Lawful Interception Page 6

“But is it illegal?” the smooth talking head asked. I cheered in my little black room. That’s the question.

  “Public safety is something we take very—”

  “Are they breaking any laws, sir?”

  “When you’re talking about large groups of people—”

  “Which specific laws are they breaking?” Oh, she was good. He squirmed.

  “I’m not here to talk about specific prosecutions—”

  “I’m sorry, we’re out of time, thank you very much—”

  I confess that I did a little victory dance on the spot.

  Even better was when the reporters took us up on our invitation to come down to Noisebridge and actually meet the people who worked on Hivemind, instead of pretending that it was all my doing and that I spoke for everyone. We never called it a press conference and we refused to let them turn it into one. Instead, we ran it like an open house, and we had all kinds of projects going, the laser-cutters whining and the 3D printers churning, and there were a million kinds of hackers doing a million kinds of projects. I think that a lot of the media had come down to find a secret group of semi-terrorists and we forced them to see us as we were: makers who cared about freedom.

  Our back-channels—IRC, message boards, email lists, Twitter and Facebook updates—were full of speculation about what would happen next week when OPD had had some time to think about it, and while there was a lot of debate about whether they’d risk the lawsuits and pull out the electromagnetic guns and whether they’d arrest us on sight, we all agreed that the Hivemind we’d run was just the demo and now it was time to get to work turning it into something real.

  We wikied up a huge wishlist of features for future versions and let the developers go to town. In theory, a super-elite OPD-DHS hacker could whip up a sly and malicious hunk of code that weakened our security without being obvious about it and check it into the codebase, then use it to start crashing Hivemind instances when the moment was at hand. But I thought it was more likely that the law enforcement presence lurking in our comms channels was there to figure out who to spy on and hassle at borders and build fat dossiers on.

  I mean, maybe we could have tried to keep it all secret, but that was a high price to pay to be superhuman. Working together on this project gave us amazing super-powers, and whatever security we built into the system would be better even if the other side knew exactly what we were doing and how we were doing it.

  Our best security was to be so wide open that everyone could help and everyone could check each other. A million free software projects have discovered that “if you build it, they will come” is a big fat lie most of the time, but in our case, they did come. The world’s hackerspaces and makerspaces had already thrown in their skills hacking on tools for the Arab Spring. That fire still burned around the world. From Hacker Dojo down the Peninsula to Hacklab in Toronto, the hackers of the world tweaked the code for Hivemind, tweaked our anklet design, and added more goodness to the drone autopilots and image-processing.

  Ange was amazing at it. She hadn’t been much of a coder when we met, but she was a natural, and always willing to learn. We were great together, working back-to-back, shouting at each other as we found bugs in each other’s code. One night, we didn’t even leave Noisebridge, just stayed up all night and then went back to my place and crashed out for five hours.

  “We need a change of scenery,” Ange said, as we washed each others’ backs in the shower.

  “Where to?”

  “Let’s visit Hacker Dojo,” she said. So we packed a picnic basket and caught CalTrain down to Mountain View and met a bunch of people f2f whose code and messages we’d known intimately, but whose faces we’d never seen live. They shared our picnic and found bugs that we’d never have found on our own, because fresh eyeballs are made of awesome, and because my Ange is made of more awesome still.

  It’s amazing to think it’s only been a week since Hivemind made its fantastic debut. Hard to believe that this crowd, these thronging thousands, heads high, a bounce in their steps, are what’s become of the morose rump protest that had been present last week.

  The OPD are waiting for us. They’ve tripled their numbers. They’ve put up a kind of cherry picker with armor around it, like a guard house in a POW movie. They’ve got water cannons. They’ve got gas.

  We’ve got code, sensors, drones and an audience.

  Even before we reach the police lines, the quadcopters are hovering along them, transmitting photos of any officer who has illegally removed his name badge. There’s a group of volunteers who asked for this feature, and they’re sitting at home with giant albums of OPD cops at previous demonstrations with their badges on, and they’re using face-matching to put a name to the face. It’s one thing to be anonymous when you’re blowing the whistle on government wrongdoing, but a guy without a badge who hits you over the head with a club isn’t a cop, he’s a mugger.

  These muggers-in-waiting have their own hashtag: #wheresyourbadge, and it’s flooded with pictures and names. You can see it working because these nameless wonders start to thrash in their lines as someone in authority gets a phone call from the OPD’s Internet team and then gets on the radio and says, “Johnson, where the hell is your name badge, goddammit?”

