Homeland (29 page)

"Money can buy."

There was laughter near Trudy Doo, and it took a few moments before the laughter subsided enough for the people near her to repeat the punch-line.

"I have been out at a million of these things.

"And we always say the same things.

"And sometimes it feels hopeless.

"But we keep coming out.

"Because the reasons we come out haven't changed."

"Because the corruption, the brutality, and the unemployment are still there.

"So we're still here."

There was applause here -- occupy style, with hands in the air, fingers wiggling -- but Trudy Doo wasn't done yet. She called out, "Mic check!" and everyone went silent.

"They tell us we overspent.

"They tell us we were greedy and we lied on our mortgage loans.

"They tell us it's a global world and we can't get paid more than they're paying in India or China.

"They tell us this is the new normal.

"No jobs.

"No schools.

"No libraries.

"No houses.

"No retirement.

"No health care.

"But somehow, there's enough money for wars.

"Somehow, there's enough money for banks and bonuses.

"Somehow, it makes economic sense to give war criminals the power to take our houses.

"But they haven't passed their dirty laws yet.

"Now we know about them, thanks to the darknet.

"And we know that any politician who votes for this is bought and paid for.

"So we're here.

"We're here to say that our country is no longer for sale.

"We're here to say we're watching."

She hopped nimbly off the base and people applauded again, both ways, and it turned into a chant, "We're watching, we're watching, we're watching." There were some people in Fawkes masks and they pointed to their eyes and then to City Hall, making a little dance out of it, shuffling back and forth funkily in their thrift-store three-piece suits. Liam was pretty much in heaven.

Trudy Doo was surrounded by a crowd, part of an intense discussion, explaining to people who hadn't heard of the darknet what it was. She spotted me and shouted, "Marcus, come here a sec!" Liam almost fangasmed right then. I admit I was a little bit pleased with myself to be called out by Trudy Doo.

But then she said, "Marcus, you've heard of the darknet docs, right?"

My mouth went dry. "Um, I guess," I said.

"Good. Gimme a sec."

She hopped nimbly back up on the base. "Mic check!" she bellowed, cupping her hands around her mouth.

"Mic check!" the crowd roared back.

"Listen up! Marcus here, some of you know him as M1k3y, right?"

All of a sudden, there were about a million pairs of eyes on me. I squirmed and made a half-assed wave.

"You want to know about darknet, right? He's the guy to ask.

"Get up here, Marcus!"

She hopped down off the base and there was a polite round of applause. She gave me a rough hug, smelling somehow of the power supply of an overheated computer, like she was wearing Eau du Server. "Knock 'em dead," she said, right in my ear, and gave me another squeeze, then shoved me toward the base. I hesitated a second by the base of the plinth and she grabbed me by the back of my jeans with one hand, put the other under my butt, and basically wedgied me up onto it.

I looked out at the crowd. They looked back. It wasn't all strangers. There were familiar faces there -- people I knew from Noisebridge, a couple girls I'd seen around the Mission, some people I knew from high school. I even spotted John Gilmore, the EFF guy, wearing a tie-died shirt and flat cap, smiling impishly within his long beard, light glinting off his round glasses.

"Wow," I said, before I could stop myself. The crowd around me said, "Wow," People's Mic style, and there was laughter all round. Ah yes, the old "repeating stuff that wasn't meant to be said" gag. Har.

And now I had no choice: I was about to give a public lecture to a couple thousand people on my top-secret leaks site. Way to keep your cover, Marcus.

Once upon a time, I helped invent a network called Xnet, because we ran it on top of hacked Xbox Universals, a games console that Microsoft gave away for free one Christmas so that they could sell more software. Naturally, there'd been a lot of interest in figuring out how to get
other
games to play on the Xbox, so someone went out and hacked it to accept a new OS: GNU/Linux, the free operating system made out of free and open code that anyone could improve and republish. There are a zillion flavors of Linux, and one of them, ParanoidLinux, was the desktop equivalent of ParanoidAndroid: an OS that assumed you were being spied on and did everything it could to keep you private.

Jolu and I tweaked ParanoidLinux so that it was ready to crack other peoples' WiFi out of the box, and then share it around, so if one Xbox was within range of a cracked WiFi link, all the Xboxes in range of it could share its connection. We used ParanoidLinux's built-in Tor stuff to create our own secret servers, chat and games, routing some of the trickier stuff through Pigspleen, Trudy Doo's old ISP.

By the time I got picked up by the DHS, Xnet was already showing its age. The ParanoidLinux project was always being patched as new security issues were found and clobbered, and keeping the Xnet version up to date was a lot of work for us. We handed over control of the project to a volunteer committee who ran it for a few more months before they folded it back in with ParanoidLinux, which was, by this time, a boot disk that set up Tor, secure versions of Firefox and a chat program called Pidgin, and other security tools right out of the box, so you just stuck it into any computer and rebooted it and you were locked down tight and secure, assuming you could manage all the complexity of your keys, and understood how darknet sites worked, and, well, a lot of other stuff that most of the world didn't get. Yet.

So the darknet was just the latest version of the Xnet -- in the same way that humans were just the latest version of chimps. I could use it, sure, but could I even explain it anymore? I was about to find out.

"Darknet sites run on Tor.

"That's The Onion Router.

"It's a tool that bounces your traffic around the net.

"Making it harder to trace and censor you.

"A darknet site is a normal website.

"Except that your computer never knows its address.

"And it doesn't know your computer's address.

"There's a darknet site.

"It has over 800,000 leaked memos on it.

"No one knows who put them there.

"No one knows what's in them.

"But a few thousand have been cataloged.

