[[This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK
bookselling chain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has
the feel of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great
stock (especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff.]]
[[Waterstones http://www.waterstones.com]]
So we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how to
use technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure
out how the technology around them can be used to make their lives
better. Ange was great too -- we made an excellent team. We'd trade off
explaining how it all worked. Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to
begin with, of course.
It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the
early nineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier
Foundation fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I
dimly knew about that period, but Barbara explained it in a way that
made me get goose-pimples.
It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government
classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export
or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have
illegal *math* in this country.
The National Security Agency were the real movers behind the ban. They
had a crypto standard that they said was strong enough for bankers and
their customers to use, but not so strong that the mafia would be able
to keep its books secret from them. The standard, DES-56, was said to
be practically unbreakable. Then one of EFF's millionaire co-founders
built a $250,000 DES-56 cracker that could break the cipher in two
hours.
Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizens
from possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its
death-blow. In 1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad
student called Dan Bernstein in court. Bernstein had written a crypto
tutorial that contained computer code that could be used to make a
cipher stronger than DES-56. Millions of times stronger. As far as the
NSA was concerned, that made his article into a weapon, and therefore
unpublishable.
Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what it
means, but it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't
real enthusiastic about telling grad students what kind of articles
they're allowed to write. The crypto wars ended with a victory for the
good guys when the 9th Circuit Appellate Division Court ruled that code
was a form of expression protected under the First Amendment --
"Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." If you've
ever bought something on the Internet, or sent a secret message, or
checked your bank-balance, you used crypto that EFF legalized. Good
thing, too: the NSA just isn't that smart. Anything they know how to
crack, you can be sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too.
Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputation from
covering the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of the
civil rights movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the
similarity between the fight for the Constitution in the real world and
the fight in cyberspace.
So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my
parents, but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about
our cryptographic protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking
stuff I didn't know the answer to -- sometimes pointing out potential
breaks in our procedure.
We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFi
nodes visible from the board room and I told it to change between them
at random intervals. She got this too -- once you were actually plugged
into the Xnet, it was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff
was a little slower, and it was all anonymous and unsniffable.
"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and I had
a terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezing
my hand under the table in a way that made me want to break away and
find somewhere private to finish making up for our first fight.
"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the things you've
told me and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll let you
see what I'm going to publish and I'll let you know when it's going to
go live. I'd prefer that you *not* talk about this with anyone else
now, because I want the scoop and because I want to make sure that I
get the story before it goes all muddy from press speculation and DHS
spin.
"I *will* have to call the DHS for comment before I go to press, but
I'll do that in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible.
I'll also be sure to let you know before that happens.
"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It's
mine. You were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay the
gift, but you don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it,
or to stop me. This is now in motion and it won't stop. Do you
understand that?"
I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was
obvious. It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall
the rocket. It was going to fall where it was aimed, or it would go off
course, but it was in the air and couldn't be changed now. Sometime in
the near future, I would stop being Marcus -- I would be a public
figure. I'd be the guy who blew the whistle on the DHS.
I'd be a dead man walking.
I guess Ange was thinking along the same lines, because she'd gone a
color between white and green.
"Let's get out of here," she said.
Ange's mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decide
where we were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but my
parents had known that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't give me
any grief if I came home late.
When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had had all
the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about was Ange,
Ange, Ange. Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry with me. Ange
never going to talk to me again. Ange never going to kiss me again.
She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut the
door to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her,
like you'd hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd
thirst for a glass of water after playing soccer for three hours
straight.
Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before.
I wanted to eat her whole, devour her.
Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let
her set and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have *her*
grab *me* and take off my shirt, drag my face to hers.
But tonight I couldn't hold back. I wouldn't hold back.
The door clicked shut and I reached for the hem of her t-shirt and
yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over her
head. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle
as the stitches came loose.
Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow.
Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my
ears.
I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into
the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books and
papers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the unmade
bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we
would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into my
mouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocal
chords, a feeling more intimate than anything I'd ever felt before.
She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open the drawer
and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I looked inside.
Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiled at her
and she smiled back and I opened the box.
I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times a
day I'd imagined it. Some days, I'd thought of practically nothing
else.
It was nothing like I expected. Parts of it were better. Parts of it
were lots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity.
Afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye.
Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something had
changed between us.
It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered
around the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. I wrapped
the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the
bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the
trash-can.
When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her
Xbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned to
face me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.
"Thanks," I said.
She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinning
hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks.
I hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "You're a good man,
Marcus Yallow," she whispered. "Thank you."
I didn't know what to say, but I squeezed her back. Finally, we parted.
She wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling.
She pointed at my Xbox, on the floor beside the bed. I took the hint. I
picked it up and plugged it in and logged in.
Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I read
streamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox was
repeatedly "joe-jobbed" -- used as the return address for spams sent to
hundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces and
angry messages came back to me. I didn't know who was behind it. Maybe
the DHS trying to overwhelm my mailbox. Maybe it was just people
pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good filters, though, and they
gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so I wasn't
likely to be drowned any time soon.
I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate
mailbox for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that
was likely to be Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't
figured out that using public keys would make their junk mail more
plausible yet, so for now this worked well.
There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of
trust. I skimmed them -- links to videos and pics of new abuses from
the DHS, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'd
blogged. The usual.
Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. That meant
that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who had written it.
It said it came from Masha, which could either be a handle or a name --
I couldn't tell which.
> M1k3y
> You don't know me, but I know you.
> I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. They
> decided I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down
> the terrorists who'd killed my neighbors.
> It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my
> actual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their
> city being turned into a police state.
> I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust.
> If I wanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an
> address you'd trust. Three addresses, actually. I'm totally inside
> your network as only another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email
> you've gotten has been carefully chosen misinformation from me and my
> handlers.
> They don't know who you are, but they're coming close. They continue
> to turn people, to compromise them. They mine the social network
> sites and use threats to turn kids into informants. There are
> hundreds of people working for the DHS on Xnet right now. I have
> their names, handles and keys. Private and public.
> Within days of the Xnet launch, we went to work on exploiting
> ParanoidLinux. The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial,
> but a break is inevitable. Once we have a zero-day break, you're
> dead.
> I think it's safe to say that if my handlers knew that I was typing
> this, my ass would be stuck in Gitmo-by-the-Bay until I was an old
> woman.
> Even if they don't break ParanoidLinux, there are poisoned
> ParanoidXbox distros floating around. They don't match the checksums,
> but how many people look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty
> of kids are already dead, though they don't know it.
> All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to
> bust you to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be
> sooner, not later. Believe.
> You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this.
> I am too.
> Here's where I come from. I signed up to fight terrorists. Instead,
> I'm spying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn't like.
> Not people who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can't do
> it anymore.
> But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it's
> only a matter of time until you're in chains on Treasure Island.
> That's not if, that's when.
> So I'm through here. Down in Los Angeles, there are some people. They
> say they can keep me safe if I want to get out.
> I want to get out.
> I will take you with me, if you want to come. Better to be a fighter
> than a martyr. If you come with me, we can figure out how to win
> together. I'm as smart as you. Believe.
> What do you say?
> Here's my public key.
> Masha
When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Ever hear that rhyme? It's not good advice, but at least it's easy to
follow. I leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. My heart thudded
and my blood sang in a cruel parody of the way I'd felt when we got
home. This wasn't sexual excitement, it was raw terror.
"What?" Ange said. "What?"
I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over and
grabbed my keyboard and scribed on the touchpad with her fingertip. She
read in silence.
I paced.
"This has to be lies," she said. "The DHS is playing games with your
head."
I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she
believed it.
"You think?"
"Sure. They can't beat you, so they're coming after you using Xnet."
"Yeah."
I sat back down on the bed. I was breathing fast again.
"Chill out," she said. "It's just head-games. Here."
She never took my keyboard from me before, but now there was a new
intimacy between us. She hit reply and typed,
> Nice try.
She was writing as M1k3y now, too. We were together in a way that was
different from before.
"Go ahead and sign it. We'll see what she says."
I didn't know if that was the best idea, but I didn't have any better
ones. I signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public
key Masha had provided.
The reply was instant.
> I thought you'd say something like that.
> Here's a hack you haven't thought of. I can anonymously tunnel video
> over DNS. Here are some links to clips you might want to look at
> before you decide I'm full of it. These people are all recording each
> other, all the time, as insurance against a back-stab. It's pretty
> easy to snoop off them as they snoop on each other.
> Masha
Attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do
exactly what Masha claimed: pull video over the Domain Name Service
protocol.
Let me back up a moment here and explain something. At the end of the
day, every Internet protocol is just a sequence of text sent back and
forth in a prescribed order. It's kind of like getting a truck and
putting a car in it, then putting a motorcycle in the car's trunk, then
attaching a bicycle to the back of the motorcycle, then hanging a pair
of Rollerblades on the back of the bike. Except that then, if you want,
you can attach the truck to the Rollerblades.
For example, take Simple Mail Transport Protocol, or SMTP, which is
used for sending email.
Here's a sample conversation between me and my mail server, sending a
message to myself:
> HELO littlebrother.com.se
250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to
meet you
> MAIL FROM:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se
250 2.1.0 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Sender ok
> RCPT TO:m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se
250 2.1.5 m1k3y@littlebrother.com.se... Recipient ok
> DATA
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
> When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout
> .
