Brenda turned the USB stick over and over in her hand, trying to decide whether she wanted to go through with this. On one hand, Lou Corlin had put himself at significant risk to go poking around some of those places he was talking about. On the other, if his skills at checking and cleaning those files wasn’t as good as he thought they were, she could manage to corrupt her entire laptop, perhaps even any networks it might be connected with.
It would be so much simpler if she had a spare computer with no network connections at all. A computer she could take chances with, without risking all her data, or even other computers here in Shepardsport.
But she wasn’t in a position to have that kind of luxury. Things had been tight up here ever since the Expulsions, which meant there was no such thing as surplussed equipment. You kept things running until they wore out, and then you sent them back to IT to be used in repairing other computers.
On the other hand, Lou did know what he was doing, and he was meticulous about getting the job done right. And if he’d been prowling around the dark side of the ‘Net, he had taken a pretty serious risk on her behalf. To refuse to look at what he’d dug up would be to disrespect his effort.
However, it didn’t mean she needed to take stupid chances. Carefully sitting Lou’s USB stick where she wouldn’t lose track of it, she retrieved one of her own and made a backup of everything on her laptop.
Only when she knew that all her data was backed up and the backup USB stick safely back in her bag did she finally mount Lou’s USB stick on her desktop. As she began to look through the folders, all neatly organized, she realized just how far Lou had gone for her.
Someone, somewhere, had gotten into a bunch of Chicago Police Department databases and dumped it somewhere on the darknet. Some of this stuff was video straight from cop dash cams and body cams. There was no way in heck any law enforcement agency would ever allow it out in the wild uncut like this.
Not to mention the 911 audio files and transcripts. Some of them could easily have serious privacy issues, depending on exactly what was on them. However, she was pretty confident that she was looking at the facts behind the rumor Drew had heard about warlords in the sketchier parts of the south side of Chicago.
And that was just the first few folders she’d gone through. If she was right, at least some of it would relate to the situation over at Schirrasburg.
Which meant she now had the problem of figuring out how to get this material to Drew without raising questions for which there could be no acceptable answers. A direct handoff would be ideal — but could she figure out a way to pass a physical object to Drew, given the quarantine measures that separated pilots from their families even during so-called personal visits?
First she needed to contact him, and carefully drop the hints that she had some seriously hot information. Then they could work out the particulars.