Austin, TX is one of those cities that turns out to be an unlikely and distant suburb of Berkeley, a counterculture town where "Keep Austin Weird" is the citywide mantra. Of course, it's got a lot of great places to buy books, but man, Book People is a hell of a store. I visit most of these stores as a touring author, but stepping through their doors instantly turns me into a reader, and all I want to do is browse the shelves, read the staff reviews, and pick over the staff-picks. Book People is one of the stores where the urge to do this is strongest.
Book People: 603 N. Lamar, Austin TX 78703, +1 512 472 50
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I've always done my best work at night, and I knew all the tricks -- combining careful doses of coffee, catnaps and showers to get my tortured, sleep-deprived brain to perform during daylight, while still cranking away through the vampire hours, where inspiration lurked in every shadow.
Jolu was the same, and that was one reason we got along so well. I can't count how many 3 A.M.s I'd shared with him over Skype or IM, or in person as we snuck out of the house to go dingledodie around the streets of San Francisco. So even though it was 8 P.M. when Ange and I finally finished arguing, I didn't worry about whether he'd be free for the evening.
Though I did feel a little weird as my finger hovered over his icon in my speed dial. That thing, you know it: you haven't called someone in a long time, so it's weird to call them, so you don't call them, and more time goes by, and it gets weirder...
"Marcus!" he said. There was a lot of noise in the background, clinking bottles and glasses and loud talk.
"Jolu!" I said. "Look, man, I'm sorry to call you out of the blue --"
"One sec," he said. "Let me go somewhere quieter." I heard him navigate what sounded like a busy party. "Hey dude! Long time no speak!"
"I'm sorry to call you out of the blue --"
"No, no, it's cool. It's great, actually! Nice to hear from you."
Wonder if you'll feel the same way after I turn your life upside down.
"Can I meet you somewhere? It's important."
"Marcus?" he said. "Important how?"
"Important important. The kind of important I don't want to talk about on the phone."
I distinctly heard him say Oh shit under his breath. "Of course," he said. "Right now?"
"Yeah, now would be good."
"Um." A long pause. "What about the place where you met Ange?"
"You mean --" I stopped myself. Good old Jolu. Anyone listening in wouldn't know where I met Ange. He was more paranoid than I was, and that was before I told him what was up. He really was the right man for the job. "Okay, when?"
"Give me an hour?"
"Okay," I said. "And Jolu? Thanks."
I heard him snort, and I could totally picture the half-smile that went with it, one bushy eyebrow raised in a quizzical expression. "No need. Anytime for you, man. You know that."
Friends. Nothing like them.
I met Ange at a key-signing party Jolu and I threw at Sutro Baths on Ocean Beach. The weird old/new ruins were spooky and dramatic, and the night was burned into my memory forever. Ange laughed when I told her where we were headed. She'd taken me there again on our first anniversary, with a picnic supper, and we'd watched the sun go down and necked on the blanket before we got too cold.
"I think we should switch off our phones," Ange said.
"Yeah," I said. That's the thing about paranoia -- it's catching. But she was right -- our phones would send our location to the phone companies, and if someone really wanted to snoop on us, it was always possible that they could find some way to tap into the GPSes on them. Then there'd be this really clear data-trail: Marcus called Jolu, then Ange, Marcus and Jolu all met up at Ocean Beach. Might was well get reflective orange vests and stencil CO-CONSPIRATOR on them. I took the battery out of my phone for good measure.
We were a quarter of an hour early -- the buses were with us -- and Jolu was ten minutes early. He hugged us both tightly, and Ange kissed him on the cheek. It had been months since I'd seen him -- he'd dropped in on an open data lecture at Noisebridge -- and he looked different. He'd grown a tidy little mustache and pointed sideburns, and had his hair styled in a short razor-cut that looked somehow grown up, cool, and business-like all at once. He'd always been better-dressed than the rest of us, but he was particularly natty that night in a button-up shirt with slightly wiggly stripes that made my eyes cross when I stared at them, heavy old denim jeans with big rivets, and elaborate leather shoes. I was in my old thrift-store jeans, beat-up motorcycle boots caked with playa dust, and a hoodie, and I felt like a slob.
He had wine on his breath. "I hope it wasn't a totally excellent party," I said.
"Just a release party for a new traffic-predicting app," he said, shrugging. "We get users' anonymized GPS data at different times on different roads and try to predict traffic jams ahead of time, also looking at all the planned road maintenance and anything realtime from the DOT. You share your calendar with us and we look at where you're going and use that to give you advice on what roads to avoid to get there on time."
