this chapter is dedicated to powell's books, the legendary "city ofbooks" in portland, oregon. powell's is the largest bookstore in theworld, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and toweringshelves. they stock new and used books on the same shelves —something i've always loved — and every time i've stopped in, they'vehad a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gra-cious about asking me to sign the store-stock. the clerks are friendly, thestock is fabulous, and there's even a powell's at the portland airport,making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for mymoney!
powell's books: 1005 w burnside, portland, or 97209 usa +1 800878 7323believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. i'donly fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven thenext day, my dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening todrag me out by the ankles. i managed to get up — something had died inmy mouth after painting my eyelids shut — and into the shower.
i let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fer-vently that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. i could sneakone on the way to school, but watching them sip down their black goldwhile i was drag-assing around the house, getting dressed and puttingmy books in my bag — it was awful.
i've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. iwent up and over the hills to get down into the mission, and everywherethere were trucks. i saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed atmany of the stop-signs. someone had a lot of surveillance gear lyingaround, waiting to be installed at the first opportunity. the attack on thebay bridge had been just what they needed.
79it all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator,embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitouscameras.
the turkish coffee shop on 24th street fixed me up good with a go-cupof turkish coffee. basically, turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be cof-fee. it's thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caf-feine than the kiddee-pops like red bull. take it from someone who'sread the wikipedia entry: this is how the ottoman empire was won:
maddened horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.
i pulled out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "no more debit,"he said.
"huh? why not?" i'd paid for my coffee habit on my card for years atthe turk's. he used to hassle me all the time, telling me i was too youngto drink the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during schoolhours, convinced that i was skipping class. but over the years, the turkand me have developed a kind of gruff understanding.
he shook his head sadly. "you wouldn't understand. go to school,kid."there's no surer way to make me want to understand than to tell me iwon't. i wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. he looked like he wasgoing to throw me out, but when i asked him if he thought i wasn't goodenough to shop there, he opened up.
"the security," he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs ofdried beans and seeds, its shelves of turkish groceries. "the government.
they monitor it all now, it was in the papers. patriot act ii, the con-gress passed it yesterday. now they can monitor every time you useyour card. i say no. i say my shop will not help them spy on mycustomers."my jaw dropped.
"you think it's no big deal maybe? what is the problem with govern-ment knowing when you buy coffee? because it's one way they knowwhere you are, where you been. why you think i left turkey? whereyou have government always spying on the people, is no good. i movehere twenty years ago for freedom — i no help them take freedomaway.""you're going to lose so many sales," i blurted. i wanted to tell him hewas a hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "everyoneuses debit cards."80"maybe not so much anymore. maybe my customers come here be-cause they know i love freedom too. i am making sign for window.
maybe other stores do the same. i hear the aclu will sue them for this.""you've got all my business from now on," i said. i meant it. i reachedinto my pocket. "um, i don't have any cash, though."he pursed his lips and nodded. "many peoples say the same thing. isok. you give today's money to the aclu."in two minutes, the turk and i had exchanged more words than wehad in all the time i'd been coming to his shop. i had no idea he had allthese passions. i just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caf-feine dealer. now i shook his hand and when i left his store, i felt like heand i had joined a team. a secret team.
i'd missed two days of school but it seemed like i hadn't missed muchclass. they'd shut the school on one of those days while the cityscrambled to recover. the next day had been devoted, it seemed, tomourning those missing and presumed dead. the newspapers publishedbiographies of the lost, personal memorials. the web was filled withthese capsule obituaries, thousands of them.
embarrassingly, i was one of those people. i stepped into the school-yard, not knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment laterthere were a hundred people around me, pounding me on the back,shaking my hand. a couple girls i didn't even know kissed me, and theywere more than friendly kisses. i felt like a rock star.
my teachers were only a little more subdued. ms galvez cried as muchas my mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to mydesk and sit down. there was something new at the front of theclassroom. a camera. ms galvez caught me staring at it and handed mea permission slip on smeary xeroxed school letterhead.
the board of the san francisco unified school district had held anemergency session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask theparents of every kid in the city for permission to put closed circuit televi-sion cameras in every classroom and corridor. the law said they couldn'tforce us to go to school with cameras all over the place, but it didn't sayanything about us volunteering to give up our constitutional rights. theletter said that the board were sure that they would get complete compli-ance from the city's parents, but that they would make arrangements to81teach those kids' whose parents objected in a separate set of"unprotected" classrooms.
why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? terrorists. ofcourse. because by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated thatschools were next. somehow that was the conclusion that the board hadreached anyway.
i read this note three times and then i stuck my hand up.
