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 nongroup 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 subgroups 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 any more 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.
“How do you do it?” I said when he sat down.
“What?” he said, smiling like he and I were in on some enormous joke together.
“I don’t know; how are you so cool? I’m crapping myself over this darknet stuff, I look like I dressed myself in the dark, I can’t figure out how to cut my hair so I don’t look fifteen years old, and you, you’re so totally, I don’t know, you know, styling.”
He gave me that easy smile again. “I don’t know, Marcus. I used to be kind of anxious all the time, did I look ‘cool,’ was I going to get in trouble, was the world going to end or whatever? And then one day, I just thought, You know, whatever’s happening, I’m not going to improve it by having a total spaz attack. So I decided to just stop. And I did.”
“You’re a Zen master, you know that?”
“You should try it, pal. You’re looking a little freaked out, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Well, you know: ‘When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.’”
“Yeah, I’ve heard you say that before. I guess what I’m asking is, how’s that working out for you?”
I closed my eyes and rubbed my hands on my jeans. “Not so good.”
“Why don’t you try just cooling it down for a minute or two, see if you can’t get your head right before this all kicks off?”
If it had been anyone except Jolu, I might have been offended, but I’d known Jolu forever, and he knew me as well as anyone in the world. I remembered that feeling I’d had in the temple that time I’d lain in the dust among the gongs and the Omm, the total peace and calm that had washed over me like a warm bath. I could remember how that felt, but I couldn’t feel it—the harder I chased it, the more elusive it felt.
Jolu put his hand on my shoulder and gave me a gentle shake. “Easy there, hoss. Don’t sprain anything. You look like you’re getting ready to kung-fu my ass. This is about relaxing, not stressing out. If it’s hard, you’re doing something wrong.”
I actually felt really bad, like I’d failed at something. To cover up for it, I kind of hammed it up, putting my face in my hands and acting like I was experiencing some kind of artistic torment.
“Don’t sweat it, Marcus. Just something to keep in mind, all right? There’s the stuff that’s happening out there in the world, which we only have limited control over, and the stuff that’s happening in our heads, which we can have total control over—in theory, at least. I’ve noticed that you spend a lot of time trying to change the outside world, but not much energy on changing how the outside world makes your inside world feel. I’m not saying you should give up on changing the world, but you might try doing a little of both for a while, see what happens.”
He was smiling when he said it, and I knew he wasn’t trying to be a dick, but it still made me feel ashamed. I guess because I knew he was right. All my life, people had been telling me to chill out, calm down, take it easy, but for some reason, taking it easy was hard, while freaking out came naturally.
He looked worried now. “Okay, forget I said anything. I only brought it up because you asked. Let’s talk about the current situation, right? As in, what the hell’s going on with the darknet? Who’s reading over our shoulders? What are they up to?”
“Good,” I said. I was relieved by the change of subject.
“Start with the process of elimination, because we need to start somewhere. The logs say no one but me, you, and Ange accessed those docs. Are you sure Ange didn’t leak them? Don’t get mad, okay? It’s just about covering all the bases.”
“Yeah, I get that. No, I can’t imagine why Ange would do that. She practically tore my throat out when I suggested that we should go public with the stuff about Benson.”
“So you wanted
to leak them?”
“What? No. I mean, yeah, of course my first reaction was to nail all those bastards to a wall, but Ange told me not to be an idiot and I reconsidered it. Besides, all I wanted to do was talk to everyone else about it, not go rogue and do it myself. I don’t even know how I’d leak it if I wanted to—whoever’s doing it is good. They stick it up on pastebin, and Reddit goes crazy and the press follows.”
Ange arrived then, looking absolutely beautiful in a chunky black sweater with a pixel-art Mario/Cthulhu mashup worked into the front, black-and-white striped tights, and a red skirt. She topped it off with ancient, cracked motorcycle boots the color of old cement and a 3D-printed plastic bracelet on each wrist. Ange was basically the most perfect woman I’d ever known, and my best friend in the whole world, and every now and again I’d see her coming down the street or walking through the park and I’d realize that I was pretty much the luckiest man that ever lived.
