cory_doctorow - Danny Thorne on Diigo

It was the identity I used when I was posting on message-boards where
I was making my contributions to the field of applied security
research. You know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the
minder-tracer on my phone.

snitch-tag killers

gait-recognition cameras

The SchoolBooks were the snitchiest technology
of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network
traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track
of every fleeting thought you put out over the net.

Cracking
my SchoolBook had been easy. The crack was online within a month of
the machine showing up,

IMParanoid

those pesky
gait-recognition cameras. Like I said, they'd started out as
face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional.
As far as I know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams
are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them.

        
      

It's a
biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got
a lot more "collisions" than either of those. A biometric
"collision" is when a measurement matches more than one
person. Only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with
plenty other people.

        
      

locked-down spyware version
of Internet Explorer

Any
program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating
system.

TOR -- The Onion Router. An
onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages
and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion
routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass
it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The
traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the
school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion
don't know who they're working for. There are millions of  nodes --
the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help
their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and
China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the
confines of an average American high school.

        
      

We
also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets
easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all
the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false
sense of security.

        
      

Library books are bad news. Every one of them has an arphid
-- Radio Frequency ID tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it
possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them
over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books
on it are out of place.

        
      

But
it also lets the school track where you are at all times. It was
another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools
track us
with arphids, but they could track library
books,
and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying
which library book.

        
      

I
had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets
lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio
energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing
ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like --

        
      

I
had a little Faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets
lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio
energy, silencing arphids. But the pouches were made for neutralizing
ID cards and toll-book transponders, not books like --

"Introduction
to Physics?" I groaned. The book was the size of a dictionary.

"Well,
I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing
arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going
for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of
lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so
the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal"
that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can
reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to
library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's
still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved
and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.

        
      

"Well,
I can't hide it, so I'm going to have to nuke it." Killing
arphids is a dark art. No merchant wants malicious customers going
for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of
lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so
the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal"
that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. You can
reprogram arphids with the right box, but I hate doing that to
library books. It's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's
still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved
and can't be found. It just becomes a needle in a haystack.

        
      

That
left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds
in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And
because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in
at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it
with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back
on its shelf.

        
      

That
left me with only one option: nuking the thing. Literally. 30 seconds
in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. And
because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when D checked it back in
at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it
with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back
on its shelf.

        
      

The
arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely
(though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a
frozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).

The
arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely
(though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a
frozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed).

"OK,"
I said. "OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got my
phone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get
me again. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.

"OK, time for emergency countermeasures." I got my
phone out. I'd planned this well in advance. Charles would never get
me again. I emailed my server at home, and it got into motion.

A
few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had
tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent
to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on
going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for
that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause.

A
few seconds later, Charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. I'd had
tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent
to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on
going off. The attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for
that I felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause.

        
      

Botnets
are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a
worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on
IRC -- the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster --
the guy who deployed the worm -- that the computers are there ready to
do his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can
comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers,
scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed
connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function
on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they
rise like zombies to do his bidding.

        
      

Botnets
are where infected computers spend their afterlives. When you get a
worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on
IRC -- the Internet Relay Chat. That message tells the botmaster --
the guy who deployed the worm -- that the computers are there ready to
do his bidding. Botnets are supremely powerful, since they can
comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers,
scattered all over the Internet, connected to juicy high-speed
connections and running on fast home PCs. Those PCs normally function
on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they
rise like zombies to do his bidding.

        
      

There
are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an
hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for
spammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with
come-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and
recruit your machine to join the botnet.

        
      

There
are so many infected PCs on the Internet that the price of hiring an
hour or two on a botnet has crashed. Mostly these things work for
spammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with
come-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and
recruit your machine to join the botnet.

        
      

I'd
just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of
them send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone,
whose number I'd extracted from a sticky note on Benson's desk during
one fateful office-visit.

        
      

I'd
just rented 10 seconds' time on three thousand PCs and had each of
them send a text message or voice-over-IP call to Charles's phone

Needless
to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. First the
SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on
the routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer
and log all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know
that it's really
easy
to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways
of doing it -- just google "spoof caller id").

        
      

Needless
to say, Charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. First the
SMSes filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on
the routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer
and log all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know
that it's really
easy
to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways
of doing it -- just google "spoof caller id").

        
      

the demons that
had possessed his most personal of devices

It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the
memory was totally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code
it needed to delete the bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase
for texts on his phone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the
thousands of messages.

        
      

"I
totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of moving
on." It wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. Once the
memory was totally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code
it needed to delete the bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase
for texts on his phone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the
thousands of messages.

        
      

Ever since the truancy moblog went live,
our world is full of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon
themselves to snap our piccies and put them on the net where they can
be perused by school administrators.

and covered up all his
Catholic school crap, which was like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with
the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones.

a set of GPS coordinates --
there were coordinates for all the major cities where Harajuku Fun
Madness was played -- where we'd find a WiFi access-point's signal.
That signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby WiFi
point that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventional
wifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range
of someone's open access-point, which you could use for free.

        
      

Darryl
and Van had phones with built-in wifinders, while Jolu, being too
cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate
little directional fob.

She
held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew.

"Cheese,"
she said. "You're on candid snitch-cam."

civil defense sirens

"Report
to shelters immediately." It was like the voice of God, coming
from all places at once. There were speakers on some of the electric
poles, something I'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on
at once.

        
      

I
looked to Vanessa -- there was no way she'd hear me. I managed to get
my phone out and I texted her.

>
We're getting out of here

I
saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then
back at me and nod vigorously.

