“Hearts and Minds”—heerts and minds—“just you have a look. And check your email more often.”
The line went dead. So much for my night off.
* * *
Zyz had its fingers in a lot of pies, and liked to spin off new divisions for each of its special projects. RedCoat was the name of the “security software” contractor that did a lot of gross lawful intercept work for various branches of the U.S. government, and governments overseas.
Hearts and Minds was one of its flagship products, though it didn’t exactly show up on the company’s website. But there it was in the darknet docs, and the more I read about it, the more angry I became.
It looked like Hearts and Minds started with a procurement order from the United States Air Force Air Mobility Command, which was looking for “persona management” software. What’s persona management? I didn’t know either. It’s the kind of weirdness you couldn’t make up.
You’ve heard of “grassroots” political movements, right? That’s when ordinary people start to care about a political cause, and start to demand justice and action.
The bizarro-world version of “grassroots” movements are “astroturf” movements. These are fake grassroots movements started by political groups, governments, ad agencies, marketing companies, crooks, intelligence outfits. I wasn’t sure at this point whether, practically speaking, there was any difference between these sorts of organizations. In astroturf movements, you get hundreds or even thousands of “ordinary” people writing letters to the editor, showing up for demonstrations, writing to their congresscritters or town assembly or school board, all the stuff that people do when they care about a cause. But in an astroturf movement, the “ordinary people” are, in fact, paid operatives—the cast of a giant theatrical production in which people are paid to pretend to be ordinary citizens who just happen to want to see a park turned into an oil field, for example.
Now, getting all those phonies to pretend to be real people with real passion costs a lot of money. A handy-dandy way to save on this unfortunate expense is to use “sock puppets”—that’s when one person operates several online identities, each pretending to be a different person, each one vigorously agreeing with the rest. Sock puppetry can get seriously twisted—you can even create a sock puppet to disagree with your cause, but in such a disagreeable, stupid, oafish fashion that they make the other side look like dolts.
But being a sock puppeteer isn’t easy. You’ve got to keep all your identities separate, remember what each one has said about its life and beliefs. The last thing you want is for your fake suburban housewife to start talking about the stuff that only your fake long-haul trucker should know.
If you want to run more than a couple fake people at a time, you need good tools to help you keep track of who’s who in your imaginary world.
That tool is called “persona management.”
Hearts and Minds was developed for the USAF, but RedCoat sold lots of copies elsewhere. The product brochure boasted that it was used by “reputation management” companies, “marketing and communications” and “strategic communications” outfits. It was clear from the testimonial quotes that these were all fancy names for companies that helped other companies discredit people who complained about their products and services online. If you were selling crappy food, or had rude staff, or if your strollers had a tendency to collapse and squish the babies inside them, it was cheaper to hire someone with a Hearts and Minds license to help “manage your reputation” by making your dissatisfied customers seem like lone whiners than it was to actually fix your shit.
The product literature boasted about how Hearts and Minds was more efficient than the 50 Cent Army, the name for the legion of fake commenters employed by the Chinese government to discredit anyone who complained about official corruption or crimes. They made fun of the crudeness of paying badly educated thugs 50 cents per post to smear their targets.
Hearts and Minds could let a single operator pretend to be dozens of people. All of a sudden, I had a pretty good idea where all those messages about how the darknet docs were just BS and hoaxes and irrelevant had come from. All of a sudden, I wondered how much of the stuff I thought to be “true” had been made true by some creep with a sock-puppet army and a copy of Hearts and Minds. It was an ugly feeling.
* * *
I did a lot of work on the darknet spreadsheet, unpicking the threads that documented Hearts and Minds (which I kept thinking of as “Heerts and Minds”), adding tags and cross references. Now that we’d told the world about the darknet docs, the spreadsheet was more important than ever, as it was the only index to the massive trove. We’d dropped signing our edits with individual IDs, and now we all shared a single admin account that let us all edit the sheet without letting the public vandalize it or add weird conspiracy theories to it (we had enough of those among ourselves). We’d indexed over 3,000 documents between us now, which only left, uh, well, basically 800,000 more to go. It was going to take a while.