"yes, marcus?""ms galvez, about this note?""yes, marcus.""isn't the point of terrorism to make us afraid? that's why it's calledterrorism, right?""i suppose so." the class was staring at me. i wasn't the best student inschool, but i did like a good in-class debate. they were waiting to hearwhat i'd say next.
"so aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? don't they win ifwe act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?"there was some nervous tittering. one of the others put his hand up. itwas charles. ms galvez called on him.
"putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid.""safe from what?" i said, without waiting to be called on.
"terrorism," charles said. the others were nodding their heads.
"how do they do that? if a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew usall up —""ms galvez, marcus is violating school policy. we're not supposed tomake jokes about terrorist attacks —""who's making jokes?""thank you, both of you," ms galvez said. she looked really unhappy.
i felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. "i think that this is a really inter-esting discussion, but i'd like to hold it over for a future class. i think thatthese issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about themtoday. now, let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?"so we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the newlobbying strategies they'd devised for getting four women into everycongresscritter's office to lean on him and let him know what it wouldmean for his political future if he kept on denying women the vote. it82was normally the kind of thing i really liked — little guys making the bigand powerful be honest. but today i couldn't concentrate. it must havebeen darryl's absence. we both liked social studies and we would havehad our schoolbooks out and an im session up seconds after sittingdown, a back-channel for talking about the lesson.
i'd burned twenty paranoidxbox discs the night before and i had themall in my bag. i handed them out to people i knew were really, really intogaming. they'd all gotten an xbox universal or two the year before, butmost of them had stopped using them. the games were really expensiveand not a lot of fun. i took them aside between periods, at lunch andstudy hall, and sang the praises of the paranoidxbox games to the sky.
free and fun — addictive social games with lots of cool people playingthem from all over the world.
giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor bladebusiness" — companies like gillette give you free razor-blade handlesand then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. printercartridges are the worst for that — the most expensive champagne in theworld is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of apenny a gallon to make wholesale.
razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the"blades" from someone else. after all, if gillette can make nine bucks ona ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makesonly four bucks selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin isthe kind of thing that makes your average business-guy go all droolyand round-eyed.
so razor-blade companies like microsoft pour a lot of effort into mak-ing it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. inmicrosoft's case, every xbox has had countermeasures to keep you fromrunning software that was released by people who didn't pay themicrosoft blood-money for the right to sell xbox programs.
the people i met didn't think much about this stuff. they perked upwhen i told them that the games were unmonitored. these days, any on-line game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. first thereare the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location sothey can go all weird and silence of the lambs on you. then there are thecops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs.
worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying onour discussions and snitching on us for violating their terms of service,83which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no "clear or masked languagewhich insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality."i'm no 24/7 horn-dog, but i'm a seventeen year old boy. sex does comeup in conversation every now and again. but god help you if it came upin chat while you were gaming. it was a real buzz-kill. no one monitoredthe paranoidxbox games, because they weren't run by a company: theywere just games that hackers had written for the hell of it.
so these game-kids loved the story. they took the discs greedily, andpromised to burn copies for all of their friends — after all, games aremost fun when you're playing them with your buddies.
when i got home, i read that a group of parents were suing the schoolboard over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'dalready lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them.
i don't know who came up with the name xnet, but it stuck. you'dhear people talking about it on the muni. van called me up to ask me ifi'd heard of it and i nearly choked once i figured out what she was talk-ing about: the discs i'd started distributing last week had been sneaker-netted and copied all the way to oakland in the space of two weeks. itmade me look over my shoulder — like i'd broken a rule and now thedhs would come and take me away forever.
they'd been hard weeks. the bart had completely abandoned cashfares now, switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you wavedat the turnstiles to go through. they were cool and convenient, but everytime i used one, i thought about how i was being tracked. someone onxnet posted a link to an electronic frontier foundation white paper onthe ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paperhad tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at thebart stations.
i used the xnet for almost everything now. i'd set up a fake email ad-dress through the pirate party, a swedish political party that hated inter-net surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret fromeveryone, even the cops. i accessed it strictly via xnet, hopping from oneneighbor's internet connection to the next, staying anonymous — ihoped — all the way to sweden. i wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. ifbenson could figure it out, anyone could. my new handle, come up withon the spur of the moment, was m1k3y, and i got a lot of email frompeople who heard in chat rooms and message boards that i could helpthem troubleshoot their xnet configurations and connections.
