The Hidden Shadow

The flower delivery van had been parked across the street for far too long. Cahey peered outside through the window blinds for the third time. By now he was certain they had him under surveillance. He had been careful not to discuss the subject matter of his current project with anyone, but there were a few souls at the Tribune who knew he was working on a major investigative piece. Apparently that was enough to spike the government’s interest.

Cahey lit a cigarette and reflected on the van’s relatively conspicuous location. Sloppy surveillance work or a deliberate attempt to scare him into silence? There was no way to know. He was, however, sure of one thing: if they came here, they would find nothing. Knowing that digital content was much easier to protect from prying eyes than papers, photographs and recordings, he had disposed of every physical record of his investigation, leaving only a digitized copy on the hard drive of his laptop computer. Two days ago, he had encrypted all this data using an open-source application called TrueCrypt, making sure to overwrite the original files several times before deletion. Now his data was unrecoverable without the password, and there was nothing anybody could do about it, not even the NSA with their army of PhD’s and their supercomputers. The spooks would be in for a surprise.

“Drrrrrt” — the sound of the doorbell pierced the smoke-infused air. Cahey glanced through the window. The van was gone. As he walked towards the door, he contemplated logging out of his Windows account, but decided against it. Bypassing that layer of security would be a trivial exercise, and it wouldn’t do the government much good anyway, given the fact that everything of interest was now encrypted. He opened the door. On his porch stood five serious-looking men in suits. “Stephen Cahey? We have a warrant to search the premises.”

———-

Agent Jack Trallis looked at the machine he had been ordered to process. It was a pretty standard Dell laptop with a dual-core CPU and a 15-inch screen that was covered with fingerprints. “God, do I hate those glossy displays”, he muttered to himself. He was alone in the room; the other agents were in the living room questioning the suspect. Trallis noticed the prominent TrueCrypt icon on the machine’s desktop. “Uh oh. Strong encryption.” He fixed his eyes on the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. There was a row of oversized, unlabeled icons that reminded him of the Hackintosh he had once built for his girlfriend. The guy’s laptop was running Windows 7. There was still a chance.

He located the Documents folder, opened its Properties window, and clicked on the “Previous Versions” tab. Just as he thought, there were five previous versions of the folder – “shadow copies” created regularly by the operating system as part of the System Restore mechanism. As these snapshots were prepared silently in the background and stored on a hidden disk volume, few users were aware of them. Agent Trallis was smiling. The good guys from Redmond were going to make his job easy again.

He selected one of the snapshots and clicked Open. An Explorer window popped up, showing the contents of the Documents folder exactly as it had appeared three days ago. “This is too funny”, he thought. There was a subfolder labeled Project Foxhunt full of scanned documents and audio files. Trallis grabbed his radio. “Sir”, he called out to his commanding officer, “I’ve got something you might want to have a look at.”