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“Except ‘urban’ is not an environment,” argued Chuck. “The environment is an environment. You talk as if cities were these self-supporting bubbles, but they’re not. They’re entirely dependent on the natural world around them.”
“The Internet is in cyberspace, but we”—he paused for effect—“are in meatspace, get it?”
but I held my tongue and tried to strike the thought from my head. Negative thoughts had a way of festering.
I glanced at their door frame and the mezuzah affixed there, a tiny but beautifully carved, ornate mahogany box. At one time I thought these were like Jewish “good luck” charms, but I’d come to understand that they were more about keeping evil away.
The meaning of my life was to protect and raise this new life, to love him and teach him everything I knew.
Wearing the masks was more to protect other people.
“Nobody knows what the hell is going on. Half the country thinks it’s terrorists, the other half an attack by the Chinese, and another half thinks it’s nothing at all.”
“Do you know that nearly ninety percent of the emergency notification systems in America are all supplied by the same company?” “So?” “Hack that one company and, wham, instant access to nationwide chaos.”
“With enough duct tape, you can fix anything,” he laughed.
“People aren’t prepared because they assume that somebody else will always fix the problem, and they’re usually right,” she said tearfully. “But this time there’s no help out there.”
and the busy noise of humans being human filled the room
While criminals might be able to obtain firearms easily in New York, it was almost impossible for a regular citizen to legally own a gun.
now everything can be attacked via the Internet.”
Name something that isn’t wired into the Internet and doesn’t use Chinese parts.”
We’re the most wired country on Earth. Everything here is accessible via the Internet, much more so than for anyone else, and way more than the countries we’re picking fights with.
“In survival situations, the order of importance is warmth, then water, and then food,” replied Chuck. “You can survive weeks or months without food, but only two days without water, and you’ll freeze to death in just a few hours. We need to stay warm and find a gallon of water per day per person.”
“Explorers in the Arctic were just as thirsty as those in the Sahara,” said Chuck. “You gotta melt snow first, and that takes energy. Eating it lowers your body temperature and gives you cramps, which could be deadly. Diarrhea and dehydration are the enemy just as much as the cold.”
With no help in sight, though, it had taken four days for scared and hungry to trump the law. There was an inevitability to it under the circumstances,
“What I mean by graceful degradation,” continued Chuck as Sarah filled his plate, “is that there’s no longer a way to revert to previous technology if something fails.” “Example?” “Like this logistics thing that screwed up shipping. Everything is ‘just in time,’ with a handful of central warehouses located in the middle of nowhere that stock almost nothing.” “So no local stock if the supply chain gets disrupted?”
We’re five times the population of when humans last used horses for transportation, with maybe one-fifth the horses. And back then, eighty percent of people lived in the countryside and had a shot at supporting themselves. Now that eighty percent live in cities.”
“Do you know what a botnet is?” “A network of computers that have been infected to use in a cyberattack?” “Right, except not just infected. People can voluntarily let their computers be used as part of a botnet.”
“And getting back to botnets, denial-of-service attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience, like a cyber version of a sixties sit-in.”
“It’s illegal to operate a botnet,” explained Damon, “but it’s perfectly legal to join one, as an individual. In denial-of-service attacks, each computer just pings the target a few times a second, and there’s nothing wrong with instructing your computer to do that. But when you control hundreds of thousands of computers and direct them to do the same thing, that’s when the problem starts.”
“And what’s illegal in one place is legal somewhere else. You can hire a botnet over the Web, paid through PayPal, to attack a competitor. How is the FBI going to arrest someone in Khuzestan? They have international laws for dealing with money laundering, drugs, terrorists, but few for cyber.”
“A democracy based on fear is not a democracy. Fear of the commies, fear of the terrorists—it never ends! You know who else used fear to keep people in check? Stalin, Hitler—”
It wasn’t often that I looked up when walking the streets, and the immensity of the world above was mesmerizing. So many people. My God, so many people.
State Correctional is releasing all minimum-security prisoners. No food, no water, no staff, generators out, and can’t open and close cells electronically. Had to let them all go. Nearly thirty prisons emptied. God help us if they release any of the bastards in Attica or Sing Sing.”
Fear isn’t the answer. If we’re afraid of everything, then we’re afraid to do anything, and that means we’re giving up our freedom.
Do you know the average age of the mission controller during the Apollo program?” Now we all shrugged, but he wasn’t really asking. “Twenty-seven!” “Your point?” “My point is that these days people barely trust a twenty-seven-year-old to cook their burger, never mind land on the moon. Everything needs to be vetted by a million committees, and we’re afraid of practically everything. We’re just not willing to accept risk anymore, and it’s killing this country.”
