"That's frustrating," she said.
"I'll teach you the password."
"What if you set the timeout to longer? Thirty minutes?"
I shook my head. "I think I could probably hold out against someone who wanted my password for fifteen minutes, especially if they were on a snatch team that broke the door down and didn't have any time to prepare. Thirty minutes, though..."
"Oh," she said.
"There's a presentation in there on how to do waterboarding. A PowerPoint. It's got bar-graphs showing the time to brain-damage based on age and general health."
"Oh," she said again. She knew that there were times when showering would give me uncontrollable shakes. Being executed will do that to you.
I brought up the VM and opened the spreadsheet again. Ange started to enter the names.
"They're all staffers for Illinois State Assemblyman Bedfellow. The logical next step is to look up which committees that Assemblyman is on, and what all he voted on. Data Journalism 101 -- or it would be, if there was a Data Journalism course in my program."
"Let's do it," I said.
"No," she said. "That's just one file. There's 800,000 more. We can't do this retail. We have to find a wholesale approach."
"We need Jolu," I said. "This is his thing."
We'd been brainstorming for hours. Ange was even more paranoid than I was. She had me clone the VM -- easy, just copy the data file -- and then set up a new TrueCrypt file that had one copy of the VM in its regular storage, and another copy in a hidden plausible deniability partition.
"Here's how it'll work: the snatch squad comes in, bags and tags you and grabs the computer. They start looking around, but before they can get very far, there's a password prompt. They start to rubber-hose you for the password, but you gut it out. Whoosh, the dead man's switch trips, the VM takes itself down, the data is scrambled.
"But
then
what happens?"
I chewed my lip. I had thought this through this far before and hadn't liked what came next. "They try to get the password out of me to decrypt the file."
"Right."
I said, "And if you're here, they can work on you, too."
"Which is why we're doing this. Because right away we can give them a password, and that password will unlock this copy of the VM. It's got a full set of the leaks. But that's not the copy we work with. That's the one we hide in the plausible deniability partition. And that's where we keep all our notes, any mailing lists of people who know about this and work on it with us. We never give them that password. Our story is, we kept the leaks on this encrypted VM, and we didn't keep notes on them. We didn't know what to do about them. It's believable. I mean, we
don't
know what to do with them."
We did that. We came up with two long, crazy passwords and practiced them on each other until we had them memorized. Then we stared at each other.
"Now what?"
"We need Jolu," I said again. "He's all about wholesale data these days."
Ange nuked the VMs, turning them back into random-seeming gibberish. "Those speakers are driving me crazy," she said. "Are you sure they'll stop this laser-listener stuff?"
I shook my head.
"Fine," she said. "Let's turn them down for a while, anyway.
"So, Jolu. You know that bringing Jolu into this is pretty much the same kind of dick move that Masha pulled when she brought
you
into it."
"I know. But it's different with Jolu. He's my friend. One of my best friends."
She chewed on some words for a while. "Marcus, no offense, but is that still true? When was the last time you guys actually hung out? When was the last time you even
talked
?"
I squirmed. She was right. "Okay, point taken, but that doesn't mean we're not still friends. We don't dislike each other, we're just, you know, busy with our own things. I've known Jolu for most of my life, since I was a little kid. He's the right guy for this."
"I don't mean to make you all defensive, all right? It's just that you're about to put Jolu into a really hard spot, and it's the kind of thing that you should be really, really sure about before you do it."
"Jolu wouldn't turn me down. This is
important
."
Ange gave me a long, long look. Here's what she wasn't saying:
If this is so important, why didn't you drop everything to do something about it? Why didn't you go to the cops, or the press? Why are you screwing around with a new job instead of making this your top priority?
It was a thought that I kept having too, and of course, I knew the answer, and so did Ange. I was too scared to go public. The last time I spilled everything to the press, I'd ended up in a torture chamber. The stuff Masha had dumped on me was a
lot
more important and scary than what I'd had to say that time, too, if our small samples were anything to go by.
Besides, Masha hadn't told me to rescue her. She'd told me to get the material out. I would. Maybe if the material was out there, Carrie Johnstone would realize that snatching Masha would do no good and let her and Zeb go.
