Homeland

by Cory Doctorow

  Here was a big slice of my city that had turned out to say WRONG. To say STOP. To say ENOUGH. I knew that these were all complicated problems that I couldn’t grasp in their entirety, but I also knew that “It’s complicated” was often an excuse, not an explanation. It was a way of copping out, saying that nothing further could be done, shrug, let’s get back to business as usual.

  I’d never seen this many people in one place. From the copters’ point of view, it was like the city had come to life, the streets turning from lifeless stone and concrete into a living carpet of humanity that stretched on and on and on. It was scary, and I had no idea how it would turn out, but I didn’t care. This was what I’d been waiting for, this was the thing that had to happen. No more business as usual. No more shrugging and saying “What can you do?” From now on, we’d do something. Not “Run in circles, scream and shout,” but “March together, demand a change.”

  I also realized that my stupid idea for what to do next for Joe’s campaign wasn’t so stupid after all.

  * * *

  Lemmy’s copters just kept buzzing the crowd, and our Ustream channel kept picking up viewers, up to a couple thousand now. No doubt a lot of them were in that crowd, but plenty were from all over the world, to judge by the realtime stats.

  Every so often, we’d deploy the three copters with the software-defined radio scanners to check for high concentrations of police-band chatter. The police had recently started to encrypt their signals, but that didn’t matter: we didn’t care what they were saying, we only wanted to detect places where a lot of police communications were taking place. In other words, we were interested in the fact that they were talking, not what they were talking about.

  When the three detected police-band spikes, they sent the fourth copter to home in on it and take some video. That way, we caught a lot of footage of arriving convoys of militarized cops and then the National Guard. Hundreds of them, and dozens of police buses—the kind they took masses of prisoners away in—and even little clusters of police quadcopters that were sending their signals back and forth in the same encrypted band.

  Two of these copters latched on to our scout and started to follow it around.

  “Uh-oh,” Lemmy said.

  “Why uh-oh?”

  “Well, even with these new power-cells, that little guy’s going to run out of battery soon enough, and I’m going to have to bring him in for a fresh power pack, and they’re going to know exactly who we are and where we are.”

  “Uh-oh,” I agreed. “Is flying a UAV illegal?”

  He shrugged. “Probably. I mean, no, not in general, but is there some kind of freaky, ‘conspiracy to abet civil disorder’ BS charge they could whomp up against anyone they don’t like? I’m pretty sure there is.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said again.

  “I guess I’ll just ditch it,” he said. “Man, this sucks.”

  “How much time is on the power pack?”

  He looked at the telemetry streaming off the scout. “Maybe twenty minutes.”

  “Can you tell it to land somewhere out of the way, maybe a rooftop, and we can try to collect it later?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Good one.”

  I used Google Earth to scout out the nearby roofs and found a likely looking spot, which I showed to Lemmy, and he took over steering the scout to it—it was away from the main body of the protest, and who knows what the SFPD crew who were piloting our tails thought we were up to. I got to steer the remaining three, staying away from the police copters. Mostly, I just tried to zoom in on any place where things looked interesting. I found one spot, right by civic center, where a bunch of parents with small children had made a kind of kindergarten, an open circle of people with a bunch of playing kids in the middle. Boy, was that cool—made me think that my fellow humans were really basically great.

  I got a call from Ange, who, of course, was already in the thick of the crowd, blocks away from me within the mass. I told her where I was and she told me to stay put and she’d come and meet me.

  “Okay, we’re down,” Lemmy said. “You bookmarked that location, right?”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “Roger that, mission control,” he said.

  “Yeah, that.” I flicked from one copter feed to the next, watching as a cam soared over our heads and I saw that we weren’t on the edge of the protest anymore—it now stretched for two blocks behind us, and there were lots of people still arriving.

  I was still taking in this fact when a large, firm hand clamped my shoulder and I had a momentary panic, sure that this was someone from Zyz come to snatch me out of the crowd. Before I was even conscious of what I was doing, I had started to move into the thick of the crowd, turning sideways to eel my way through the small gaps between bodies. But then a familiar voice said, “Marcus!” and I stopped and turned around. It was Joe Noss, in his usual campaigning clothes, sweater and all. He was grinning like a bandit.

  “Joe!” I said. “Sorry, you startled me!”

  “Ah, I know no one wants to run into the boss on the weekend,” he said. “Isn’t this something, then?”

  “It’s amazing,” I said, thinking as I said it that maybe he wasn’t someone who supported this kind of thing and wondering if I’d said the wrong thing. “I mean, I think it’s incredible, right?”

  “Marcus, in all my life I’ve never seen anything like this. If there was ever a time to be an independent candidate, it’s now. These people are just plain fed up with the way things work in government. And so am I; so there we are, all in this together.”

  “Preach, brother!” Lemmy said, and Joe smiled his thousand-watt smile at him.

  “Hello there,” he said. “I’m Joseph Noss.”