  We cheer as the OPD chapter of Anonymous uncloaks and pastes its badges back on. The people who know what’s going on cheer for that; the rest cheer for the sheer joy of a beautiful late afternoon and the wonder of a massive crowd that’s bursting with confidence. Then the ones who know what’s what clue the rest in and the cheers get louder.

  The first skirmish comes right away, no warning this time. They’re not in rigid lines anymore—they’ve apparently drilled in smaller squads that can break up and try to outmaneuver us. This probably sounded good in theory.

  It’s a total fail. We absorb the police units like amoebas surrounding their food, and then we poop ‘em out again. The cops whirl to keep up with us and we dance with them like a do-se-do. Yee-haw!

  The cops reform their lines and get ready for the next skirmish. It doesn’t go any better. Neither does the next. We’re all slightly breathless now, because we’ve been dancing like gooney birds for half an hour. We’re all in shorts or jeans and tees. We’re not allowed to wear armor. The cops, though, are wearing twenty pounds of nylon and metal and tactical everything, and they’re sweating like pigs. Some of us had talked about bringing bottles of water to offer them, but figured they’d never accept them.

  They’re not going to dance with us all afternoon. It takes two heavy hoses and a full teargas charge, and more than half of us get away, but eventually they manage the kettle. But it’s not the same kind of kettle, somehow.

  For one thing, we know which cops to avoid. Another volunteer squad—back playing the home game—has been keeping track of which cops have been too macho to rotate off the line. Those are the timebomb cops, the cortisol-fuelled stressbunnies who are going to stand there, grinding their teeth, until it all gets to be too much and the baton comes out. Word gets around: stay clear of those cops.

  We had 487 Hivemind rigs at the start of the day. Of those, 174 ended up inside the kettle, but half of those got watercannoned to death, so our intelligence is a little thin. On the other hand, that means there’s more spare batteries to go around, and the folks on the outside are determined to make sure that we don’t have it too rough. A squadron of drones glide overhead, and in unison they drop small, cylindrical parcels with parachutes that snap open. Inside each insulated tube is a burrito and a bottle of water. The drones circle back and pick up more ammo, and soon there are burritos raining all around.

  When the sun sets, I reach into the change pocket of my jeans for the thing I’ve been compulsively checking every five minutes. It’s still there, right down at the bottom of the pocket where I’d shoved it. I hold it tight in my hand.

  Ange is next to me, arm around my waist. She’s holding the last bite of a burrito in her free hand.

  “You know,”
she says, “we should rig up some kind of modified blood-sugar monitor for Hivemind, get it to measure cortisol levels, help figure out when you’re about to go off the deep end. Like that guy—” she says, pointing to a guy who’s getting really worked up, shouting at the cop line.

  This is a very good idea, but I can barely take it in, because my blood is whooshing in my ears and my hands are shaking.

  “Ange,” I say, around my tongue, which is thick and dry. I swallow, but I can’t swallow, and so I choke a little. I kneel.

  I am on one knee.

  “Ange,” I say again, and she looks at me, and her eyes widen, because she always knows what I’m going to say before I say it.

  “No way!” she says. She drops the burrito.

  Time stops. My heart stops. The world stops.

  She.

  Said.

  No.

  Way.

  I am not breathing. I realize this just as she claps her hands over her mouth in horror and I inhale and she inhales, and then she says, “I mean, ‘yes,’ of course but no way because of this—”

  And now she’s digging in the change pocket of her jeans and she produces a something that sparkles in the last rays of the sun. “I made it myself,” she says, holding up the ring in her hand. “Out of petrified bogwood.”

  “I made mine by hollowing out a nickel and polishing it. I engraved the rim. It says LOVE, in UTF-8 encoded binary.” I show it to her.

  “The one I made for you says ALWAYS in Morse.”

  We hold our rings. Then she grabs my hand, folds the fingers down until only the ring finger is out, and slips it on.

  I do the same to her.

  “Will you?” we say.

  “Yes,” we say.

  The kettle didn’t lift for five more hours. I hardly noticed them. And that time, neither of us went to jail.

  There was always next time.

  Lawful Interception. Copyright © 2013 by Cory Doctorow.

  Art copyright © 2013 by Yuko Shimizu

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address A Tor Book, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  e-ISBN: 978-1-4668-4217-5

  First eBook Edition: February 2013