Sam's mind stopped when he heard her say several ships had corrupted data. "Isn't that supposed to be impossible? Or at least self correcting? That's the whole point of putting a black box on everything that moves under its own power. If one source is corrupted the checksums--"<br/>He stopped himself. He's minored in cryptography way back at the academy, "but that's the point isn't it? The system self corrects against random corruption. These things weren't all corrupted exactly the same way, were they?" The chances of such a thing happening were astronomically small given the sheer size of the data buffers in the black boxes. Far more likely someone was spreading bad data.<br/><br/>He'd seen pirates try that once. Dumb pirates caught by a tipoff from ITC's own data integrity department. It didn't take much for him to put the pieces together.<br/><br/>"Are you telling me this was an inside job?"