Homeland (17 page)

"Oi!
I
put the chips in the oven, didn't I?" Mom said. When Mom says "chips," she's speaking British and means "fries" -- specifically the sweet potato oven fries she makes herself and freezes. I have to admit, they're pretty awesome.

"Yes, my dear, you certainly did. Plus, you supervised."

Dad set down the platter of faintly sizzling meat on the table. He once did some freelance work helping an organic meat cooperative with its data mining and ecommerce tuning, and when he'd written to them asking if they had anything else for him, they'd taken pity on him and offered to sell him some meat at employee rates. So we had all the emu, venison, and buffalo sausage we could want, as often as we wanted. I especially liked the venison, which tasted very good, assuming you didn't think too much about Bambi while you ate it.

Dad went back to turn off the stove's extractor fan, which had been humming loudly while it sucked out all the delicious meaty smoke and steam. Then he smacked himself in the forehead. "Wait, Ange, you're a vegetarian, aren't you?"

I hid a smile. Ange had gone veggie at the start of the summer, but Burning Man had brought out her inner carnivore -- especially the trips to camps where they were handing out kick-ass barbecue.

"It's okay," Ange said. "Beef is just a highly processed form of vegetable matter."

"Riiiight," Dad said, and forked a couple of sausages onto her plate before sitting down himself.

It felt curiously wonderful to be having dinner as a family again, with a big plateful of food in front of me and my parents making bright conversation as though they weren't in a mild, continuous panic about the mortgage and the grocery bill.

But it couldn't last. I had to say something stupid.

"I saw the coolest thing the other day," I said. "It was from a history of crypto in World War II and there was this chapter on the history of cipher machines -- Enigmas and such -- at Bletchley Park, in England."

"Which ones were they again?" Mom said.

"The ones the Nazis used to scramble their messages," Dad said. "Even I know that."

"Sorry," Mom said. "I'm a little rusty on my Nazi gadgets."

"Actually," Ange said, swallowing a huge mouthful of buffalo sausage, "the Enigmas weren't exactly 'Nazi.' They were developed in the Netherlands, and sold as a commercial product to help bankers scramble their telegrams."

"Right, I said. "And all the Axis powers used them. So the first generations of these were, you know,
beautiful
. Just really well made by some totally badass engineers, copying the Dutch models, but after adding a bunch of cool tricks so they'd produce harder-to-break ciphers. There were about ten iterations of these things, the Enigma and its successors, and they kept on adding rotors and doing other stuff to make them stronger. But at the same time, they were using up all their best raw materials on killing people. So by the end of the war, you've got this box with twelve rotors, up from the original three, but it's made of sandwich metal and looks, I don't know, boringly functional, without any of that flair and craftsmanship of the first generation. I guess they were in a pretty bad mood by then. They probably spent half their time overseeing slave labor or tending the death-camp adding machines. So, basically, everything elegant and beautiful in these things was just sucked out by the war, until all that was left was something you wouldn't call 'beautiful' unless you were totally insane."

"Woah," Ange said. "Symbolic."

I play-punched her in the shoulder. "It
was
, doofus. It was like a little illustration of the collapse of everything good in a society. I'll show you the pictures later. Those first-gen machines were
awesome
, just amazingly made. They were like works of art. The last versions looked like they'd been built by someone who was absolutely miserable. You'll see."

Mom and Dad didn't say anything. I didn't think much of it, then I saw a silent tear slip down Dad's cheek. I felt weirdly ashamed and embarrassed. Dad got up wordlessly from the table and went to the bathroom, came back a few minutes later. None of us said anything while he was gone, and the silence continued after he got back, his face freshly washed and still slightly damp.

He ate a few mouthfuls and said, quietly, "Amazing how a society can just slide into the crapper, huh?"

Mom gave a brittle laugh. "I don't think it's as bad as all that, Drew."

He put his fork down and chewed and chewed and chewed at his food, chewed like he was angry at it. The words that came out after he swallowed had a choked, tight feel. "Isn't it? There were three more foreclosures on our street today, Lillian.
Today
. And as for slave labor, just think about how much of what we own is stamped 'Made in China,' and how much of our 'Made in the USA' came out of a prison somewhere."

