Fishbowl (8 page)

10

THE MAN WAS
an FBI agent called John Dimmer who worked out of the Palo Alto resident agency. After he had established that there was no legal officer in the company, and after he had identified which of the three young men in the common room was Andrei Koss, he asked Andrei if there was somewhere private that they could go.

For want of anywhere else, Andrei took him into his bedroom. As they stood between two unmade beds in a room that could have done with an airing, Dimmer took an envelope out of his pocket and explained that he had brought it over personally because he knew this was the first time the company had received one of these and the FBI didn't have a named officer to send it to.

Andrei took the envelope hesitantly.

‘It's a National Security Letter,' said Dimmer. ‘Do you know what that is?'

Andrei shook his head.

‘It requires you to hand over data on a number of specified internet address holders.'

‘What do you suspect these people of doing?'

‘That's none of your concern, Mr Koss. This request is part of an investigation into international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, which gives us grounds to issue you with this letter. That's all I can tell you. Read the letter. I'll wait. You may want to consult an attorney, but I'll answer any questions you have.'

Andrei opened the envelope. He took out two stapled pages. The first one had the FBI shield printed at the upper left corner.

Andrei read over the pages.

‘Let me go over the main points for you,' said Dimmer. ‘This is serious, so it's important you understand them. You are legally required to provide this information. You do have the right to challenge this request in court, but I can assure you that this letter meets the requirements of the relevant federal legislation and executive order and you will not win. Note carefully the information you are required to provide. We are not asking for content, only the transactional information on these account holders – activity logs, header information, etcetera. Note also, and this is particularly important, that you may not disclose the contents of this letter or even its existence to any person other than if required to provide the data requested or to obtain legal advice, and anyone to whom you do disclose it is bound by the same requirement. If you do disclose it to any other person for purposes of fulfilling the request, I may require you to give me their names. It is also your duty to inform them of this non-disclosure requirement. Do you understand this, Mr Koss?'

Andrei nodded.

‘The penalties for breaching the non-disclosure requirement are severe and you would be prosecuted.'

‘How long do we have to give you this stuff?' asked Andrei.

‘Like it says right there on the second page. Fourteen days.'

Andrei hadn't taken that in. He hadn't taken quite a lot in. His mind was still trying to process the fact that he was embroiled with the FBI over an issue of national intelligence.

‘Do you have any other questions?'

‘I can consult an attorney about this, right?'

‘Yes. Like it says on the second page, your attorney will be bound by the same duty of non-disclosure. He'll understand that when he sees the letter. Something else I want to make sure you understand – when you send the data we've requested, you need to hand it personally to me or use a secure delivery service. It's in the letter but I want to make sure you've got this. Do not use the routine mail. Do not use email and attach it. If you have any
questions for me, you can call me, but do not mention this letter on the phone. Calls are not secure. You can say that you want to discuss something and that will be enough – we'll arrange a meeting. All this stuff is in the letter, but I'm saying it in case you don't think it's serious. It is serious. If the substance of this request is disclosed to subjects of the investigation as a result of a telephone call that is intercepted, the lives of a number of people may be at risk. You will also be subject to prosecution. Do you understand, Mr Koss?'

‘Yes.'

Dimmer gazed at him for a moment. ‘OK. Unless you want to do this stuff yourself from now on, you need to nominate an officer to receive these things. You're going to be getting more of them.'

Dimmer left. Andrei sat on his bed. He felt as if someone had just punched him hard in the stomach. The wind of reality that he had felt blowing in his face a few days earlier when Mike Sweetman had made him his offer had just got a whole lot colder.

He read the letter again, this time trying to take in each of the points. Then he sat back and closed his eyes.

Eventually he got up and went out into the common room. Kevin and Ben watched him. Wordlessly, he put the letter down on the desk. ‘Read it,' he said. As they did, he got on the phone to their lawyer.

The lawyer Andrei rang was the one who had drawn up the agreement between the three founders. He knew nothing about National Security Letters and sounded as if he didn't want to, but he said he could find them someone who did. The following day, Andrei and Ben went to see the attorney he had suggested. On reading the letter, Kevin had let out a blast about Fishbowll becoming an agent of the government, and Andrei didn't think it was going to be productive to have him in the room.

The attorney looked at the letter and explained that, as the FBI agent had said, it was a lawful demand that could be made by
the government without need for a court order. He asked what kind of business they were in and when Andrei told him what Fishbowll was, he nodded knowingly. He explained that, as the letter stated, they were required only to provide transactional data – dates, times, email addresses, IP addresses – but not the content of any communications.

‘Is this common?' asked Andrei.

‘The government issues about one hundred thousand of these a year.'

‘One hundred thousand?'

‘In the business you're in, you're going to see a lot of these.'

