In the early days, Paul had championed a new approach to secrecy called Alternate Reality Flooding (ARF), huge data dumps onto the internet whenever there was a leak. The logic was that it was easier to bury a secret in plain sight than it was to try to disappear it. Plus, all of the search engine companies were now in Cornerstone’s COA, able to direct queries about “areas of concern” to mundane and misleading results. In the beginning, the search companies would receive a government memo about a tweak to their search algorithms every few months. Now, it was daily. A classified memo would go
...more