This chapter is dedicated to Waterstone's, the national UK booksellingchain. Waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of agreat independent store, with tons of personality, great stock (especiallyaudiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff.
WaterstonesSo we told her. I found it really fun, actually. Teaching people how touse technology is always exciting. It's so cool to watch people figure outhow 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 ex-plaining how it all worked. Barbara was pretty good at this stuff to beginwith, of course.
It turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the earlynineties when civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Founda-tion fought for the right of Americans to use strong crypto. I dimly knewabout that period, but Barabara explained it in a way that made me getgoose-pimples.
It's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the governmentclassed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export oruse it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegalmath 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 forbankers and their customers to use, but not so strong that the mafiawould 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 intwo hours.
Still the NSA argued that it should be able to keep American citizensfrom possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. Then EFF dealt its death-223blow. In 1995, they represented a Berkeley mathematics grad studentcalled Dan Bernstein in court. Bernstein had written a crypto tutorial thatcontained computer code that could be used to make a cipher strongerthan DES-56. Millions of times stronger. As far as the NSA was con-cerned, that made his article into a weapon, and therefore unpublishable.
Well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what itmeans, but it turned out that the average Appeals Court judge isn't realenthusiastic about telling grad students what kind of articles they're al-lowed to write. The crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guyswhen the 9th Circuit Appellate Division Court ruled that code was aform of expression protected under the First Amendment — "Congressshall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." If you've everbought something on the Internet, or sent a secret message, or checkedyour 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 canbe sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too.
Barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputationfrom covering the issue. She'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of thecivil rights movement in San Francisco, and she recognized the similaritybetween the fight for the Constitution in the real world and the fight incyberspace.
So she got it. I don't think I could have explained this stuff to my par-ents, but with Barbara it was easy. She asked smart questions about ourcryptographic protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuffI didn't know the answer to — sometimes pointing out potential breaksin our procedure.
We plugged in the Xbox and got it online. There were four open WiFinodes visible from the board room and I told it to change between themat random intervals. She got this too — once you were actually pluggedinto the Xnet, it was just like being on the Internet, only some stuff was alittle slower, and it was all anonymous and unsniffable.
"So now what?" I said as we wound down. I'd talked myself dry and Ihad a terrible acid feeling from the coffee. Besides, Ange kept squeezingmy hand under the table in a way that made me want to break away andfind somewhere private to finish making up for our first fight.
"Now I do journalism. You go away and I research all the thingsyou've told me and try to confirm them to the extent that I can. I'll letyou see what I'm going to publish and I'll let you know when it's goingto go live. I'd prefer that you not talk about this with anyone else now,224because I want the scoop and because I want to make sure that I get thestory 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 dothat in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. I'll also besure to let you know before that happens.
"One thing I need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. It'smine. You were very generous to give it to me and I'll try to repay thegift, but you don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or tostop me. This is now in motion and it won't stop. Do you understandthat?"I hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was ob-vious. It meant that I had launched and I wouldn't be able to recall therocket. 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 nearfuture, I would stop being Marcus — I would be a public figure. I'd bethe 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 acolor 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 decidewhere we were going for the evening. It was past supper time, but myparents had known that I was meeting with Barbara and wouldn't giveme any grief if I came home late.
When we got to Ange's, I had no urge to plug in my Xbox. I had hadall the Xnet I could handle for one day. All I could think about wasAnge, Ange, Ange. Living without Ange. Knowing Ange was angry withme. Ange never going to talk to me again. Ange never going to kiss meagain.
She'd been thinking the same. I could see it in her eyes as we shut thedoor to her bedroom and looked at each other. I was hungry for her, likeyou'd hunger for dinner after not eating for days. Like you'd thirst for aglass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight.
Like none of that. It was more. It was something I'd never felt before. Iwanted to eat her whole, devour her.
225Up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. I'd let herset and control the pace. It was amazingly erotic to have her grab me andtake 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 andyanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as I pulled it over herhead. I tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle asthe stitches came loose.
