Lawful Interception

by Cory Doctorow

  The “smooth transition” gave us a new reason to go on. Whatever had brought us together, fighting for our survival kept us going.

  The next demonstration was planned, not spontaneous. There were more silk-screened signs than handmade jobs made out of scraps of corrugated cardboard hand-lettered with sharpies. We had a permit from the City of Oakland, official “parade marshals” in reflective vests, and a real marching route and everything. In theory, it should have been a pleasant walk. There were kids out, old people, a large cadre of veterans in their uniforms—some of them young women and men in Afghanistan desert camou, more older ones in Vietnam greens and even some WWII and Korea uniforms. Some were in wheelchairs, and not just the old ones. There were a lot of Afghanistan- and Iraq-vintage vets missing arms. I’d heard about that. It was the kind of an injury you got if you had body armor and a helmet, but nothing protecting your arms. A generation before, they’d have come home in a body bag. Now they came home missing an arm. Or two.

  As always, the numbers are in dispute. Organizers say x. Cops say [x time 0.5]. Estimating crowds in an inexact science, of course—but not that inexact. There were at least twenty civilian drones doing flyovers during the march, and if you use a computer to estimate based on that footage, you get a number that’s a lot closer to x than one-half x. Call it 45,000 people. Or just call it a freaking huge number of people, if you prefer.

  But the energy was…different. Something about being organized instead of spontaneous. It changes the nature of the crowd. Maybe it’s the knowing. When you just show up with a lot of people because something is just too screwed up not to show up, you can’t know where it’s going to end. When it’s planned in advance and there’s a route and a permit and marshals, you can be pretty sure that when it’s done, you’ll just be going home, a little more footsore than you were when you started.

  We marched. There were bands at intervals through the march, including the inevitable drum-circle types, but also a totally insane brass band whose horns were like a jazzed-out battle-cry; a samba squad; and a “band” whose instruments were hundreds of bells sewn onto their sleeves and pants-legs who jingled their way down the street, belting out a merry rhythm. A lot of the kids had painted faces—clown makeup, animal makeup. Some of the grownups, too. But it was missing something. That spark of anything-can-happen.

  Until, that is, anything happened. If you watch it from the drone’s-eye-view, which is the best way to watch stuff happen in a crowd, here’s what you see: first the masks go on, some of them the traditional Black Bloc balaclavas, some of them Guy Fawkes masks, some just bandannas worn around the face like a cowboy movie bank robber. Five of the masked people put on reflective marshal vests, pull out reflective wands and begin to direct the mass of the demonstration down a side street, off the official route, and toward the site of the original Occupy camp, the one place we’d been sternly refused permission to march near.

  About twenty percent of the demonstration had already gone past the detour, and it wasn’t like everyone was going to follow a bunch of random dorks in face masks who were frantically waving them to turn, turn, turn here. But not everyone in a demonstration can see the marshals; sometimes you can only see the people who are around you or in front of you.

  From the drone, you see the crowd milling and swirling at the detour, a confusion like leaves swirling around a drain. Then, a turning point: the brass band, focused on their intense choreography and awesome jam, swung down the detour, the front row following the dancers ahead of them, who, in turn, were following a couple of masked types who were truly rocking out as they danced their way around the corner. Where the brass band went, others followed. Now the crowd was like a river diverted from its banks, carving a new path, and it seemed to suck up the parts of the march that had gone the “right” way on the official route. A few of the people closest to the detour doubled back and joined it, and then the people who were ahead of them doubled back, and soon the tide of people on the official route had reversed itself and was headed back to join up with the main body of the demonstration.

  If you zoom up that aerial footage, you can see real marshals trying to get people back on track, especially the 20% advance guard that was being sucked back again. Some poor souls drifted from the official demonstration to the much larger one, got turned back, drifted back again, ended up lost, droplets thrown off by the river and beached. Here’s where it gets really interesting: for one reason or another, the marshals guiding that lost tribe on its safe, official route turned it back again, directed it to the breakaway. In other words, the fake, masked marshals had become the de facto official route-planners, and everyone else had to follow their lead.

  “You see that?” Ange said, freezing the frame. We’d taken over the Turing room at the Noisebridge hackspace in San Francisco’s Mission District by degrees. We’d started off on a workbench, examining the video on my laptop, but we’d drawn a crowd, and someone had warmed up the projector and dragged up the chairs in the Turing room, and then someone else brought in one of the wireless webcams so that people who heard that something interesting was happening at our hackerspace could tune in and watch. Then, inevitably, someone else brought in another projector and splashed the #noisebridge IRC channel on the wall, because what was the fun of watching if you couldn’t join in, especially with quippy one-liners?

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why did they join in?” I shifted the ice-pack I was holding to my elbow. The cops hadn’t liked the diverted demonstration route. Not one little bit. They hadn’t been shy about expressing their disapproval, even with little kids and veterans and old people there. The National Lawyers Guild would be pulling shifts at the courthouse for days to get everyone bailed out. Luckily (?), Oakland PD’s high spirits and freewheeling approach to due process meant that pretty much everyone would get out with suspended sentences or charges dropped altogether (there were probably several waiting to stand up in front of the judge who hadn’t been charged with anything at all).

