Patriot games
Patriot Games is a thriller novel, written by Tom Clancy and published in July 1987. Without Remorse, released six years later, is an indirect prequel, and it is chronologically the first book featuring Jack Ryan, the main character in most of Clancy's novels. The novel focuses on Ryan being the target of Irish terrorist group Ulster Liberation Army for thwarting their kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales in London.
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- Really sad to see him pass. Some of his books were absolutely superb: Rid Storm Rising, Hunt for the Red October, Patriot Games, Without remorse. RIP :(
- In Patriot Games by Tom Clancy, there is a scene early in the book where Jack Ryan is talking about the laptop he is using to write his book.
I don't remember the exact specs but am 100% sure he mentions that it has bubble memory.
- It's a potential goldmine. Spy satellites are on orbits and follow a very regular predictable path. I recall reading Patriot Games back in the day and terrorists had satellite timetables scrawled on a board so they knew when to cover their gear up with camouflage.
- Many people claim to do it.
It's a plot point in a Patriot Games, a 1987 Tom Clancy novel that introduced the term "canary trap" for this trick. He says he invented the term, but not the technique, which was already in use.
In a spat over the plot of Star Trek III (so, early 1980s), Harve Bennett distributed slightly different versions of the script, allowing him to track a leak back to Gene Roddenberry.
The book SpyCatcher says it was in routine use at MI-5, and you can find variations of it in lots of fiction too.
- Tom Clancy in the book "Patriot games" (1987), p86 at https://archive.org/details/patriotgamesclan00clan/page/86/m... :
> ... first draft of the report, I came up with an idea to make each one unique."
> "They've been doing that for years," Holmes noted. "All one must do is misplace a comma here and there. Easiest thing in the world. If the newspeople are foolish enough to print a photograph of the document, we can identify the leak."
> "Yes, sir, and the reporters who publish the leaks know that, too. They've learned not to show photographs of the documents they get from their sources, haven't they?" Ryan answered. "What I came up with was a new twist on that. Agents and Agencies has four sections. Each section has a summary paragraph. Each of those is written in a fairly dramatic fashion."
> "Yes, I noticed that," Charleston said. "Didn't read like a CIA document at all. More like one of ours. We use people to write our reports, you see, not computers. Do go on."
> "Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so -- well, lurid, I guess -- is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it. They've got an even more refined version of the trap working now. You can do it by computer. You use a thesaurus program to shuffle through synonyms, and you can make every copy of the document totally unique."
- I remember reading a number of years ago about a method of detecting the leaker of documents that are supposed to be kept confidential. [1] This is basically what the statistics professor used to catch the cheaters in his class.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
P.S. Yes I know that this technique played an important role in "Patriot Games" by Tom Clancy.
