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Eureka
I drove through the night to get to that appointment, armed with a video camera. I was in disguise, after a fashion. I had excavated my closet to find things I haven’t worn in thirty years, and that nobody would recognize me in today. Especially not anyone I work with, in the new group or the old.
I shouldn’t have bothered. It was nothing like I had expected.
I thought I’d be seeing an assemblage of corrupt administrators and politicians. In my imagined scenario, I would snap a few incriminating photographs, perhaps record an incriminating conversation, and head straight for the press or the FBI. But the address was just some store.
After an impatient few minutes, I went in and browsed the stock. Comic books, if you must know.
I was clearly out of place. Before long, an employee approached me and asked if I needed help. In a flash of inspiration, I blurted out the password. The employee nodded, unsurprised, and led me to the counter. I was given a bag and ushered outside, too shocked to think to ask any questions.
It looks like it wasn’t a meeting I discovered, but some sort of surreptitious data exchange. The bag contained, among other things, a cell phone with a document on it.
The bad news is that I may have more information now, but I haven’t been able to make heads or tails of it. It’s encrypted. I might be able to crack it if I had a month to spare to work on it, but I don’t.
Maybe one of you does. Tell me if you figure it out.
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One of my readers emailed me saying that one Soren Ulfert has a connection to Project Naaczaal at the Institute for Human Continuity. Thanks for that, it looks like an intriguing lead.
I’d never heard of this Institute before, and I have no idea what it has to do with my own employer, but Naaczaal isn’t exactly a common word, is it? I’ve reached out to Dr. Ulfert to see if he has any more information. We’ll see what comes of it.
Meanwhile, I’ve done a little more creeping around and subverting security policies. I finally hit a vein with one search for NCZL. I turned up an address, a date and time, and what looks like a password for a security system. It’s not close by, and I don’t know what precisely to expect if I turn up there, but I’m going to roll the dice and check it out.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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I was concerned that my hunt would be effectively ended when I was reassigned. I have no question that was the intent. But I’ve found that this new group has lax security standards. Think along the lines of passwords left on stick-it notes on monitors, or secure terminals left logged in and unattended.
It’s shameful. If I weren’t taking advantage of it, I’d be reporting it.
I won’t go into specifics here, but I was able to access data that I typically would not. I took advantage of it to search for information on my missing $180 million item. I didn’t expect to find anything.
Imagine my surprise when I turned up a run-of-the-mill form filed when resources are reallocated from one project to another. This basic particle of bureaucracy wouldn’t typically be so secure, so I can only speculate that I’m dealing with a black hole of a black ops project. If that’s the case, I can think of enough policies, statutes and mandates it’s breaking to keep an office building of lawyers busy for the next decade.
So yes, I’m going to keep at it. And now I have something to go on. Two words: Project Naaczaal.
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Apparently I am not enough of a team player, as they say in manager-land. All of my meticulous work has had a definite, immediate result.
I’ve been reassigned to another group. It’s not precisely a demotion, but it’s not far from it. I don’t know if I’ll be in a position to continue searching from my new role, but I certainly won’t give up. I have learned one important lesson, though: Management isn’t to be trusted.
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Knowledge is power, so I’ve spent the last few days making myself as powerful as possible. I stayed long after hours through the holiday weekend to take a complete inventory and see if I could thoroughly identify all of the resources that we should have… but don’t.
There should have been some hint of a pattern; high-value shipments, low-security equipment. Or perhaps a pattern of escalation as the thieves became increasingly bolder. What I found was perplexing. There is no rhyme or reason to it.
The disappearances ran deeper than I had known. No area has been spared. The $180 million item has some innate value, and I can easily see it sold on the black market – possibly to a foreign government. But even smaller items have vanished, and recently, too. Boxes of nuts and bolts and soldering wire, crates of graph paper and cheap pens. Who would do this, and why? I struggle to make sense of it, but fail.
Still, now I have more than suspicion to bring to the table. I’m writing a thorough report and have requested another meeting with our head of security and my own manager. Let’s see them laugh this one off.
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Where to begin…have you ever found yourself sailing along, minding your own business - nose to the grindstone - and then out of nowhere, you hit a rock and you look up and suddenly realize you don’t know where you are or how you got so far? After that moment, you can’t look at anything the same way again.
That’s me. I was focused on my job, meeting my deadlines, and then last week I hit a rock. A big one. A $180 million rock. This particular rock was a very important delivery for a project I’m involved with. Recently, resource allocation and distribution had been very lax. Shipments hadn’t been showing up when and where they were supposed to, so I took it upon myself to handle this shipment personally - even signing for it myself.
The next day, I went back to the loading bay to arrange for everything to be moved to its correct location, and the shipment was gone. Just vanished. This was no small item either. Moving it would require at least five strong men and a forklift.
Now in case you are thinking this is just about me trying to create a story to cover myself with my superiors, I can assure you it’s not the case, because the really disturbing part of the story isn’t just that it disappeared, but that when I went to our head of security to report a theft, he laughed it off. He told me it was none of my concern, and I should order a replacement.
No formal inquiry. No investigation. Just forget about it, order another one and move on. Something stinks to me, and I want to find out what – or who – is behind it.
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Who Am I
For the moment, I think it’s best for me not to reveal my identity. All you need to know is that I work for a government agency, and the information to which I have access is legitimate. Whether I am male or female, young or old or employed as a secretary, executive, janitor, book-keeper or simple mover of boxes doesn’t matter.
I have worked in government long enough to have developed a healthy distrust of the legal system and have zero confidence in the federal protections offered to whistleblowers. There are few employers for a person of my particular skills and interests; and at the end of the day, I love what I do. I want to do the right thing, but I’m not prepared for it to cost me my livelihood in the process.
My Motivation
As part of a government agency, any institutional waste or corruption is ultimately coming out of the pockets of everyday Americans - your tax money and mine. I have developed a sense of righteous indignation about this, and coupled with what is admittedly an outsized sense of justice, I’ve decided to do something about it.
I’ve noticed an unsettling pattern of very expensive resources going missing from my latest project. They cannot be simply vanishing into thin air. No one else seems concerned; I’m going to get to the bottom of it.
How You Can Help
The old adage says “Two heads are better than one.” How much better then, are a dozen heads, or a thousand, all working together? I need assistance in uncovering the truth, but I also want allies. I want people who can bear witness to what I find and get the message out. I guess I’m also a fan of another adage, “There is safety in numbers.”
Beyond that, I don’t have any specific information for you yet. Feel free to share this site with people you trust, and stay tuned.
Contact: corruptiontheory@yahoo.com
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