More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  That is: one copy of a piece of free software, and everything afterward is distributed over the air.

  “It’s a frontier for technical people to explore. There is enormous social payoff for exploring. The payoff is plain because the harm being ameliorated is current and people you know are suffering from it.”

  He reflected for a moment on the history of the free-software movement in meeting such challenges, and then moved back to the case in point. “Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy,” and the crowd applauded.

  “Let’s give it to him.”

  A voice shouted from aisles: “For free!”

  “For free,” Moglen agreed.

  This effort was not about Facebook. The architecture of the web provided scaffolding for “immense cognitive auxiliaries for the state—enormous engines of listening for governments around the world. The software inside the plug-in computer could include special routing devices that disguise the digital traffic, making it harder to trace any individual on the Internet. “By the time you get done with all of that, we have a freedom box. We have a box that actually puts a ladder up for people who are deeper in the hole than we are.”

  All this from free software. “The solution is made of our parts. We’ve got to do it. That’s my message. It’s Friday night. Some people don’t want to go right back to coding, I’m sure. We could put it off until Tuesday, but how long do you really want to wait? You know every day that goes by, there’s data we’ll never get back.”

  The first critical problem was identifying a way to attack it. “The direction in which to go is toward freedom—using free software to make social justice.”

  Someone shouted, “Yeah,” and the applause washed across the room.

  “But you know this,” Moglen said. “That’s the problem with talking on a Friday night. You talk for an hour and all you tell people is what they know already.”

  —

  As the applause petered out, Max and Ilya felt like gongs that had been struck. They had arrived early for the talk, prodded by two teachers important to them: the adviser to the campus computer club, Evan Korth, who was also an officer of the New York division of the Internet Society; and Biella Coleman, an anthropologist who studied hacker culture and was Max’s senior paper adviser. Now they did not budge. The moment, the possibility, the necessity of what Moglen had mapped out was nothing less than an alternative universe. It called to their idealism, and held the transgressive promise of, maybe, subverting a powerful institution. Its gravity absorbed them. So, yes, Friday would be spent in the math and computer science building. They had plenty to explore right there and then.

  “Max,” someone said from behind them.

  Fred Benenson, who had graduated from NYU a few years earlier, had met Max at meetings of the campus branch of Students for Free Culture, a movement to ease copyright restrictions on the use of creative material.

  Benenson could see that Max had been roused by Moglen’s talk, and he could not resist playing devil’s advocate. It was fine to talk about anonymity and privacy, he said, but in the real world, online retailers like Amazon and Netflix collected data from their customers, and used it to make recommendations on books, music, and movies.

  “It’s incredible how powerful those recommendation engines are,” Benenson said. He had recently started at a job where he did research on just this kind of information gathering.

  “You need data in aggregate form, even if it’s anonymized, to make these interesting features that the users expect,” he said.

  “I know,” Max said.

  Yet they both knew that even if the records were kept anonymously, it was possible to match them up with other data, and identify people who had not realized how vulnerable they were to being easily deanonymized through reverse engineering, often by comparing anonymous and public databases. One famous example involved movies people watched and rated on Netflix. In 2007, two researchers at the University of Texas, Austin, showed they could easily figure out a person’s supposedly private Netflix movie-viewing history by using other publicly available data.

  A year earlier, Netflix had released 100 million movie ratings, from 500,000 people, and announced a $1 million prize for anyone who could improve the formula for making recommendations. The customer identities were scrubbed from the rankings. But the researchers were able to unmask them by comparing the Netflix movies they had privately rated with ones they had publicly discussed on IMDb, a website that catalogs and ranks movies.

  That study was not the only example of “anonymous” data being laced with other, public information to trace its origins. AOL had released 20 million search queries after first stripping away identifying information like the users’ names and their computer addresses. They were then assigned random numbers. It did not take long for Michael Barbaro, a business reporter with the New York Times, to track down the user who had searched for “numb fingers” and for “60 single men” and “dog that urinates on everything.” The same person also queried women’s underwear, landscapers in Lilburn, Georgia, and homes in a certain subdivision. The digital bread crumbs led directly to a sixty-two-year-old woman living with three dogs.

  People wanted the convenience of recommendations, and many also wanted their privacy, and even sincere promises by web companies that data was being used only in big, random, atomized clumps was no protection, since information that had been teased apart could be reconstituted. The advances in computing power meant that a jar of bread crumbs could be turned into a full loaf.

  “How are you going to reconcile that aggregation of data with the desire to remain private?” Benenson said.

  Max was ready. People should be allowed to choose if they wanted to be included in the mass repositories, he said. That is, they ought to be asked what they wanted.

  “It should be a conscious, explicit, opt-in,” Max said.

  “That’s a great answer,” Benenson said, surprised. “You’ve really thought about this. Wow. I’m inspired.”

