Posted by Lieutenant Commander Faye Calloway (Counter-Intelligence Officer) in Calloway’s Lab - Sharing Information

Posted by Commander Shedda Mal’athar (Executive Officer) in Calloway’s Lab - Sharing Information

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Faye Calloway (Counter-Intelligence Officer) in Calloway’s Lab - Sharing Information

(snip)

Faye couldn’t help but smirk at the rumours part. If the new XO hadn’t heard them yet, she would and probably sooner rather than later. “Sort of. Depends on what’s needed. I mean, realistically, I’m not spending my day hacking. It’s a useful skill I employ in more critical situations. Having control over another person’s systems can give you all sorts of advantages we might need in a dire situation. What I really do is this…” she said, turning back to her screen. Her fingers flew furiously over the console and the screen flipped to a schematic of the ship with dots all over the place glowing.

“It’s an experimental secondary incursion protection system. R&D at Intelligence came up with the basic idea and I fleshed it out. They built the parts and then I installed them. A thousand hours of work later and we brought it online… successfully. It works. Now, it tosses errors at me on the regular and I have to then go investigate and crawl through jefferies tubes to figure out the issues. Sometimes it’s a parts issues, other times it’s programming and I have to troubleshoot and implement solutions. I do have the clearance to read you in on the reason why we need this, but I thought we’d wait till we got the pleasantries over with before I depress you for the rest of the day,” Faye said with a wink.

~Faye Calloway, Counter-Intelligence

Mal’athar leaned in watching the screen, “This is seperate from our security and internal sensor grids? Am I correct in assuming that this system runs on a stand alone power source and computer corp? Can you monitor this from anywhere else or do you need to be at this station?” The benefits from a detection grid that could be monitored even if the ship’s systems went down were..how did humans put it…a game changer. “Is this system merely passive or could it be used offensively?”

Mal’athar, XO

Faye screwed her face up in concentration, working through how best to explain this all. “Uh, let me tackle that in order as best I can. Yes and no. Think of it as an overlay. It’s built right into our systems and uses physical trap point along the data network to lock down anything that is flagged. These nodes are the dots you see there and are at important computer junction points. I can control the system itself separately from anywhere on the ship, even an isolated PADD, using a program I designed myself. But it is tied into our power systems. However, this lab uses an isolated core and we have a whole bunch of redundancies in place. The code that runs this program was made from scratch right here on site as I installed the physical system. This allowed me to build a system that is perfectly matched to the Manhattan, because every ship- even ones of the same class- have their own quirks and their missions demand different things. As for Offensive…” Faye interlaced her fingers and inverted her hands, stretching her fingers. “The system will isolate, contain and attack anything deemed harmful, which is double checked by a real person, currently me. And if something does get loose in the system that’s when I go all hacker on our own systems and fight back. I’ve done it before and I’m confident that I can do so again here. But also, the system is sophisticated enough that that would be a very rare last resort. I designed this thing so that eventually it didn’t need me babysitting it.”

~Faye Calloway, Counter-Intelligence

Shedda was no whiz at computers. She’d taken the basic courses at the Academy and then in her command training she’d gotten more indepth over views of the systems used. And being CSO she had worked and learned from the computer scientists working under her. So she knew enough to know Calloway was brilliant and possibly scary. “So this system identifies digital attacks to our systems. Could it identify and contain a person? Say someone was physically on the ship and accessing the system or does it just counter and stop what the person is doing?” She could see the benefit of such an ability but also the possibility for....mishaps.

Mal’athar, XO