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"I drove up from San Francisco to see her. It's late morning, we're at Glacier Point, elevation 7,200 feet, in September 2002. The air is still and cool.
We're in Yosemite with its excellent view of Half Dome.
She loves nature. She loves the open air and she's never visited Yosemite before, she tells me. She's so excited. They're English, transferred here temporarily to work for the American office. She’s sent her husband away - to get coffee or some such pretext; we have maybe 15 minutes.
The previous day he was in San Francisco himself, talking to all the startups seeking cash: part of his job. There's one company that he's particularly keen on - they have some new ideas which interest him from his past research in artificial intelligence. Something to do with transforming the way the web could be used - 'bypassing all those symbol-processing paradigms,' he says, 'which don't scale.'
A mystery.
As instructed, she's covertly copied the papers from his computer onto a USB stick and now I take it. She wants this photograph too so I get to play-act the helpful tourist; she really has no idea about security!
But I know that she won't be talking about this.
I have no idea whether these papers are of any use; I’m not an analyst. I was told that the computational requirements are simply beyond us today so maybe we'll just cut those guys loose.
Or maybe we'll keep them on a slow drip of deniable funding - and just see what turns up.”
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