by Bell, D. R.
Los Angeles, USA
Jeff Kron’s campaign headquarters were located in a former “shared office space” in Culver City. These spaces have sprouted like weeds during the second Internet boom in the middle of the previous decade. Increased telecommuting and the 2019 financial crisis killed many of them. Robert Marosyan, Jeff’s campaign manager, liked the space for its openness and extensive computer cabling. And because it was only a few blocks from Jeff and Jennifer’s house where Marosyan often stayed. Jeff didn’t like it, but then he thought that his house was a perfect place to run a presidential campaign from and renting this warehouse-type facility was a massive waste of funds that the Reform Party didn’t have. Marosyan begged and pleaded for weeks until Jeff relented.
Jeff scowled at his own posters as he and Jennifer walked into the huge open space:
“They made me look like some kind of tenth century saint! In this day and age, who needs posters anyway?”
“Don’t worry, nobody will mistake you for a saint,” smirked Marosyan, a thin, nervous man with an unruly mop of jet-black hair. “And yes, with all the social media and virtual townhalls we still need old-fashioned posters.”
Jennifer stood in front of the offending object and thoughtfully drummed slim fingers against her lips:
“I agree with Jeff. This background, this faraway look on Jeff’s face...”
Marosyan started biting his fingernails:
“These have been approved already and printed and distributed and...”
“All right, all right, Robert, I am just teasing you,” Jennifer hugged Marosyan and kissed him on the ear. “You know that Jeff does not like any of his pictures. He does not like attracting attention.”
“Yes, he is the only political candidate I’ve ever met that doesn’t like attention,” nodded Robert sorrowfully. “Some days I wonder why I am bothering to run his campaign.”
“Because you believe in him?” smiled Jennifer.
“I do,” agreed Marosyan and pointed at the back of Jeff Kron, who was out of the earshot shaking hands with his campaign workers. “I hope he believes in himself as much as I believe in him.”
A blond man in his 20s waited for them in a conference room. Upon seeing Jeff and Jennifer, he stood up, knocking down his cup of coffee in the process:
“O-o-ops!”
“David, don’t worry about it. It’s so good to see you!” laughed Jennifer, hugged the man – who turned out to be skinny and tall – and helped him clean up the mess on the table.
She then turned to Marosyan:
“Robert, please meet our dear and somewhat awkward friend, David Weinstein.”
“Nice to meet you, Robert,” David extended his hand. He had a slight but noticeable accent.
“Nice to meet you. Where are you from?”
David looked at Jennifer questioningly.
“It’s a bit of a story,” she told Robert. “You see, David is a son of my father’s college friend in Moscow. David’s father is an American and David moved here after finishing high school. He recently finished his PhD in political economics and, instead of chasing big bucks on Wall Street, volunteered to join Jeff’s campaign.”
“Jennifer is omitting a few important details,” smiled David. “Firstly, it was Jennifer’s father Pavel that enabled me to come here. He left my mother a substantial sum of money when he died in 2006. My natural father never helped me financially. When I came to the U.S. nine years ago – too late, I am afraid, to lose my accent – I sought out Jennifer to thank her. Jeff and Jennifer practically adopted me, helped me with college, I slept on their couch for months. And I did not volunteer – I begged them to let me work on Jeff’s campaign.”
“Well, Dr. Weinstein, welcome to the team!” smiled Marosyan. “Happy to have someone with your credentials.”
He turned to Jeff:
“Speaking of credentials, where is your VP Dr. Moonson?”
“He couldn’t make it, not feeling well.”
“I wish we could have designated Jennifer as a VP, she has a great name recognition,” Marosyan shook his head.
“Why couldn’t you?” wondered David.
“Electoral college laws. Electors can’t vote for two people from their state. We didn’t want to risk losing California,” explained Robert. “So we ended up with Dr. Moonson, who doesn’t help the ticket much.”
“That’s OK, Robert,” Jennifer waved her hand in a don’t worry gesture, “people vote for the president, not the VP. Anyway, there is a reason David is here. I asked him to talk to us about the emerging socio-economic landscape of the country so we can fine-tune our economic message.”
“Well, I guess that would be useful,” allowed Marosyan not too happily. “But I wish you talk some sense into your husband about running this campaign to win. I mean, we have the polling data we should be using to fine-tune our messaging, we have the backers that are willing to throw money at us...”
“Robert, don’t start this again!” Jeff shook his head. “I want to win but I want to win the right way. I will take no money from special interests; I want to rid the country of their influence. I will not change my message based on polling. There are millions of people that believed what I wrote and what I said, they follow me because of that. We will build our coalition around them, not by betraying their trust!”
“Ahhh, who said anything about betraying anyone!” screamed Marosyan in frustration. “I am talking about doing some professional campaigning, the kind you hired me for!”
“See, David, that’s the zoo you signed up for,” Jennifer put her arm around David. “It’s not too late to walk away and grab that high-paying job on Wall Street.”
