Homeland

by Doctorow, Cory

  “I think that’s great,” she said. “Seriously great. I’m proud of you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That means a lot.” It really did. I didn’t hold her hand, but oh, how I wanted to. “What about you?”

  “College,” she said. “College, college, college. Doing a double courseload to get out as fast as I can. My student debt, God, it’s like the national debt of some drowning island nation.”

  “There’s still time to drop out,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah. We can’t all be professional revolutionaries.”

  Not if you’re drowning in student debt, is what I didn’t say, because I didn’t want to fight with Ange. More than anything, I didn’t want to fight with Ange.

  The temple came into sight. It was even more amazing than last year’s, and it was surrounded by art bikes and milling crowds of people dropping off their memorials or reading them or making them. By some unspoken agreement, we walked to them in silence.

  By the same unspoken agreement, we took each other’s hands.

  When we sat down in the central atrium and the first deep Omm moved through us, tears began to flow. Ange was crying, and so was I. Our fingers were interlocked, and squeezed so hard that my knuckles creaked. But the sound kept coming, and with it, a kind of peace. Peace wasn’t something I’d had much of in the last year, and I barely recognized it—and then I sank into it.

  My eyes closed, I sensed someone settle to the floor next to me. I opened my eyes. I knew before they opened who it would be.

  Masha’s hair was pink again, and she looked better than she had the last time I’d seen her, but she also looked older. There were deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes. They looked good on her somehow. Her eyes were the same, and just as I’d remembered them.

  She and I looked into each other’s eyes for a long time. I squeezed Ange’s fingers and sensed her looking at Masha, too. The three of us stared at one another, three pairs of eyes, three brains, three sets of hands, three people inside the crowd, inside the temple, inside Black Rock City, on the skin of the planet.

  Then Masha stood up, blew us both a kiss, and smiled in a way that made her look ten years old and made me feel like I’d been blessed by a holy woman. I gathered Ange into a hug that started off stiff and awkward and then turned into the most familiar feeling in the world.

  Afterword

  by Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks

  “Utopia is impossible; everyone who isn’t a utopian is a shmuck.”

  Cory asked someone to write to the children of the newest generation and to say something to inspire them. To write something that would encourage them to take up the cause of bettering the world. That’s you or someone you love—when you’re finished, please pass this book on to the person who needs it most.

  Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us. Every minute that we are able to enjoy in a society that is not ruled by senseless violence is a minute given to us by the hard work of people who dedicated their lives for something better. Every person we meet is carrying his own burdens. Each person is the center of her own universe. There is so much left to be done, so many injustices to right, so much suffering to relieve, so many beautiful moments to be lived, an endless amount of knowledge to uncover. Many secrets of the universe wait to be uncovered.

  The deck from which our hands are dealt need not be stacked against us; it is possible to create societal structures that are just and capable of reasoned compassion for everyone. It is possible to change the very nature of our lives. It is possible to redesign the entire deck, to change the very face and count of the cards, to rewrite the rules and to create different outcomes.

  We live in the golden era of surveillance; every phone is designed to be tapped, the Internet passes through snooping equipment of agencies that are so vast and unaccountable that we hardly know their bounds. Corporations are forced (though some are willing enough!) to hand over our data and the data of those whom we love. Our lives are ruled by networks and yet those networks are not ruled by our consent. These networks keep us hooked up but it is not without costs that they keep us hooked together. The businesses, the governments, and the individuals that power those networks are incentivized to spy, to betray and to do it silently. The architecture of the very systems produces these outcomes.

  This is tyranny.

  The architecture of our systems and of our networks is not the product of nature but rather the product of imperfect humans, some with the best of intentions. There is no one naturally fit to survive in these unnatural systems, there are some who are lucky, others who have adapted.

  This letter to you, from your perhaps recent past, was written with Free Software written as a labor of love by someone who wished to help the children of Uganda while flying over an expansive ocean at difficult to understand heights; it was composed while running under a kernel written by scores of people across every national line, across every racial, sexual, and gender line by a socially and politically agnostic engineer; it was sent through multiple anonymity networks built by countless volunteers acting in solidarity through mutual aid; and it was received by an author who published it for a purpose.

  What is the common purpose of all of these people? It is for the whole of our efforts to be more than the sum of our parts—this creates a surplus for you—to give breathing room to others, so that they may take the torch of knowledge, of reason, of justice, of truth telling, of sunlight—to the next step, wherever it may lead us.

  There was a time when there were no drone killings, societies have existed without armed policemen, where peace is not only possible but actually a steady state, where mass surveillance was technically and socially infeasible, where fair and evenhanded trials by impartial juries were available for everyone, where fear of identification and arrest was not the norm but the exception. That time was less than a generation ago and much more has been lost in the transition from one generation to the next.