Maybe.
Book People: Austin, TX
Austin, TX is one of those cities that turns out to be an unlikely and distant suburb of Berkeley, a counterculture town where "Keep Austin Weird" is the citywide mantra. Of course, it's got a lot of great places to buy books, but man, Book People is a hell of a store. I visit most of these stores as a touring author, but stepping through their doors instantly turns me into a
reader
, and all I want to do is browse the shelves, read the staff reviews, and pick over the staff-picks. Book People is one of the stores where the urge to do this is strongest.
I've always done my best work at night, and I knew all the tricks -- combining careful doses of coffee, catnaps and showers to get my tortured, sleep-deprived brain to perform during daylight, while still cranking away through the vampire hours, where inspiration lurked in every shadow.
Jolu was the same, and that was one reason we got along so well. I can't count how many 3 A.M.s I'd shared with him over Skype or IM, or in person as we snuck out of the house to go dingledodie around the streets of San Francisco. So even though it was 8 P.M. when Ange and I finally finished arguing, I didn't worry about whether he'd be free for the evening.
Though I
did
feel a little weird as my finger hovered over his icon in my speed dial. That thing, you know it: you haven't called someone in a long time, so it's weird to call them, so you don't call them, and more time goes by, and it gets weirder...
"Marcus!" he said. There was a lot of noise in the background, clinking bottles and glasses and loud talk.
"Jolu!" I said. "Look, man, I'm sorry to call you out of the blue --"
"One sec," he said. "Let me go somewhere quieter." I heard him navigate what sounded like a busy party. "Hey dude! Long time no speak!"
"I'm sorry to call you out of the blue --"
"No, no, it's cool. It's great, actually! Nice to hear from you."
Wonder if you'll feel the same way after I turn your life upside down.
"Can I meet you somewhere? It's important."
"Marcus?" he said. "Important how?"
"Important important. The kind of important I don't want to talk about on the phone."
I distinctly heard him say
Oh shit
under his breath. "Of course," he said. "Right now?"
"Yeah, now would be good."
"Um." A long pause. "What about the place where you met Ange?"
"You mean --" I stopped myself. Good old Jolu. Anyone listening in wouldn't know where I met Ange. He was more paranoid than I was, and that was
before
I told him what was up. He really was the right man for the job. "Okay, when?"
"Give me an hour?"
"Okay," I said. "And Jolu? Thanks."
I heard him snort, and I could totally picture the half-smile that went with it, one bushy eyebrow raised in a quizzical expression. "No need. Anytime for you, man. You know that."
Friends. Nothing like them.
I met Ange at a key-signing party Jolu and I threw at Sutro Baths on Ocean Beach. The weird old/new ruins were spooky and dramatic, and the night was burned into my memory forever. Ange laughed when I told her where we were headed. She'd taken me there again on our first anniversary, with a picnic supper, and we'd watched the sun go down and necked on the blanket before we got too cold.
"I think we should switch off our phones," Ange said.
"Yeah," I said. That's the thing about paranoia -- it's catching. But she was right -- our phones would send our location to the phone companies, and if someone really wanted to snoop on us, it was always possible that they could find some way to tap into the GPSes on them. Then there'd be this really clear data-trail: Marcus called Jolu, then Ange, Marcus and Jolu all met up at Ocean Beach. Might was well get reflective orange vests and stencil CO-CONSPIRATOR on them. I took the battery out of my phone for good measure.
We were a quarter of an hour early -- the buses were with us -- and Jolu was ten minutes early. He hugged us both tightly, and Ange kissed him on the cheek. It had been months since I'd seen him -- he'd dropped in on an open data lecture at Noisebridge -- and he looked different. He'd grown a tidy little mustache and pointed sideburns, and had his hair styled in a short razor-cut that looked somehow grown up, cool, and business-like all at once. He'd always been better-dressed than the rest of us, but he was particularly natty that night in a button-up shirt with slightly wiggly stripes that made my eyes cross when I stared at them, heavy old denim jeans with big rivets, and elaborate leather shoes. I was in my old thrift-store jeans, beat-up motorcycle boots caked with playa dust, and a hoodie, and I felt like a slob.
