Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  I looked out at the crowd. They looked back. It wasn’t all strangers. There were familiar faces there—people I knew from Noisebridge, a couple girls I’d seen around the Mission, some people I knew from high school. I even spotted John Gilmore, the EFF guy, wearing a tie-dyed shirt and flat cap, smiling impishly within his long beard, light glinting off his round glasses.

  “Wow,” I said, before I could stop myself. The crowd around me said, “Wow,” People’s Mic style, and there was laughter all round. Ah yes, the old “repeating stuff that wasn’t meant to be said” gag. Har.

  And now I had no choice: I was about to give a public lecture to a couple thousand people on my top-secret leaks site. Way to keep your cover, Marcus.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, I helped invent a network called Xnet, because we ran it on top of hacked Xbox Universals, a games console that Microsoft gave away for free one Christmas so that they could sell more software. Naturally, there’d been a lot of interest in figuring out how to get other games to play on the Xbox, so someone went out and hacked it to accept a new OS: GNU/Linux, the free operating system made out of free and open code that anyone could improve and republish. There are a zillion flavors of Linux, and one of them, ParanoidLinux, was the desktop equivalent of ParanoidAndroid: an OS that assumed you were being spied on and did everything it could to keep you private.

  Jolu and I tweaked ParanoidLinux so that it was ready to crack other peoples’ WiFi out of the box, and then share it around, so if one Xbox was within range of a cracked WiFi link, all the Xboxes in range of it could share its connection. We used ParanoidLinux’s built-in Tor stuff to create our own secret servers, chat, and games, routing some of the trickier stuff through Pigspleen, Trudy Doo’s old ISP.

  By the time I got picked up by the DHS, Xnet was already showing its age. The ParanoidLinux project was always being patched as new security issues were found and clobbered, and keeping the Xnet version up to date was a lot of work for us. We handed over control of the project to a volunteer committee who ran it for a few more months before they folded it back in with ParanoidLinux, which was, by this time, a boot-disk that set up Tor, secure versions of Firefox and a chat program called Pidgin, and other security tools right out of the box, so you just stuck it into any computer and rebooted it and you were locked down tight and secure, assuming you could manage all the complexity of your keys, and understood how darknet sites worked, and, well, a lot of other stuff that most of the world didn’t get. Yet.

  So the darknet was just the latest version of the Xnet—in the same way that humans were just the latest version of chimps. I could use it, sure, but could I even explain it anymore? I was about to find out.

  * * *

  “Darknet sites run on Tor.

  “That’s The Onion Router.

  “It’s a tool that bounces your traffic around the net.

  “Making it harder to trace and censor you.

  “A darknet site is a normal website.

  “Except that your computer never knows its address.

  “And it doesn’t know your computer’s address.

  “There’s a darknet site.

  “It has over 800,000 leaked memos on it.

  “No one knows who put them there.

  “No one knows what’s in them.

  “But a few thousand have been cataloged.

  “And they’re scary as hell.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “You probably saw a lot of comments.

  “About how it’s all BS.

  “A hoax.

  “Nothing there.

  “Well, if you check the darknet.

  “You’ll find a ton of memos about something called Hearts and Minds.” I managed not to pronounce it “heerts.”

  “That’s a product developed by Zyz.

  “To help them spam discussion forums.

  “With fake people.

  “And now there are a whole crapton of people.

  “You’ve never heard of.

  “Flooding message boards.

  “Saying that the memos that show that Zyz is really evil.

  “Are all BS.

  “I think that’s pretty suspicious.”

  Finger-wagging applause. That made me feel a little better about the fact that I was on the verge of outing myself as the darknet docs guy.

  “The easiest way to get to the darknet.

  “Is to install a free browser plugin called Torbutton.

  “Then visit est5g5fuenqhqinx.onion.

  “I know that’s a long number to remember.

  “I’ll say it again.”

  A voice from the crowd—one of the Anonymous guys, muffled by his mask—said, “I have a bunch of flyers explaining all this with the address on it.”