"Drew --" Mom said.

"Marcus, Ange, I'm very sorry," he said.

"It's okay Dad," I began.

"No, I mean I'm
sorry
that you've inherited such a miserable, collapsing old country. A place where rich bankers own everything, where you've got to be grateful for a part-time job with no benefits and no retirement plan, where the most health insurance you can afford is being careful and hoping you don't get sick, where --"

He clamped his lips shut and looked away. I'd seen a bill on Mom's desk from a health insurance company warning us that we'd lose our coverage if we didn't make a payment. I'd tried not to think too hard about it.

"It's okay, Dad," I said again. His skin had gone pale beneath his beard, and it made the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and in his neck stand out. He looked twenty years older than he had at the start of dinner.

"Cheer up, Drew," Mom said. "Honestly, it could be much worse. There's plenty who'd be grateful for our problems. Let's have a glass of wine and watch
The Daily Show
, all right? I PVRed it." When my parents got rid of their cable box, I'd built them a cheapie PVR using MythTV and an old PC. It only worked with the few HD broadcast channels that aired in San Francisco, but it automatically converted the files so they could play on our phones and laptops, and snipped out all the commercials.

Dad looked down and didn't say anything.

"Come on, Ange," I said. We were pretty much through with dinner anyway. And there were darknet docs to plow through.

Mysterious Galaxy: San Diego and Rendondo Beach, CA

This chapter is dedicated to the incomparable Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, California, and Redondo Beach, CC. The Mysterious Galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time I've been in San Diego for a conference or to teach (the Clarion Writers' Workshop is based at UC San Diego in nearby La Jolla, CA), and when I've stopped in LA on tour. Every time I show up, they pack the house. This is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. In summer 2007, I took my writing class from Clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final Harry Potter book and I've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.

Mysterious Galaxy
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302 San Diego, CA, USA 92111 +1 858 268 4747
2810 Artesia Blvd., Redondo Beach, CA 90278 +1 310 542 6000

If you ever want to blow your own mind, sit down and think hard about what "randomness" means.

I mean, take pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Everyone who's passed sixth-grade math knows that pi is an "irrational" number. It has no end, and it never repeats (as far as we know):

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273 724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360011330530548820466521384146951941511609...

And so on. With a short computer program, you can compute pi all day long. Hell, you can compute it to the heat-death of the universe.

You can grab any thousand digits of pi and about a hundred of them will be 1s, a hundred will be 2s, and so on. But there's no pattern within those digits. pick any digit of pi -- digit 2,670, which happens to be 0. The next digit happens to be 4, then 7, then 7, then two 5s. If you were rolling a ten-sided die and you got these outcomes, you'd call it random. But if you know that 047755 are the values for the 2,670th - 2,675th digits of pi, then you'd know that the next "dice roll" would be 5 (again!). Then 1. Then 3. Then 2.

This isn't "random." It's
predictable
. You may not know exactly what "random" means (I certainly don't!), but whatever "random" means, it
doesn't
mean "predictable," right?

So it would be crazy to call pi a "random number," even though it has a bunch of random-like characteristics.

So what about some other number? What if you asked your computer to use some kind of pseudorandom algorithm to spit up some grotendous number like this: 2718281828459045235360287471352662497757. Is that random?

Well, not really. That
also
happens to be a number called "e," which is sometimes called "Napier's constant." Never mind what "e" means, it's complicated. The point is that e is a number like Pi. Every digit in it can be predicted.

How about if your random-number generator gave you this number:

222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222222

Is that random?

Well, duh. No.

Why isn't it random? Because if I said, "What's the one hundredth digit of a number that consists of a thousand twos?" you'd know the answer. You wouldn't be
surprised
.

It turns out a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a decent definition of "random." One of the best definitions anyone's ever come up with is "A number is random if the simplest way to express it is by writing it down."

If you just went lolwut, don't panic. This is hard, but cool. So, take our friend pi again. You could write a program to print out pi in, like two hundred characters. Maybe less. pi itself is infinite, which is a lot more than two hundred characters long. So the simplest way to express pi is definitely to write the "print out pi program" and not to write out all the infinite digits of pi.

