi was about to trash the log as yet another case of false results, then he remembered that his country simply could not afford false outcomes. Besides that, no one could blame him for being too cautious, so he compiled his analysis of file 178 and sent it to the Shin Bet email address.