84i missed harajuku fun madness. the company had suspended thegame indefinitely. they said that for "security reasons" they didn't thinkit would be a good idea to hide things and then send people off to findthem. what if someone thought it was a bomb? what if someone put abomb in the same spot?
what if i got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? banumbrellas! fight the menace of lightning!
i kept on using my laptop, though i got a skin-crawly feeling when iused it. whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why i didn't use it. ifigured i'd just do some random surfing with it every day, a little lesseach day, so that anyone watching would see me slowly changing myhabits, not doing a sudden reversal. mostly i read those creepy obits —all those thousands of my friends and neighbors dead at the bottom ofthe bay.
truth be told, i was doing less and less homework every day. i hadbusiness elsewhere. i burned new stacks of paranoidxbox every day,fifty or sixty, and took them around the city to people i'd heard werewilling to burn sixty of their own and hand them out to their friends.
i wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because i hadgood crypto on my side. crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," andit's been around since roman times (literally: augustus caesar was a bigfan and liked to invent his own codes, some of which we use today forscrambling joke punchlines in email).
crypto is math. hard math. i'm not going to try to explain it in detailbecause i don't have the math to really get my head around it, either —look it up on wikipedia if you really want.
but here's the cliff's notes version: some kinds of mathematical func-tions are really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in theother direction. it's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together andmake a giant number. it's really, really hard to take any given giant num-ber and figure out which primes multiply together to give you thatnumber.
that means that if you can come up with a way of scramblingsomething based on multiplying large primes, unscrambling it withoutknowing those primes will be hard. wicked hard. like, a trillion years ofall the computers ever invented working 24/7 won't be able to do it.
there are four parts to any crypto message: the original message,called the "cleartext." the scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." the85scrambling system, called the "cipher." and finally there's the key: secretstuff you feed into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext.
it used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. everyagency and government had its own ciphers and its own keys. the nazisand the allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambledtheir messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramblethem. that sounds like a good idea, right?
wrong.
the first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, i im-mediately said, "no way, that's bs. i mean, sure it's hard to do this primefactorization stuff, whatever you say it is. but it used to be impossible tofly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytesof storage. someone must have invented a way of descrambling the mes-sages." i had visions of a hollow mountain full of national securityagency mathematicians reading every email in the world andsnickering.
in fact, that's pretty much what happened during world war ii. that'sthe reason that life isn't more like castle wolfenstein, where i've spentmany days hunting nazis.
the thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. there's a lot of math thatgoes into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses themhas to keep them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have tofind a new cipher.
the nazi cipher was called enigma, and they used a little mechanicalcomputer called an enigma machine to scramble and unscramble themessages they got. every sub and boat and station needed one of these,so it was inevitable that eventually the allies would get their hands onone.
when they did, they cracked it. that work was led by my personal all-time hero, a guy named alan turing, who pretty much invented com-puters as we know them today. unfortunately for him, he was gay, soafter the war ended, the stupid british government forced him to get shotup with hormones to "cure" his homosexuality and he killed himself.
darryl gave me a biography of turing for my 14th birthday — wrappedin twenty layers of paper and in a recycled batmobile toy, he was likethat with presents — and i've been a turing junkie ever since.
now the allies had the enigma machine, and they could intercept lotsof nazi radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since86every captain had his own secret key. since the allies didn't have thekeys, having the machine shouldn't have helped.
here's where secrecy hurts crypto. the enigma cipher was flawed.
once turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the nazi cryptograph-ers had made a mathematical mistake. by getting his hands on an en-igma machine, turing could figure out how to crack any nazi message,no matter what key it used.
that cost the nazis the war. i mean, don't get me wrong. that's goodnews. take it from a castle wolfenstein veteran. you wouldn't want thenazis running the country.
after the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this.
the problem had been that turing was smarter than the guy whothought up enigma. any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable tosomeone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.
and the more they thought about it, the more they realized that anyonecan come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break.
but no one can figure out what a smarter person might do.
you have to publish a cipher to know that it works. you have to tell asmany people as possible how it works, so that they can thwack on it witheverything they have, testing its security. the longer you go withoutanyone finding a flaw, the more secure you are.