“Oh no, not in a million years!” exclaimed David.
“So, do you have some ideas for us?” asked Jeff.
“Oh yes,” David’s eyes lit up. “I wrote down a few suggestions.” He grabbed a slightly coffee-sogged folder on the table in front of him. “The society has become...”
“It’s all well and good, but the timing sucks. We have an electronic townhall in twenty minutes,” said Marosyan.
David sat down, visibly deflated.
“It’s my fault, bad scheduling,” apologized Jennifer. “David, Robert, why don’t you come over for dinner tomorrow night and we’ll give David the floor. Are you both available?”
David and Robert nodded.
“Great, we have a plan. Now, let’s go to the studio,” Kron got up. “David, welcome to the team.”
Los Angeles, USA
“We found Jim Brobak,” announced Alejandro. “He is now in Farmington, New Mexico.”
“How can I contact him?” jumped David.
“With caution,” replied Alejandro. He nodded at the phone in the middle of the table between them. “If he is willing to talk to you, this phone should ring fairly soon.”
“Why?”
“This phone is ‘encryption paired’ to another phone that has been delivered to Jim Brobak a few minutes ago. They are hard-wired to the same encryption key. A very long encryption key that would take years to break via brute force. You can’t extract the key without destroying the phone. The phones are delivered physically; no keys get exchanged over the internet. The encrypted conversation goes over the internet using TOR-3A, the latest version of the secure router, making it very difficult to determine the location of the caller or the recipient.”
“How did you come up with all this?” Oleg’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“It was partly TV that gave me this idea,” Alejandro turned the TV on, a projection appeared on the wall and a seductive if slightly robotic female voice started praising wonderful deals in the neighborhood while images of stores and restaurants in the vicinity were flashing on the screen.
“This is an older model,” explained Alejandro. “The new, immersive ones have image and voice recognition built in so they will tailor the programming and advertising to whoever is in the room. A couple of years ago it totally spooked me when
I went to visit a friend and the damn TV started addressing me by name and offering me a special at a gym club. They even added that the gym had two hundred seventy four unattached blonde female members between ages of 18 and 25.”
“So they knew you like them young and blonde?” laughed Maggie.
“I do prefer blondes,” Alejandro lowered his head in her direction and Maggie blushed, “but it was the fact that they tracked exactly where I was and what I like. And that’s where I got my business idea. That, and the identity change that Javier did for you two years ago. This data is all supposed to be private, but do you really trust it to be? There was a well-publicized disclosure where the law enforcement gained real-time access to this supposedly marketing data to ‘track terrorists and enforce the law’.”
TV advertising stopped and was replaced with images of AeroCars racing furiously above and between buildings, engines roaring. “Fast and Furious 17,” said the caption.
“So what was your business idea?”
“I am oversimplifying, but let’s say we provide privacy and ‘identity protection’ services. Help people ‘drop out.’”
“Drop out?”
“Yeah, it’s the term we use. Although ‘opt out’ might be more appropriate. You see, some people just don’t want their appliances spying on them, that’s more of an ‘opt out’ thing. Others try to ‘get off the grid’ completely, to minimize their data footprint. We help.”
“How?”
“Take me, for example. I made sure there are no image and voice recognition devices in any of my places. I do a daily electronic sweep for suspicious gadgets. I use wearable devices only when I am sure they are not transmitting my location data out. License plates on all my cars are shielded to give video cameras distorted readings. My glasses, hats, shirts all have miniature devices that detect the presence of camera sensors and direct a pulsing light back at them, distorting any imagery. And I carry an electronic voice changer with me for other eventualities. I surf the internet anonymously, using browsers with TOR-3A built-in. All my voice and e-mail communication is encrypted using long-length codes that change daily. My kitchen robot Cumba has been modified to not store or send any household information out.”
“Even your robot?”
“Yes, absolutely. We let robots into our homes, they work for us, and we think they are ours. But they have their ‘eyes,’ they have their ‘ears,’ and people who built them can see what they see, can hear what they hear. And if their makers have the information, it means the government also has access. I allow diagnostic data to go back, but nothing else.”
“Isn’t this a lot of daily work?” wondered Maggie.
“Not really, once we set people up with secure apps, much of this happens automatically. The trick is that we do it for them once and then we are on call, to help as needed. When people download or search for privacy apps or devices themselves, the government knows about it and potentially starts tracking them. We do the setup off-net. And people themselves are now getting smarter about avoiding devices that spy on them. A year ago, the Feds tried to convict someone using data captured from a backdoor in his phone. In three days, that phone manufacturer’s sales collapsed.”
“And how many people do this?”
“A minority, perhaps one in ten. You see, it’s convenient to remain ‘in the system’ – you don’t even have to carry identifications or credit cards any longer, just allow your iris to be scanned and you can buy things, the money will be automatically deducted from your account. But our business is growing fast: people usually start with ‘opting out’ from being recognized by their devices because of annoying advertising and then decide they don’t want to have their lives recorded.”
