Hooper accepted the financial charge from the central archives, for the subject access requests they had made, and applied it to the holding account for the divisional section. The holding account was only tallied once every week, so there would be three more days of making the requests for data and accepting charge forms before the system reported what Hooper was doing.
The moment that the system checked in his requests, and updated divisional budgets the activities would be obvious. Hooper was sure his quarry would flee, they would be monitoring this level of investigation.
The quarry was careful, clever and had been doing this for a long time. They no doubt had flags to notice if someone was doing large scale data requests. Especially since Hooper had requested the precise movements of all personnel, organic and inorganic, for the past ten years. That data was not held by the judiciary. The law enforcement was an arm of government and all data was centrally collected and archived.
There was also the data protection legislation. Judiciary couldn’t acquire information secretly without a warrant, or good cause, linking it to an active investigation. That was a request that would see every affected intellect in the department notified that their personal movements, both on and off duty, had been part of an access request. So Hooper had used the holding account for the division and had requested everything. It was risky, they might find nothing, they might get fired and prosecuted for a waste of departments funds and resources.
Judiciary was a planetary organisation. Its budgets were paid for from taxes and the application of fines, land rates and loans. There was an oversight committee who decided how much the departments could spend and there were audits of all accounts. What made the situation more complex was the systems that were used by judiciary; computer intellects, storage systems, shuttlecraft, equipment, they were all loaned. Various government departments, individual suppliers, contracts and tenders made up the actual mechanics of the judiciary. The hardware and equipment was not owned by them, it was rented.
All interaction with equipment was recorded, it was what Hooper relied on for his current line of inquiry. All government equipment was charged, on usage. So every auditor on the payroll was highly attuned to ensuring departments had the best possible equipment, that they used sparingly.
Hooper added the information to the datasets that were already correlating and cross-referencing all the sensor information. There was something forming, a small edge of a pattern, Hooper was sure of this.
Hooper checked the intellect that had been analysing the small bursts of static that had been unearthed as coming from the satellite. The intellect was unable to decode it directly as the information too short and lost in a sea of digital static. One would have to know precisely what they were looking to find. The estimation from the systems was that it would take even the combined intellect of all the government systems a decade to crack a single occurrence. There were thousands of instances. It would be more important to find something analogous. So Hooper had it cross-comparing data. Hooper was looking for patterns, or for the absence of patterns, and praying there were exceptions.
The exceptions, in Hooper’s estimation, made the rules, So the exceptions, were always interesting.