  It’s up to you to bring those things back to our planet. You can do this with little more than cooperation, the Internet, cryptography, and willingness. You might do this alone or you might do it in a group; you might contribute as a solitary person or as one of many. Writing Free Software empowers every person, without exception, to control the machines that fill our lives. Building free and open hardware empowers every person, without exception, to construct new machines to free us from being slaves to machines that control us. Using free and open systems allows us to construct a new basis by which we may once again understand as a whole, the systems by which we govern ourselves.

  We are on the edge of regaining our autonomy, of ending total state surveillance, of uncovering and holding accountable those who commit crimes in our names without our informed consent, of resuming free travel without arbitrary or unfair restriction. We’re on the verge of ensuring that every person, not one human excluded, has the right to read and the right to speak. Without exception.

  It’s easy to feel hopeless in the face of the difficult issues that we face every day—how could one person effectively resist anything so much larger than herself? Once we stop acting alone, we have a chance for positive change. To protest is to stop and say that you object, to resist is to stop others from going along without thinking and to build alternatives is to give everyone new choices.

  Omission and commission are the yin and yang of personal agency.

  What if you could travel back through time and help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon Papers? Would you take the actions required, would you risk your life to end the war? For many it is easy to answer positively and then think nothing of the actual struggles, the real risk or the uncertainty provided without historical hindsight. For others, it’s easy to say no and to think of nothing beyond oneself.

  But what if you didn’t need to travel back through time?

  There are new Pentagon Papers just waiting to be leaked; there are new wars to end, new injustices to make right, fresh
uncertainty that seems daunting where success seems impossible; new alternatives need to be constructed, old values and concepts of justice need to be preserved in the face of powerful people who pervert the rule of law for their own benefit.

  Be the trouble you want to see in the world, above nationalism, above so-called patriotism, above and beyond fear and make it count for the betterment of the planet. Legal and illegal are not the same as right and wrong—do what is right and never give up the fight.

  This is one idea out of many that may help you and your friends, may free our planet from the tyranny that surrounds us all. It’s up to you now—go create something beautiful and help others to do the same.

  Happy hacking,

  Anonymous

  000000/002012/00/00/00:00:00:00

  Afterword

  by Aaron Swartz, Demand Progress (cofounder, Reddit.com)

  Hi there, I’m Aaron. I’ve been given this little space here at the end of the book because I’m a flesh-and-blood human and, as such, I can tell you something you wouldn’t believe if it came out of the mouth of any of those fictional characters:

  This stuff is real.

  Sure, there isn’t anyone actually named Marcus or Ange, at least not that I know, but I do know real people just like them. If you want, you can go to San Francisco and meet them. And while you’re there, you can play D&D with John Gilmore or build a rocket ship at Noisebridge or work with some hippies on an art project for Burning Man.

  And if some of the more conspiracy-minded stuff in the book seems too wild to be true, well, just google Blackwater, Xe, or BlueCoat. (I myself have an FOIA request in to learn more about “persona management software,” but the Feds say it’ll take three more years to redact all the relevant documents.)

  Now I hope you had fun staying up all night reading about these things, but this next part is important, so pay attention: what’s going on now isn’t some reality TV show you can just sit at home and watch. This is your life, this is your country—and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved.

  I know it’s easy to feel like you’re powerless, like there’s nothing you can do to slow down or stop “the system.” Like all the calls are made by shadowy and powerful forces far outside your control. I feel that way, too, sometimes. But it just isn’t true.

  A little over a year ago, a friend called to tell me about an obscure bill he’d heard of called the Combatting Online Infringement and Counterfeit Act, or COICA. As I read the bill, I started to get more and more worried: under its provisions, the government would be allowed to censor websites it didn’t like without so much as a trial. It would be the first time the U.S. government was given the power to censor its citizens’ access to the net.

  The bill had just been introduced a day or two ago, but it already had a couple dozen senators cosponsoring it. And, despite there never being any debate, it was already scheduled for a vote in just a couple days. Nobody had ever reported on it, and that was just the point: they wanted to rush this thing through before anyone noticed.

  Luckily, my friend noticed. We stayed up all weekend and launched a website explaining what the bill did, with a petition you could sign opposing it that would look up the phone numbers for your representatives. We told a few friends about it and they told a few friends and within a couple days we had over 200,000 people on our petition. It was incredible.

  Well, the people pushing this bill didn’t stop. They spent literally tens of millions of dollars lobbying for it. The head of every major media company flew out to Washington, DC, and met with the president’s chief of staff to politely remind him of the millions of dollars they’d donated to the president’s campaign and explain how what they wanted—the only thing they wanted—was for this bill to pass.

  But the public pressure kept building. To try to throw people off the trail, they kept changing the name of the bill—calling it PIPA and SOPA and even the E-PARASITES Act—but no matter what they called it, more and more people kept telling their friends about it and getting more and more people opposed. Soon, the signers on our petition stretched into the millions.