There’s no way Ange had been leaking stuff behind our backs.
She gave Jolu a warm hug and then gave me a warmer one, with a big long kiss that ended with me burying my face in her neck and breathing in the heavenly smell of her collarbones.
“Hey, guys, so have you solved all our problems yet?”
“Not yet, but we’re working on it.”
We unpacked our lunches. I’d made myself a sack of PB&Js and thrown in an apple, some cookies, and a little bottle of cold brew before leaving the house that morning. I’d realized I’d need to start brown-bagging it when I started thinking about how little of my paycheck would be left over if I blew eight bucks every day on coffee, a burrito, and horchata. Ange, like always, had made herself a perfect and awesomely cute bento box with rice and vegetables and cold tofu and beef arranged in precise, colorful patterns. Jolu had one of his badass homemade energy bars, big as a two-by-four and twice as dense with all kinds of nuts and seeds, studded with bits of smoked bacon and dusted with his secret mix of spices. I’d seen him live off one of those for a whole day while on a camping trip, having a casual gnaw at it whenever he got a little peckish.
“Before we go any further,” Ange said, around a dainty mouthful of rice and marinated eggplant, “Jolu, you’re not the leak, are you? I mean, no offense, but—”
He laughed. “Yeah, I know. You should have seen Marcus here when I asked if he thought it could be you.”
“Well, you’ve got to start somewhere. I’m not the leak, for what it’s worth. I wish I was, because it would mean that no one was inside our security, messing with us. But Jolu, you haven’t answered the question yet—are you the leak?”
“No, Ange. I wish I was, for the same reason. Because I don’t like the alternative, either. I mean, either someone’s really seriously compromised the security of my server, which would be pretty goddamned hard because there isn’t a single byte of cleartext going in or out of that box, or—”
“Or someone’s rooted your computer, or mine, or Ange’s.”
“Yeah.”
That was the possibility that had been going through my head all morning. Someone with total control over my computer, someone with the power to light up the camera and the mic, to grab text off my screen or files off my hard drive. It wasn’t a possibility I liked to think about. The darknet docs showed that Fred Benson had grabbed over eight thousand photos of one student alone, some poor kid the old bastard had a hate-on for.
How many times had my computer been compromised? Zero? Or eight thousand?
And more important: if my computer had been pwned, had it been “random”—someone scanning for vulnerabilities discovering my computer in a rare, unpatched moment and grabbing control over it—or had it been “special”? That is, had someone targeted me? Like Gödel, I wasn’t sure I knew the difference between random and special anymore.
* * *
I don’t know what Jolu told Restless Agent and the rest of his buddies, but there was no darknet chat accusing me or Ange of being the leak. I still didn’t know who Jolu’s people were, and didn’t want to know, but I kind of assumed that they were people he worked with and that he’d gone back from lunch and had a little chat with them—hopefully away from any computers that might be covertly running their mics and cameras.
But of course, no one wanted to do much chatting at all on darknet, not without knowing who and how someone or someones were eavesdropping on us.
Long after the last person—Liam—had left Joe’s campaign office, I sat at my desk, staring at my computer like it might have a live, venomous snake hiding inside it. I had stayed late at my desk, theoretically to finish up the day’s work and make up for my little lunchtime face-to-face meeting, but also because I didn’t want to try to deworm my laptop at home, not when I had an office filled with so many spare and useful computers lying around.
In theory, it should be easy to secure (or resecure) my laptop. Find another hard drive and create an encrypted filesystem on it. Boot up my computer—or any computer!—with a boot disk downloaded fresh from the Internet, after carefully validating the checksum to make absolutely, positively certain that I was using a clean, uninfected, pristine version of ParanoidLinux. Then I’d install a fresh build of ParanoidLinux on the new drive, copy over the user data from my old disk to the new one, and I’d essentially have given my computer a fresh brain with all the memories of the old one, but with a high degree of certainty about the brain’s reliability and trustworthiness. It all worked best if you had a couple of spare laptops and hard drives lying around, which the Joe campaign had—old laptops are one of those things that no one really wants to throw away, so we’d accumulated a lot of semiantique machines that had been donated by Joe’s supporters.