  I waved at him. He waved back, all jaunty body language to match the wide, sardonic grin on his mask. “That guy has the address on flyers.” He executed a showy bow over one leg.

  “I hope you’ll go and see the darknet docs yourself.

  “And make up your own mind.

  “Well, thanks, I guess,” I finished, and hopped down off the base, my pulse going whoosh-whoosh in my ears. The crowd was clapping politely, which was more than I had any right to expect. It wasn’t as if I’d riled them up, given them marching orders, and sent them to fight the powers of evil. I’d given them tech support. There’d been a million cameras on me, of course, and some of them would have been streaming live to the net, and the rest would be grabbing footage to upload to YouTube and whatnot later on. And then there were three clean-cut guys in blue SFPD windcheaters with little camcorders who circulated endlessly through the crowd, making sure to get long shots of every face, especially anyone standing on a piece of street furniture and yelling out instructions, like me. I swallowed. Well, they knew who I was already, right? I’d been gassed and busted by them before. As the old saying went, it was the equivalent of a formal introduction.

  The Anon guy with the flyers came over and handed me one, then shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said.

  “You, too.” He was about my age, as far as I could tell from his eyes and the way he held himself. I looked at the little quarter-sheet of paper in my hand, hastily sliced into an off-kilter rectangle. It had all the basic info: an address for downloading a ParanoidLinux disk image that would boot any computer, the darknet docs address, some URLs for tutorials. It was liberally decorated with Guy Fawkes masks and funny slogans, and it had a fingerprint you could use to verify that your ParanoidLinux disk image hadn’t been interfered with during the download. For a second, I thought that the numeric address they’d listed was wrong, and I spun off on a paranoid fantasy that these guys were part of some kind of disinformation campaign and maybe the ParanoidLinux fingerprint was no good, maybe it went to a poisoned version that spied on everything you did? Then I realized I’d been reading the address wrong and decided I needed to calm the hell down. “This is good,” I said. “Thanks for doing it.”

  The Anon cocked his mask at me. “No problem—it was the least I could do. Seemed like it needed doing. I jumped on the darknet docs as soon as I heard about ’em, saw that BS this morning about Hearts and Minds, figured people needed to know the truth, so I wrote it down and made some copies. That seems like the best way to do stuff these days: make a lot of copies.”

  He said it with such hilarity I had to laugh. “Works for the bacteria,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You think we could get some biotech freak to encode it all in a bacteria? Leave it in a petri dish overnight, make a trillion copies?”

  “Viral marketing,” I said.

  Liam said, “Bacterial marketing.”

  Anon guy laughed some more behind his mask. I wondered if it itched. “This is my friend Liam,” I said. “He brought me here today.” They shook, and the Anon guy fingered Liam’s bandanna with admiration. Liam slipped it on and I could see he was grinning behind it.

  “Dude,” Anon guy said.r />
  “I know, right?” Liam said.

  Trudy Doo flung an arm around my shoulders from behind. “You look like you’re doing good, Marcus,” she said.

  “I haven’t slept properly in weeks, I broke my nose last week, and I’m kind of a nervous wreck, but that’s nice of you to say,” I said.

  “Just like I said. Looks like you’re keeping really busy, which means you’re doing good. Better than being a tube-fed zombie waiting for the grave.” She shook my shoulders.

  “How are you doing?” It seemed like a rude thing to say to someone who’d just lost her company, but I didn’t know what else to say, plus I was kind of basking in the envious looks I was getting from Liam and didn’t want Trudy Doo to go away before I’d finished showing off how cool I was.

  She shrugged. “Pissed off,” she said. “Pissed off is good. I’d rather be pissed off than resigned and peaceful. All the stuff that’s gone down, all the money the super-duper richie-richies took out of the economy, all the shenanigans from the big phone companies that nuked Pigspleen … Every bit of it’s made me ready to fight and fight some more.”