  Ange shrugged. “There’s only so much uncertainty and solitude anyone can bear, I guess. I mean, there’s a point where, if you’re in the demonstration, and the whole demonstration is over there, then you have to go over there, too.”

  “It’s like liquid democracy,” said one of the Noisebridge founders, a guy I didn’t see very often around the place, because he spent most of his time on the road. The IRC filled up with chatter as people talked about whether this was an apt comparison or not. I tried to remember what liquid democracy was, then I just googled it on my phone and showed Ange my screen. We read the Wikipedia entry together.

  Apparently, this was some kind voting system that the Pirate Party liked. It was supposed to be a sweet spot between representative democracy—where you elected professional politicians who quit their day jobs and spent all their time debating the best way to do things and voting on them; and direct democracy, where everyone got polled on every issue, all the time, even when it was stuff they hadn’t a clue about, like whether to give more funding to carbon nanotubes or use the money to fund Lyme disease research at Columbia. Neither of them was very good. The first one gave you professional politicians who spent more time keeping the people who funded their campaigns happy than they did voting for the programs that the voters needed. The second one turned every voter into a full-time maker-of-decisions about stuff that they often didn’t care much about.

  But liquid democracy supposedly solved this problem. For every and any issue, anyone could give her vote to some expert. So if there’s someone you know who really understands urban cycling issues, you give your vote on cycling issues to her. And if there’s some expert she trusts on the specifics of some particular cycling issue, she gets to delegate both your vote and hers, and so on. At any time, you can yank your vote from your delegate and vote it yourself, or redelegate it to someone else. It sounded complicated but I’d had plenty of crappy experiences with representative democracy—getting waterboarded isn’t something I’d recom
mend—and I’d been around groups where everything got put to a vote until everyone was ready to scream, so maybe this was a happy medium.

  And it was right: this was like liquid democracy—the people around the edges delegated their vote on which way to go to the people who could see the marshals. The people who could see the marshals delegated their vote to the marshals. The marshals delegated their vote to the cops. When some of the group set off on its own path, the remainder pulled their votes and re-delegated them, and off they went.

  It turned out that Ange had cracked a couple of ribs. They taped her up, but everything hurt—bending over, sitting up, carrying things, getting dressed. She got off easy. The kettle had hurt plenty of people, some of them badly. Getting caught in tear gas was bad. Getting hit by a tear gas canister at close range was worse. Not to mention that no one wanted to show up at a demonstration with a helmet or any other kind of armor, because the Alameda County District Attorney loved to add “conspiracy to riot” charges to the rap-sheet if you got arrested with any kind of protective gear, as though wearing a helmet was the same thing as carrying a baseball bat or a crowbar.

  But funnily enough, it wasn’t Ange that got scared. It was me. I was technically a convicted criminal, though my sentence had been suspended, and my lawyer from the XNet days had let me know that if I ever got arrested again, for anything, that sentence could be un-suspended. That meant that I could go to jail for doing something that would get the rest of my friends a slap on the wrist.

  I could tell everyone that that was why I didn’t want to go on demonstrations, why I didn’t want to defend the place that we’d made and the thing that we’d built. But the truth was I was just plain scared. There was something about the idea of being caught in a kettle, stampeded and herded this way and that. Once I’d seen it from overhead, seen the casual brutality and the hopelessness of the people who were caught in the middle of it all… I’d just lost my nerve.

  “Out with it,” Ange said. “Come on, enough. You’ve been lying around heaving sighs like an amateur production of Hamlet over there for the past two hours. Either tell me what’s wrong or cut it out. But actually, tell me what’s wrong. Come on, Marcus.”

  I reached for the lamp, but Ange had unplugged it so that she could plug in a charger for a drone-battery. I grabbed my phone instead, which was charging off my laptop, which was plugged into the other outlet. I turned on the flashlight app and threw a dirty t-shirt over it to dim the light a little.

  I sat up and looked at her. I’d had a crush on her since the night we’d met. Hell, I’d had a crush on her since the minute we’d met. We’d been through a lot together, and she was pretty much the only serious girlfriend I’d ever had, and vice-versa, and there was a part of me that was rational and said that it was basically impossible that I’d fall in love at first sight with the woman I was destined to spend my whole life with. I told that part to go die in a fire. This was Ange, and when I looked at her, I felt like I wanted to hug her, kiss her, jump on top of her, protect her, and cuddle her, all at once or in no particular order. Turning the lights on in a dark bedroom where she was lying next to me in was a kind of wonderful magic trick that never failed to lift my spirits.

  Though in this case, my spirits were so low that they were merely lifted from the deepest catacombs to the depths of the lowest sub-basement.

  “You look like you’ve been told you can’t have a puppy for Christmas,” she said. “What the hell is going on?”

  So I told her. “I know it’s stupid. I wasn’t even there. I was on the outside, where it was safe. You were in the middle of it all. You got hurt. But you still have the guts to keep on going out.” I stopped. I was circling what I felt, but couldn’t bulls-eye it. Sometimes, emotions just couldn’t be reduced to words.