When that was done, I dragged my exhausted ass into bed, barely getting my shoes off before I hit the sack. But a few hours later I woke up with a jolt from a claustrophobic dream, my mouth pasty and tasting of the ginger in the pho. I slopped into the bathroom and gulped a cup of water and swiped at my teeth with a toothbrush and at my face with a facecloth and went back to bed, put my head on the pillow, and closed my eyes. But now sleep wouldn’t come. Why would anyone go to all that trouble to tell me about Hearts and Minds? It wasn’t like I could do anything about it.
It was stupid, is what it was, and every time sleep stole over me, I’d feel a kind of full-body pucker of outrage that these dinks had made such a point of calling me up just to tell me that I was the target of powerful, highly resourced attackers who had me outgunned in every way. I mean, duh. I knew that already.
Not being able to sleep sucked mightily. I needed to sleep. I had a job to do tomorrow, and I needed a clear head, and it had been so long since I’d had a real night’s sleep, it was starting to turn me into a member of the living dead. The more I worried about this, of course, the harder it was to find sleep. Finally I counted down slowly from one hundred, taking a breath at every number, trying to find that place I’d gone to in the temple on the playa, and I was just about there when a thought occurred to me:
If all the Hearts and Minds messages were being generated and managed by a single piece of software, maybe there was a way to automatically figure out whether someone was using Hearts and Minds to post—a fingerprint, a signature, a trademark. I had a moment’s excitement at this, a sketch of a plan for a program to analyze Hearts and Minds messages and find the connection, and then sleep did come, and bash me over the head with a sledgehammer, knocking me into a deep, dark dreamless place that my alarm-clock dragged me out of just a few short hours later.
* * *
I was at my desk when Liam came over, still looking a little wounded, but with that kind of worshipful look that made me so awesomely uncomfortable.
“So,” he said, “uh, you going to go to lunch soon?”
I nodded. I’d packed another PB&J that morning before blearily going out the door, sprinkling a handful of chocolate espresso beans in the sandwich, which seemed like a good idea at the time but which I’d probably regret.
“’Cause I thought I might go to Civic Center for the occupation.”
“Is there another one of those today?” It seemed like there were new occupations springing up every month, like putting up tents and taking over some public square had become the default way to show that you were pissed off about something. Sometimes they were huge, and sometimes they were just a few hardcore people, but I kind of felt like we’d all gotten to the point where news-footage of pepper-spray-happy cops in Darth Vader suits waging chemical warfare on vomiting, weeping protesters had lost its shock value. I mean, I was sympathetic to the victims of course—I’d ridden the Scoville Express myself—but I just couldn’t get as worked up as I’d been a co
uple years back when it all kicked off.
Liam’s eyes bugged out, as though he couldn’t believe that someone as amazingly cool as me didn’t know about everything going on everywhere in the world. I always hated those people, people who always said, “Oh yeah, I heard about that,” no matter what it was, even when you knew they were lying. The kind of people who’d never done anything for the first time. But hanging around Liam was going to turn me into one of them if I didn’t watch it.
“It’s huge, yo! A bunch of different Anons are way pissed about this darknet stuff, they want to get at Zyz.” He put on a menacing robot voice. “We are Anonymous. We are legion. We don’t forget. We don’t forgive. Expect us.” I squirmed. You used to hear a lot about Anonymous, a kind of tribe of Internet people who would pull off these daring raids and denial-of-service attacks. But then the price for botnets crashed and anyone could be a denial-of-service terrorist, and then there were a ton of big stupid Hollywood movies where the good guys or the bad guys or the serial killers or the stoners were running around in Guy Fawkes masks, and well, it just all got kind of lame and played out. There were still real anons out there, hanging out on places like 4chan and being deeply weird and offensive in the way that no Hollywood movie would dare to come close to, but the image of Anonymous has been turned into even more of a cartoon than it had been when they started. And as for this “We are legion” business, it had been the chorus of a summer pop song so awful you’d icepick your own ear to escape it. Any menace it had once held was now offset by the fact that it was the modern successor to La Macarena and the Chicken Dance.
“So it’s a bunch of Anons in tents?”
“No, dude. Anons kicked it off, but it’s, like, everyone. It’s huge. There’s students from all over the city, even high school kids playing hooky. Teachers, too! Even parents.”