Figuring out whether the old machine had been infected at all was a harder, more subtle problem. If someone had infected the machine and altered the kernel—the nugget at the middle of the operating system where you’d hide the most vicious spyware—I’d either have to go through it line-by-line looking for something out of place (which might take a hundred years or so), or try to build an identical kernel from known good sources and compare the checksums and see if there was any obvious dissimilarity. The problem was that I’d patched and tweaked my kernel so many times over the years that if the new one didn’t match, it would almost certainly be because I’d built the new one wrong, not because I’d been taken over. At the very least, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
My computer sat there, staring at me from its little webcam, a ring the size of a grain of rice. The mic was a pinhole-sized hole set into the screen’s frame. The first thing I’d done after getting back to the office was grab a roll of duct tape from the supply cupboard, thinking I’d tape over the camera and mic.
But I hadn’t done it. It felt paranoid. I was paranoid. If there was someone inside my computer, that person knew more about me than anyone. But so far, all that person had done was carefully, effectively release docs that I’d been planning to leak. Maybe that person wasn’t a bad guy (or girl). Maybe that person was on my side, in some twisted way. I found myself imagining the snoop: a seventeen-year-old like me a couple years ago, glorying in the thrill of being where he shouldn’t be. Or maybe an old, crusty FBI agent, sitting in a cubicle in Quantico, making careful notes on my facial expressions and my kissing techniques with Ange. Or some thick-necked mercenary saving screengrabs of the most embarrassing moments so that Carrie Johnstone could laugh at them later.
It was eerily silent inside Joe’s office. The street noises were washed out by the air-conditioning’s hum. I looked straight into the webcam and started talking: “You’re in there, aren’t you? I think it’s pretty creepy, I have to say. If you think you’re helping me, let me tell you, you’re freaking me out instead. I’d much rather that you talk to me than sneak around spying on me. And if you’re one of the bad guys, well, screw you. Nothing you do to me now will stop the darknet docs from going public, and if I get scared enough or disappear altogether, I’ll just dump the whole goddamn
ed pile. Do you hear me? Are you there?”
Boy, did I feel stupid and awkward. It was like the one time I’d tried praying by my bed, when I was about ten or eleven and I’d been seized by a weird, sudden terror that if there was a God, He’d be really pissed off at me and my family for our total disbelief in Him. I didn’t actually believe in God, but I had this wobbly cost-benefit analysis moment that went like this: It costs nothing to believe in God. If the tiny likelihood of the existence of God turns out to be the truth, then He’ll punish a failure of belief with eternal damnation. The consequences are terrible, but the risk is low. Wouldn’t it make sense to take out some sort of insurance policy to protect against this tiny possibility? My dad had just changed our household insurer and an adjuster had come over to look at the house and talk about whether we’d need flood and fire and lightning and earthquake insurance, and how much, and Dad and I had geeked out on the math together, which had been codified by Richard Price, a British mathematician who had been the patron of Thomas Bayes, my dad’s all-time math hero. So I had insurance on the brain.
That was weird enough—but the really weird part was that once I got this idea, it got me, too. I couldn’t let go of the feeling that I hadn’t bought the right kind of insurance—I was believing in the wrong God—or that I wasn’t sending my premiums to the right place—I wasn’t praying right. I spent about a week in a low-grade panic about my religious incompetence, and it was always worse at night, when I was lying in bed, waiting for sleep to come.
So one night, I’d gotten out of bed and, feeling incredibly dumb and self-conscious, I’d gotten down on my knees beside the bed, folded my hands together, bowed my head, and closed my eyes. I’d seen kids praying this way in old cartoons—I think Donald Duck made his nephews do it, or maybe that was Popeye—though I’d never done it myself.