"And they're scary as hell."

I took a deep breath.

"You probably saw a lot of comments.

"About how it's all BS.

"A hoax.

"Nothing there.

"Well, if you check the darknet.

"You'll find a ton of memos about something called Hearts and Minds." I managed not to pronounce it "heerts."

"That's a product developed by Zyz.

"To help them spam discussion forums.

"With fake people.

"And now there are a whole crapton of people.

"You've never heard of.

"Flooding message boards.

"Saying that the memos that show that Zyz is really evil.

"Are all BS.

"I think that's pretty suspicious."

Finger-wagging applause. That made me feel a little better about the fact that I was on the verge of outing myself as the darknet docs guy.

"The easiest way to get to the darknet.

"Is to install a free browser plugin called TorButton.

"Then visit est5g5fuenqhqinx.onion.

"I know that's a long number to remember.

"I'll say it again."

A voice from the crowd -- one of the Anonymous guys, muffled by his mask -- said, "I have a bunch of flyers explaining all this with the address on it."

I waved at him. He waved back, all jaunty body language to match the wide, sardonic grin on his mask. "That guy has the address on flyers." He executed a showy bow over one leg.

"I hope you'll go and see the darknet docs yourself.

"And make up your own mind.

"Well, thanks, I guess," I finished, and hopped down off the base, my pulse going whoosh-whoosh in my ears. The crowd was clapping politely, which was more than I had any right to expect. It wasn't as if I'd riled them up, given them marching orders, and sent them to fight the powers of evil. I'd given them tech support. There'd been a million cameras on me, of course, and some of them would have been streaming live to the net, and the rest would be grabbing footage to upload to YouTube and whatnot later on. And then there were three clean-cut guys in blue SFPD windcheaters with little camcorders who circulated endlessly through the crowd, making sure to get long shots of every face, especially anyone standing on a piece of street furniture and yelling out instructions, like me. I swallowed. Well, they knew who I was already, right? I'd been gassed and busted by them before. As the old saying went, it was the equivalent of a formal introduction.

The Anon guy with the flyers came over and handed me one, then shook my hand. "Nice to meet you, sir," he said.

"You, too." He was about my age, as far as I could tell from his eyes and the way he held himself. I looked at the little quarter-sheet of paper in my hand, hastily sliced into an off-kilter rectangle. It had all the basic info: an address for downloading a ParanoidLinux disk image that would boot any computer, the darknet docs address, some URLs for tutorials. It was liberally decorated with Guy Fawkes masks and funny slogans, and it had a fingerprint you could use to verify that your ParanoidLinux disk image hadn't been interfered with during the download. For a second, I thought that the numeric address they'd listed was wrong, and I spun off on a paranoid fantasy that these guys were part of some kind of disinformation campaign and maybe the ParanoidLinux fingerprint was no good, maybe it went to a poisoned version that spied on everything you did? Then I realized I'd been reading the address wrong and decided I needed to calm the hell down. "This is good," I said. "Thanks for doing it."

The Anon cocked his mask at me. "No problem -- it was the least I could do. Seemed like it needed doing. I jumped on the darknet docs as soon as I heard about 'em, saw that BS this morning about Hearts and Minds, figured people needed to know the truth, so I wrote it down and made some copies. That seems like the best way to do stuff these days: make a
lot
of copies."

He said it with such hilarity I had to laugh. "Works for the bacteria," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "You think we could get some biotech freak to encode it all in a bacteria? Leave it in a petri dish overnight, make a trillion copies?"

"Viral marketing," I said.

Liam said, "
Bacterial
marketing."

Anon guy laughed some more behind his mask. I wondered if it itched. "This is my friend Liam," I said. "He brought me here today." They shook, and the Anon guy fingered Liam's bandanna with admiration. Liam slipped it on and I could see he was grinning behind it.

"Dude," Anon guy said.

"I know, right?" Liam said.

Trudy Doo flung an arm around my shoulders from behind. "You look like you're doing good, Marcus," she said.

"I haven't slept properly in weeks, I broke my nose last week, and I'm kind of a nervous wreck, but that's nice of you to say," I said.

"Just like I said. Looks like you're keeping really busy, which means you're doing good. Better than being a tube-fed zombie waiting for the grave." She shook my shoulders.

"How are you doing?" It seemed like a rude thing to say to someone who'd just lost her company, but I didn't know what else to say, plus I was kind of basking in the envious looks I was getting from Liam and didn't want Trudy Doo to go away before I'd finished showing off how cool I was.

She shrugged. "Pissed off," she said. "Pissed off is
good
. I'd rather be pissed off than resigned and peaceful. All the stuff that's gone down, all the money the super-duper richie-richies took out of the economy, all the shenanigans from the big phone companies that nuked Pigspleen... Every bit of it's made me ready to fight and fight some more."

The Anons clustered around her as she spoke, clearly enjoying her rant. I wished I could talk like that.

I had another paranoid moment: maybe Anon guy was the person who'd been spying on me through my computer. Maybe he and his buddies were the ones who'd staged that ghostly argument in my word-processing window the other night. For some reason, I'd pictured them living thousands of miles away, in a small town where there was a lot of spare time. But maybe they were practically my neighbors. Hell, maybe I hadn't flushed them out of my computer after all and they'd been watching me all along, had rushed down here when they saw Liam come and drag me off to the demonstration.

I couldn't go on like this. I was going to have to get my head straight. If I could only get a decent night's sleep, I could sort it all out. I'd felt that way for years, I realized. If I could only get a normal day, a day when my parents weren't freaking out about money and jobs, a day when I was just a regular student or a regular coder, or something else regular --