The Man Who Lit The Dark Web

Before Chris White could help disrupt Jihadi finance networks, crush weapons markets, and bust up sex-slave rings with search tools that mine the dark Web, he first had to figure out how to stop himself from plummeting through the open gun door of a banking Black Hawk helicopter. White was on his way to a forward operating base outside Kabul headquarters, as part of a secret intelligence cell to help confront the Taliban and al-Qaida, smash their encrypted online money stream, and win over the hearts and minds of the Afghanistan population. Slight and lanky and 28, White felt Dukakis-ridiculous in his unwieldy body armor and bulbous helmet with "Dr. White" scrawled in marker on duct tape across the front, and with the dust from liftoff, he was finding it hard to breathe. He was still struggling with the unfamiliar seat straps when the pilot hit the stick, sending White sliding toward the hot square of the door and the desert 200 feet below. Down there, Afghanistan was a messy, dangerous place for pretty much everybody. After nearly a decade of U.S.-led war, the American body count had hit 1,000, and civilian casualties were beyond calculation, as President Obama's 30,000-troop surge intensified the fighting that spring. Many feared the situation was only going from bad to worse. The U.S. was escalating drone strikes across the border in Pakistan. And U.S. command was under assault after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the surge's architect, found himself without a job after he and his staff made disparaging remarks about the commander in chief in some music magazine. It is hard to imagine that only a few weeks earlier, White had been just another impossibly young-looking Harvard postdoc in flip-flops looking forward to a Cambridge summer. Helicopter gunships and war zones weren't on the radar; there were lattes in the square and rock climbing, and on the other side of campus, a prestigious fellowship in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, where he was working at the intersection of big data, statistics, and machine learning. He had earned academic pole position and had every expectation it would continue that way forever -- becoming a professor, building a lab, and sniping out white papers from a tenured ivory tower.