He had wine on his breath. "I hope it wasn't a totally excellent party," I said.
"Just a release party for a new traffic-predicting app," he said, shrugging. "We get users' anonymized GPS data at different times on different roads and try to predict traffic jams ahead of time, also looking at all the planned road maintenance and anything realtime from the DOT. You share your calendar with us and we look at where you're going and use that to give you advice on what roads to avoid to get there on time."
"Woah, creepy," Ange said. I'd been thinking it, but hadn't wanted to say anything.
Jolu wasn't offended, though. He just grinned. "Yeah, it is. I mean, everyone is opt-in, and we anonymize the data when we get it so we don't know where
you've
been, just that
someone
has been there. But yeah, if we had a data leak, there'd be an awful lot of stuff there you might not want the world to know." He sat down on a rock and fished some gum out of his pockets, offered it around. It was black licorice gum, his favorite, the kind that turned your tongue and spit disgusting black. Just the smell of it made me smile and sent me spinning back in time to the old days.
"Or if the police seized your servers," Ange said. "It's so weird that we do all this Xnet stuff to keep our personal information from being captured by the government, but we give it to companies and the cops can just waltz in to their data centers whenever they want and just take it all."
"You don't know the half of it," Jolu said. "Get me to tell you about the lawful intercept stuff some time, okay? It'll curl the hair on your toes."
"So, speaking of the police and servers," I said. "I've got an interesting technical problem I wanted to talk to you about."
"I figured you might."
"Before I start -- is your phone on by any chance?"
He pulled it out of his pocket and removed the back, showed me the missing battery. "Dude,
estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo
," which was the punchline to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.
Jolu listened attentively, asking a few questions as we told the story. I put in my theory about the explosion on the playa and Ange didn't say anything about not believing me. When we were done, we both looked at him across the darkness and the grey no-color of the light leaking from the streetlamps on the cliff above us.
"So what do we do now?" he said.
"We?"
He shook his head. "Duh. Yes, 'we.' Did you think I wouldn't get involved?"
"The last time you sat where you're sitting and I sat where I'm sitting, you told me that it was different for you. You told me that the risk was bigger if you're brown than if you're white."
"Yeah, I said that. It's every bit as true today as it was, then, too."
"But you're in."
He looked out into the darkness and didn't say anything. I smelled his gum.
"Marcus," he said. "Have you noticed how
messed up
everything is today? How we put a 'good' president in the White House and he kept right on torturing and bombing and running secret prisons? How every time we turn around, someone's trying to take away the Internet from us, make it into some kind of giant stupid shopping mall where the rent-a-cops can kick you out if they don't like your clothes? Have you noticed how much money the one percent have? How we're putting more people in jail every day, and more people are unemployed every day, and more people are losing their houses every day?"
"I've noticed," I said. "But haven't things always been screwed up? I mean, doesn't everyone assume that their generation has the most special, most awful problems?"
"Yeah," Ange said. "But not every generation has had the net."
"Bingo," Jolu said. "I'm not saying it wasn't terrible in the Great Depression or whatever. But we've got the power to
organize
like we've never had before. And the creeps and the spooks have the power to spy on us more than ever before, to control us and censor us and find us and snatch us."
"Who's going to win?" I said. "I mean, I used to think that we'd win, because we understand computers and they don't."
"Oh, they understand computers. And they're doing everything they can to invent new ways to mess you up with them. But if we leave the field, it'll just be
them
. People who want everything, want to be in charge of everyone."
"So we're going to win?"
Jolu laughed. "There's no winning or losing, Marcus. There's only doing."
"Man, I leave you alone for a couple of months and you turn into
Yoda
."
"So what do we do?" Ange asked again.
"Well, we're not going to be able to look at 800,000 of these."
"810,097," I said.
"That. I think we need to build some kind of site for these things, something secure and private, where we can run searches on them, try to find the good stuff, leave notes for each other."
"And then what do we do with them?"
"We release them."