250 2.0.0 k5SMW0xQ006174 Message accepted for delivery
QUIT
221 2.0.0 mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.
This conversation's grammar was defined in 1982 by Jon Postel, one of
the Internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most
important servers on the net under his desk at the University of
Southern California, back in the paleolithic era.
Now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an IM session. You
could send an IM to the server that said "HELO littlebrother.com.se"
and it would reply with "250 mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello
mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you." In other words, you
could have the same conversation over IM as you do over SMTP. With the
right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of
a chat. Or a web-session. Or anything else.
This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat "tunnel."
You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if you wanted to
be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel.
In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's
cool, because it means that if you're on a network with only Web
access, you can tunnel your mail over it. You can tunnel your favorite
P2P over it. You can even tunnel Xnet -- which itself is a tunnel for
dozens of protocols -- over it.
Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet protocol,
dating back to 1983. It's the way that your computer converts a
computer's name -- like pirateparty.org.se -- to the IP number that
computers actually use to talk to each other over the net, like
204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic, even though it's got
millions of moving parts -- every ISP runs a DNS server, as do most
governments and lots of private operators. These DNS boxes all talk to
each other all the time, making and filling requests to each other so
no matter how obscure the name is you feed to your computer, it will be
able to turn it into a number.
Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this was a
single document that listed the name and address of *every single
computer* connected to the Internet. Every computer had a copy of it.
This file was eventually too big to move around, so DNS was invented,
and ran on a server that used to live under Jon Postel's desk. If the
cleaners knocked out the plug, the entire Internet lost its ability to
find itself. Seriously.
The thing about DNS today is that it's everywhere. Every network has a
DNS server living on it, and all of those servers are configured to
talk to each other and to random people all over the Internet.
What Masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video-streaming
system over DNS. She was breaking up the video into billions of pieces
and hiding each of them in a normal message to a DNS server. By running
her code, I was able to pull the video from all those DNS servers, all
over the Internet, at incredible speed. It must have looked bizarre on
the network histograms, like I was looking up the address of every
computer in the world.
But it had two advantages I appreciated at once: I was able to get the
video with blinding speed -- as soon as I clicked the first link, I
started to receive full-screen pictures, without any jitter or
stuttering -- and I had no idea where it was hosted. It was totally
anonymous.
At first I didn't even clock the content of the video. I was totally
floored by the cleverness of this hack. Streaming video from DNS? That
was so smart and weird, it was practically *perverted*.
Gradually, what I was seeing began to sink in.
It was a board-room table in a small room with a mirror down one wall.
I knew that room. I'd sat in that room, while Severe-Haircut woman had
made me speak my password aloud. There were five comfortable chairs
around the table, each with a comfortable person, all in DHS uniform. I
recognized Major General Graeme Sutherland, the DHS Bay Area commander,
along with Severe Haircut. The others were new to me. They all watched
a video screen at the end of the table, on which there was an
infinitely more familiar face.
Kurt Rooney was known nationally as the President's chief strategist,
the man who returned the party for its third term, and who was steaming
towards a fourth. They called him "Ruthless" and I'd seen a news report
once about how tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them,
IMing them, watching their every motion, controlling every step. He was
old, with a lined face and pale gray eyes and a flat nose with broad,
flared nostrils and thin lips, a man who looked like he was smelling
something bad all the time.
He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone else was
focused on his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as they could
type, trying to look smart.
"-- say that they're angry with authority, but we need to show the
country that it's terrorists, not the government, that they need to
blame. Do you understand me? The nation does not love that city. As far
as they're concerned, it is a Sodom and Gomorrah of fags and atheists
who deserve to rot in hell. The only reason the country cares what they
think in San Francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been
blown to hell by some Islamic terrorists.
"These Xnet children are getting to the point where they might start to
be useful to us. The more radical they get, the more the rest of the
nation understands that there are threats everywhere."
His audience finished typing.
"We can control that, I think," Severe Haircut Lady said. "Our people
in the Xnet have built up a lot of influence. The Manchurian Bloggers
are running as many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels,
linking to each other, mostly just taking the party line set by this
M1k3y. But they've already shown that they can provoke radical action,
even when M1k3y is putting the brakes on."
Major General Sutherland nodded. "We have been planning to leave them
underground until about a month before the midterms." I guessed that
meant the mid-term elections, not my exams. "That's per the original
plan. But it sounds like --"
"We've got another plan for the midterms," Rooney said. "Need-to-know,
of course, but you should all probably not plan on traveling for the
month before. Cut the Xnet loose now, as soon as you can. So long as
they're moderates, they're a liability. Keep them radical."
The video cut off.
Ange and I sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen. Ange
reached out and started the video again. We watched it. It was worse
the second time.
I tossed the keyboard aside and got up.