which is how it stands today. if you want to be safe, you don't usecrypto that some genius thought of last week. you use the stuff thatpeople have been using for as long as possible without anyone figuringout how to break them. whether you're a bank, a terrorist, a governmentor a teenager, you use the same ciphers.
if you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance thatsomeone out there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a turingon your butt, deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling atyour dumb gossip, financial transactions and military secrets.
so i knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but iwasn't ready to deal with histograms.
i got off the bart and waved my card over the turnstile as i headedup to the 24th street station. as usual, there were lots of weirdoshanging out in the station, drunks and jesus freaks and intense mexicanmen staring at the ground and a few gang kids. i looked straight pastthem as i hit the stairs and jogged up to the surface. my bag was empty87now, no longer bulging with the paranoidxbox discs i'd been distribut-ing, and it made my shoulders feel light and put a spring in my step as icame up the street. the preachers were at work still, exhorting in span-ish and english about jesus and so on.
the counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replacedby guys selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and wouldlift their legs if you showed them a picture of osama bin laden. therewas probably some cool stuff going on in their little brains and i made amental note to pick a couple of them up and take them apart later. face-recognition was pretty new in toys, having only recently made the leapfrom the military to casinos trying to find cheats, to law enforcement.
i started down 24th street toward potrero hill and home, rolling myshoulders and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurantsand thinking about dinner.
i don't know why i happened to glance back over my shoulder, but idid. maybe it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. i knew iwas being followed.
they were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made methink of either cops or the gay bikers who rode up and down the castro,but gay guys usually had better haircuts. they had on windbreakers thecolor of old cement and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. ithought of all the things a cop might wear on his waistband, of theutility-belt that dhs guy in the truck had worn. both guys were wearingbluetooth headsets.
i kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. i'd been expecting thissince i started. i'd been expecting the dhs to figure out what i was do-ing. i took every precaution, but severe-haircut woman had told me thatshe'd be watching me. she'd told me i was a marked man. i realized thati'd been waiting to get picked up and taken back to jail. why not? whyshould darryl be in jail and not me? what did i have going for me? ihadn't even had the guts to tell my parents — or his — what had reallyhappened to us.
i quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. i didn't have any-thing incriminating in my bag. not too incriminating, anyway. myschoolbook was running the crack that let me im and stuff, but half thepeople in school had that. i'd changed the way i encrypted the stuff onmy phone — now i did have a fake partition that i could turn back intocleartext with one password, but all the good stuff was hidden, andneeded another password to open up. that hidden section looked just88like random junk — when you encrypt data, it becomes indistinguish-able from random noise — and they'd never even know it was there.
there were no discs in my bag. my laptop was free of incriminatingevidence. of course, if they thought to look hard at my xbox, it wasgame over. so to speak.
i stopped where i was standing. i'd done as good a job as i could ofcovering myself. it was time to face my fate. i stepped into the nearestburrito joint and ordered one with carnitas — shredded pork — and ex-tra salsa. might as well go down with a full stomach. i got a bucket ofhorchata, too, an ice-cold rice drink that's like watery, semi-sweet rice-pudding (better than it sounds).
i sat down to eat, and a profound calm fell over me. i was about to goto jail for my "crimes," or i wasn't. my freedom since they'd taken me inhad been just a temporary holiday. my country was not my friend any-more: we were now on different sides and i'd known i could never win.
the two guys came into the restaurant as i was finishing the burritoand going up to order some churros — deep-fried dough with cinnamonsugar — for dessert. i guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired ofmy dawdling.
they stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. i took my churrofrom the pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of thedough before i turned around. i wanted to eat at least a little of mydessert. it might be the last dessert i got for a long, long time.
then i turned around. they were both so close i could see the zit onthe cheek of the one on the left, the little booger up the nose of the other.
"'scuse me," i said, trying to push past them. the one with the boogermoved to block me.
"sir," he said, "can you step over here with us?" he gestured towardthe restaurant's door.
"sorry, i'm eating," i said and moved again. this time he put his handon my chest. he was breathing fast through his nose, making the boogerwiggle. i think i was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over thehammering of my heart.
the other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker toreveal a sfpd insignia. "police," he said. "please come with us.""let me just get my stuff," i said.
89"we'll take care of that," he said. the booger one stepped right up closeto me, his foot on the inside of mine. you do that in some martial arts,too. it lets you feel if the other guy is shifting his weight, getting ready tomove.
i wasn't going to run, though. i knew i couldn't outrun fate.
