Intentional Consequences

by Charles Harris

  This is the essence of our problem: The internet and the social media culture it enabled make us more susceptible to fallacious arguments and allegations that are far cheaper and easier to target and deploy over social media. Start with something that fuels our desires or fears, add in a celebrity endorsement or some spicy cultural misconduct, mix well with traditional media coverage or social media targeting, and you have immediate and trending political impact. It’s hot, it’s sexy and it fills our short attention span. We don’t have time or interest to check it out, but we’ll tweet about it and forward it on to our friends. Far too often, our friends will do the same.

  Let’s move on to the declining trust in our socio-political institutions. In America as in most established democracies, we have various institutions and leaders that help us understand and assess what we need to know when we exercise our right to vote. Examples include our religious and political institutions and leaders, our unions, the writers and commentators we respect, the traditional media, celebrities and sports stars, business leaders and so on. These guideposts provide perspective, and help buffer our individual and tribal passions, so we exercise our power to vote in a socially responsible way that builds and preserves our nation. (If you’re an activist, these are the institutions and people you criticize as entrenching the status quo.)

  Today, surveys show Americans are losing faith in most of these institutions and elites. (Ironically, sports stars and celebrities seem to be holding up, at least with the people who follow them.) This loss of trust is happening at the same time the internet is making us more interested in easy answers. We are more willing to form a quick emotional opinion based on potentially misleading information on the internet than to spend the time and effort to form a well-reasoned assessment. We’re doing this at the same time we are becoming less willing to trust the institutions and elites we’ve historically used to help guide us as we exercise our democratic right to vote. It’s a bad combination.

  You can see the impact of this convergence throughout our current political environment. We are more susceptible to radical political ideas than we have been since the 1930’s. Socialism. Packing the Supreme Court. Killing the filibuster. Adopting new economics that ignore Federal deficits and the costs of new social programs. Embracing leaders who have no Federal or even government experience. Calling out white men as unacceptable representatives of a diverse America. Considering a 37-year old and a 77-year old as presidential nominees. The list goes on, and it will become even more perverse as we approach November 2020.

  To some, all this is a good thing. In the words of Silicon Valley, it disrupts our democracy, opening it up to new people and new ideas. It lessens the inertia our established institutions and elites impose on the rate and intensity of change. It gives candidates more access to the people who can elect them, counterbalancing the influence of wealthy contributors and PACs. If you are a progressive pressing for radical change now, it helps your cause and your dream of direct democracy driven by people on both coasts who support your ideals. If you are a political outsider, it gives you a chance to be discovered and to build a following to finance your campaign. If you are a typical elite or a policy wonk, on the right or on the left, it puts you at risk of being left out or pushed out of the conversation. If you are a white male Democrat, well, that’s its own problem, at least in the primaries. If you’re also over 50 or served in a prior administration, that’s even worse.

  My concern is what these trends are doing to rational decision-making in our democracy. A well-informed electorate is indispensable to a strong democracy. This is why freedom of speech is such an essential freedom.

  If we are more susceptible to choosing candidates based on emotion, we will see less need to question the facts that surround decisions about policy and substance. We’ll be more willing to defer those matters to the leaders and groups we ‘like’. We will also be more susceptible to propaganda, whether it appears as fake news or misleading hyperbole. In addition, we will be more easily enflamed against some perceived political enemy or identity group. We will also be more readily attracted to political incentives and benefits that appeal to our base needs or desires (think free college tuition, forgiveness of college loans and Medicare for all, for example).

  All this will make us more willing to accept, and even demand, extreme change in our political institutions and their leaders. At the same time, it will leave us less able to understand, assess and debate the changes that should be made. This will play well for candidates who either lack policy understanding and experience or who prefer to keep their political views undercover while running for election. Candidates who have policies and experience will lose voters either through boredom or having their positions chopped into negative sound bites. Either way, we’ll elect our leaders based on their personalities, their looks, their tribal identities, their broad aspirational visions, their impractical promises and their social media expertise. If you have doubts, just watch the upcoming primaries for the 2020 presidential election.

  Trading a well-informed electorate for one agitated by emotional posts and tweets raises opportunities for the candidates who are prepared to take advantage of this new political reality. Because this shift is something we have never seen before, and it’s occurring at a time when political passions are already high, it also opens the stage to replace democracy with autocracy, whether on the right or on the left.

  For some people, such a result would be untenable. For others, it would be just what they’ve been working so hard to achieve.

  Of the thousands of people who read Valerie’s Op/Ed that day, at least two had particular interest.

  One person was Andy Baker. When he was a student at UT-A, Baker had taken several classes from Professor Williams, including his departmental honors seminar. Sitting in his cube at the Sentinel Observer, Baker read through the Op/Ed, then saved it as a PDF in the China folder for his Bernbach project. He added an entry to his To Do List to call Professor Williams. When he was done, he logged into his Amazon account and ordered her book, Saving American Democracy.