  We managed to stall them for over a year through various tactics, but they realized if they waited much longer they might never get their chance to pass this bill. So they scheduled it for a vote first thing after they got back from winter break.

  But while members of Congress were off on winter break, holding town halls and public meetings back home, people started visiting them. Across the country, members started getting asked by their constituents why they were supporting that nasty Internet censorship bill. And members started getting scared—some going so far as to respond by attacking me.

  But it wasn’t about me anymore—it was never about me. From the beginning, it was about citizens taking things into their own hands: making YouTube videos and writing songs opposing the bill, making graphs showing how much money the bill’s cosponsors had received from the industries pushing it, and organizing boycotts putting pressure on the companies who’d endorsed the bill.

  And it worked—it took the bill from a political nonissue that was poised to pass unanimously to a toxic football no one wanted to touch. Even the bill’s cosponsors started rushing to issue statements opposing it! Boy, were those media moguls pissed.…

  This is not how the system is supposed to work. A ragtag bunch of kids doesn’t stop one of the most powerful forces in Washington just by typing on their laptops!

  But it did happen. And you can make it happen again.

  The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time—this is real life, after all—but we finally have a chance.

  But it only works if you take part. And now that you’ve read this book and learned how to do it, you’re perfectly suited to make it happen again. That’s right: now it’s up to you to change the system.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to the people who helped with suggestions and technical details to make this book work: Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Swartz, Quinn Norton, Tiffiniy Cheng, Nicholas Reville, Holmes Wilson, Joe Trippi, Danny O’Brien, Tim Hardy, Nat Torkington, Thomas Gideon, Roger Dingledine, Barry Warsaw, Gord Doctorow, James Gleick, Lee Maguire.

  Thanks to my campmates at Liminal Labs for introducing me to Burning Man and making me so welcome there.

  Thanks to John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Mitch Kapor, and Wil Wheaton for letting me give them a cameo (and thanks again to Gilmore for his plotting suggestions!).

  Thanks to my agents, Russ Galen, Danny Baror, Heather Baror, and Justin Manask, for the awesome work in bringing Little Brother and Homeland to the world.

  Thanks to all the fans and readers, the librarians and teachers, and hackers and remixers and especially the booksellers who put my books into peoples’ hands.

  Thanks to my editors, especially Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who has always improved my books.

  Bibliography

  When I was a kid, facts were hard to come by. If you wanted to know how to hack a pay phone, you’d have to find someone else who knew how to do it, and get them to teach you. Or you’d have to find operating manuals for pay phones and pore over them until you came up with your own method. There’s nothing wrong with either of these solutions, except that they’re slow and can be tedious.

  Today, facts are cheap. As I type this in early 2012, a Google search for “How to hack a pay phone” gives back a full screen of detailed YouTube videos full of fascinating and often practical advice on getting pay phones to dance to your will. So if you know or suspect that a thing is possible, it’s easy to discover whether someone has managed it, and how they did it. Just bear in mind Arthur C. Clarke’s first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” If you’re trying to do something that every
one on the net swears is impossible, it may still be worth a go on your own in case you think of something they’ve never imagined.

  With Homeland—and in Little Brother—I’ve tried to give you some scenarios and keywords that might expand your impression of what is and isn’t possible, to give you the search terms you’ll need to educate yourself and get yourself doing cool stuff. So, for example, if you google “hackerspaces” you’ll find that places like Noisebridge are very real and have spread all over the world (Noisebridge is also real!). You can join your local hackerspace. If it doesn’t exist yet, you can start it. Just google “how do I start a hackerspace?” And while you’re searching, try “drone” and “tor project” and “lawful intercept.” You’ll be amazed, scared, energized, and empowered by what you find there.

  Wikipedia is an amazing place to do research, but you have to know how to use it. Your teachers have probably told you that Wikipedia has no place in your education, and I’m sorry to say that I think that this is a lazy and dumb approach. There are two secrets to doing amazing research on Wikipedia:

  1. Check the sources, not the article.

  In an ideal world, all the factual assertions in a Wikipedia article will have a citation to a source at the bottom of the article. Wikipedia hasn’t achieved this ideal state (yet—that’s what all those [citation needed] marks in the articles are about) but a surprising number of the facts in a Wikipedia article will have a corresponding source at the bottom. That’s where your research should take you when you’re reading an article. Wikipedia is where your research should start, not where it should end.

  2. Check the “Talk” link.

  Every Wikipedia article has a “Talk” link that goes to a page where everyone who cares about the article discusses its state. If someone has a weird idea about a subject and finds a source somewhere on the net to support it, they might just stick it into the Wikipedia article. But chances are that this will spark a heated debate on the Talk page about whether the source is “reputable” and whether its facts belong in an encyclopedia.