“If it’s so convenient, why opt out?”
“People are starting to value their privacy over convenience. We are humans, we all have something to hide, and we want some parts of our lives to be ours. Besides, with all the rules and regulations each and every one of us has violated something at some point in time. They hear stories about others being questioned for things they did in private. Collect enough data and everyone is guilty. They don’t want to live in fear. For those that decide to drop out completely, there is a whole decentralized economy that evolved in parallel to the official one. It does not have as many conveniences, but it’s outside of the government’s eye.”
The phone on the table began to vibrate, stopping the conversation in its tracks.
Farmington, USA
Jim Brobak didn’t really care for his days off. Not in this empty rental house. Not since Janet left and took the kids. Ran back to her rich daddy in Dallas. She hated the move to New Mexico. She didn’t want to be the wife of a resident special agent in a sleepy little town. She mocked it as a place of ‘UFO obsessed baseball fans.’ As if he had a choice. As if he asked to be demoted and sent here. The divorce papers were lying on the sofa, right where he threw them two weeks ago when they arrived. Janet has left three messages by now.
It was only 11 a.m., but he was already nursing a glass of bourbon in the dusty backyard, looking at gravel, withered grass, and cactuses. He didn’t expect anyone, so sounds of people talking startled Jim. He walked over to the front yard and came face-to-face with a gardening crew.
“Hey, I didn’t ask for gardeners! And if that vulture landlady wants to send anyone, she has to call me first!”
“No problem, señor, no problem, we go,” agreed the older gardener, a short man with a withered face darkened by the New Mexico sun. “We go. This – for you,” he pushed a brown manila envelope into Brobak’s hands.
“What? What is this? Why are you giving this to me?” uttered a surprised Jim, but the crew quickly piled into a beat-up truck and left.
Jim shook his head and looked at the front of the envelope. It was indeed addressed to him. Probably another one of Janet’s tricks. He went back into the backyard, threw the envelope on the table and resumed his bourbon.
Something didn’t feel right. The landlady was stingy as hell, wouldn’t even replace a burned-out light bulb. And if she did send the gardening crew, why did they leave so quickly – was he that scary? Jim looked at the envelope and his eyes narrowed: it had no return address and no stamp. What the hell?
Brobak pushed aside the glass with bourbon, studied the envelope for a couple of minutes, carefully picked it up and looked at the other side. Just a regular manila envelope. Something was inside, an object the size of a phone. He listened; there was no ticking or other suspicious sounds.
Jim went to the kitchen, brought scissors and at an arm’s length delicately opened the package. No powder. He gingerly shook the envelope and an object slid out. It was indeed a phone with a small yellow sticker. The sticker read: “From friends of John Platt.”
John Platt. His late long-time friend. The man who got involved in investigating the Schulmann affair and asked Jim to help. The man whose plane crashed only a few days after that. The man who changed Jim’s life, because it was helping Platt that got him demoted and transferred out of Dallas. Nobody said it outright, but Jim knew it. Which set in motion another chain of events, culminating in the divorce papers on the sofa.
Jim had the urge to throw the phone over the backyard fence, into the empty field outside. Let rattlesnakes and scorpions use it. He picked up the phone, then stopped. John didn’t do this to him. John tried to investigate a friend’s death and got killed. Because Jim didn’t for a second believe that the plane crash a few days later was a coincidence. And who were those “friends” that sent Jim the phone? When the Schulmann file story broke, Jim figured that John’s “associates” must have been David Ferguson and Maggie Sappin. Officially, fugitives on the run wanted for questioning. Unofficially, to a great many, heroes that stood up to powerful people that considered themselves to be above the law. Were they the “friends” trying now to contact Jim?
Jim studied the phone. It was a no-name brand. There would be only one reason to send him the phone rather tha
n a number to call: security. No online key distribution. Probably built-in strong encryption. Working for the FBI, he was familiar with such devices. One of the costliest but also highly protected ways to communicate remotely. They tried to crack down on such devices, but it was next to impossible. And now he was going to use one himself?
Jim turned the phone on. It powered up. There were no messages of any kind. He opened the address book; it had one name “JohnP” and a number with a Newfoundland area code. It did not matter what the area code was, must be a gateway that would securely route packetized calls, bounce them across multiple servers in different areas, and re-assemble packets at the destination without allowing anyone to trace it. Jim gulped down the rest of the bourbon and pressed the number.
A man’s voice answered:
“Jim?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
The call must have been bounced between many servers because even with fiber-optic connections the delay was noticeably annoying.
“This is David Ferguson.”
As I expected, thought Jim, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach.
“What do you want?”
“I need your help. I am sure you’ve heard of me. Two years ago, you helped John Platt evade the police. I was with him.”
“Go on.”