And if pi is easy, "222222222222222222222222222222222222222222" and so on is really easy. In python, it'd be: "print ''.join(['2']*42)". Perl's more compact: "print 2x42". But even in verbose old BASIC, a programming language that's so flowery and ornate it's practically Shakespearean, it's:

10 PRINT "2" 20 GOTO 10 30 END

That's thirty characters, which is shorter than 222222222222222222222222222222222222222222 to infinity. A lot shorter. So if we mean a random number is a surprising one -- one that has no easily expressed pattern or structure, then we can say that:

A number is "random" if the shortest program you can write to print that number out is longer than the number itself.

This has a neat compactness to it, the ring of a good rule: short, punchy and to the point. A guy named Gregory Chaitin came up with this neat rule, then he came up with a hell of a twist on it. He was so proud of this feat that he mailed a paper to one of math's great mad geniuses, a guy called Kurt Godel (pronounced "Girdle," more or less) and messed everything up by asking, "How do you know whether you've come up with the shortest program for printing out a number?"

Which was a good point. Programmers are always coming up with novel ways of solving problems, after all. And there may be some hidden pattern to a number you didn't even realize was there. Say I asked you to write a program to print out this number:

6464126002437968454377733902647251281941632007684873625176406596754069362175887930785591647877727473927200291034294956244766130820072925073452917076422662104767303786316995423745511745652202278332409680352466766319086101120674585628731741351116229207886513294124481547162818207987716834634132236223411778823102765982510935889235916205510876329808799316517252893800123781743489683215159056249334737020683223210011863739577056747386710217321237522432524162635803437625360680866916357159455152781780392177432282343663377281118639051189307590166665074295275838400854463541931719053136365972490515840910658220181473479902235906713814690511605192230126948231611341743994471483304086248426913950233671341242512386402665725813094396762193965540738652422989787978219863791829970955792474732030323911641044590690797786231551834959303530592378981751589145765040802510947912342175848284188195013854616568030175503558005494489488487135160537559340234574897951660244233832140603009593710558845705251570426628460035

Look all you want, you probably won't find any pattern at all (if you do, it's a product of your imagination). So is it random? Nope. It's part of pi: digits 100,000-101,000, to be specific.
Now
you can write a
very
short program to print out that number: just add a line to the "print out pi" program that says, "only start printing when you get to the 100,000th digit, and stop 1,000 digits later."

What Chaitin realized was that no one could ever know for sure whether a sufficiently long, interesting number could be printed out with a program shorter than it. That is, you could never tell whether
any
big number was random or not. In fact, maybe there were
no
random numbers. He called this "incompleteness" as in "You can never be completely sure you know if a number is random."

Godel was already famous for the idea of "incompleteness," the idea that mathematical systems couldn't prove themselves. Chaitin saw incompleteness in the way we thought about random numbers, too.

As far as anyone knows, he was right. We basically can never know whether something is random or totally predictable. He is one of mathematics's great smartasses.

Fun fact: Godel went crazy at the end of his life and became convinced that someone was trying to poison him. He refused to eat and ended up starving himself to death. No one knows exactly why he went crazy, but I sometimes wonder if all that uncertainty drove him around the bend.

I didn't leak the docs on LaptopLock. Neither did Ange. Neither did Jolu. According to the logs, we were the only ones that had touched them.

But they leaked anyway.

Of course, Liam knew about it before I did. He pretty much
ran
over to my desk as soon as he saw the story on Reddit. "You went to Chavez High, right?"

"Uh, yeah?"

"Did you know this Fred Benson skeeze?"

He didn't have to say anything else, really. By that point, I knew exactly what this had to be about. But it was worse than that. The pastebin dumps of the stuff about LaptopLock were all headed "DARKNET DOC ______" with the number of the document. The highest-numbered LaptopLock document happened to be 745,120, and several people had already noted this and concluded that somewhere out there, there was a site called "darknet docs" with at least 745,120 documents on it.

We were blown.

"It's amazing, right? I mean, can you believe it? I wonder what else they've got?"

"Yeah," I said. "Huh. Wow."

Liam dragged a chair over to my desk. He put his head close to mine. He smelled of Axe body spray, which may just be the most disgusting scent known to humankind.