  The Anons clustered around her as she spoke, clearly enjoying her rant. I wished I could talk like that.

  I had another paranoid moment: maybe Anon guy was the person who’d been spying on me through my computer. Maybe he and his buddies were the ones who’d staged that ghostly argument in my word-processing window the other night. For some reason, I’d pictured them living thousands of miles away, in a small town where there was a lot of spare time. But maybe they were practically my neighbors. Hell, maybe I hadn’t flushed them out of my computer after all and they’d been watching me all along, had rushed down here when they saw Liam come and drag me off to the demonstration.

  I couldn’t go on like this. I was going to have to get my head straight. If I could only get a decent night’s sleep, I could sort it all out. I’d felt that way for years, I realized. If I could only get a normal day, a day when my parents weren’t freaking out about money and jobs, a day when I was just a regular student or a regular coder, or something else regular—

  Was there ever going to be a “normal” again? Since we’d arrived, the crowd had been growing. And growing. And growing. I’d been in some big demonstrations in San Francisco before, but they were generally the kind that had permits and marshalls and were very orderly. This wasn’t like that. I’d been vaguely aware all summer that occupy demonstrations had been growing, mobilizing more people each time. But I hadn’t quite figured out what that meant, not until I realized that the nearly painful roaring in my ears was just thousands and thousands of people all talking in very close quarters.

  “Holy crap,” I said, and Liam grinned, looking around, then showed me his phone, which had a live feed off someone’s UAV, one of several that were buzzing the demonstration. Some had police markings, other had news-crew logos, and some were more colorful, with rainbows and slogans and grinning skulls. But most of them were eerily blank, and could have belonged to anyone. The one that was feeding Liam’s phone was flying a lazy figure-eight pattern over the crowd, which, I saw now, stretched all the way down to Grove Street and all the way up to Golden Gate Avenue, and there were people with homemade signs converging on the crowd from side streets.

  Liam was practically dancing a jig, and he was showing his phone’s display off to everyone else—Trudy Doo, the Anons, anyone who’d hold still. Meanwhile, I was fighting panic. There was one big, unscheduled crowd I’d been in, the thousands of people who’d streamed into the Powell Street BART station when the air-raid sirens went off, a crowd so dense it had been like a living thing, a boa constrictor that strangled you, an enormous dray horse that trampled you to death. Someone in that crowd had stabbed Darryl, a random act of senseless violence that I had often laid awake at night wondering about. Had that person just freaked out? Or had they been secretly waiting for the day when the opportunity to stab strangers with impunity would arise?

  The crowd pressed in on all sides of me, moving in little increments, a sixteenth of an inch at a time, but moving, and not stopping, and growing closer every moment. I tried to step backwards and landed on someone’s toe. “Sorry!” I said, and it came out in a yelp.

  “Um, Liam,” I said, grabbing his arm.

  “What is it?”

  “I got a bad feeling, Liam. Can we go? Now? I want to get back to the office, and we’re not going to do that if we go to jail.” Or if we get crushed to death.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Liam, I’m going,” I said. “I’ll see you at Joe’s.”

  “Wait,” he said, grabbing hold of me. “I’ll go.” Then, “Wait. Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Kettle.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek and swallowed hard against the rising knob of vomit coming up my throat. “Kettling” is when the police surround a protest in a cordon of cops with riot shields, facemasks, batons, and helmets, and then tighten it, reducing the amount of space for the crowd, shoving them in together like frozen peas in a bag, often with nowhere to sit or lie down, with no food or water or toilets. Tens of thousands of people—kids, sick people, pregnant women, old people, people who needed to get back to work. For some reason, kettles had to be airtight—no one was allowed to get in or out until the police decided to let you dribble out in small numbers. Anyone who tried to get out was treated as a desperate criminal, which is why “kettle” had become synonymous with protesters on stretchers, blood streaming from their head wounds, eyes red with pepper spray, twitching with the effects of the gas and their injuries.