I dug around my bag for my sandwich and stuck it in my coat-pocket. “All right,” I said. “You’ve convinced me.” And truth be told, he had. Maybe the darknet docs weren’t on the front page of every newspaper, but here was a bunch of people who were protesting because of them, sort-of-kind-of. If that was all I was going to get out of this, I’d take it. For now, anyway.
“We don’t have to wear masks, do we?” Those plastic V-for-Vendetta masks were even more played out now. Plus the last thing I wanted was to be in a crowded, volatile situation with no peripheral vision.
“Naw,” Liam said. “These are better.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of worn black bandannas, screened with elaborate patterns. He shook one out and held it out. It was a cotton kerchief, silk-screened with the Guy Fawkes face right in the middle of it. “Watch,” he said. He folded it in half diagonally, making it into a big triangle, and tied it around his neck like a cowboy. Then he pulled it like a bank robber, and the way he had it folded, his whole lower face was the Guy Fawkes face. Then he untied it and shook it out again and took off his baseball hat and fussed with the kerchief, tucking the top edge under the hat and then retying the corners at the back of his head, so that now it covered his whole face, with only his eyes looking out through the eyeholes he’d cut out of the cloth. “It’s a transformer,” he said, muffled by the cloth. “Choose your level of covertness and tie accordingly. Plus it’s treated with stuff that’s supposed to help with pepper spray. I got ’em from a guy on eBay. Want to take one? We could both wear them!”
He sounded so enthusiastic I wanted to hide in the toilet. One thing I did not want was to show up looking like the dork twins. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll just keep it in my pocket, you know, in case.”
“Cool,” he said, crestfallen. I made a show of carefully folding the kerchief and tucking it into my pocket. Who knew, maybe I would need to blow my nose—or soak up some blood.
* * *
I heard the protest long before I saw it, the unmistakable drum-circle, whistle-blowing sound. It made something inside of me cramp up a little, a reminder of the Xnet concert in Mission Dolores park, the gassings and beatings that had followed it. But Liam was clearly energized by the noise, started to pogo a little as we came up out of the BART station and headed toward it. The streets were lined with SFPD cruisers, and the sidewalks were thronged with beefy SFPD officers, ostentatiously sporting thick bundles of zip-strip handcuffs at their belts. They all had goggles pushed up on their foreheads, masks pulled down around their collars. For the gas, of course. And yeah, there were a couple officers wearing what looked like SCUBA tanks, except I knew they were filled with pepper spray, connected to spray-nozzle hoses that were clipped to their chests. I didn’t make eye contact with them, but their body language told me they were playing plenty of attention to me and Liam. I wondered if it was the Guy Fawkes bandanna around Liam’s neck.
The tents filled the area in front of City Hall, spraypainted with old slogans from old occupations. This left very little room for the demonstrators, so we spilled out into the street, holding hand-lettered signs about student debt, corrupt politics, joblessness. The news was always full of stories about homeless camps being moved along, and big lengths of Shotwell Street had turned into tent cities, the whole sidewalk full of tents and mattresses and piles of cardboard. There was a big billboard by the Powell Street BART advertising the services of a security-through-occupation company that would move its employees into abandoned or foreclosed houses to keep squatters out.
Off to one side, a woman had climbed up on the high concrete base of a lamp post. She had cut off her long, fluorescent pink dreads, and it made her seem a lot older and wiser, but I’d recognize Trudy Doo anywhere. The frontwoman for Speedwhores and founder of Pigspleen.net was a San Francisco icon, and she’d been Jolu’s boss until her ISP went out of business the year before. She shouted, “Mic check!”
Around her, people echoed the cry: “Mic check! Mic check!” This was the People’s Mic, another fixture of occupy protests. At first, people did it because their cities wouldn’t give them “amplification permits” to use megaphones, but even in cities where the authorities didn’t play stupid amplification gotcha-games, the People’s Mic was preferred. Something about having everyone cooperating to help each other be heard really felt right.
“We have the best government—”
She shouted with her gravelly punk-singer voice, making each word good and clear and loud. The crowd echoed it, with some grumbles. “We. Have. The. Best. Government,” shouted the people around Trudy Doo. Then people around them repeated it. Then the people around them, and so on, in concentric circles that finally reached to the other side of Van Ness Ave, which was now thronged with people.
“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 m
akes 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.