"Woah, creepy," Ange said. I'd been thinking it, but hadn't wanted to say anything.
Jolu wasn't offended, though. He just grinned. "Yeah, it is. I mean, everyone is opt-in, and we anonymize the data when we get it so we don't know where you've been, just that someone has been there. But yeah, if we had a data leak, there'd be an awful lot of stuff there you might not want the world to know." He sat down on a rock and fished some gum out of his pockets, offered it around. It was black licorice gum, his favorite, the kind that turned your tongue and spit disgusting black. Just the smell of it made me smile and sent me spinning back in time to the old days.
"Or if the police seized your servers," Ange said. "It's so weird that we do all this Xnet stuff to keep our personal information from being captured by the government, but we give it to companies and the cops can just waltz in to their data centers whenever they want and just take it all."
"You don't know the half of it," Jolu said. "Get me to tell you about the lawful intercept stuff some time, okay? It'll curl the hair on your toes."
"So, speaking of the police and servers," I said. "I've got an interesting technical problem I wanted to talk to you about."
"I figured you might."
"Before I start -- is your phone on by any chance?"
He pulled it out of his pocket and removed the back, showed me the missing battery. "Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo," which was the punchline to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it.
Jolu listened attentively, asking a few questions as we told the story. I put in my theory about the explosion on the playa and Ange didn't say anything about not believing me. When we were done, we both looked at him across the darkness and the grey no-color of the light leaking from the streetlamps on the cliff above us.
"So what do we do now?" he said.
"We?"
He shook his head. "Duh. Yes, 'we.' Did you think I wouldn't get involved?"
"The last time you sat where you're sitting and I sat where I'm sitting, you told me that it was different for you. You told me that the risk was bigger if you're brown than if you're white."
"Yeah, I said that. It's every bit as true today as it was, then, too."
"But you're in."
He looked out into the darkness and didn't say anything. I smelled his gum.
"Marcus," he said. "Have you noticed how messed up everything is today? How we put a 'good' president in the White House and he kept right on torturing and bombing and running secret prisons? How every time we turn around, someone's trying to take away the Internet from us, make it into some kind of giant stupid shopping mall where the rent-a-cops can kick you out if they don't like your clothes? Have you noticed how much money the one percent have? How we're putting more people in jail every day, and more people are unemployed every day, and more people are losing their houses every day?"
"I've noticed," I said. "But haven't things always been screwed up? I mean, doesn't everyone assume that their generation has the most special, most awful problems?"
"Yeah," Ange said. "But not every generation has had the net."
"Bingo," Jolu said. "I'm not saying it wasn't terrible in the Great Depression or whatever. But we've got the power to organize like we've never had before. And the creeps and the spooks have the power to spy on us more than ever before, to control us and censor us and find us and snatch us."
"Who's going to win?" I said. "I mean, I used to think that we'd win, because we understand computers and they don't."
"Oh, they understand computers. And they're doing everything they can to invent new ways to mess you up with them. But if we leave the field, it'll just be them. People who want everything, want to be in charge of everyone."
"So we're going to win?"
Jolu laughed. "There's no winning or losing, Marcus. There's only doing."
"Man, I leave you alone for a couple of months and you turn into Yoda."
"So what do we do?" Ange asked again.
"Well, we're not going to be able to look at 800,000 of these."
"810,097," I said.
"That. I think we need to build some kind of site for these things, something secure and private, where we can run searches on them, try to find the good stuff, leave notes for each other."
"And then what do we do with them?"
"We release them."
"Duh," Ange said. "But how do you think we'll do that? How do you put the information in a place where people will see it and care about it, but not a place that can be traced back to us?"
Jolu shrugged and stared at the ruins. "I don't know. I guess it depends on the kind of stuff we find. Maybe we google journalists who sound like they'd be interested in the story and email the docs to them from throwaway accounts. Something else, maybe. I don't know. But when you've got a problem that has two parts, and one part comes first, and you know how to solve that part, the best thing to do is solve that part and see if a solution to the rest suggests itself while you're working."
"That sounds right," I said.
"I suppose," Ange said. "But, Marcus, what about Zeb and Masha?"
"Yeah. Well, I don't know how we work that out. Maybe releasing the material will put them in more danger. Maybe it'll take them out of danger. We know who took her: Carrie Johnstone. That's got to be part of the story, however we release it."
"You're sure it was her?" Jolu asked.
"There are some faces I'll never, ever forget. Hers is one of them. It was her."