  “You’re afraid that they broke you. You’re afraid that you’ll always be afraid.”

  And sometimes, emotions can be reduced to words after all.

  Which is not to say that it felt good to hear her say it. In fact, I shook my head and told her that wasn’t it at all, even though she’d totally nailed me with a single shot. She did that cocked-eyebrow thing that let me know she had my number, then squeezed my hand and told me to go back to bed.

  She is scarily good at figuring me out.

  Of course, she hadn’t dropped it. She just tabled it so that she could get a decent night’s sleep. Come morning, while I puttered around her mother’s kitchen making coffee for her, her mother, and her sister, she sat on the counter beside me, playing with her tablet, not saying a word, but letting me see that she hadn’t forgotten our middle-of-the-night discussion.

  Ange’s mom had been one of those people who bought an overpriced “pod” espresso machine that used non-refillable sealed bullets of stale, pre-ground coffee to produce a sterile, messless, bitter and nearly undrinkable shot of espresso. She always made a point of telling me how great she thought it was and how she didn’t understand what all the fuss was. Then I thrifted an Aeropress whose flange had cracked and fixed it up with some industrial adhesive, fixed the motor in a burned-out spice-grinder the same thrift shop was throwing out and brought it over to use as a grinder, then began to ruin her for lesser coffee, one cup at a time.

  She still made the rotten pod stuff when I wasn’t around, and she still made sarcastic noises when I pressed out a shot and topped it up with hot water, and she refused to let me explain the theory of coffee extraction at low temperatures, but damn, she drank the hell out of the coffee I made her.

  I made her three cups before we ran out of beans, and all the while, Ange stood by me, tapping her tablet, letting the distinctive aural mix of protests, drone engines, wind in mics, and police megaphones provide a soundtrack to the morning.

  Her sister peered over her shoulder for a bit while I washed up. “Look at that,” she said. “From this angle it looks so easy to get away. Maybe we should get everyone on the ground to watch this feed while the cops are trying to put ‘em in a kettle. They’d run circles around them.”

  She seemed to picture it for a moment, then she laughed. “What a mess that’d be, though. Like a million idiots texting and walking at once. You’get your feet stepped on and then you’d get kettled.”

  Ange shut off the tablet and set out scrambled eggs for both of us. As usual, she made mine too spicy and made hers insane. But Ange’s spice addiction has its good points. All that hotness quickly obliterates any extraneous thoughts, focusing one hundred percent of your attention on the sensation that you’ve just swallowed a piranha made of live, white-hot coals, and it’s simultaneously chewing and barbecuing its way out of your guts.

  But in a good way.

  “Funny thing,” she said, looking down at her screen. “We get together at a protest because together, we’re stronger that we would be on our own. But once we’re all in one place, it’s so hard for us to move as a group that we’re easy pickings. We become more and less at the same times.”

  “Superpowers are expensive,” I said.

  “Now there’s an interesting thing for you to say,” she said. “Has my master plan to get you all hopped up on caffeine and spice-endorphins shaken something loose in that twisty little brain of yours?”

  “Funny you should mention that,” I said. “It’s like there’s something good right there, just in the corner of my eye. Don’t want to look at it straight on, it’ll vanish.”

  She held her palm out like she was luring a cat out from under a sofa. “Come on out little fella, we won’t hurt you.” She moved her hand so that she was cupping my chin, looking me straight in the eye. “Out with it, Yallow. Superpowers are expensive.”

  I snorted. “Fine. Let’s see where this goes. What you can do, what I can do, what any of us can do on our own, that’s ‘human.’ There’s a good wide range in ‘human.’ You got your concert pianists at one end, people like me who can’t play chopsticks at the other end. But even the greatest pianist is less than an orchestra.”

 
“I don’t know if that’s true. I mean, what if the orchestra sucks?”

  I clucked my tongue. “Say the whole orchestra is made up of the greatest musicians you can find. The world’s greatest piano player with the world’s greatest cellist and the world’s greatest triangle player and so on.”

  “Okay, I’ve got you.”

  “So the problem is that if you’re an awesome piano player, all it takes for you to make beautiful music is to sit down at a well-tuned keyboard and play. But if you’re playing with other people, you’ve got to, you know, pick a song, pick a key, pick a tempo. Spend a lot of time listening to the rest of the band and making sure everyone’s playing at the same time. But you do it, because playing six or ten instruments at once, and doing a good job of it, that’s more than one person can do.”

  “It’s superhuman, in other words,” Ange said.

  “Exactly. So cooperating with other people gives you superhuman powers. Literally. But it costs something. Every moment you’re spending checking your tempo or arguing about the piece or picking a key is a moment you’re not spending playing music. That’s the tax.”

  Ange nodded and opened up her tablet and stared at the screen again. “Look at this,” she said, and pointed to the cops’ rigid line. “These guys here, they’re coordinated, and they don’t need to stare at a phone screen the whole time to figure out where to stand or when to move. They just listen to the orders coming through their earpieces and do whatever their leaders tell them. That’s the price of their superpowers: they have to shut up and do what someone else says. That’s not a deal I’d want to take.”