“We’re afraid of terrorists, so we let the government start to collect personal information about where we are and what we’re doing, put up cameras everywhere.” “No risk,” said Chuck, wagging one finger in the air, “equals no freedom.” “But if you’re not doing anything wrong,” I pointed out, “you have nothing to be afraid of. I don’t mind giving up a little privacy for the sake of security.” “That’s where you’re wrong,” countered Rory. “You have everything to be afraid of. Where’s that information going?”
“Do you know there are new laws that give the government the right to look at everything you do online, watch everywhere you go?” I shook my head. “Anytime there’s even a hint of the government limiting the public’s ability to buy guns, people go crazy about them taking away our freedom, but this new law that gives the government the right to spy into every aspect of your life, without your consent—barely a peep. A clear violation of the third and fourth amendments, but nobody says a word.”
“You know what freedom really is?” demanded Rory. “Freedom is civil liberty, and the foundation of civil liberty is privacy. No privacy means no civil liberty means no freedom. You know why they don’t just fingerprint everyone?” “Seems like a good idea to me,” laughed Chuck. “Because once they have your fingerprints,” continued Rory, ignoring Chuck, “you instantly become a suspect in every crime. They’ll run your fingerprints against everything they find at a crime. You go from being a free citizen to being a criminal suspect.” “And fingerprints are just one way of identifying you,” added
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“What are they going to use it for? That exactly the question. And if they have it, then anyone can steal it,” replied Rory. He pointed at me. “And the new media applications you work on are even worse.”
“If you’re not paying for a product, you are the product. Isn’t that right? Aren’t you selling all the private information you collect on consumers to marketing companies?”
Our grandfathers stormed the beaches of Normandy to protect our freedom. And now, because we’re afraid and not willing to accept personal risk, we’re giving up those same freedoms that they fought and died for. We’re giving away our freedom because we’re scared.” He had a good point. Damon nodded. “You can’t protect freedom by giving it away.”
Command and control servers were located all over the world, most of them within the US itself, and they were being shut down one by one.
“Any game theory simulation of society is more robust if you include a criminal element.” “Simulation, huh?” “The criminals force society to improve. They weed out the weak, making us strengthen our institutions and networks.”
“Without a certain baseline amount of people who take advantage of others,” I continued, “society just doesn’t advance.” “Sounds like a bad deal for the ones getting taken advantage of.” “But a good deal for society as a whole. I’m not saying that we don’t catch and punish criminals. I’m just saying that we need them.”
“Criminals help society evolve,” I continued. “Slavery was legal back when Columbus got here, so you don’t judge him, but he would be a criminal today. And Gandhi was a criminal when he broke the salt laws in India. They’re both heroes now. Criminals help push the boundaries.”
communication is the key to civilization.”
“You know what drove the twentieth century, laid the foundation for the world as we know it?” I ventured. Damon fiddled with the phone. “Money?” “Well, yeah, that, plus artificial light.”
“Oil was the currency, but light was the product. It was America’s desire for light that drove Rockefeller
“Before he began supplying kerosene to New York in the 1870s, when the sun went down America went dark. Kerosene was the first cheap, clean way to make artificial light. Before that, Rockefeller was just a down-and-out businessman sitting on a patch of soggy petroleum in Cleveland, not knowing what to do with it.”
Cleveland was the Saudi Arabia of Wild West–era America, and by the early nineteen hundreds he was producing more kerosene than could be used for lighting alone, so guess what came next?”
“Cars. Did you know that the first cars were electric? In 1910 there were more electric-powered cars on the streets of New York than gas-powered ones, and everyone back then assumed that electric cars were the future—they made a lot more sense than the crazy engines that ran on controlled explosions of volatile, toxic chemicals. But Rockefeller funded Ford to make sure that gas-powered cars, not electric, would be the way of the future, so he would have a place to sell his oil.”
“And, poof, there you have the mess of the twentieth century, the Middle East, all those wars, the world’s reliance on oil, and a good chunk of global warming. Even maybe what’s happening now. It all sprang out of the desire for light.”
a coordinated cyberattack on this country’s infrastructure and the worldwide Internet.”
organizations associated with, or controlled by, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
Iranian Ashiyane hacking group is now claiming responsibility for the Scramble virus that brought down logistics systems,
the initial attack was targeted at US government networks. It quickly spread to secondary systems—” “Iranians are Persians, not Arabs,” repeated Rory. “They pretty much invented science and mathematics.
