Fishbowl

by Matthew Glass

  But there were other people who weren’t so sure that the responsibility had been faced – or that it was even up to the people who ran social networks to decide how to do that.

  23

  SENATOR DIANE MCKENRICK of Arizona was a three-term veteran of the upper house and a leading member of the right wing of the Republican Party. Daughter of Ed McKenrick, a firebrand Arizona attorney general who had gone on to serve as a reactionary justice of the state supreme court, she was an alumnus of Yale law school and had been a partner at the Phoenix law firm of Witherby, Hollins, Franck before entering politics. Now aged fifty-nine, McKenrick was chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and was widely thought to be positioning herself for a tilt at the Republican nomination for the presidency the following year. Her long experience in security affairs gave her a solid claim to the role of commander in chief – especially important for a female candidate – and her reputation as a hawk would reassure a good portion of the party base. Like any putative presidential candidate, what she needed was something to stamp her identity solidly into the national consciousness.

  Nothing would do that better than taking resolute action in defence of the United States against terrorism – even if it was home-grown.

  The senator had watched events following the Denver bombing closely. The Homeland Security Committee had received a closed-door briefing from the most senior officials in the FBI, and she already planned to convene public hearings into the intelligence failure that had allowed two ex-Marines, apparently well known in extremist right-wing circles, not only to plan but to execute the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil after 9/11, and had made an announcement to that effect. But the hearings would have to wait until after the FBI and the other agencies involved had completed their initial investigations. That would mean a delay of at least a couple of months. By then, the raw shock of the bombing would have receded and, outside Denver and the beltway, the nation’s attention would have moved on. And she would be investigating investigators, not people implicated in the actual crimes. McKenrick expected to receive a good degree of coverage for the hearings, but nothing like the attention she would have received if she could have held them right then, and if she could have had in front of her committee people with some responsibility for what had happened.

  The allegation of the link with Fishbowl thus caught her attention. She had heard only vaguely of the company, and it had probably stuck in her mind only because of its ridiculous name, but McKenrick had sat on hearings in the past into the security implications of social media. Supporters of social media cited the role it had played in helping democracy movements bring down repressive regimes in places as far-flung as Tunisia and Thailand. She saw this enthusiasm as naive. They saw democracy – she saw destabilization, and the potential for similar activities by extremist minorities against democratically elected governments. If what was being said about the usage of this Fishbowl website by the Denver killers was true, it was as if her prophecy had come to life.

  When McKenrick was told that the CEO of Fishbowl had posted a statement saying that Fishbowl might have unwittingly facilitated the planning of the atrocity, she read it in disbelief. In the senator’s opinion, admitting that something like that might have happened without pledging action to stop it in future was an outrage. For that reason, it was also a gift. A gold-plated, diamond-encrusted gift. So much so that she couldn’t believe anyone connected with one of these companies would ever do it. She got her chief of staff to call Fishbowl and make sure it was genuine. Apparently it was.

  An opportunity like this didn’t come along every day. The senator felt as if she almost had a duty to see if she could make something out of it, to tie social networks to terrorism and raise people’s awareness of the true magnitude of the threat they posed. And burnish her security credentials on the national stage along the way. If the Fishbowl involvement in the Denver bombing exposed a chord of anxiety in the American people about lack of control over social media, and if she could touch that chord while it was still raw, she might go from a name known in Arizona, Washington and the arcane world of the intelligence establishment to a name known across the country.

  McKenrick had a long discussion with her senior staffers. Some thought she might succeed, others thought the link between Fishbowl and the bombing, still unproven, was too tenuous to create a generalizable case. Eventually the senator had her press spokesman put out a statement welcoming Mr Koss’s intent to cooperate and saying that Senator McKenrick was following very carefully the investigation into the role that Fishbowl and, indeed, other social media sites, might well have played in the taking of the lives of 300 American citizens in Denver. It suggested that if the executives running these sites, as Mr Koss had confessed, were aware of their potential to offer a medium of conspiracy to terrorists, then maybe the time had come for them to do something about it.

  And then she waited to see what kind of reaction her statement was going to get.

  The noises out of the press at the right end of the spectrum were encouraging. McKenrick decided to push things a little further. She appeared on a couple of politics shows to say that she was looking for responsibility, not restriction. But if restriction was the only way to enforce responsibility, then perhaps some kind of restriction would need to be considered. Or perhaps some other means of ensuring that the next pair of deranged fanatics wouldn’t be provided with the medium to do what Hodgkin and Buckett had done. When asked what she had in mind, she replied that there were steps that Congress could take, and they were all under consideration.