"Okay, okay. Let's talk about forward secrecy," he said.
It turned out Jolu had been hanging out with some heavy Tor dudes who were working on "darknet sites" -- "hidden services" that could host files and message boards, sites that anyone could reach, providing they knew the address. But these were unlike regular sites: even if you knew the address, you couldn't figure out where the physical computer it led to was, who was running it, what server you'd have to sieze to shut it down. Darknet sites were places you could visit but couldn't shut down.
"So you've got these rendezvous points, they're servers that know some other servers that know some other servers that know the way to reach the darknet site. You ask a rendezvous site to introduce you to the server and it does this dance with the other servers down the line, and creates a temporary circuit that bounces your connection through a one-off route to the darknet machine, so every time you visit the site, there's a different, random way to reach it.
"What I want to do is grab a cheapo server-on-demand VM and slap a ParanoidLinux install on it -- nothing unencrypted, ever. Then we slap a copy of your data on it, and a clone of Google Spreadsheets. Grab a doc, put its title in the first field, a description in the next field, and a place where you can put some keywords. Smack together a script that runs every couple of minutes and searches for those keywords in the uncategorized documents, and automatically suggests possibly related ones."
"And then what? We look at 800,000 documents, us three?" I figured I might be able to do a hundred docs a night, depending on how complicated they were. At that rate, it'd take us three a year or so to get through them all. Too slow.
"No, not us three. With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. We've got to bring more people in. People we can trust."
Jolu said, "Yeah, I know a few of those."
I was almost late for work the next day. After coming home, I'd stayed up for hours banging away at the document dump. I hadn't meant to, but Jolu's idea of searching for words in the dump gave me some ideas.
The first thing I searched for was "Masha" and "Zeb." I got a few documents with "zebra" and "mashallah," but nothing else. I tried "Marcus" and "Yallow." There were five "Marcus"es but none of them were me.
Then I tried "Carrie Johnstone" and hit the jackpot.
Carrie Johnstone had been a busy little soldier in Iraq. There were more than four hundred documents that mentioned her by name. I went after them alphabetically at first, but it was all confusing, until I had the bright idea of sorting them by date and starting with the oldest and reading toward the newest -- a document that was just over a month old.
Reading those four hundred documents -- some very short, some very long -- kept me up to three in the morning, and the more I read, the more I learned about Carrie Johnstone's weird and terrible career in and out of the U.S. military.
The first documents dated from Johnstone's career at FOB Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's old palace. There was a memo she'd written describing the handover of a bunch of Iraqi prisoners to the Iraqi police. I didn't see at first why anyone would bother to save the document, but the next memo explained it. It was a memo explaining why they hadn't told the Red Cross about the transfer of prisoners, and hadn't gotten any kind of chain-of-custody receipts from the Iraqi cops. A little googling and I figured out what that meant: fifty-one men, women and children had vanished into the custody of Iraq's police force, and no one knew whatever became of them. They had been arrested after anonymous tips, or snatched off the street for "suspicious behavior." And for all anyone knew, they were nameless and rotting in a jail somewhere, while their families wrote them off for dead. Or maybe they were dead, dumped in a mass grave.
Then she'd ended up at FOB Grizzly, working as an "intelligence officer" alongside the military police. She'd been reprimanded for unauthorized "stress interrogations" of suspected terrorists, and had overseen an arrest sweep that brought in more than five hundred suspects, all of whom had been released over the coming months as it emerged that they had nothing to do with terrorism.
It was around then that she left the military, and though she'd written a letter of resignation, there was also a memo from a commanding officer to Army Human Resources Command saying that she'd been "shown the door" after an "incident" involving "materiel." Another memo was more explicit -- she'd been involved in a plan that delivered American guns and ammo to private mercenaries working for a military contractor, and those guns and that ammo had been part of a massacre that killed over a hundred people.
From there, she'd gone private, working for the military "contractor" -- hired killers, according to a quick search -- and had distinguished herself with a very lucrative bid to take over the management contract for the FOB she'd been fired from.
It was ugly.
As I lay in bed with my thoughts swirling, I wondered if Carrie Johnstone had snatched Masha because the leaks file had so much embarrassing material about her, personally, or whether she'd been hired to retrieve them for the U.S. government. How could the Army fire her one day and then re-hire her to do the same job at ten times her old salary a month later? Were they on crazy pills?
