Let me rephrase. They know that we could likely very easily get access to such things due to our first contact and what was revealed of the Five Court's technology then. They know we have magic AI and that the more advanced technology of that world is subservient to Molly rather than several different nations fighting amongst themselves.
It was an explicit plot point back during the Boston affair that they didnt know that Molly had AI support and cyberdevils and hacking, and that was why we called the Fed vice-chair.
Word of QM:
She has talked to you under the effects of your full social suit of buffs, she knows you have some way to turn that 10 into at least a 9, that is that you can do the unreasonably hard and that you are an inhumanly good social operator (10 dice+). Also she does not know about your hacking so her risk assessment on taking time to brief the guy at the Federal Reserve is even more bleak than Molly's own.
They know we have advanced tech, multiple species, are great at social, and suspect we are better at a lot of things.
They know very little about our hard capabilities, because we have been good at information control thus far.
The only people who have had a good look are the wizards.
Hell, the very fact that we werent able to simply scrub everything that Basilisk did in Boston would lead them to believe that there are real and tangible limits to Molly's ability to penetrate and compromise computer systems.
Boston was interrogation, after all.
Its like with Molly asking them to get legal papers for the Mendozas to enter the US; if she'd pwnd all major US computer systems, she wouldnt ask.
How does this work exactly? I don't think you read that right. EvilBob was using U.S. satellites to stalk people. Do you not need privileged access to manage that?
Edit: We know this because of what our clone discovered with Gard.
1)Evil Bob was apparently stalking multiple people, not just Gard. And there are multiple modalities.
Hacking your computers. Your security cameras. Your bank accounts. Your phone records. Your internet connection. Your Internet shopping accounts. Your social media. Thats all stalking shit.
2)Evil Bob was using either spy planes or satellite surveillance to map Gard's wards according to Sophia.
This was in collaboration with fine thralls being used to probe the area.
The implication being that he has meatspace collaborators, and was able to fake work orders for aerial overflights of some sort in time with the weather.
US military satellites dont spy on US metro areas. Thats not their tasking. Nor are they responsive to the weather. Furthermore, satellites have limited fuel, and their fuel determines their lifespan; you cannot reposition a satellite to spy on the Chicago metro area without drawing the attention of entire tiers of US oversight and multiple foreign agencies literally dedicated to tracking US milsat activity.
Much easier to get aerial overflights. Hell, you can even do that without government involvement, by renting a private plane for regular overflights with a high-resolution camera at ten to thirty thousand feet.
Besides, from what I remember from my days reading techno thrillers, there is a meatspace interface between surveillance satellites and any new programmed instructions into their computers.
No military satellites is connected to the Internet, or to external networks.
Putting Evil Bob in the computers wouldnt have been enough.
I'm sorry but this has to be the most mind boggling argument I've ever seen from you.
EvilBob and co removed one of the walls of the National Security Agency headquarters, put a corpse in there, may have done something to the contractor's minds to make them forget, and used it to 'hack' into their systems and access privileged information and satellites. When discovered he was pulled out by an unknown party. They could have access to other government assets in/through other locations or use whatever methods they did in the instance with the NSA building to do so again for different more problematic reasons.
But your saying that moving against them does not constitute as us combating an enemy of the Government and it's assets free of charge.
How does that work?
Fact check, I went back and it was an "office in DC" that the corpse was found in not Natsec. Point still stands though.
1)The implication has been more along the lines of EvilBob having meatspace collaborators than that he did any of this alone.
It wouldnt have been possible to use contractors to wall in a Black Court vampire; his co-conspirators did that.
Those civilians who kept "stumbling" into Gard's wards were also whammied by someone.
=======
2)My understanding has been that Evil Bob has been using govt computers like reallife hackers use a botnet, allowing them to obscure who or what is coordinating an intrusion campaign.
For example, if Im a hacker in South Korea, I can control a network of infected devices(computers, routers, webcams etc) in South Africa, Germany and Chile, and use them to hack or otherwise attack a system in the UK. To the victim in the UK, the attacks look like they are coming from SA, Ger and Chile, instead of South Korea.
And its much harder to trace it back to the original perp
Same principle. Evil Bob was in
South Korea a Blampire, controlling infected devices in
Germany US federal network to
attack a system in the UK conduct a campaign against Gard.
If IRIS and the cyberdevils werent so supernaturally good, we wouldnt have known about Evil Bob either.
======
2) Let me try and explain this using RL examples.
When the Russian Federation sent Sergey Cherkasov under a Brazillian passport as a spy in the US and in the Netherlands, they had to break Brazillian ID systems and get into records and maybe computers in order to build him a legend.
Dude actually got admission to and studied at John Hopkins and Trinity College.
They are on Brazil's shitlist, but they did not attack Brazil.
Thats a confrontation between Russia and the US/Netherlands; Brazil's interests are not involved in getting in the middle of that.
When the Israelis used forged Australian and European passports to murder Hamas agent Mahmoud Al-Mahbouh in Dubai?
Thats a clash between the Israelis and Hamas/Iran; the Aussie and European govts whose resources the Israelis stole to get at their target are not involved, its not an attack on them.
When an unknown nationstate blew up the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany?
It wasnt an attack on Denmark or Sweden, despite it happening inside their claimed EEZs.
Neither country is even investigating.
When Chinese state-sponsored hackers infect Vietnamese systems with Mirai as part of their subverted botnet to engage in cyberespionage against the US?
Its not an attack on Vietnam either, and the Vietnamese dont get between the US and China.
When Evil Bob
steals uses US government assets and resources to spy on a Monoc operative, they didnt attack the US.
He and his backers are probably on Uncle Sam's shitlist(assuming its not another US govt agency playing shadow games and cutting backroom deals like in the Cold War), but its a confrontation between Team Evil Bob and Team Monoc.
Team Library of Congress' interests stop at cutting EvilBob off and preventing him getting back in. Which has been done.
Not in hunting him down; that's Team Monoc's business.
Right now, they are offering us a favor, one that they expect will be repaid in the future.
Note that we dont know who his backers and facilitators are.
Its entirely possible that his faction did a deal and was working with another US government agency. Those people who have some knowledge of the Cold War and the origins of the drug trade wont be surprised.
Furthermore, let me remind you: Many people wont even share computers, or give other people access to guest accounts on their hardware for fear of them poking around and finding their porn stash or bank account passwords or private notes.
This is orders of magnitude beyond that.
This is giving someone else access to (some of)Uncle Sam's porn stashes, and account information.
Computer security experts harp on the importance of denying physical access to secure hardware, and to assume that if someone else has physical access the hardware is compromised. Possibly irreparably.
And the Library are offering to help us get access to secure physical hardware of the nation they are sworn to protect.
They have no reliable way of knowing if Molly can compromise the physical hardware in perpetuity so it keeps reporting to her, or copy off all the data in every computer in this center.
This is a Very Big Favor.