  “Oh, I know it! I’m Lemmy.”

  “Lemmy’s a friend of mine. From the hackerspace.”

  Joe shook his hand. “What a treat. Marcus has told me about your space. It sounds, well, extraordinary. Like you’re some kind of superheroes of science. From what he tells me, you folks can build just about anything you set your mind to.”

  Lemmy nodded vigorously. “Yeah, pretty much. And if we can’t build it, someone at some other makerspace or hackerspace will help us out. We have a Friday night drop-in—you should come by and see what we’re up to.”

  “I’d love that, though perhaps I might have to wait until after election day, as I’m a little preoccupied.” He scanned the crowd again. “I can’t get over this,” he said. “All these people.”

  “Look at this,” Lemmy said, and showed him his screen.

  “Is that from one of the news networks?” Joe asked.

  Lemmy laughed. “Yeah, HNN, Hackerspace News Network. It’s coming off some unmanned quadcopters I built. Up there.” He pointed at the sky. Joe looked up, looked back at him.

  “You’re joking. You’re flying helicopters by remote control?”

  “Oh, they only weigh a couple pounds and they’re the size of dinner plates. Little guys, nothing fancy. Maybe fifty bucks’ worth of parts in each of them. Most expensive thing in them are the batteries, and I hand-built them from salvaged cell phone battery packs.”

  Joe put his hands on his hips and cocked his head at Lemmy, as if wondering whether he was pulling his leg. Then he shook his head in admiration. “Incredible,” he said. “Just amazing.”

  “Want to fly one?” Lemmy said, tapping at his screen. “There’s about fifteen thousand people watching the feed off this one, go nuts. Just use the keypad.”

  Joe looked at the phone in his hand as if it were radioactive. “I don’t think I’m qualified to operate an aircraft.”

  “Oh, you’re not operating it. It operates itself. You just tell it where to go.”

  I thought Joe was going to balk, but he prodded tentatively at the screen, then more forcefully. “Amazing,” he said, after a little time. “Just … amazing. What’s this red icon flashing for, though?”

  Lemmy took the phone. “Low battery,” he said. “Better bring th
e gang in for a battery swap. Luckily I brought a ton of charged spares.”

  He disappeared down the rabbit hole, all his attention focused on his phone, doing that classic nerd-focus thing, radiating a cone of “I’m busy, don’t bug me” as his fingers danced.

  There was something I wanted to tell Joe, but I was scared to. My mouth had dried up, but my palms were wet. The crowd noise around us was loud, but I could still hear my heart in my ears.

  “Joe,” I said. He looked at me with those eyes that seemed to bore straight into my soul.

  “Yes, Marcus?” he said. His whole body language shifted into a posture of thoughtful listening, one of those politician magic tricks that seemed to set him apart from the rest of us. Part of my mind wondered if he even knew he was doing it, while the rest of my mind was calming down and responding to it. Minds are weird.

  “I think I’ve got an idea for your campaign. It’s a bit, um, ambitious, though.”

  “Ambitious is good. I like ambitious.”

  “What if we give our supporters a vote-finding machine, a little app they can run on their PCs. First it goes through your contacts lists on Facebook, Twitter, email, and whatever, and gives you a one-click way to send a message to each person in your neighborhood who you think you could recruit to support your campaign. We could give them some checkboxes for issues that they think each contact cares about, and automatically create a pitch note with your positions on each. Every new supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Then we go after everyone in the local campaign donor records, cross-checking to see if any existing supporters have a connection to them that we can use to pitch them for money. And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote.

  “But we don’t just use a static pitch. We start with what we think our best talking points are, write several variations, and test them to see which ones perform best. A/B testing—is this one or that one more effective? We can tweak the pitch several times a day, if we get enough volume, all through the campaign, like polling but fast. And anyone who recruits a friend gets points, and we do leaderboards, and invite the best performers every week to a big beer-and-pizza party at HQ, make it all into a game, a championship.

  “Meanwhile, we use mapping software that knows where every voter is to calculate the optimal places to hold events around the state. The press database is blasting them out—and the press is coming, because they’re actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they’re much more like stand-up or The Daily Show—full of great, witty sound bites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they’re so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events.”

  Joe’s eyes were wide. “You can build this?”

  I shrugged. “Probably. I mean, most of it sounds like it’s just a quick tweak of some of the free/open campaignware out there. But I don’t think anyone’s done it for elections yet. I could build something, get it running.”

  “So if you could build it, then my opponents could, too?”

  “Can’t see why not. But that sounds like a reason for you to build it first.”

  He laughed. I had an idea, though.

  “So, but I’ve also been thinking of ways you can use the net that your opponents can’t.”

  “Go on.”

  The same remote part of my mind wondered why he didn’t say, “Can’t this wait until Monday?” But then, he was Joe. He was the candidate. He didn’t get weekends. He was here, with one of his campaign workers, and that meant that he was, fundamentally, at work.