  After the lecture hall emptied, the computer club convened in the little office on the third floor of the computer science building, electricity surging. High spirits reigned. Rafi and his brother Mike had come to NYU after a splendid meal with their father.

  “I just got there for the end of his speech,” Rafi said.

  “It was awesome,” Ilya said.

  By temperament, Rafi was measured, even after a few glasses of wine at dinner, a cool yin to Ilya’s hot yang. For that matter, he had developed immunities to lawyerly eloquence: his father, Abe Sofaer, was a retired federal judge, former senior counsel in the U.S. State Department, and partner in a big Washington law firm. Rafi, the youngest of five sons, also didn’t need to hear the others rave about a talk that he had mostly missed.

  “No speech could be better than the meal I just had,” Rafi said.

  Still, the mood was contagious. Even he was intrigued. They all were. And they kept talking about it, late into the night. It was February 2010. The four young men most moved by Moglen’s speech had met a few months earlier in the computer club office, a campus chapter of the ACM, or Association for Computing Machinery.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Just as in cartoons when toys come to secret, robust life after dark, being inside the Courant Institute for Mathematics in the middle of the night had an emancipating effect on members of the computer club in 2009 and 2010. A student or two learned to pick locks, a skill of necessity when late-night tinkering required something that was not at hand but could be cannibalized from a piece of hardware on the other side of a door.

  Raphael Jedidiah Sofaer was the first of the family not born in New York City. He had been aiming toward the city throughout high school. The family had moved to Palo Alto when his father was appointed as a fellow in the Herbert Hoover Institute at Stanford. The family home in Palo Alto, California, often hosted prominent government figur
es, and the Sofaer sons were always ready to debate. Rafi, baby-faced, was the most level-headed of the Diaspora group, eager to discourage overblown expectations of what they were going to accomplish, but also to spell out its necessity.

  Before NYU, Rafi went to the Woodside Priory, a small independent boarding school founded by Benedictine friars near his family’s home. He spent summers at Hebrew camp. Hacking was not the center of his life, but a way to scratch his intellectual and political itches. Slight in build, short in height, and an acute listener, he would sit in a room filled with raging argument, a half-smile laced to his face. No one would mistake him for the stereotypical math whiz, corralled and isolated by his intellect and drawing satisfaction only from numbers; though not a practitioner of small talk, he was open and friendly.

  Going to New York had been Rafi’s dream, but it was a long distance from the cozy atmosphere of the friary. And NYU itself is an unruly village that sprawls across square miles of lower Manhattan in patches from the financial district to Union Square. Many dormitories are a subway or bus ride from the core of classrooms near Washington Square Park. Students lug books and laptops for hours. Everyone improvised places to take breaks, preferably somewhere they could just put their stuff down.

  The ACM room on the third floor of the Courant Institute was only a few hundred square feet, with five or six computers, but it offered a psychic niche, a hangout between classes. Rafi had been looking for a kind of nest, or safe harbor, and he found one in the ACM room.

  At twenty-two, a few months from graduating, Max seemed to have found his footing in the tech world. He had come to NYU with wide-eyed dreams of being a musicologist, and went to work as a radio DJ on the campus Internet station, then took a part-time job with an independent record company. By the end of two years, the culture of nonchalance in the company, the all-purpose dismissive “whatever” that he heard when he pushed to get music out the door, had battered his spirit. “Nobody likes the enthusiastic music kid,” he said later. “I want to be in a situation to succeed, and have that be a good thing—and not to be shunned because of that.”

  Born in 1987, Max had been reared, like his classmates, in the digital age. He was fluent from an early age in computer programming. His father had spent much of his life in retail food and beverage stores, having worked for the Campbell Soup Company and Gallo wines. As a boy, Max had tagged along on his dad’s visits to grocery stores, and took in the thinking behind their strict layouts: fresh foods like vegetables, meat, and dairy along the perimeters, and categories like soups, soda, and soaps in the center. They were completely engineered spaces, he thought, much like websites.

  His capacious curiosity took him to a course in the anthropology of hackers, and there he became certain that the technology world would welcome his wholeheartedness. “In Silicon Valley, the enthusiastic kid who has the crazy idea gets very lucky,” Max would say. He was also dogged: good at completing a task. The previous September, he enrolled in a class on heuristics, strategies for solving problems. After the first meeting, he was approached by a slightly disheveled, smiling student. His name was Ilya Zhitomirskiy, and he had noticed Max wearing a button with the logo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal nonprofit that fought to keep civil liberties pinned into place as technology created new platforms for speech and commerce that had not been anticipated by centuries of legal precedent and law. Ilya was impressed.

  “I really like your pin,” he said.

  “Do you even know what it is?” Max asked.

  Ilya snorted. “Of course I know what it is,” he said.

  Officially, Ilya was not taking the heuristics class but dropped in because he had heard, as Max had, that the subject was hard and the professor interesting. That curiosity and fearlessness proved a strong adhesive. They had no doubt about the centrality of programming to life in the twenty-first century.

