Requiem: Chapter 21

Lucy Nicholson sent a number of encrypted e-mails to a shortlist of persons that same night. Each department head had a part of the Resistance's membership base and in between there were some people who belonged to the target group they were looking for.. Obviously, that list was extremely secret and in this case they did not use the real name of these people. Every member of the Resistance therefore had an alias and a corresponding e-mail address. These IP addresses were practically impossible to identify because they were the onion router or for short TOR were sent.

TOR is from a network of virtual tunnels to hide your IP address and secure mail traffic. The system of transmission worked through a series of computers serving as an intermediate station. The message traveled through the onion computers where each computer or server peeled off a layer of onion and eventually turned it into plain reading language at the person who was supposed to receive the message. The TOR program randomly selects some of these computers and therefore the messages are not interceptable..

If one still came across a strange message, for example, by setting up a Tor-Exit node and intercepting a message, one would not understand the text without having the complete decoding system.. It was a system set up by the US Naval Research Laboratory at the end of the 20th century and both the software and the use of the network were free for users.

Out of security, the Resistance changed the encryption code every other month. It was based on a numerical system and certain texts from well-known books and magazines. The people of the shortlist were all people who would have the chip examined in some way.. All these department heads in turn sent the same encrypted message to their shortlist at the Resistance. The message would eventually reach its goal.