  “Liam,” I said. “We need to get out of here now.” On his screen, I could see the skirmish line of SFPD officers with all their tactical crap, helmets and shields, like the wet dream of some Zyz mercenary or mall ninja. “Before they tighten the cordon.”

  To my amazement, he started singing and smiling. “Polly put the kettle on/Sukey take it off again!” Meanwhile, his fingers flew over his phone’s screen. “Don’t you know it?” he said, seeing my puzzlement.

  “What?”

  “Sukey? Like the old poem? ‘Polly put the kettle on/Sukey take it off again’? No? It’s a nursery rhyme. I thought everyone knew it!”

  “I don’t know this nursery rhyme, Liam. Why does it matter, precisely?” I was struggling not to bite his head off. No one should look that thrilled about being in a kettle.

  “Sukey’s an open source intelligence app. It gathers reports on kettles from people in the crowds, UAVs, webcams, SMSs, whatever, and overlays them on a U.S. Geographical Survey map, so that you can easily see what routes are still open. There’s no way they could block all the side streets off in a space this big.”

  He handed me his phone and I peered intently at it. Angry, thick red lines denoted the police lines, with arrows showing the directions that reinforcements were arriving from. Thin green lines showed the escape routes.

  “Dotted lines are unverified. Solid lines are verified, but they fade into unverified dots if they’re not regularly refreshed. That one looks good.” He pointed at a pedestrian walkway between two civic buildings, a few hundred yards down the street.

  “That one’s unverified,” I said. “What about this one? It’s verified and it’s closer.”

  He shook his head. “Yeah, but someone needs to go verify that one. And if it’s shut off, look, there’s another verified route just past it. It’d be doing our part for the cause.”

  “I just want to go, Liam,” I said.

  He gave me a look of such utter disappointment that I was literally unable to set off, pinned in place by his gaze and the crush of bodies around me. The Anons had climbed up on the base and were impossible to read beneath their masks’ gigantic grins. Trudy Doo had moved off into the crowd and I’d lost sight of her. But I felt like she was watching me, along with the Anons, and Liam, and the whole crowd, all watching “M1k3y” lose his nerve. Like they were already tweeting i
t.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Let’s go check the Sukey route.”

  Liam smiled uncertainly and we set off. It was like walking through molasses, and while there was plenty of happy chanting and discussion, there were also far-off cries that might have been screams. I began to shiver as I inched through the press of bodies. But Sukey was right: the little walkway was unguarded, and people were slipping in and out of it. We followed them, going single file, and when we reached the end, Liam tapped his screen and verified the route. “Job done,” he said, and we headed down Market Street. I made Liam take off his bandanna. We passed plenty of cops, both stationary and moving toward the demonstration. There were also plenty of demonstrators, and the police were stopping some of them, searching them and their bags. We passed a pair of girls about our age in plastic handcuffs, one looking furious, the other looking like she might cry any second, being led into a police cruiser. We hurried past.

  We descended into the BART station and rode in uncomfortable silence. The oppressive feeling of being watched crowded in from all sides.

  As we came up onto Mission, Liam said, “I can’t believe how many people came out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like, no one wanted to come out until they found out that everyone else was. And once everyone started to come out, everyone else came out, too.”

  Unspoken, hanging in the air between us, was the question “So why aren’t we there now?”

  I finished the day at my desk, flipping back and forth from my work to newsfeeds and streams and tweets from the monster demonstration. According to Sukey, people were still escaping the kettle, but from what I could tell from the overhead shots, more people were joining the demo than were leaving. The UAV shots were like some kind of monster rock show. Ange texted me after class to say she was heading to one of the satellite demonstrations that had formed on the other side of the kettle, turning the police line into a stupid joke. Later, I found out that Jolu, Darryl, and Van had all been there separately. I didn’t go back. Just before I fell asleep, I checked my phone and saw that the kettle had lifted and most of the demonstrators had gone home—except for the 600-plus who’d been hauled off to jail, and the couple dozen who’d gone to the hospital. I went to sleep.