I couldn't afford to drag my ass around work the next day, so I didn't. I pounded the Turk's coffee and munched chocolate espresso beans and finished my inventory and network map. Joe surprised me by scheduling me for lunch. The first I heard of it was when he showed up at my desk at 12:30 and stood over it, smiling expectantly at me.
"Hi, Joe," I said.
"Lunchtime, Marcus?"
We went to a nice veggie place where they knew him by name and seated us right away. He knew their names, too, and greeted everyone from the waiter to the guy who filled up our water glasses personally, switching to Spanish as necessary and asking sincere, friendly questions about their wives and husbands and kids and health.
The sincere part was the weirdest thing. When I was really on fire and feeling very, very sociable, I might remember half of the names of the people I saw. I just sucked at names. And when people told me about their kids or parents or siblings or whatever, I tried to be interested, but I mean, how interested can you really be in the lives of people you barely know or have never met at all?
But Joe had the uncanny ability to seem really, genuinely interested in people. When he talked to you, you felt like he was also listening to you, carefully, thoughtfully, and not waiting for you to finish talking so that he could say whatever he was going to say next. It made him seem, I don't know, holy or something, like one of those people out of a religious story who overflows with love for his fellow man.
And the weirdest part? He didn't make me feel like a dick for not being that interested myself. Instead, he made me want to try to be more like him, more caring.
After our water glasses were full and we'd put in our orders, he said, "Thank you for making the time to see me today. I know you must be busy."
If it was anyone else, I'd have thought he was blowing smoke up my ass, but he really sounded like he thought being the webmaster/sysadmin/net guy was the hardest job in the world and he felt lucky that all he had to do was run around and try to get elected.
"You're welcome -- I mean, it's a pleasure. I mean, it's wonderful. I'm so glad to have a job, and it's such a cool job, too. Everyone's really nice and interesting and I really believe in your platform, so, well, it's just great." I was babbling like an idiot and I couldn't seem to stop -- and he didn't seem to notice.
"You remember when I spoke to you on the phone the other night, I mentioned how my campaign would need great technology to be successful. And I'm sure that when you and Flor chatted she had some pointed opinions about that and what her side of the campaign needed from you. You might be wondering who wins in a little struggle like that. I wanted to give you some context to help you resolve that.
"Flor is your boss -- and she's my boss, too. She's in charge of the campaign from top to bottom, and I'm familiar with her ideas about what campaigns need vis-a-vis boots on the ground, knocking on doors, and raising money. She's right as far as she goes, and that's why I let her be my boss.
"But I'm the candidate, and I have some additional priorities. I say 'additional' -- not 'different.' Flor is right about needing money, boots and door-knocking. But once you've got all that running to the best of your ability, there's more that I want you to get thinking about. I want you to tell me how technology can help me reach people who would otherwise be beyond my reach. I want you to tell me how technology can transform the way that voters and their representatives collaborate to produce good, accountable government. Every wave of technology, from newspapers to radio to TV, has transformed politics, and not always for the better. Some people think that the Internet is a tool for politicians to raise money or coordinate volunteers, but I don't think that's even one percent of what technology can do for politics. I want you to help me figure out the other ninety-nine percent."
Woah. "Okay," I said. "Do you want, what, an essay or a website or something?"
He smiled. "Let's start with a chat, like this one, tomorrow at the end of the day. I'll have Flor put it in both of our schedules."
It made me feel good and a little scared -- I really didn't want to let him down, but all I could think of was darknet sites and leaked docs. I wondered what he would say if I told him that I was sitting on more than 800,000 confidential, compromising government memos. But I also remembered what Flor had said: The first time I catch so much as a whiff of anything illegal, immoral, dangerous or 'leet' I will personally bounce your ass to the curb before you have a chance to zip your fly.
I went over to Ange's after work. Jolu had already set up our darknet site and grabbed a copy of the docs off BitTorrent. I'd handed him a USB stick with the key on it, and by the time I got my computer up into a secure mode with a dead man's switch and an anonymized, private network connection, the site was ready to go.
In fact, it was already going. Jolu had met with Van on his lunch break, and she'd plowed through more than fifty docs while I'd been bringing the Joe for Senate servers' patch levels up to date. I wondered whether Van had had a chance to talk to Darryl. He'd been my best friend, as tight as a brother, but I hadn't seen him in months. It was all too weird between us -- the fact that he was with Van and that Van had confessed that she'd once had a crush on me; the unwordly fragility of his mind after his time in Gitmo-by-the-Bay; his constant struggle to keep up with even a half-time courseload at Berkeley. I thought of what seeing that nasty little waterboarding PowerPoint would do to Darryl.