"I am *so sick* of being scared," I said. "Let's take this to Barbara
and have her publish it all. Put it all on the net. Let them take me
away. At least I'll know what's going to happen then. At least then
I'll have a little *certainty* in my life."
Ange grabbed me and hugged me, soothed me. "I know baby, I know. It's
all terrible. But you're focusing on the bad stuff and ignoring the
good stuff. You've created a movement. You've outflanked the jerks in
the White House, the crooks in DHS uniforms. You've put yourself in a
position where you could be responsible for blowing the lid off of the
entire rotten DHS thing.
"Sure they're out to get you. Course they are. Have you ever doubted it
for a moment? I always figured they were. But Marcus, *they don't know
who you are*. Think about that. All those people, money, guns and
spies, and you, a seventeen year old high school kid -- you're still
beating them. They don't know about Barbara. They don't know about Zeb.
You've jammed them in the streets of San Francisco and humiliated them
before the world. So stop moping, all right? You're winning."
"They're coming for me, though. You see that. They're going to put me
in jail forever. Not even jail. I'll just disappear, like Darryl. Maybe
worse. Maybe Syria. Why leave me in San Francisco? I'm a liability as
long as I'm in the USA."
She sat down on the bed with me.
"Yeah," she said. "That."
"That."
"Well, you know what you have to do, right?"
"What?" She looked pointedly at my keyboard. I could see the tears
rolling down her cheeks. "No! You're out of your mind. You think I'm
going to run off with some nut off the Internet? Some spy?"
"You got a better idea?"
I kicked a pile of her laundry into the air. "Whatever. Fine. I'll talk
to her some more."
"You talk to her," Ange said. "You tell her you and your girlfriend are
getting out."
"What?"
"Shut up, dickhead. You think you're in danger? I'm in just as much
danger, Marcus. It's called guilt by association. When you go, I go."
She had her jaw thrust out at a mutinous angle. "You and I -- we're
together now. You have to understand that."
We sat down on the bed together.
"Unless you don't want me," she said, finally, in a small voice.
"You're kidding me, right?"
"Do I look like I'm kidding?"
"There's no way I would voluntarily go without you, Ange. I could never
have asked you to come, but I'm ecstatic that you offered."
She smiled and tossed me my keyboard.
"Email this Masha creature. Let's see what this chick can do for us."
I emailed her, encrypting the message, waiting for a reply. Ange
nuzzled me a little and I kissed her and we necked. Something about the
danger and the pact to go together -- it made me forget the awkwardness
of having sex, made me freaking horny as hell.
We were half naked again when Masha's email arrived.
> Two of you? Jesus, like it won't be hard enough already.
> I don't get to leave except to do field intelligence after a big Xnet
> hit. You get me? The handlers watch my every move, but I go off the
> leash when something big happens with Xnetters. I get sent into the
> field then.
> You do something big. I get sent to it. I get us both out. All three
> of us, if you insist.
> Make it fast, though. I can't send you a lot of email, understand?
> They watch me. They're closing in on you. You don't have a lot of
> time. Weeks? Maybe just days.
> I need you to get me out. That's why I'm doing this, in case you're
> wondering. I can't escape on my own. I need a big Xnet distraction.
> That's your department. Don't fail me, M1k3y, or we're both dead.
> Your girlie too.
> Masha
My phone rang, making us both jump. It was my mom wanting to know when
I was coming home. I told her I was on my way. She didn't mention
Barbara. We'd agreed that we wouldn't talk about any of this stuff on
the phone. That was my dad's idea. He could be as paranoid as me.
"I have to go," I said.
"Our parents will be --"
"I know," I said. "I saw what happened to my parents when they thought
I was dead. Knowing that I'm a fugitive isn't going to be much better.
But they'd rather I be a fugitive than a prisoner. That's what I think.
Anyway, once we disappear, Barbara can publish without worrying about
getting us into trouble."
We kissed at the door of her room. Not one of the hot, sloppy numbers
we usually did when parting ways. A sweet kiss this time. A slow kiss.
A goodbye kind of kiss.
BART rides are introspective. When the train rocks back and forth and
you try not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not
to read the ads for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and AIDS testing,
when you try to ignore the graffiti and not look too closely at the
stuff in the carpeting. That's when your mind starts to really churn
and churn.
You rock back and forth and your mind goes over all the things you've
overlooked, plays back all the movies of your life where you're no
hero, where you're a chump or a sucker.
Your brain comes up with theories like this one:
*If the DHS wanted to catch M1k3y, what better way than to lure him
into the open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public Xnet
event? Wouldn't that be worth the chance of a compromising video
leaking?*
Your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only
lasts two or three stops. When you get off, and you start moving, the
blood gets running and sometimes your brain helps you out again.
Sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems.
&&&