Europareich 2057 - A Cyberpunk CYOA

Mhmmm no. When you do any kind of operation, always prepare your exit. If things go to hell, you will have a ready vehicle, and two guys outside who can make a distraction so the inside team can get away. Get in there in full force risk a siege situation. Not good. And one guy out is not that better.

 

C1

 

Flopping to C1, there's no way we can pull of E if we can't speak spanish and it's certain someone will ask us what are we doing/who are we or for example there will be security guard in front of the library and knocking him out won't be an option in the middle of the day, not to mention any people that may be in the library. Overall, I think choosing E may also cost us a fate point, with so many ways it could go wrong.

 

Oh come on E isn't that suicidal, you're not wearing a towel on your head or speaking with an Arabic accent.

 

We aren't very good at playing cover agents to begin with, we do not even know the language of the country we are infiltrating, not to mention we are trying to kidnap and interrogate an accomplice of a minor terrorist attack and not someone really important. Plus, it's a future so police(or maybe even a nearby military patrol) may get there really fast if we screw up and alarm goes off. Breaking in at night, at least we don't have to worry about crowd of witnesses.

 

They're too poor to have VTOL transport, cars didn't really get any faster. At least not within a city.

 

Damn, there goes my next suggestion. Thought we could cover up a few scars.

 

It is safe to assume that a couple of people walking around a busy university campus will not arouse ANY suspicion and the chances of them being able to go anywhere and do almost anything without having to talk to people is quite high. Universities are not high-security facilities, even if they may have some restricted areas here and there. Finding a publicly accessible network terminal should be piss easy. Why break in at night when you can walk in during the day? Don't you think that the second option will raise far less suspicion?

 

It's all based on probability. Going in the night, in the worst case scenario we will leave at least one door with damaged lock(if we fail the lockpick), one or few unconscious guards(if we fail the sneak) and completely clean footage which may raise suspicions. In terribad scenario, we also get injured and get cops on our tails.

Going with the card, we first have to find one of the university employees and secretly either steal the card or knock them out and take it, then we have to find the library at the University and while it's doubtful it'll be guarded(lots of people are probably going back and forth trough it) two employees of "Raul’s Cleaning Goods" walking about the university campus may be quite conspicuous, not to mention a possibility of access card having ID of the person we took it from. And I don't think they actually let random people just use computers whenever they feel like it. Worst case scenario, we will get a lot of witnesess mentioning german workers and said workers being suspected of assault of university employee. Even if we are safe, our superiors won't like that kind of crap. Terribad scenario may involve police siege.

Sorry, I meant that since it's the future then police station will probably get instantly notified of alarm at University, since everything is networked and all that. I'm sure that we will have enough time to get out of the building, maybe even have a nice police chase trough the city.

 

It's the number of potential witnesses.

Going in the day you cant even count how many people will see your face, disguised or otherwise. Going in the night the number of total people out and about reduced drastically. And if someone look at you from afar, they will need night vision glasses, not exactly an everyday accessory.

Deniable is paramount. They may know someone break in, they MUST NOT know that perpetrator(s) are from our government.

 

A single internal burglar alarm is enough to fuck up going in at night (whole neighbourhood wakes up and police surround the perimeter). We need to keep this as simple and foolproof as possible.

I assume that we'll ditch the cleaning uniforms once we've mugged the university member? Might also be wise to ditch them when we're doing the mugging so any witnesses just think it's your usual street thuggery.

 

My answer to this is:

Moving forward:

Why in the world "two employees of "Raul’s Cleaning Goods" walking about the university campus" would be "quite conspicuous"?

Let me tell you about the network access in the two universities I'm most familiar with: In one of them you have true open WiFi access, so you can just wander off the street, sit on a bench somewhere in range of an AP and get on the net. In the other you have open Wifi with a captive portal where you need your college credentials to get through, secured WiFi that you connect to with college credentials and computer workstations in some hallways/near the common rooms that anyone can access using their college credentials. Again, you can just wander in off the street if it's during daytime. Given that we have a team of ECK hackers at the other end of the line, getting around silly things like the need for a college username and password is going to be a non-issue. As long as we don't get in dressed in a way that screams "we don't belong here" and we don't go around loudly talking in German, then there is no way we couldn't get to a network connection during daytime without anyone noticing.

The plan is not to mug, or otherwise forcibly get it somehow from someone/somewhere. The plan is to get it without anyone even noticing. The desired effect is the mark wondering "Where the heck did I put that keycard? I must have dropped somewhere. Fuck, I need to ask for a new one again..."

 

Yes, it would be handy if we could just use wifi, probably wouldn't even have to go into the library then. But Hellraiser clearly told us we have to physically plug the uplink into a network cable so it's not quite this easy. And doesn't our military grade bionic arm scream "we don't belong here"?

 

It may not be that easy, but it's not much harder either. As for the bionic arm, don't they have long-sleeved shirts and gloves in the future?

