Internet Kill Switch (11 page)

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Bass
left Schnell to his work, then ate a banana and visited the eight-stall latrine before heading out to the Chopping Block. The latrine was made of wood and had no lights or “modern” conveniences like running water. Indoor plumbing meant electricity. And, except for the lab, electricity had been outlawed.

The
Chopping Block was a half-mile from the compound, through dense forest that hid them from the prying eyes of the government. Today Bass took a direct route to the site, instead of exploring the area as he liked to do. No wandering today; he had work to do. The day was hot, which suited Bass fine. It would make him sweat; sweating meant a man was working his body, being physical. A sweating man was interacting with his environment, rather than wasting his time staring at a computer screen. A sweating man was alive, vibrant; not some fish-belly-white geek who got his thrills from arguing with other anonymous morons about the president’s latest gaffe. No one sweated while they watched YouTube.

The
Chopping Block was where Bass did his best thinking, and he headed there with purpose in his stride. To think. To sweat.

The
Chopping Block was the flat stump of what had been a gigantic oak tree. Next to the stump sat a huge supply of logs, ready for chopping. Omega needed a lot of wood for winter, so the Chopping Block was popular in the fall. In the spring, like now, it rarely got used.

Next to the stump lay a 20-pound iron splitting maul
. The maul was supposed to have been kept in the tool shed on the compound, but someone forgot to bring it in after the last splitting session. Bass suspected Josiah Timmons was the forgetful one; it was his way. If so, Josiah would be punished when Bass got back.

He put a log on the stump, picked up the maul, and swung it directly over his head, bringing it crashing
down on top of the log. The log split in two, the newly-formed halves jumping off the stump in opposite directions. He grabbed another log and repeated the process. A few beads of sweat formed on his brow. Bass grimaced in pleasure as he grabbed another log. He didn’t smile, ever. Grimacing was as close as he ever got. He grimaced again as the heavy maul sliced through another log.

As he chopped, h
is mind turned to the new development. He was so close now. So close. The phone was the spark on the kindling of his vision. Soon the kindling would turn to a  blaze, bright as a bonfire. Many things would burn.

Bass thought about what it had taken to get to this point.
Fifteen years ago, cutting logs in a forest was the last thing he would imagine he’d be doing. Fifteen years ago he had hair. Fifteen years ago, he was the very model of what he now hated most: a hacker, addicted to technology.

As a teenager growing up in Flint, Michigan, Bass got hooked on programming when he learned how to create a simple Web page pop-up in JavaScript. It said “This is Mitch!”, and appeared in a small window in his Internet Explorer browser. Wow, thought Mitch: I can make a computer do what I want! That was all it took. He’d found something he could control; something he could give orders to. He was hooked immediately, and spent all his spare time in cyberspace.

As his skills developed, Bass learned one other thing: He liked doing stuff on his own. Hacking needed nothing more than a computer and Internet connection. He didn’t need anyone else, like you
needed for sports. He wasn’t good at sports, and the brain-dead school jocks let him know it. He wasn’t good at talking to girls, and they
really
let him know it. He had a few friends, but whenever he saw them, things usually ended up in a big argument. They were idiots, and Bass wasn’t shy about letting them know.

Bass’s parents noticed their boy’s
inability to get along from a young age. Once, worried about his lack of friends, they urged 10-year-old Mitchell to join his local Boy Scout troop. The troop had about 20 kids, and they met once a week in the basement of a nearby Methodist church.

Bass didn’t fit in from the beginning. They sang songs, and he hated singing, because he thought he was terrible at it. They did crafts, which didn’t interest him. They played
Dodgeball, and owing to a lack of coordination, he usually got hit in the first 30 seconds.

It wasn’t the scouts’ fault; the other boys
and troop leaders treated Mitchell well. They welcomed him and didn’t snicker behind his back, like so many kids at school. Still, he felt like he didn’t belong, like they didn’t understand him; for his part, he sure didn’t understand them. So he dropped out after a few months. After that, his parents didn’t try as hard to get him involved.

Hacking
was different: he didn’t have to worry about being looked at funny by other kids, and he didn’t have to make moronic small talk. All his interactions were remote and anonymous. Online, it only mattered how good you were at something, not how well you followed the stupid, superficial rules of society. Getting along didn’t matter on the Internet. Why couldn’t life be more like that?

The huge axe went up over Bass’s head, and came down on another log. He’d split enough to heat his own room for the winter, but he kept going, now that he’d gotten his rhythm. Sweat covered his fatigues, and rolled down his arms onto his hands. The maul slipped a bit on one swing, shaving off a tiny bit of a log edge. Bass sat down on the stump and swigged from the water bottle he brought, drying off the sweat with a towel stolen from a Ramada Inn.

Bass didn’t mind stealing from hotels; it was just another small way to stick it to The Man. Bass didn’t like The Man, a
nd stuck him like a voodoo doll. It wasn’t stealing, really, if you were taking it from The Man.

Bass took another log from the pile and put it on the stump, then started swinging again. The Man
stole from The People, after all, and increasingly used computers to do it. Wall Street, after all, ran on computers; that’s why Bass went after it with all the programming force he could muster. It was awhile, though, before he could slay that beast.

His single-mindedness and lack of social interaction meant he had tons of time to devote to his hobby. And as his hacking skills grew, his reputation grew with it. He knew that suitors would follow, and they did. He eventually fell in with a loose-knit group of serious hackers from Russia called “The Shadow”. They were part of the new hacker subculture: the old-timers, guys like Kevin Mitnick, hacked mostly for status; breaking into corporations or banks was like bagging the head cheerleader. You were a rock star.

