Information: Dark Matter Volume 1

Chapter 6

No more daydreaming. The Peruvian data package was sitting there, directories full of documents, all waiting for her attention. Then she could get back to work on the interesting stuff Spaceboy had given her. She looked at the directory on this massive download. Where to begin? Blackleaks would already have run a security pass. That meant no Trojans, macros, bugs, or other glitches to tie up her gear. But that left all the tedium of cataloguing. Every single document needed coding. While a key word search would get people a lot, most of a trove like this would stay invisible. Plus, the really useful correlations would never show up under a general search pattern. No doubt there would be some very important documents in this pile and getting to them would take quite some time. Then there were the anomalies, personal notes, obscure pictures, things that did not fit normal patterns. Meta-data needed its own analysis. It went on. Data wasn't information until after there was organization. It didn't matter what might be in this pile if no one could reliably track what they were looking at. That was the librarian's job. Her job.

At least the documents were mostly in Spanish. The translation software was quick and accurate. That would simplify her work. Sometimes things came in obscure languages and she was never sure she had a really good grasp of what was in them. Even with good translation software it was easy to miss the nuances. Some languages were so rare that the translation software was rudimentary. At that point, cataloguing was hit and miss.

She set up the files for a first run of category typing. This was a simple program that would analyze and code every document with meta-data regarding the type of document and date as well as insert the Black Leaks logo. This should run smoothly, though there would always be a few anomalies that would need her attention. She clicked it on. Nothing to do but wait while it ran. Since she was running this through her confidential systems, she spent some time looking for search results on Colin's alien. Not much there. A few items coming back, so she tagged and stashed them.

The next pass through the Peruvian material was an algorithm that looked for specific word patterns and key vocabulary. This would tag every file containing key words and word patterns pre-identified by Blackleaks as significant for its own use. It also logged the tags into a macro-file which would generate tables around the key terms and prioritize documents for proprietary deep analysis. While all the documents, with a very few exceptions, would be publicly logged once she finished with them, Blackleaks had its own agenda and liked to be one step ahead of the journalists when it came to data analysis. There was nothing like juicy leaks to keep the fund-raising active.

There was always the money angle. She hated it, but it was part of the work. The world ran on money and Blackleaks needed money like everyone else. Her work was part of turning on the money faucet. She would run an active monitor on the table her software was developing. That would be boring, but she'd found that watching keywords emerge gave her a sense of the documents' structure and content. With that in mind she'd be able to run the rest of her work faster. She flicked it on and watched the table begin to populate.

She took a break to stretch and get some coffee. She was careful not to trip on the long cable that connected her gear to the boxes on the table. They included powerful encryption hardware. This was all running elsewhere, some remote cloud server, or maybe a proprietary server farm run by Blackleaks. She didn't know. Even for trash like this, the security was absolute.

Cup in hand, she stared out the window. The sky was bright. No haze due to the on-shore wind. She could see the whitecaps formed across the harbor, rank on rank. Wind-generators were slowly turning along the mountain ridge in the distance. She could feel them sucking the energy out of the air currents and turning it into electricity. How many of them across the planet turned just to drive the server farms she used to do her analysis? Computing was the single biggest energy user on the planet. How weird was that? She got back to work.