As ever, the NSA often applied the brakes. The Snowden leaks had exposed many of its secret programs and capabilities, forcing the agency to painstakingly rebuild its exploits and infrastructure around the world. Now, Cyber Command risked revealing its surviving programs and new infrastructure. There were frequent debates about the trade-offs of using, and therefore jeopardizing, particular assets or exploits.
More broadly, Cardon recalls, there was the old, ingrained philosophical clash between military operators geared toward the battlefield and intelligence professionals, who operate in the shadows and whose instinct is to protect their hiding places and secret backdoors. With ARES, that clash seemed to come to a head. “They would say, ‘If you do it like that, they'll know it's you!’” Cardon says. “I'd just look at them and say, ‘Who cares? When I'm using artillery, attack aviation, jets—you think they don't know that it's the United States of America?’”
Throughout, the pressure from the top was unrelenting. Rogers “wanted to pull out all the stops to pass this test,” a senior official recalls. Even while the effort was weeks old, Pentagon officials began complaining in the press about the slowness of the progress. The crew was working 14-hour days, seven days a week.
Finally, ARES had done the reconnaissance and laid its groundwork, penetrating ISIS' networks and communication channels, laying malware and backdoors to ensure later access. The president had been briefed. The plan was dubbed Operation Glowing Symphony, and it would attempt to combat ISIS online by exploiting a careless weakness. The ARES team had discovered that despite ISIS' sophisticated, multifaceted global media campaign, the terror group was just as lazy as most internet users. Nearly everything it did connected through just 10 online accounts.
On November 8, 2016—Election Day in the US—D-Day arrived. ..
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