The new wave of hacker didn’t care
-- or, at least, didn’t care as much -- about status. Money was the endgame, not prestige. Hackers started demanding ransoms after stealing credit card data or publicly posting lists of executive salaries. It was, essentially, the digital Mafia:
Nice little database you got there. Shame if anything happened to it.

And the corporations and governments paid up, Bass learned
quickly. For his share of a bank hack, $10,000 had been wired into his Cayman Islands account (which The Shadow set up, being much more experienced than he was at that end of the business). He bought himself a Segway as his reward.

M
ore checks came, and they got bigger. As they grew, Bass’s ego grew with them. The money was confirmation of his worth, that he really
was
somebody, after all. Somebody special. As befitting a star, he started to live faster; bling became his constant companion.

Bass’s hacking skills were immense; even his rivals admitted that he was the best
. The cyber-security experts couldn’t catch him, although they constantly tried. In time, they started to wonder if he
was
catchable. Bass was sure he wasn’t.

Yes, l
ife as a hacker was good. Bass had loads of money in the bank, a new house and a Ferrari in the driveway. Since he had no visible means of support, and never talked about what he did, his new neighbors suspected he was a drug dealer. Little did they know he had a much more lucrative career than that.

Bass
eventually broke away from The Shadow and went solo; he got tired of sharing the profits, when he felt like he did most of the work. He also wanted the satisfaction (and hacker cred) of breaking into supposedly hack-proof networks without any help. He didn’t need the group anymore, and didn’t want to share the glory. He even started mocking The Shadow on various hacker boards, implying that the most difficult hacks were his doing.

H
e proved it, too, by finally bringing down the opponent he’d beat against for years, but never broken: the New York Stock Exchange network, which he brought down, with his typical flair, on a Friday the 13th. The Shadow had never done it, but now Mitchell Bass had. He stood alone at the top of Hacker Mountain, arms raised in victory.

Bass now had a sizeable pile of firewood, and started stacking it for the cart he’d get someone to push back to the compound. His hands hurt from gripping the axe so long and hard, and his back and shoulders ached. But he wouldn’t use medicine to stop the pain; that was another severely-enforced Omega rule. He’d recover naturally, through a night of solid sleep.

I’m not as young as I was, Bass thought
as he stretched a bit. Or, fortunately, as stupid.

Young people feel immortal; hackers
feel invulnerable. Bass, being at the time of his Stock Exchange triumph both young and a hacker, believed his lifestyle would go on forever, because he was so much more clever than the corporations and the cops.

Then one day
, as he started to wonder if he could hack into the private White House network, he got an untraceable message from The Shadow.
Enjoy your new digs
, it said simply. Bass thought the message referred to his house, although he’d lived there for several years.

As
he wondered if the message could refer to something else, he heard the doorbell ring. A group of six FBI agents stood on his columned porch. He ran to his back door. Three more awaited him there. He turned and tried to get upstairs, to his computers, to erase the drives. But the agents who were at the front door a minute ago were now in the house, and grabbed him as they waved a search warrant in his face. They escorted Bass away in handcuffs for a variety of network intrusions, starting with his Wall Street hack.

Enjoy your new digs
, the message said. So, someone from The Shadow had turned him in. Why, he didn’t know. Maybe he joked about the wrong person’s sexual preferences; his social skills online were no better than with real people. Maybe they were angry with him for going indie and abandoning them. Maybe they were simply jealous of his superior hacking skills (the explanation he favored). He never found out why they ratted him out, but whatever the reason, he was no longer invulnerable.

Bass’s first prison stop was a low-security facility in Bastrop, Texas. Minimum security because hackers like him were considered non-dangerous.

He
experienced electronic withdrawal for the first time at Bastrop. Stripped of any ability to use computers, he mostly sat on his bunk, doodling on notebook paper. He’d almost forgotten that actual paper you could hold in your hand existed. He also spent a lot of his time thinking up revenge plots against The Shadow. They were fantasies, of course; he’d probably never be able to find any of them when he got out.

He grew more and more restless in jail, and absolutely hated his successi
on of brain-dead, tatted-up cellmates. Eventually, Bass decided he’d had enough.

He
struck up relationships with guards, and eventually found an especially poor one. Bass bribed him regularly with cash he’d had smuggled in, getting the guard dependent on the infusion. Eventually, Bass paid him $2,000 to get him an old iPhone 3G. Bass told him it was only for surfing the Internet, a story the idiot guard bought without a second thought.

Over a series of weeks, Bass used the phone to probe the prison’s security system, finding its flaws. When ready, he used the phone to hack the prison’s n
etwork in an attempt to escape, disabling the right security systems in a perfectly-timed sequence that led him through the prison in the middle of the night.

The plan was brilliant, except for
a single, fatal flaw: The guard, although poor, was honest. He immediately reported Bass’s interest in him to the warden. The warden, rather than taking action right away, decided to let the scenario play out: he wanted to see how a hacker might attempt to escape. So the guard played his part, and the warden got valuable information on his prison’s vulnerabilities. On the night of his escape attempt, Bass didn’t find the getaway car he expected. Instead, he found the guard he thought he’d duped; the warden; and nine other guards waiting for him in the prison parking lot. He gave up without a fight.

That got Bass a ticket to
the notorious Florence ADX “Supermax” prison in Colorado. Once inside the walls of Florence, he quickly came to understand how good he’d had it in Bastrop. The prisoners in Florence were orders of magnitude more dangerous. They were also more aggressive in showers and other isolated areas. In Florence, Bass learned hard lessons about life.