‘Should we challenge it?' asked Ben.

‘Do you have grounds?'

Ben looked at Andrei, who shrugged.

The lawyer described the grounds for challenge. ‘Be aware that the government will contest your challenge as high as it needs to go. It does whatever it can to avoid precedents that could impair its ability to use this instrument. It will involve you in considerable expense. But that doesn't mean you can't win if you have grounds and you're determined. There have been cases where the government has had to back down or modify its demands. But it's a long and very costly process.'

Ben and Andrei glanced at one another again. The company's finances were thin enough as it was.

‘What do most people do when asked for this data?' asked Ben.

‘They hand it over.'

‘Homeplace? Would they be doing that?'

‘I would imagine that occasionally, in some exceptional case, they might haggle with the FBI, but mostly they would probably hand it right over.'

‘The FBI agent said they'd win if we challenged.'

‘He would,' said the lawyer. ‘Unless you have grounds to challenge, this is perfectly legal, remember. This is above board. You may not like it, but right now it's the way our justice system works. No court needs to authorize this. But remember, it's only
the transactional stuff you have to give them.' The attorney smiled for a second. ‘As you probably know, the government has its own ways of getting at the good stuff.'

Back at Robinson House, Kevin predictably blew up again. But Andrei didn't see an alternative. Instinctively, he didn't want to hand over the data, and felt that he was compromising himself. He had heard so much about the way the government's intelligence agencies operated that he had no idea if they really had a case against the suspects they were supposedly investigating, or if it was just a fishing expedition. But he couldn't imagine that he would win a court challenge, and he didn't see the point of wasting Fishbowll's dwindling reserves of cash on a quixotic attempt to avoid a foregone conclusion.

The problem prompted a number of lengthy discussions. It made them determined to ensure that Fishbowll's security would always be as strong as it could be in order to prevent any unauthorized gathering of information on their users, to the extent that that was possible. But this instance wasn't unauthorized, and not even Kevin had an answer to the simple reality that the law required them to comply. All he could say was that it was wrong.

Andrei thought they needed to understand what Fishbowll was there to do. Was it there to challenge the law? Did it have an ideology it wanted to promote? While Kevin blustered, Andrei talked through the questions with Ben. Eventually, Andrei decided that Fishbowll was neutral. It had to be neutral. If people wanted to challenge the law, it was a medium for them to do it – the medium, not the message.

In the end, Andrei handed over the data to Dimmer, still feeling conflicted about it. He told the agent that in future Ben would act as the officer to be contacted for National Security Letters. It wasn't long before more of them arrived.

11

AS FISHBOWLL GREW
, the three founders struggled to keep up with their class work. The academic authorities at the university had got to know about the website and while they had no power to stop anyone working on it – and had their own interest in seeing a successful tech start-up emerging from Stanford – they let Andrei, Kevin and Ben know that they were expected to maintain their studies. Amongst themselves, the three young men had agreed that they would each do the minimum required to get through their courses until the end of the academic year. Every other waking moment was devoted to Fishbowll.

The common room of the suite in Robinson was an engine house. Andrei and Kevin would be deep in coding, Ben would be analysing user statistics, responding to questions in the Grotto or dealing with inquiries coming from the press, which were becoming increasingly frequent. Andrei didn't want to talk to anyone. Ben became the unofficial spokesman for the company with instructions to keep the press at bay. A couple of other programmers Andrei knew from his class at Stanford, and who he was now paying to work on Fishbowll, were often crammed into the common room as well. People wandered in and out, wanting to be part of the buzz. Being college students, they engaged in long philosophical discussions about Fishbowll – its place, its purpose, its principles – and drinking games. One fuelled the other, and vice versa. While Fishbowll's dealings with the FBI remained a secret shared only by the three founders, every other topic was fair game.

When Andrei had his headphones on and a clutch of Coke cans beside his screen – which was most of the time – he ignored the chaos around him. When he took the headphones off, he joined in. The mantra in these all-in talkfests was not making the world a worse place. Despite the myths that would later develop about which of the three founders had originally articulated that slogan, none of them could actually remember who had said it first or what they had been talking about at the time. But over the last few weeks it had become the touchstone for the company and its fellow travellers.

The numbers kept growing, running far ahead of the figures Andrei had scribbled on the napkin at Yao's. The early users who had taken to the Grotto had established themselves as a kind of self-appointed advisory community through the sheer depth, intensity and fanaticism of their debate over every feature and change in Fishbowll, no matter how minor. They had developed a group page within the Grotto that they called the Cavern and although there were no enforceable rules about who could go there, it was quickly made clear to interlopers that they weren't wanted. No one knew exactly how many of them there were, but in the common room at Robinson House they became known as ‘the 300', after one of Andrei's favourite epic movies. Their comments crowded out almost everyone else on the Sunken Wall of Atlantis, as the site for public comments in the Grotto was known. Although the three Fishbowll founders had never met any of them, they felt as if they personally knew the more prominent members of the group. They were almost phantom figures inhabiting the common room alongside them, especially for Ben, who spent much of his time responding to their comments.

