The Secret Life

by Andrew O'Hagan

  While Ronnie was becoming known in those circles, having chats, spending money, discovering what he and others could be and do, I was reaching back to see what more I could find out about the real Ronald Pinn. I stood one afternoon as an entire block of flats was being torn down on the Old Kent Road. I studied old photographs of Avondale Square and read through online chats where people remembered their childhood friends. I went to the former location of men’s clothing shops, now pound shops; someone said the real Ronnie’s family might have run businesses there. Nobody asked me why I was curious about this young man who died thirty years ago, as if it was normal to ask after people, as if that is just one of the things we do with our lives, asking after the dead. The cliché about reporting is that ‘ordinary’ people don’t want to have their lives invaded. But they do. More than anything they want to talk about who lived and who died and what changed. But who owns the narrative of a person’s life? Do you own your own story? Do you own your children’s? Or are these stories just part of what life manifested over the course of time, with no curator, no owner, no keeper who has the rights and holds the key? You have responsibilities and rights before the law, but do you own what you did and who you are, and is privacy a vain wish or an established right? Is there no copyright on one’s experience and only the ability of others to remember or forget? I kept wondering about Ronnie’s mother, whether she was alive somewhere. It seemed reasonable to expect that the story of Ronnie’s real life would be something she felt she owned, or had to protect, and that the story of his second life would not only surprise her but feel like an invasion.

  By the time I walked up the streets to his old schools, peered into the halls where he ate his school dinners and read his old report cards, the Ronnie Pinn who came after him, and used his birth certificate, was present and available to the mass consciousness of the World Wide Web and the dark web in ways that would have made the real Ronnie’s mind boggle thirty years ago. It took three or four clicks to find the fake Ronnie and all his comments and many of the places he’d been. Before leaving my office to see the building where Ronald Pinn died in 1984, when I was sixteen, I looked into the possibility of buying the fake Ronnie a second passport, a Turkish one, and an ‘identity pack’ (a bundle of fake ID cards and utility bills tailored to the buyer’s chosen name and address, as well as their face). It was a busy morning. Using several bits of his fake ID, he got signed up for a gambling website. At his ‘address’ in Islington I found that he now had a tax code and was getting letters from the Inland Revenue. Was it only a matter of time before Ronnie was able to open a bank account, make investments, write his memoirs, and book a seat on a flight he would never arrive for?

  With his fake self and his fake friends, Ronnie became like an ideal government ‘sleeper’, a supposedly real person who could infiltrate political groups and shady markets. He started as a way of testing the net’s propensity to radicalise self-invention, but, by the end, I was controlling an entity with just enough of a basis in reality to reconfigure it. Ronnie Pinn’s only handicap lay in his failure physically to materialise, but, nowadays, that needn’t be a problem: everything he wanted to do, he could try to do, except find a partner, but even that, though tricky, was not impossible. I simply didn’t go there for fear of fooling the innocent and learning nothing. He could chat people up online but when it came to meeting them, well, Ronnie was nothing, wasn’t he? His existence was powerful in the dark and busy world of self-invention, but like Peter Pan, he was a stranger to adulthood, and a grotesque outcrop of the imagination like Mr Hyde; he lived for a season inside the mind of the person writing this story.

  The ‘people’ now moderating the dark web don’t care about the old codes of citizenship and they don’t recognise the laws of society. They don’t believe that governments or currencies or historical narratives are automatically legitimate, or even that the personalities who appear to run the world are who they say they are. The average hacker believes most executives to be functionaries of a machine they can’t understand. To the moderators of Silk Road or Agora, the world is an inchoate mass of desires and deceits, and everything that exists can be bought or sold, including selfhood, because to them freedom means stealing power back from the state, or God, or Apple, or Freud. To them, life is a drama in which power rubs out one’s name; they are anonymous, ghosts in the machine, infiltrating and weakening the structures of the state and partying as they do so, causing havoc, encrypting who they are. When the FBI attacks Silk Road and attempts to shut it down, as it did in November 2014, the resilience it shows is impressive. ‘Our enemies may seize our servers,’ the moderators of Silk Road wrote on their relaunched website, ‘impound our coins, and arrest our friends, but they cannot stop you: our people. You write history with every coin transacted here … History will prove that we are not criminals, we are revolutionaries … Silk Road is not here to scam, we are here to end economic oppression. Silk Road is not here to promote violence, we are here to end the unjust war on drugs … Silk Road is not a marketplace. Silk Road is a global revolt.’

  ‘When you’re in a tsunami you can’t push back the water,’ City of London Police Commissioner Adrian Leppard said recently, when talking about piracy and the failure to hold it back. ‘You have to start thinking very differently about how we protect society … Enforcement will only ever be a limited capability in this space.’

  Ronnie Pinn, the invented one, was a single digit in ‘this space’. He achieved all the legitimacy I could glean for him in the time I had. But always I was drawn back to the ‘real’ Ronnie and what it meant to be out of the world for thirty years and then revived in a different guise. Eventually, I got a message from a woman I’d written to called Kathleen Pinn. In the first instance she said she thought Ronnie’s mother might still be alive, and, when I asked her to elaborate, she wrote again. ‘My family have never met up since my mother’s death in 1979,’ she said. ‘Glenys was living in Bermondsey then, that’s all I can tell you, I do not have her address.’ Eventually I found a number for her in a 1977 telephone directory, but the phone line was dead and the building was gone.