 

I guess they do, but unless we have the gloves already it's another thing we need to obtain. And even wearing gloves I'm not sure a battle-scarred soldier who can't speak Spanish is going to fit in in a bunch of students during the day. What if the card flashes up a photo of the registered user when entering, as most security cards these days do?

I realise there are risks to breaking in at night, such as an alarm going off and us being apprehended before we can escape, but I also think there are risks in trying to follow people around the campus, steal their access card, and then use it to access the library in full view of the staff. We are soldiers after all, not professional spies and I doubt we can be very unobtrusive.

So I suppose the balance in voting between C, D and E lies in how everyone weighs those relative risks.

 

Military operatives on a black ops mission without any gloves? My suspension of disbelief for Hellraiser's artistic license has limits and a black ops team not bringing along gloves or appropriate clothing is definitely crossing over that line.

Scars don't mean anything. You should see the tattoos on the workers and builders doing regular maintenance around various universities.

We don't need to speak. We just need to act and carry ourselves in such a manner that we don't get spoken to and need to reply.

That would only matter if we would need to show the card to a human. For access control, the card would have either a magnetic strip or an RFID chip and we would only need to swipe it through/wave it in front of the reader and we're in, no matter what picture is printed on it.

We don't need to stalk one individual all over the campus for a whole day. The vast majority of people on campus will be carrying an access card. We need to pick out of the crowd someone careless with his/her card and act. All we need is patience and a little sleigh of hand. Borg has the patience, with him being a hunter and everything. As for the sleigh of hand part, that's why we're sending two people in: to be able to assist each other in completing their mission. One can run interference while the other lifts the card from the mark, or something of that sort.

The library staff won't even bat an eyelash because you swipe, you get it, you go in the library and look for a computer. Unless you start doing truly foolish while you're in there, then nobody will notice anything. This is one of the weaknesses of electronic access control that old school guard at the gate setups didn't have: the staff will trust the system implicitly and, if you can fool the system, the staff will never bother you because of their trust in the system. The people are never on their toes because they consider the system infallible.

Risk assessment is based on knowledge. If you have incomplete information, your risk assessment is going to be flawed. The reason I have been writing all of these posts is that many may not be aware of what it entails to get to a networked terminal in a college environment.

 

I just want to say that for more drama technical reasons you can't just walk onto the campus and connect to the wifi. It's got shitty packet loss and packet loss makes McKay angry, he's got a hard on for efficiency after all. Hence you need an actual network cable. McKay does have a point, the faster he can interface with the main server the less likely he is to be detected and the sooner you can disconnect the uplink and leave. Assuming a third world university Net Admin could detect somebody who's half computer himself anyway and probably thinks in binary by now.

Obviously you have gloves, a lockpick set and inconspicuous cloves (plus some stealthier ones for the night). After all breaking into at least one apartment was the plan from the start. You aren't really dresses out of the ordinary, your cover is being cleaning goods salesman or delivery people, that job doesn't really require a special uniform. Now if you provided actual cleaning services, then you probably would have needed those.

 

Oh well, flopping back to E1. You're right, skuphundaku. And I'm way too paranoid.

 

Have you ever remotely connected to a computer over ssh or telnet? Do you really think that 56kbit/s, 2Mbit/s or 1Gbit/s is going to make any difference? They either have a smart enough IDS/IPS (intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system) and he'll be detected almost instantly, or they don't and they will never detect anything. The bandwidth of the connection will make no difference. The time it takes to get the job done is not determined by the connection bandwidth, because we're not downloading media, but by how long it takes McKay to find what he's looking for.

Edit: I understand your need to create drama somehow, but for me all the technical inconsistencies are really sticking out and killing my suspension of disbelief.

 

You cant ever be paranoid enough. Too fancy an option like E WILL bite you in the ass. Just wait and see.

 

Now I think that C is too fancy. Ida and her comrades aren't bunch of retards, we have disguise and we can just speak english if we have to(I assume we know english ). If we don't rise any suspicions then we'll be out of University as quickly as we get in.

 

A hell of a lot less can go wrong with E.

Worst case scenario for E = We fail our pickpocketing roll and have to rough up/intimidate a university professor and take his wallet. He walks home with a black eye and bump on his head grumbling about how this neighbourhood has gone to hell. Don't even have to reveal we're German ('hand over your wallet or we're going to beat you up' is pretty universal). Cops won't give a fuck about local mugging #1405.

Now compare that to how hideously wrong breaking in at night could go. A single cheap alarm and the building goes off while police scramble to the scene and surround us. We get surrounded and have to break out guns-blazing leaving a trail of dead Spanish cops in our wake as we get to the getaway vehicle with the Spanish police hot on our tail.

If we fail the pickpocketing role for E then we can simply mug the university staff member and no one will have any reason to suspect it's anything more than some local thugs.

If we botch a night-time burglary then we've got to deal with armed police.

 

skuphundaku Writing about hacking when knowing jack shit about it is a time honored cyberpunk tradition, just ask William Gibson

 

Now that I think about it, I'll just say the uplink can't use wifi because the antenna/receiver fucks up the quantum entanglement thingamajig. Hence you need a cable, better?

 

Point taken