  The other person with interest was David Bernbach, who had automatically received a link to the Op/Ed from an online flag he had placed on Valerie’s name. After reading the piece, he sent a secure text to Fred Billings that read: “Bluebonnet at it again. See link, then call me.”

  A few minutes later, Bernbach received the call from Billings. Bernbach said, “I don’t know where Bluebonnet finds the ideas for what she writes, but we need more passion and emotion out there, not less. She’s way too credible. We need to go after her objectivity.”

  Billings said, “Understand. I’ll call Franks. He’s been working on this already. It’s good to have him on board.”

  Chapter 24

  More than a month after it happened, Eva was still shaken by the drone incident and the home invasion. The drone was bad enough, but the home invasion was deeply personal to Eva. As much as she wanted to look to Dan for help, Eva felt he was more annoyed than shaken. To Eva, Dan was only concerned about the potential loss of JPAC’s data. He was oblivious to any psychological impact the two events might have had on her or her friends, not to mention Daneva Tech.

  With Dan’s narrow focus, Eva drove the changes to the physical security of their property. Within a few days after the incident, they had upgraded their security cameras and alarm system, adding more high res cameras and hidden silent alarm buttons across the house. Eva had started carrying an emergency button in her pocket when she was home alone. Dan had reluctantly put one on his keychain. They had added and upgraded smart phone apps to provide easier access to cameras and better remote controls for lights, locks and garage doors. They had installed a black chain link fence across the waterfront side of the property, with sophisticated people sensors along the fence line. They had also hired a builder to retrofit Eva’s master bedroom closet and the storage room in her studio to short-term safe rooms, which were finally nearing completion. They had even
installed dash cams in their three vehicles.

  All these steps except the people sensors made Eva feel better. Although they had used a military-grade system with AI, the people sensors initially produced sporadic false alerts that terrified her. The alerts chimed on their mobile phones and on boxes in the kitchen and the master bedroom. They also triggered outdoor lights and security cameras, which fed video to their phones and flat screens. As the AI got better at understanding what a coyote looked like, Dan and Eva became more patient at checking the cameras or waiting for a second alert. Within three weeks, the system was working as expected.

  Eva was determined not to let the home invasion alter her lifestyle. She loved everything about where she lived: Her house, her studio, her gardens and the freedom she enjoyed. Although they might never be the same, she also loved her happy Mondays and the carefree spirit they represented. She was not going to move off the lake or change how she dressed or buy curtains for the windows in their bathroom. After all, this guy wanted information, not her. Yet, she worried about how she would handle what happened. She worried about how she’d feel when Dan was out of town or she was working in her studio at night or even when she was just taking a shower overlooking their garden terrace. She loved wearing whatever she wanted with their close friends at their crazy parties, but she did not love pulling off her orange top off to keep from being shot in her own yard.

  She was still embarrassed to talk about her feelings with anybody, even Dan. Yet she knew she had to work her way through it. Some days, she did well, almost feeling back to normal. Other days, she overcompensated, leaving herself emotionally as well as physically exposed. On still other days, she concealed herself and her spirit, afraid to live as she had before.

  Eva had gone to weekly counseling sessions for a month to help her deal with her reaction to the home invasion. The counseling helped, but she didn’t need a counselor to tell her the incident had shaken her self-confidence. Since she was a little girl, she had been mentally strong and independent. She could be soft and attractive on the outside, but she was tough on the inside, and proud of it. People around her, friend or foe, quickly learned she did not intimidate easily. She was not about to let that change.

  Within a couple of weeks, she had traded some of her usual workout sessions for Jeet Kune Do, or what Bruce Lee called “the art of fighting without fighting” in Enter the Dragon. She had Dan join her for private training on personal security, including a high threat security driving course that had been eye-opening as well as fun. Despite her aversion to owning a gun, with encouragement from George and Mary Ball she and Dan had taken the courses required for Texas concealed carry permits. Eva had taken additional defensive shooting lessons at a local gun range from a friend of George’s, where she’d learned to aim and shoot rapidly, both from a fixed position and on the run. In the process, she had proven she was one hell of a shot with a pistol or a rifle. With two hands on the weapon and a solid stance, she was deadly. With advice from George, Eva had bought weapons and gun cases to secure them: Two Glock 22 pistols for home and one for each car, a Colt M4 Carbine rifle and a Remington 870 Express Tactical shotgun with 6+1 capacity, along with plenty of ammunition and extra magazines for the pistols and rifle.

  Whenever Eva was annoyed or down, she went to the range to practice or take a refresher lesson, sometimes with Dan, but more often without. The sessions drained her frustrations and refueled her confidence.

  Although the remediation of the cyber intrusions had commenced immediately, the data breach forensics had gone on for weeks. The cyber consultants had been unable to determine who sent the drone or used Eva’s access credentials to breach their home network or the Daneva Tech network, but they strongly suspected hackers under the control of the Chinese government.