Her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shal-low. Mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring inmy ears.
I took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them intothe piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. There were books andpapers all over the bed and I swept them aside. We landed on the un-made bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing likewe would pull ourselves right through one another. She moaned into mymouth and I made the sound back, and I felt her voice buzz in my vocalchords, a feeling more intimate than anything I'd ever felt before.
She broke away and reached for the bedstand. She yanked open thedrawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. I lookedinside. Condoms. Trojans. One dozen spermicidal. Still sealed. I smiledat her and she smiled back and I opened the box.
I'd thought about what it would be like for years. A hundred times aday 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 werelots worse. While it was going on, it felt like an eternity. Afterwards, itseemed to be over in the blink of an eye.
Afterwards, I felt the same. But I also felt different. Something hadchanged between us.
It was weird. We were both shy as we put our clothes on and putteredaround the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. Iwrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took itinto the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep intothe trash-can.
When I came back in, Ange was sitting up in bed and playing with herXbox. I sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. She turned toface me and smiled. We were both worn out, trembly.
226"Thanks," I said.
She didn't say anything. She turned her face to me. She was grinninghugely, 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. Ipicked it up and plugged it in and logged in.
Same old same old. Lots of email. The new posts on the blogs I readstreamed in. Spam. God did I get a lot of spam. My Swedish mailbox wasrepeatedly "joe-jobbed" — used as the return address for spams sent tohundreds of millions of Internet accounts, so that all the bounces andangry messages came back to me. I didn't know who was behind it.
Maybe the DHS trying to overwhelm my mailbox. Maybe it was justpeople pranking. The Pirate Party had pretty good filters, though, andthey gave anyone who wanted it 500 gigabytes of email storage, so Iwasn't likely to be drowned any time soon.
I filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. I had a separate mail-box for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that waslikely to be Xnet-related and possibly sensitive. Spammers hadn't figuredout that using public keys would make their junk mail more plausibleyet, so for now this worked well.
There were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in theweb of trust. I skimmed them — links to videos and pics of new abusesfrom the DHS, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff I'dblogged. The usual.
Then I came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. Thatmeant that no one else could read it, but I had no idea who had writtenit. 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.
>
227I was arrested the day that the bridge blew. They questioned me. Theydecided I was innocent. They offered me a job: help them hunt down theterrorists who'd killed my neighbors.
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It sounded like a good deal at the time. Little did I realize that my ac-tual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city be-ing turned into a police state.
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I infiltrated Xnet on the day it launched. I am in your web of trust. If Iwanted to spill my identity, I could send you email from an addressyou'd trust. Three addresses, actually. I'm totally inside your network asonly another 17-year-old can be. Some of the email you've gotten hasbeen carefully chosen misinformation from me and my handlers.
>
They don't know who you are, but they're coming close. They continueto turn people, to compromise them. They mine the social network sitesand use threats to turn kids into informants. There are hundreds ofpeople 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 Para-noidLinux. The exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but abreak is inevitable. Once we have a zero-day break, you're dead.
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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.
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Even if they don't break ParanoidLinux, there are poisoned Para-noidXbox distros floating around. They don't match the checksums, buthow many people look at the checksums? Besides me and you? Plenty ofkids are already dead, though they don't know it.
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All that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bustyou to make the biggest impact in the media. That time will be sooner,not later. Believe.
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228You're probably wondering why I'm telling you this.
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I am too.
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Here's where I come from. I signed up to fight terrorists. Instead, I'mspying on Americans who believe things that the DHS doesn't like. Notpeople who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. I can't do itanymore.
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But neither can you, whether or not you know it. Like I say, it's only amatter of time until you're in chains on Treasure Island. That's not if,that's when.
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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.
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I want to get out.
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I will take you with me, if you want to come. Better to be a fighter thana 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.
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MashaWhen 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 fol-low. I leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. My heart thudded andmy 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?"229I pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. She rolled over andgrabbed 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 yourhead."I looked at her. She was biting her lip. She didn't look like she believedit.
"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 keyboa............