  “You know the darknet docs, right?” It took everything in me not to look around at that moment to see if anyone was watching.

  “I’m familiar with them,” he said. His face was unreadable, the same mask of listening he’d slipped into when I started talking.

  “Well, they’re hard to get at right now. You have to do a lot of stuff with Tor, which is this anonymizing technology that’s kind of tricky. On the plus side, it’s really hard to take them down or even figure out where they are. On the other hand, they’re hard for normal people to go and see. That’s because no one’s hosting them on a regular, boring old Internet site, as a collection of documents that anyone with a web browser can see and link to.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I think that’s right. The main reason I didn’t go and look at them myself is that it seemed altogether too complicated for someone who wasn’t a dedicated techno-ninja.”

  I started to say, It’s not that hard—and was about to launch into a little tutorial about how to use Tor, but I stopped myself. It didn’t matter, and besides, if Joe felt like it was too complicated, it was important to acknowledge that he had the right to feel that way.

  “Well, I have looked at these documents, and from what I’ve seen of them, they’re full of corruption, crime, and sleaze. And by and large, this corruption, crime, and sleaze has been committed by the big parties and their pals. So it seems to me that if you want to convince people that they should risk voting for an independent candidate, it’d help if you could show people that they’re not ‘wasting their votes’ when they vote for you, because any other vote is going to give power to the same dirtbags who did all this bad stuff.”

  “You think we should host all the darknet documents,” he said. He didn’t look like he thought it was the worst idea in the world, but he also didn’t throw his arms up and give me a bear hug and shout, Marcus, you’ve done it!

  “Yeah.”

  “From what I understand, only a small percentage of these documents have been examined. What if we put all this stuff on our site and it turns out that its full of lies or dirty jokes or peoples’ bank details?”

  Damn, I liked Joe. That was a really good question. “Well, there’s the darknet spreadsheet, and that lists all the docs that have been combed over by the darknet team, whoever they are”—I made a conscious effort not to look guilty—“so we could just slurp those in. I could write a script that checks the spreadsheet several times a day and grabs anything that’s been described.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Well, that’s better than putting it all up, but, Marcus, we don’t know who these darknet people are. What you’re talking about is fundamentally giving them the ability to put anything they want on the Joe Noss campaign website, just by adding it to their spreadsheet. That seems like a big step to me. And a big risk.”

  That was frustratingly true. I hate it when people are right at me. “Um,” I said. “Well, what if we set up a requirement that everything has to be looked at by a human in our office before it goes live?” I thought for a moment longer. “I could put up all the titles of the docs that we haven’t approved yet, and let visitors to the site vote for which ones they want reviewed first. So if they started pouring in by the thousands, we’d prioritize the ones that Joe Noss supporters were most interested in.”

  He started nodding midway through this, and by the time I finished, he was smiling. “That’s a very interesting idea. Not at all what I had in mind, I have to say, but it’s pretty interesting. Being the best place in the world to find out about the corruption of traditional politics is a smart move for a reforming, independent political candidate. And you think you could build this?”

  I thought about it for a moment or two, mentally sketching out the way I’d stitch together off-the-shelf parts from various software libraries that already existed for Drupal, the industrial-strength system we were using to manage our website. “Yeah,” I said. “It should be pretty straightforward. I’ve done most of that stuff before, it’s just a matter of doing it again, but gluing it together in a different way.”

  He nodded again. “Do it,” he said. “Do both. Build me a demo and I’ll show it to Flor and my advisory committee. I might get you in to help with that. If they sign off on it, we’ll make it happen. Can you have something for Monday?”

  It was Saturday. Theoretically, I could do this on Sund
ay. He’d said a demo, right? I could nail up a demo in a couple hours. “Yeah,” I said. “I can do that.”

  “You are my delta force ninja, Marcus!”

  Lemmy straightened up from his work on the quadcopters’ batteries and laughed. “That sounds about right.”

  My phone rang then—it was Ange, lost in the crowd nearby, and I talked her in, waving my hands in the air so she could spot me. She gave me a giant hug, and I introduced her to Joe.

  “Marcus thinks you’re pretty awesome,” she said to him, by way of hello.

  “It’s entirely mutual,” he said, and the way he said it, it was like he meant it, not like a mere formality. I could actually feel my head swelling. “And I’m sure you’re something special, given what I know about him. You should come by our office sometime and say hello, watch Marcus do his magic.”

  “I’d like that,” Ange said, and I could tell she felt the same immediate trust and bond with Noss that I’d felt. It was like magic—scary and wonderful at once.

  Ange crouched down to say hi to Lemmy and went to work with him getting the quadcopters ready to go again. She’d tuned in to our feed—following my tweet—and was itching to do some flying. I could tell that Lemmy would have a hard time getting the controller away from her.

  “I imagine you go to these all the time,” Joe said to me.