  Eradicating the fake Ronnie was difficult. He had sixty-eight followers on Twitter and I don’t suppose many of them noticed he’d gone; some of them were as fake as he was. But rubbing out a Twitter account leaves a shadow on the net. It used to be that real people could go missing and nobody would really notice, and nothing would be left behind. Life used to be good at that. But nowadays the fake identities are hard to abolish, and something of the fake Ronnie is indelible, his ‘legend’ part of the general ether. He has ‘metadata’, the stuff that governments collect, the chaff of being. And he will go on existing in that universe though he never existed on earth.

  Ronnie’s last tweet was a single word, ‘Goodbye’, on 12 December 2014; then I deleted his account. ‘We will retain your user data for 30 days,’ Twitter told me, but ‘we have no control over content indexed by search engines like Google.’ His unreality was now embedded in the system; it would never have to explain itself. On Facebook, there was a final ‘friend’ request from someone called Peter Lux: I have no idea who Mr Lux is, or why he wanted to friend Ronnie Pinn, or if he is even real or just another figment shoring up his legend. Facebook doesn’t make it easy to deactivate an account: it wants you to stay. ‘Laura will miss you,’ the message said, choosing one of Ronnie’s ‘friends’ at random. And then: ‘Your 23 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you,’ before warning me that ‘messages you sent may still be available on friends’ accounts’. When it let me leave, it demanded that I tick a box saying why I was leaving and I chose one that seemed right: ‘I have a privacy concern.’ Reddit was also sorry to see Ronnie Pinn go, and his conversations about freedom, about guns, about drugs, would never necessarily be wiped and would remain up there like a dead star.

  Ronnie’s online gambling account, which was set up using false documents, couldn’t be closed down. Craigslist promised his ac
count would self-delete after a few months of inactivity. The bitcoin laundering service, a secret service alert to the very last, had no record of Ronnie buying anything and his ‘presence’ disappeared as soon as I deleted his email accounts and ripped up the passwords. ‘We’re sorry to see you leave!’ Gmail said, but the we that was sorry was never identified, and traces of who Ronnie was and what he did through various email accounts are now hidden in servers around the world. My invention had become so present in the official world of things that as well as a tax code he had a national insurance number, though I had never tried to register Ronnie as a taxpayer or as someone drawing a salary. Banks were soliciting his custom, and, though he wasn’t on the electoral roll, it seemed only a matter of time. The flat in Islington had nothing to do with Ronnie and no one who lived in the building had ever heard of him, though it felt strange when I went to the hall for the last time and picked up his letters.

  I’d almost given up when I found Ronnie’s mother. Her name was on a register I had in my possession all along and it seemed to prove she was still alive. There was no phone number and the house was to the north-east of London, almost in Essex. I held on to the details for a few weeks more, putting a card on my desk with the address written on it. Every morning I looked at it and wondered if solid reality wouldn’t yet prove something more. Then, one morning at the end of November while it was still dark outside, I got up and got dressed, put my recorder and a notebook in my bag and walked out into the rain. The Tube was crowded at Bank, everyone keeping themselves to themselves: the Indian lady in sandals and socks; the young man with earphones and jagged hair lost in beats not his own; the lady across from me with the Aztec necklace; the man in the North Face jacket; the schoolchild looking out anxiously for her stop. All the while I was thinking about Mrs Pinn. Would she be out of bed now, making tea and wondering what the day would hold? Would she be pulling back the curtains, coming down the stairs, not knowing that today was the day a stranger would come to speak to her about her son? I thought about her as the train stretched away beyond Central London and the commuters left group by group until, past Barkingside, there was only me. The morning’s newspapers were blowing down the carriage, and it grew light over the fields.

  I walked for a mile or so to find the house. I wasn’t sure it would be the right one, or that the Mrs Pinn I’d find there was the person I was looking for. There was a strong chance she wouldn’t want to speak to me and would hate the whole thing. I knew all that, and the streetlamps blinked off as I walked under a flyover and past a bank of skinny trees. An elderly man stood behind a hedge at the end of Mrs Pinn’s street. The path was neat as I walked up to the house and the garden was simple. There was a dog barking inside and I stood for a moment. An elderly, good-looking woman came to the kitchen window and we each stared for a moment. She was wearing a leopard-pattern dressing gown and holding the dog’s tiny yellow ball. She opened the kitchen window expecting a salesman and was surprised when I said her name. I said I wanted to speak to her about Ronnie and I would explain everything. Her eyes widened and she seemed astonished for a second as she said the word ‘Ronnie’. I noticed she squeezed the yellow ball before nodding and coming to the door. ‘It will be nice to talk to you,’ she said, letting me into the hall. ‘You must be about his age.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Oh, Ronnie,’ she said. ‘There was nobody like him.’