There was Karl Morrow, for instance, who was always angry. Even when they made some kind of change that he had been aggressively demanding for weeks, he was angry. Ben devised a measure of the degree of Karl's anger called the Morrowmeter and he tracked it whenever an idea was under discussion. It was generally agreed that, as a rule, the angrier Karl was, the better the idea. At the other extreme of the spectrum was Barry Diller,
or the Dillerman, as he was dubbed in the common room. The Dillerman had a reputation for finding a way to defend everything Andrei did. Some of the 300, never shy of conspiracy theories, aired suspicions that the Dillerman was actually Andrei himself, especially since he said he was from Boston, which was Andrei's home town. Whenever they were testing some new innovation on the site, Andrei only had to ask Ben what Karl Morrow and the Dillerman were saying in the Cavern in order to hear the two extremes of the spectrum.

But as Fishbowll's growth exceeded Andrei's projections, so did something else.

It had been surprisingly easy to say no to Mike Sweetman's offer of $100 million, but now Fishbowll ran the risk of going out of business for want of a couple of hundred thousand. They were burning through cash almost twice as fast as Andrei had anticipated. One night, Andrei took a look at the numbers and did some new projections. He estimated that if Fishbowll kept growing on the same trajectory, by May they would have exhausted the funds they had put in and the company would be broke.

Andrei didn't think he would be able to get anything from his parents, who had shown no inclination at Christmas to encourage what they considered to be a distraction from Andrei's school work, despite Dina's and Leo's attempts to persuade them that it was much more than that. It was pretty clear that there wouldn't be more forthcoming from Ben, who hadn't even been able to raise the full starting sum. Kevin's family was wealthier but even with another fifty or a hundred from Kevin, how much longer would that keep Fishbowll in business? There was Sandy, of course. He could try to tap her family for funds, but he had the sense that would only be putting off the inevitable. Logic dictated that the site eventually would need to be able to generate money in order to keep going.

At some level, Andrei had always known that, but somehow he just hadn't engaged with it in his mind. He hadn't expected the moment to arrive so soon.

There was an obvious solution to the problem, of course.

Andrei baulked at it. His aim was to make Fishbowll as efficient as possible – allowing advertising on the site would do the opposite. Measured against the twin technical tests that he used to assess any new functionality – improving connection and retaining simplicity – it failed on both counts. He believed it would contribute nothing towards connection, and would reduce simplicity. And even if it didn't, the idea of advertising nauseated him. Site after site in social networking, in search, in so many other functions on the net, had started off with apparently good intentions and ended up as not much more than vehicles for intrusive advertising steered by the rape and pillage of user data. He hadn't founded Fishbowll to join their number.

Kevin, on the other hand, had no opposition to the prospect. He had always expected advertising to be the ultimate revenue generator for Fishbowll and had no philosophical problem with the idea. From his libertarian standpoint, he regarded advertising as a form of expression that was as legitimate as any other form of expression in a free society, and it would be up to Fishbowll's membership to accept or reject it. Ben, who saw Fishbowll as a massive social experiment, suspected that advertising would inevitably affect the way it developed – but that would be interesting in itself.

Sandy, like Kevin, saw no problem either. Her father was an oil company executive and had reconciled his own genuine sense of social responsibility with the dirty reality of the industry that funded his lifestyle by adopting the view that, while the world certainly needed changing, all you could do in the meantime was work with it as you found it. As she grew up, Sandy rebelled against that suspiciously convenient accommodation and had called her father a hypocrite on more than one occasion. Yet now that push came to shove in regard to her boyfriend's nascent business, she turned out to have more of her father in her than she might have suspected. Her attitude was briskly pragmatic: ‘You have to survive,' she said to Andrei. ‘So? You let in advertising. As
long as you know why you're doing it, you can still retain your integrity.'

But Andrei wasn't so sure. That was probably what Mike Sweetman had told himself at the beginning, he thought, and look what had happened to him. Homeplace had become a byword for the appropriation and exploitation of user data.

As Fishbowll's financial position worsened, the issue came to dominate conversations in the common room. Everyone who turned up had an opinion, often reflecting the fact that they had the luxury of not actually having to make a decision. But for the three founders, the need to find funding was real.

Since Andrei was so reluctant to allow advertising, they tried to think of other ways of raising cash. Kevin came up with the idea of creating virtual goods and selling them. ‘For every School we've got,' he said, ‘there's probably some kind of virtual goods we can create and sell. Take the Saddam Hussein memorabilia group. We could create, I don't know, avatars of Saddam or 3-D cyperspaces of his palaces and sell them.'