  Ilya dropped in on another one of Max’s classes, taught by his adviser, Gabriella Coleman. She had asked the class a question. What happens when people are being watched? No one had the answer, but the question she posed and then answered herself, stayed with Ilya.

  When people are being watched, she had said, they perform. Ilya loved that insight. He was an expert at lighting the stage, literally.

  Two years younger than Max, a puppy in spirit, Ilya was already well into PhD-level math courses. His grandfather was a mathematician. So was his father. When he was twelve, the family moved from Orekhovo-Zuevo, a town outside Moscow, to the United States, and began their American life in New Orleans. Ilya was decidedly off-kilter, nervous about fitting in, but saw no reason that he shouldn’t wear pants in the brightest neon colors that he could find, or giant plastic orange sunglasses.

  At his first school in the new country, he was astounded by the familiarities of the teachers, with their cheery greetings of “Hi!” They had none of the sonorous formalities of the teachers in Russia who had taught him bits of the queen’s English. One day the principal appeared at his classroom door and summoned Ilya to come with him to the office.

  What, Ilya fretted, had he done?

  At the office door, the principal turned to him. “I can’t get into my computer,” he said. “I lost the password. They tell me that you might be able to fix it.”

  Five minutes later, the principal was back on his computer. Ilya was rewarded, to his amazement, with a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate. Still, he managed to run into a bewildering string of trouble with some Americans. The family moved to Boston from New Orleans, and he was not yet sure-footed in English. Another boy from Russia often translated for him. After weeks of this, Ilya realized that the other boy had been entertaining himself by deliberately warping the translation and watching Ilya squirm.

  By junior year in high school, Ilya had full command of English, and the Zhitomirskiys had settled in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. His Russian accent had been sanded down by four years in the United States. He decided to leverage his perennial newcomer act into a social project. Every day, he would meet a new person. Just walk up to someone he didn’t know and, in the easy American way, say, “Hi, I’m Ilya.” The trick was making it seem casual. In truth, before he approached strangers, the anxiety sweated into his palms, and he would have to dry them on his sleeves. He was one of the few kids in school who did not have a Facebook account. Instead, he built his own social network, one handshake at a time. Before the year was out, he was working with the stage crew on the school drama club productions, happy to dry his palms and pretend that climbing the high rails to adjust the lighting was no big deal. In the summer before his senior year, he knocked on the stage door of every theater in Philadelphia, looking for work. Few people had time for him but he kept going.

  At the Academy of Music, which was showing The Lion King, the manager said that he had no jobs, that Disney did all the hiring, and that Ilya wouldn’t be hired in any event because he wasn’t a union member.

  Another rejection.

  But then: “Do you want to come in and see how things work?” the manager asked.

  Soon, Ilya was striding along catwalks in the upper reaches of the hall. Eventually, he landed tech jobs at a few small theaters. For college, he wanted a top-ranked math program, and was accepted to one at the University of Maryland, though his seat would not be available until the January after his graduation. That meant he had a term to kill, so he registered at Tulane in New Orleans, where he joined the juggling team and learned to unicycle. Following that semester, he transferred to the University of Maryland in College Park, and after math classes took up competitive swing dancing. He also power-kited, propelling himself over the crests of hills and gliding as far as he could. For meals, he practiced Dumpster diving—salvaging edible sandwiches and even sushi from the bins outside a coffee shop. The Maryland program was strong, but he was drawn to a place he had never lived: the heart of a big city. The Courant Institute o
f Mathematical Sciences at New York University, housed in Greenwich Village, piqued his academic and personal interests. So for the third time in three years, he began at a new college.

  It was as if he had landed in a black-and-white photograph of the mythic, shimmering metropolis. His first dorm was across from the Brooklyn Bridge; his roommate was a jazz musician who came home from gigs at three in the morning and played a keyboard while Ilya worked on math problems. In the lounge of the math department, he would laughingly harangue students who spent time on Facebook; why, he wondered, were they wasting time with such fake relationships, where people just spread themselves out? Where was the joy of discovery? One day, as a prank, a classmate set up a Facebook account in Ilya’s name and friended everyone in their circle, including other students and the graduate teaching assistants. When he discovered the trick, it was the only time most people saw him truly angry. He confronted another student, Stephanie Lewkiewicz, with whom he had developed a romantic relationship. She conceded knowing that the scheme was afoot, but swore that she had not instigated it or taken part. Another student had.

  “That guy friended all my TAs,” Ilya sputtered. He was shutting down the account. “What are they going to think? Everyone is going to be offended thinking I just defriended them.”

  “But honestly,” Stephanie said, “I didn’t actually do it.”

  “I believe you that you didn’t do it. You probably just thought it was hysterical,” Ilya said.

  “I did,” she said.

  He hunted for the Facebook account cancellation procedure, but had no faith that it would actually work. Somewhere, he was certain, his personal data was going to be stashed on a server.