  THE SATOSHI AFFAIR

  The Raid

  Ten men raided a house in Gordon, a north shore suburb of Sydney, at 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday 9 December 2015. Some of the federal agents wore shirts that said ‘Computer Forensics’; one carried a search warrant issued under the Australian Crimes Act 1914. They were looking for a man named Craig Steven Wright, who lived with his wife, Ramona, at 43 St Johns Avenue. The warrant was issued at the behest of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). Wright, a computer scientist and businessman, headed a group of companies associated with cryptocurrency and online security. Wright and his wife were gone but the agents entered the house by force. As one set of agents scoured his kitchen cupboards and emptied out his garage, another entered his main company headquarters at 32 Delhi Road in North Ryde, another suburb of Sydney. They were looking for ‘originals or copies’ of material held on hard drives and computers; they wanted bank statements, mobile phone records, research papers and photographs. The warrant listed dozens of companies whose papers were to be scrutinised, and thirty-two individuals, some with alternative names, or alternative spellings. The name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ appeared sixth from the bottom of the list.

  Some of the Wrights’ neighbours at St Johns Avenue say they were a little distant. She was friendly but he was weird – to one neighbour he was ‘Cold-Shoulder Craig’ – and their landlord wondered why they needed so much extra power: Wright had what appeared to be a whole room full of generators at the back of the property. This fed a rack of computers that he called his ‘toys’, but the real computer, on which he’d spent a lot of money, was nearly nine thousand miles away in Panama. He had already taken the computers away the day before the raid. A reporter had turned up at the house and Wright, alarmed, had phoned Stefan, the man advising them on what he and Ramona were calling ‘the deal’. Stefan immediately moved Wright and his wife into a luxury apartment at the Meriton World Tower in Sydney. They’d soon be moving to England anyway, and all parties agreed it was best to hide out for now.

  At 32 Delhi Road, the palm trees were throwing summer shade onto the concrete walkways – ‘Tailor Made Office Solutions’, it said on a nearby billboard – and people were drinking coffee in Deli 32 on the ground floor. Wright’s office on level five was painted red, and looked down on the Macquarie Park Cemetery, known as a place of calm for the living as much as the dead. No one was sure what to do when the police entered. The staff were gathered in the middle of the room and told by the officers not to go near their computers or use their phones. ‘I tried to intervene,’ one senior staff member, a Dane called Allan Pedersen, remarked later, ‘and said we would have to call our lawyers.’

  Ramona wasn’t keen to tell her family what was happening. The reporters were sniffing at a strange story – a story too complicated for her to explain – so she just told everyone that damp in the Gordon house had forced them to move out. The place they moved into, a tall apartment building, was right in the city and Wright felt as if he was on holiday. On 9 December, after their first night in the new apartment, he woke up to the news that two articles, one on the technology site Gizmodo, the other in the tech magazine Wired, had come out overnight fingering him as the person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who in 2008 published a white paper describing a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ – a technology Satoshi went on to develop as bitcoin. Reading the articles on his laptop, Wright knew his old life was over.

  By this point, cameras and reporters were outside his former home and his office. They had long heard rumours, but the Gizmodo and Wired stories had sent the Australian media into a frenzy. It wasn’t clear why the police and the articles had appeared on the same day. At about five that same afternoon, a receptionist called from the lobby of Wright’s apartment building to say that the police had arrived. Ramona turned to Wright and told him to get the hell out. He looked at a desk in front of the window: there were two large laptop computers on it – they weighed a few kilos each, with sixty-four gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the sixty-third floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the sixty-first floor, where there were office suites and a swimming pool. He stood frozen for a minute before he realised he’d rushed out without his passport.

  Ramona left the apartment shortly after Wright. She went straight down to the basement car park and was relieved to find the police weren’t guarding the exits. She jumped into her car, a hire
vehicle, and, in her panic, crashed into the exit barrier. But she didn’t stop, and was soon on the motorway heading to north Sydney. She just wanted to be somewhere familiar where she would have time to think. She felt vulnerable without her phone, and decided to drive to a friend’s and borrow his. She went to his workplace and took his phone, telling him she couldn’t explain because she didn’t want to get him involved.

  Meanwhile, Wright was still standing beside the swimming pool in his suit, with a laptop in his arms. He heard people coming up the stairs, sped down the corridor and ducked into the gents. A bunch of teenagers were standing around but seemed not to notice him. He went to the furthest cubicle and deliberately kept the door unlocked. (He figured the police would just look for an engaged sign.) He was standing on top of the toilet when he heard the officers come in. They asked the youngsters what they were doing, but they said ‘nothing’ and the police left. Wright stayed in the cubicle for a few minutes, then went out and used his apartment keycard to hide in the service stairwell. Eventually, a call came from Ramona on her friend’s phone. She was slightly horrified to discover he was still in the building and told him again to get out. He, too, had a rental car, and had the key in his pocket. He went down sixty flights of stairs to the car park in the basement, unlocked his car and opened the boot, where he lifted out the spare wheel and put his laptop in the wheel cavity. He drove towards the Harbour Bridge and got lost in the traffic.