Attack Surface (Little Brother, #3)

by Cory Doctorow

A couple passes through Anonymouth and I had a candidate text, along with a URL for a pastebin that I’d put all the SMSes into. No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email, because no normal human does, and so it was simplicity itself to manufacture an email in Litvinchuk’s inbox that was indistinguishable from the real thing. I even forged the headers, for the same reason that a dollhouse builder paints tiny titles on the spines of the books in the living room—even though no one will ever see them, there’s professional pride in getting the details right. Also, I had a script that did it for me.

I am pretty good at sitting still and waiting. It’s an important skill in my line of work. Impatience, not fear, is the mind-killer.

Johnstone was everything I wasn’t: super-straight, with a haircut that was so blunt and squared off it looked like it had been specially constructed for her by the Army Corps of Engineers. Second-generation military, navy brat who’d grown up in ports all around the world, poli-sci major, and then washed out of special forces training—broke both her legs, just like Snowden, which was an irony she didn’t appreciate at all when that came out. Also, she was hot, you know, ice-queen style, the kind of blue eyes that someone will inevitably call “piercing.” She was an old-school country fan, Merle Haggard and Conway Twitty and absolutely no Willie Nelson because she didn’t smoke weed and didn’t want to know you if you did.

Working for The Man was difficult. There was the bureaucracy, which was only slightly better at places like Xoth and Xe than it was in the government agencies we serviced, because to do business with the DHS, you had to impedence-match them, have parallel bureaucracies.

The reality is, there was a kind of blip when a minority of working stiffs—white dudes, mostly—held a little more political power, that lasted for less than a century. Now, humanity was returning to its baseline: all or nothing, with a tiny super-rich minority able to control everyone and everything else. The smarter your device, the harder it would be for you to outsmart it. Technology didn’t create the brief democratic blip, and it didn’t kill it, but now that it’s dead, technology will sure as shit make sure it never comes back. Those days are done.

Statistically, only ten percent of programmers are really in the killer leagues, but dudes all like to think that they’re defying the odds and sitting up there among that elite decile. I have good ideas, but I’m not about to kid myself that I’m the greatest programmer that ever lived.”

“We grew out of Black Lives Matter. They threw everything at BLM: spies, provocateurs, terrorism charges, RICO charges, disinformation campaigns. BLM kept growing. States passed laws that let them charge million-dollar fines to activist groups that called demonstrations where there was property damage—any property damage, even a kicked-over trash can.

There are companies out there that make “products” that barely run, but they’ve got the right kind of sale-dudes, bros who can convince other bros to give them lots of money for stuff that no bro will ever have to actually use—that’s the job of monkeys further down the evolutionary ladder: customer-service reps, grunts, fast-food clerks, tellers, check-in staff. Those people earn so little money that the business can afford to have them stuck in endless glitch loops, waiting while progress bars crawl across their screens (those progress bars aren’t going to watch themselves, after all).

Things got even faster when I figured out the lame-ass encryption used for the app’s database and sucked it into MySQL—an open-source database used by everyone in the world except greedy contractors who wanted to mark up Oracle licenses—and started probing it with real database queries.

By high school, we had fought and broken up and made up a dozen times and we were tighter than ever. Neesh continued to ace every test and do every extra-credit assignment, while I was the kind of nightmare student who calculated the minimum work necessary for a C-minus and did exactly, precisely that, with such polish and perfection that the teachers knew exactly what I was doing.

I ate the Japanese buffet the next morning, haunted by the ghosts of my friends Tanisha and Becky, and the times we’d saved up to visit the Nikko’s fancy in-house restaurant for seaweed, salted salmon, and even natto, God help us.

Crypto and gadgets might be securable against enemy spies and criminals—maybe, depending on how targeted you were—but when it came to the government whose police force had jurisdiction over you, could arrest you and take your stuff away, it was game over. The government didn’t even have to be very good at it: companies like Xoth would supply them with everything they needed.

“Masha, I know you think that the ‘struggle for justice’ is a corny fantasy, but you live in a world where people have weekends, don’t get maimed on the job, and have constitutional rights, at least some of the time. You live in a world where I’m not someone’s property, where I can vote, where I can marry a woman or a man. That’s because sometimes, the struggle for justice gets somewhere. Do you know how that happens?

I shrugged. “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice?” She made a fart noise. “You know what makes it bend, Masha? People hauling on that mother, with all their strength, with all their lives. We pull and pull and pull, and then, bit by bit, it bends. People hear Dr. King’s quote and they think, oh, well, if the arc of history is going to bend toward justice then all we have to do is sit back and wait for it. But the truth is, it bends because we make it bend, and the instant we let up, even a little, it snaps back.”

“I have given this offer more consideration than it is due already. Now, fuck off. Then keep fucking off. Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying ‘You Can’t Fuck Off Past Here.’ Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.”

San Francisco was—as always—ahead of the curve. But I’d seen this playing out in London and Berlin, Dubai and Hong Kong. The world was going through a phase-shift, what had been a smooth grade from poor to rich, with plenty in the middle, was becoming a cliff.

The thing is, I’d always known that compartments weren’t a good thing. They were just the least terrible thing I had.

Technology debt is when you cheat a barely functional solution to an important problem early in the development cycle, telling yourself that you’ll revisit your fugly hack later and put something real in its place. But you don’t. So you’re forever walking around with this lurking knowledge that you’ve built a fifty-story skyscraper full of people on top of foundations made out of whatever garbage you had lying around at the time.

the point of fake news isn’t just to make it so that no one can tell what’s true, it’s to make it so that no one cares anymore, so that when you try to get all your friends to go out and march about something that they should already be thinking about, they’re all like, ‘Eh, is that even real?’ Your enemies don’t need people to disagree with you, they just need people not to care.”

So the A-team was off drinking bulletproof coffee in Mountain View and the B-team was building liquidity-provision algorithms in the City of London and the C-team was working for US military contractors and the D-team was working for the US military and the E-team was doing startups and the F-team was writing cryptojacking scripts and injecting them into ad networks and so on.

“Masha, I get the feeling from you that you think life is like a double-entry bookkeeping system, where the debts go on one side and the assets go on the other and you need the assets to exceed the debts or you go bankrupt. That is not how it works. That’s why all the good things you’ve done have not made you feel any better: you keep waiting for the good deeds to cancel out the bad and since that never happens, you feel like you’re drowning in ethical debt. You will never pay off your debts, Masha, because the past is unalterable. “Someday, you will figure out that the reason you feel so bad is that you’re trying to make up for things you can never make up for.”