  They had found it easier to track how the account access had unfolded on the day of the home invasion. Whoever was working with the invader at Eva’s house had been able to log into Eva’s online password vault, using the access credentials Eva gave them and the two-factor authentication on her iPhone. That gave them access to every password and security question Eva had stored in the vault. Fortunately, most of the firewall, router and financial accounts required two-factor authentication. Unfortunately, the second factor was readily available to them through Eva’s iPhone.

  The home invaders had successfully logged into the network devices and the Johnson’s personal financial accounts, using Eva’s iPhone for two-factor authentication when needed. No money was transferred, which added weight to the theory the hackers were state-sponsored. They had also logged into Eva’s Gmail and Exchange Online accounts, where they had presumably searched and copied her personal and business emails and contacts. In addition, through the home network they had logged into Eva’s laptop, which gave them access to all her files other than those with file-level encryption.

  The forensics experts had found no evidence the hackers had gained access to JPAC’s company network. Notwithstanding Dan’s initial fears, JPAC’s data security infrastructure had held, largely because the home invasion had not exposed any logon information for his company systems and no one on his team had fallen for any of the numerous spearphishing efforts launched against them as the attacks unfolded.

  The FBI had not shared whatever conclusions it had reached about the drone or the data breaches. No one had come looking for the drone before or after Dan turned it over to the agency. No videos from their pool party and no financial information had shown up online or anywhere else. Officially, however, both the drone incident and the home invasion were still under a Federal investigation now classified as Secret. Neither the FBI nor Dan’s IT team knew anything about the VADS software trojan the hackers had downloaded from Daneva’s company network.

  Chapter 25

  The due diligence on the CnEyeco system had moved swiftly and positively. The license negotiations had been a non-event, just as Bernbach had promised. Three weeks to the day after Ward flew back to San Francisco from Shanghai, PaprW8 had signed a licensing deal for exclusive rights in the U.S. and Canada and an option for non-exclusive rights worldwide. The financial terms were favorable, with a small upfront payment and volume-based licensing fees based on system use. Bernbach had been a key player in the negotiations, relaying back channel positions with Chen.

  The toughest business point had also been the hardest technical discussion: How to assure access to the PII needed to power the CnEyeco software. Although the lawyers would describe it differently in the contract, PaprW8 essentially agreed to share its database with CnEyeco for use in China and CnEyeco agreed to share its US and Canadian database with PaprW8 for use in those countries. In each case, the database could only be used with the CnEyeco application.

  The lawyers had added appropriate protections to document the parties respect for legally mandated protections on PII, including the transfer of PII across international borders. What the lawyers did not appreciate was the clever way these protections had been implemented under Ward’s direction, which made the protections far more effective in the documents than in the encrypted protocols used to access the shared data.

  Hastings had been torn over how to deal with the PII. He initially balked at the idea of fudging the data privacy rules. Ward had been clear from the beginning the PII was essential to optimizing the value of the system. “Either do the deal and find a creative way to share the PII, or don’t do the deal,” she had said. To get Hastings off his morality horse, she had reached out to Bernbach, who had pressed Hastings to back off and leave the technical solution to Ward. Hastings reluctantly agreed.

  Bernbach was more concerned about whether CnEyeco had enough PII on U.S. and Canadian users to matter, and if they did, whether the Chinese government would allow PaprW8 to access that data. Ward had reached out to Zhang for confirmation on both points, which came back in 24 hours.

  The best part of the deal was the implementation. Working together, the engineers from the two companies had designed a
hybrid cloud-based “software as a service” structure. This SaaS architecture allowed PaprW8 to run encrypted online queries against CnEyeco’s servers and data almost from the first day. Besides accelerating the “go live” date, this structure optimized access to personal data from multiple public and private data sources. In the process, it also obfuscated international data flows that might otherwise have triggered data privacy concerns.

  At the last minute, Chen had called Bernbach and offered some AI-based image editing software at no extra charge. He said, “This code can be used to create digital edits that are hard to detect. The CnEyeco engineers think this software could also be made to detect alterations to photos and videos. They would like to work with PaprW8 on this to help identify fake news.” Bernbach threw the issue to Ward and Hastings, who agreed. The resulting royalty-free license gave each of their companies ownership of the code and any enhancements.

  Chapter 26

  Valerie’s department chair called her in for a meeting. When she arrived at his office, he closed the door. “Thanks for coming on such little notice. I’m glad we could get together. Please, sit down,” he said, motioning to the chair in front of his desk.

  Albert Ammerman had been Chair of the Government Department for five years. They had co-authored a couple of papers together. In his early sixties and comfortably overweight, he had bushy grey hair and a ruddy complexion. He was universally adored by his students and the professors who worked with him.