"Marcus," he said, in a low voice, "dude. You remember yesterday, when you were talking about root certs and stuff? It sounded like maybe you knew more about the subject than you were letting on."

"Did it."

"I mean, look, you're
Marcus Yallow
. If there's a darknet, you've gotta be all over that shit, yo. I mean, seriously, dude." He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I never knew what to say when someone ended a sentence with "yo." They always seemed to be acting out some script for a bromance comedy movie that I hadn't had a chance to see. But Liam was so excited he was shaking a little. "Come on, hook me up, man."

Ah, there it was. Liam wasn't stupid. He was enthusiastic and a little immature, but he listened carefully and knew that 10 plus 10 equaled 100 (in binary, at least). His heart was in the right place. And Jolu had brought his friends into the darknet clubhouse. But I couldn't just randomly start signing up overenthusiastic puppies like Liam without talking to everyone else. Especially as there appeared to be someone in our base, possibly killing our doodz.

"Liam, I seriously, totally, honestly have no idea what you're talking about. This is the first I've heard of it."

"Really? Like pinky-swear really?"

"Cross my eyes and hope to fry. I don't even have a Reddit account. I can't believe how much stuff they've dug up on the administrators who were using LaptopLock."

"Oh, that's nothing," Liam said, already forgetting his conviction that I was the ringleader of some leak-gang in his excitement at the awesome power of the Internet hivemind. "You should see what happens when Anon d0xxes someone."

I knew about Anonymous -- the weird non-group that was an offshoot of /b/, the messageboard on 4chan where everyone was anonymous and the name of the game was to be as humorously offensive as possible. I knew that they kept spinning out these sub-groups that did something brave or stupid or vicious (or all three), like getting thousands of people to knock PayPal offline in protest of PayPal cutting off Wikileaks. I knew that they had some incredibly badass hackers in their orbit, as well as plenty of kids who drifted in and out without knowing much about computers or politics, but who liked the camaraderie or the power or the lulz (or all three).

But I can't say as I spent a lot of time on them. I'd had my time in the cyberguerrilla underground and I had decided I didn't want anymore to do with it, especially when it came to crazy, impossible-to-describe "movements" that spent as much time squabbling among themselves as they did fighting for freedom and lulz.

"D0xxes," I said, trying to remember what it meant.

"Yeah, they get really righteously pissed at someone and they d0x them, dig up all the documents they can about them that they can find -- court records, property records, marriage, birth and death, school records, home address, work address, phone number, news dumps... everything. It's insane, like the DHS turned inside out, all that weird crap all the different agencies and companies and search engines know about you, just, like,
hanging out there
, all of it where the search engines can find it, forever. The stuff they found about your douchey old vice principal is
nothing
, man. If Anon gets on this tip,
bam
, it's going to be
sick
."

Now
I remembered what d0xxing meant. Yikes. "Do you ever wonder if there's anyone else who can do that sort of thing?"

"What do you mean? Like the cops or the FBI or something?"

"Well, I mean, sure, yeah, of course they can do all this stuff."
And more
, I thought, imagining what you might dig up with a lawful intercept appliance. "But what about, I don't know, some CEO? Or a private military contractor?"

"You mean, is there someone like Anonymous out there, but doing it for the money instead of the lulz? Like hackers for hire or whatever? Oh, man, I'm totally sure there are. It's not like you have to be an angel or a genius to learn how to do an SQL injection or crack a crappy password file. I bet you half the creeps who used to give me noogies at recess are laughing it up at private intelligence outfits these days."

"Yeah," I said. I wondered how many of those particular kinds of creeps were drawing a paycheck from Carrie Johnstone and whether any of them might be hanging out in our darknet, messing with our heads.

I took a long lunch (feeling like a total slacker for grabbing extra time off on my third day at work) and asked Ange and Jolu to meet me in South Park, which was about the same distance from Ange's school and Jolu's and my offices. It was a slightly scuzzy little park right in the middle of SoMa -- south of Market -- but it had been ground zero for a whole ton of dotcom start-ups and tech companies and it was always full of the right kind of nerds. I felt comfortable there.

Jolu arrived first, looking cool and grown-up as usual. A couple of the people eating their lunches on the benches around us recognized him and waved at him.