‘Aren't people already doing that?' said Ben.

‘It's just an example.'

Andrei stared. ‘We've got a Saddam Hussein memorabilia group?'

Ben nodded.

‘And they're selling avatars?'

‘Dude, check out the Grotto,' said Kevin. ‘Half the place is a bazaar.'

‘When did people start doing that?' demanded Andrei

Kevin laughed. The libertarian in him loved the filthy, opportunistic, entrepreneurial Wild West that the Grotto had become. ‘Probably about as soon as we set it up.'

The problem with the idea, which Kevin himself immediately pointed out, was that they would be competing with a large array of other sellers that had already moved into the marketplace they had inadvertently created. He doubted they could generate revenue quickly enough to solve their cash crunch. Besides, they
would have to hire people to monitor what was happening in the Grotto, identify the opportunities for virtual goods, and create them, and that would add more cost just when they were struggling to keep going. It was such a great idea, it might eat them alive before they ever got to see it work.

Rather than trying to create virtual goods, Ben suggested simply taking a cut of the transactions.

‘Dude,' retorted Kevin, ‘you're turning into the government!'

‘No, we provide the Grotto, so it's like we're providing the real estate and we're taking a rent—'

‘We're taking a sales tax!' said Kevin, picking up the fly swat and whacking the armrest of his chair with it.

‘It's a service fee.'

‘It's a tax. No! We're not taxing anybody. We're creators, not taxers!'

Andrei agreed. He then came up with the idea of developing virtual money for the transactions in the Grotto, taking a fee for issuing and managing the currency. Kevin didn't think that was much better than Ben's idea. ‘Dude, you're turning us into the Fed! If you guys want to do stuff like that, why not just charge a membership fee?'

‘Don't be an idiot,' said Andrei. ‘No one's going to pay a fee.'

‘We could say we're not for profit. We could ask for donations.'

Andrei gazed at Kevin suspiciously. Of the three of them, he was the least likely to propose that idea.

Kevin laughed at the preposterousness of his own proposition. ‘And you can kiss goodbye to any of the development ideas we've got. We'll be lucky to raise enough to keep going.'

‘I don't know,' said Ben, ‘it's possible—'

‘Dude, someone else will start up and do exactly what we're doing for free, because they'll let in advertising. And not only will they make a shitload of money, they'll build a better, faster, smarter service for their users, and nobody's going to fork out anything for the slow, shitty service that we'll be offering. Anyone
who does this is going to let in advertising, because that's the only way to make this thing work.'

There was silence.

‘I like the currency idea,' said Andrei.

‘That's because you thought of it,' muttered Kevin.

‘We'll call it Fish Food. Fish Food comes in all shapes and sizes.'

Kevin shrugged. If he had to choose between Ben's idea and Andrei's, he preferred Andrei's, but only marginally. But in any event, like his own virtual goods proposal, it would take time to get going, and would impose more costs up front.

‘Maybe we should take an investment,' said Andrei, when they found themselves hashing over the problem again a couple of days later and another few thousand dollars down in their bank account. Apart from Mike Sweetman's $100 million offer for the whole company, he had had some calls from venture capitalists asking if they could come and talk to him. Some of them had even made preliminary offers over the phone.

‘Sure,' said Kevin. ‘And you know the first thing they're going to say to you? How do you monetize this business? And if advertising isn't part of it, that's the first thing they're going to ask for. At least this way we have control. We don't hand it over to a bunch of corporate suits. And we can be smart about this. I'm not talking about banner ads. I'm not talking about anything that's going to deface the site. Say you log on to your home page and you get a message about a some selected aspect of your specific interest. You know right away it's about something you're really interested in. It's giving you knowledge as much as trying to sell you something – it's giving you information you need to know because of your interest. It's a service as much as anything. This doesn't have to be the same as everybody else. We can do it in a totally Fishbowll way.' Kevin leaned forward. He waved the fly swat for emphasis.

‘Do you know what we have here, Andrei? We have
the
most targeted list of audiences for advertisers in the history of the
world. This is fucking awesome or awe-inspiring or whatever the word is. Most sites, you know, people say what they're interested in, and you try to target like that. Or on the basis of searches they've done or stuff they've previously bought.' Kevin snorted. ‘Like advertising for what you bought yesterday isn't closing the door some time after the horse has bolted! How dumb is that? But
we
can generate data on the things people care enough about to actually go and find like-minded people. Things that they're going to be interested in today, tomorrow, next week, and interested enough in to spend some money. That's gold-plated, Andrei. Advertisers will pay a shitload of money to get to those people.'