"Duh," Ange said. "But how do you think we'll do that? How do you put the information in a place where people will see it and care about it, but not a place that can be traced back to us?"
Jolu shrugged and stared at the ruins. "I don't know. I guess it depends on the kind of stuff we find. Maybe we google journalists who sound like they'd be interested in the story and email the docs to them from throwaway accounts. Something else, maybe. I don't know. But when you've got a problem that has two parts, and one part comes first, and you know how to solve that part, the best thing to do is solve that part and see if a solution to the rest suggests itself while you're working."
"That sounds right," I said.
"I suppose," Ange said. "But, Marcus, what about Zeb and Masha?"
"Yeah. Well, I don't know how we work that out. Maybe releasing the material will put them in more danger. Maybe it'll take them out of danger. We know who took her: Carrie Johnstone. That's got to be part of the story, however we release it."
"You're sure it was her?" Jolu asked.
"There are some faces I'll never, ever forget. Hers is one of them. It was
her
."
"Okay, okay. Let's talk about forward secrecy," he said.
It turned out Jolu had been hanging out with some heavy Tor dudes who were working on "darknet sites" -- "hidden services" that could host files and message boards, sites that anyone could reach, providing they knew the address. But these were unlike regular sites: even if you knew the address, you couldn't figure out where the physical computer it led to was, who was running it, what server you'd have to sieze to shut it down. Darknet sites were places you could visit but couldn't shut down.
"So you've got these rendezvous points, they're servers that know some other servers that know some other servers that know the way to reach the darknet site. You ask a rendezvous site to introduce you to the server and it does this dance with the other servers down the line, and creates a temporary circuit that bounces your connection through a one-off route to the darknet machine, so every time you visit the site, there's a different, random way to reach it.
"What I want to do is grab a cheapo server-on-demand VM and slap a ParanoidLinux install on it -- nothing unencrypted, ever. Then we slap a copy of your data on it, and a clone of Google Spreadsheets. Grab a doc, put its title in the first field, a description in the next field, and a place where you can put some keywords. Smack together a script that runs every couple of minutes and searches for those keywords in the uncategorized documents, and automatically suggests possibly related ones."
"And then what? We look at 800,000 documents, us three?" I figured I might be able to do a hundred docs a night, depending on how complicated they were. At that rate, it'd take us three a year or so to get through them all. Too slow.
"No, not us three. With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. We've got to bring more people in. People we can trust."
Jolu said, "Yeah, I know a few of those."
I was almost late for work the next day. After coming home, I'd stayed up for hours banging away at the document dump. I hadn't meant to, but Jolu's idea of searching for words in the dump gave me some ideas.
The first thing I searched for was "Masha" and "Zeb." I got a few documents with "zebra" and "mashallah," but nothing else. I tried "Marcus" and "Yallow." There were five "Marcus"es but none of them were me.
Then I tried "Carrie Johnstone" and hit the jackpot.
Carrie Johnstone had been a busy little soldier in Iraq. There were more than four hundred documents that mentioned her by name. I went after them alphabetically at first, but it was all confusing, until I had the bright idea of sorting them by date and starting with the oldest and reading toward the newest -- a document that was just over a month old.
Reading those four hundred documents -- some very short, some very long -- kept me up to three in the morning, and the more I read, the more I learned about Carrie Johnstone's weird and terrible career in and out of the U.S. military.
The first documents dated from Johnstone's career at FOB Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old palace. There was a memo she'd written describing the handover of a bunch of Iraqi prisoners to the Iraqi police. I didn't see at first why anyone would bother to save the document, but the next memo explained it. It was a memo explaining why they hadn't told the Red Cross about the transfer of prisoners, and hadn't gotten any kind of chain-of-custody receipts from the Iraqi cops. A little googling and I figured out what that meant: fifty-one men, women and children had vanished into the custody of Iraq's police force, and no one knew whatever became of them. They had been arrested after anonymous tips, or snatched off the street for "suspicious behavior." And for all anyone knew, they were nameless and rotting in a jail somewhere, while their families wrote them off for dead. Or maybe they were dead, dumped in a mass grave.