It wasn't just Van working on the docs, either. Jolu had enlisted some of his other trusted friends, people with cryptic handles like Left-Handed Mutant and Endless Vegetables. I hoped Jolu was right to trust them. I hoped he'd been cagey about where the docs had actually come from. Out of curiosity, I googled the strangers' handles and confirmed to my satisfaction that they didn't appear to have been used before. It would have been such a basic mistake to recycle a nickname that you'd already used someplace that could be linked to your real identity.
Endless Vegetables was working his (or her) way through a gigantic pile of documents on student loans, judging from the tags and summaries. I vaguely knew that the government guaranteed student loans made by universities, which were sold to banks that collected on them. The darknet docs went into disgusting details -- like a series of jokey emails between a congressman who'd gotten a tearful letter from a constituent who'd been hit with crazy penalties that turned her $20,000 loan into a $180,000 loan and an executive at the bank who'd assessed the penalties. The congressman sounded like he was pretty good friends with the banker, and they made it sound like this girl's problem was hilarious.
Jolu had added an "I'm feeling lucky" button to the spreadsheet that would bring up a random, uncataloged doc. I hit it and found myself looking at a cryptic set of numbers and acronyms. I tried to google the search terms but found myself getting nowhere, so I grabbed another, and then another. It was mesmerizing, like channel surfing on a massive cable network that only got heavy, strange programs about corruption, murder, and sleaze.
"Jeebus H Christmas," Ange said. "Have a look at the doc I just checked in."
I resorted the spreadsheet by author and found Ange's latest contribution, loaded it up. It was an instruction manual for a "lawful intercept" network appliance sold to cops and governments for installation at an Internet Service Provider. The appliance monitored all incoming requests for updates to Android phones, and checked to see if the phone's owner was on a list of targets. If they were, the appliance took over the network session and sent a fake update to the phone that gave spies and spooks the power to secretly turn on the phone's GPS, camera, and mic. I stared in mounting horror at the phone on the bed next to me, then flipped it over and took out the battery.
"Keep reading," Ange said. She'd been following the auto-linked documents and found a bunch of captured emails and phone sessions. One was a complaint from a DHS field operative about a target who'd installed "ParanoidAndroid" on his phone and couldn't be gotten at.
"What's ParanoidAndroid?" I asked.
"I'm reading up on that now," Ange said. "Looks like it's a fork from the CyanogenMod." I knew about Cyanogen, of course -- hackers had taken the source code for Google's Android operating system and made a fully free and open version that could do all kinds of cool tricks. "It doesn't accept updates unless their checksums match with other users and the official releases. Lets you tell whether an update is real or a spoof."
"Well, what are we waiting for? Let's install it!"
Ange pointed at her phone, which was already cabled to her laptop. "What do you think I'm doing?"
"Do mine next?"
"Duh."
There was more. Other lawful intercept appliances would disguise themselves as iTunes updates for Macs and PCs, and another one worked by sending fake updates to your browser. Then there were the saved emails between a senior DHS IT manager who'd worked at one of these companies before going to Homeland Security. His old boss was explaining how they were using a shell company in Equatorial Guinea -- a country I'd never even heard of! -- to market their products in China, Iran, and other countries.
It just got worse. Logs of law enforcement requests to install spyware bugs on people involved in peaceful protest groups. Reports of break-ins by suspected criminals who'd used the systems to spy on their victims.
I was trying to figure out how all this stuff could possibly work. After all, software updates usually went over SSL, which used cryptographic certificates to verify the identity of the sender. How were they spoofing connections from Apple and Google and Microsoft and Mozilla?
Oh, that's how. A search on "certificates lawful intercept" brought up another email exchange, this one with a huge American security company that had one of the "signing certificates" that were trusted by all browsers and operating systems. They'd been supplying blank certificates to the DHS for years, it seemed -- certificates that would give the government the power to undetectably impersonate your bank or your company, or Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Ange and I split up the remaining lawful intercept docs, getting deeper and deeper into the terrifying secrets of snoops and spies. Before I knew it, it was 2 A.M. and I could barely keep my eyes open.
"Want to stay over?" Ange said as I yawned for the tenth time in five minutes.
"I think I already have," I said. We'd started staying over at each other's houses that summer, and while it had been weird at first (especially over breakfast with the parents!), everyone had gotten used to it. My parents had more important stuff to worry about, and Ange's mom was just one of those cool grownups who seemed to have an instinctive grasp of what mattered and what didn't.