I whipped my phone out and punched 911. The sound
I got wasn't even a busy signal -- it was like a whimper of pain from
the phone system. You don't get sounds like that unless there's three
million people all dialing the same number at once.

"What
about Wikipedia?"

desks lined the walls with banks of slick
flat-panel displays climbing above them on articulated arms that let
them be repositioned in a halo around the operators

He
touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go, my
arms dropping suddenly behind me. It was like he was wearing Batman's
utility belt -- wireless remotes for shackles!

"What's
this for?" she said, holding up my phone. The screen was showing
the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data
without giving the right password. It was a bit of a rude message --
an animated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture --
because I liked to customize my gear.

        
      

We found a number of suspicious devices on your person.

We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly
stuff on the public Internet.

I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files
in its memory.

"I'm
not going to unlock my phone for you," I said, indignant. My
phone's memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails,
little hacks and mods I'd installed. "That's private stuff."

"What
have you got to hide?"

"I've
got the right to my privacy,"

Honest people don't have anything to hide.

FAQs on getting arrested

bar-codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each of the
cell-doors

You've acted like you've got
something to hide, and we don't like that.

my
phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder, and my memory keys

unlock the phone

decrypt the data on these memory
sticks

email passwords

why an
innocent man would act like he's got so much to hide is beyond me

this BS about "safety" and
"security,"

You're talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the Bill of
Rights.

You want to preserve the Bill of Rights? Help us stop bad people from
blowing up your city.

She didn't want me to just unlock the
phone. She wanted me to submit to her. To put her in charge of me. To
give up every secret, all my privacy.

The
truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between my phone
and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my
friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done.
You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd
carried out and the electronic reconciliations we'd arrived at.

        
      

I know my phone is private. I know my memory
sticks are private. That's because of cryptography -- message
scrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and me
get access to the same crypto that banks and the National Security
Agency use. There's only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: crypto
that's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That's how you
know it works.

        
      

There's
something really liberating about having some corner of your life
that's yours,
that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or
taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone
has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or
weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on,
every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it
in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be
buck naked?

        
      

Even
if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many
of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that
idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in
until we exploded.

        
      

It's
not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something
private.
It's about your life belonging to you.

They
were taking that from me, piece by piece.

I fantasized that the
wall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right
now, opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the
projects there -- the old cans I was turning into a ghetto
surround-sound rig, the aerial photography kite-cam I was building,
my homebrew laptop.

        
      

They
took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some interesting
messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group or another,
some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me out with
some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There was
nothing on there you couldn't find with Google, of course, but I
didn't think that would count in my favor.

        
      

he
cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of
the yard

There
was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop
talking, to walk, but we ignored it.

I gave them everything: server address, login,
password. This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. I
downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded
and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They
wouldn't get anything out of my mail -- it got cleared off the server
and stored on my laptop at home.

        
      

"We've
been reading your mail for a day now. We changed the password so that
your home computer couldn't fetch it."

"We
have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, Marcus.
Your possession of these articles --" she gestured at all my
little gizmos -- "and the data we recovered from your phone and
memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we'd no doubt find
if we raided your house and took your computer. It's enough to put
you away until you're an old man. Do you understand that?"

I
didn't believe it for a second. There's no way a judge would say that
all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. It was free
speech, it was technological tinkering. It wasn't a crime.

In my mind, I stood and delivered, telling her
that I was a citizen who loved my freedom, which made me the patriot
and made her the traitor.

Our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on
its soil. How many 9/11s do you want us to suffer before you're
willing to cooperate? The details of our investigation are secret. We
won't stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of
these heinous crimes to justice.

        
      

We will be watching you. We'll be waiting for you to make a
misstep. Do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the
time?

national security

It was a
nondescript white 18-wheeler.

It
was because I wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night.
That's why they singled me out.

"I'm right, aren't I? All this
crap, all the X-rays and ID checks, they're all useless, aren't
they?"

parked down the whole length of Market Street were big, nondescript
18-wheelers like the one that had carried us

buzzed
with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out
of them. The suits wore little badges on their lapels and the
soldiers scanned them as they went in and out -- wireless
authorization badges.

        
      

Then I
noticed the truck up the hill from me, a nondescript 18-wheeler

I felt the eyes watching me from all directions.

Meanwhile,
millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net. A couple of
the sites were old MySpace clones that had run out of money and saw a
new lease on life from all the attention. After all, some venture
capitalists had missing family in the Bay Area. Maybe if they were
recovered, the site would attract some new investment. I grabbed
dad's laptop and looked through them. They were plastered with
advertising, of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad
photos, wedding pictures and that sort of thing.

        
      

There was a little form for marking people found and
another one for writing up notes about other missing people.

scavenging parts from Craigslist and garage sales and
ordering stuff from cheap cheap Taiwanese vendors we found on the
net

So
I knew exactly
how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when the thing was
closed, and it was not
supposed to look like this.

        
      

Luckily, the third time
I'd had to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten
smart: I'd taken a photo of the guts with everything in place. I
hadn't been totally smart: at first, I'd just left that pic on my
hard drive, and naturally I couldn't get to it when I had the laptop
in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuck it in my messy drawer
of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where I kept all the warranty
cards and pin-out diagrams. I shuffled them -- they seemed messier
than I remembered -- and brought out my photo. I set it down next to
the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things
that looked out of place.

Then
I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the
logic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was
no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of
normal operations. I tried to press it back down again and discovered
that the plug wasn't just badly mounted -- there was something
between it and the board. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.

There
was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware,
only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was
plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words,
it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while
I typed on my machine.

It
was a bug.

There were eyes out there, eyes and ears,
and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced
at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the
Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of
Homeland Security had joined them.

        
      

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