  Andrei and the rest of the Fishbowl leadership didn’t even register a vague statement made in Washington by a senator they had never heard of, amidst all the predictable noise from a thousand sources about the dangers of social media. McKenrick and her team, for their part, watched the reaction from the right-wing press and the hard core of the Republican Party, her natural constituency. There was interest in what she had said. It was high time that someone got control of the anti-life, anti-gun and anti-Americanism that passed for normal on so much of the internet, and if Diane McKenrick thought she could do it, then she ought to come on out and tell the nation how.

  The senator talked to people whose support would be critical if she decided to take things further. She concluded that enough of them were behind her.

  Two weeks after the Denver bombing, Diane McKenrick stood up in front of a press conference, waved a copy of Andrei Koss’s statement, read the first sentence, and said that someone in Congress had to take a stand. She then issued a five-point plan for regulation of social networking sites, involving higher levels of transparency, increased accountability, and, most radically, the holding of officers of social networking companies personally answerable for enabling criminal activities that could be demonstrated to have been planned or promoted by use of the site. She announced that she was sponsoring a bill to put her proposed measures in place before any further catastrophes befell the American people.

  McKenrick’s proposal was challengeable on at least three constitutional grounds and, in normal circumstances, wouldn’t have merited discussion. But in normal circumstances, Diane McKenrick, who was as wily an operator as any three-term senator, wouldn’t have put the proposal forward. Challenges would take years. If her legislation did make it through, only to be struck down later, it would make little difference to her. By then the election would have taken place, and she would either be the US president or still have another four years in her term as senator. And if the legislation didn’t make it through, she would still cement her place as the champion of the hawks and have a host of targets amongst her rivals to beat up on security grounds as she made her run for the presidency.

  If Diane McKenrick was hoping to touch a chord on the national stage, she did, to an extent that not even she could have envisaged.

  Her proposal polarized the nation. Emotion was pent up after Denver on all sides of the political
spectrum, just waiting for a valve to vent. Hardcore users of social networks – disproportionately young, educated and affluent – came out against the senator with visceral revulsion. Light or non-users of social networks – disproportionately old, poorly educated and blue collar – swung behind her. The committed right, bruised by the fact that Buckett and Hodgkin had emerged from their own shadowy fringe, saw in McKenrick’s attack a way of shifting the blame towards a target they could excoriate. The committed left saw it as an assault on freedom and diversity. But in those early days after Denver, it took courage to make a case that people should be free to say what they chose and exchange whatever information they desired without being castigated as soft on terrorism. Many liberal politicians spoke softly or went to ground. Right-wing politicians felt empowered to raise the volume, telling hair-raising stories of things that had been done and said on social networks that were severely distorted, if not entirely fabricated. The first amendment was in retreat before a posse of enraged vigilantes who seemed to have the wind at their backs. Not sure which way the chips were going to fall, the president prevaricated. His press secretary announced that the White House was studying the senator’s proposal.

  In the furore, the facts of what Buckett and Hodgkin had actually done on Fishbowl became unimportant. Ideas of creating an American Taliban, which Buckett had aired a couple of times, were treated largely as a joke by others on the website, who failed to grasp his intent. Reading his posts carefully now, it was possible, with hindsight, to find clues that pointed to Denver, although there was nothing approaching an explicit plan that he enunciated, and the ravings of some of the other participants in these forums were even more lurid. In this world of violent fantasy, it seemed, Buckett had been a rare example of someone who was prepared to act. Nothing in his words picked him out as that person.

  But someone in the FBI was leaking information to McKenrick’s office and there was enough in Buckett’s words for Senator McKenrick to quote him selectively, as if his remarks on Fishbowl set out nothing short of a comprehensive blueprint for the killings. She gave an interview in which she cited a few ambiguous phrases of Buckett’s – ostentatiously reading from an official-looking dossier, which in fact contained a single sheet with three type-written sentences – claiming that these were only the least damning of the terrorist’s postings and that the FBI was in possession of much more explicit material.

  The director of the FBI called the officer leading the enquiry to ask if that was true, and when he discovered that it wasn’t, he called McKenrick and asked her to desist. The senator responded by threatening to call the FBI director before the Committee for Homeland Security to explain what progress his inquiry had made so far in accounting for the FBI’s dereliction of duty in failing to identify Buckett and Hodgkin as potential mass murderers.

  On social networks themselves, numerous group pages were set up in which people registered their opposition to McKenrick’s campaign. Some were more inflammatory than others, but all had in common a view that free speech had to be protected and that website operators shouldn’t be called to do the work of the police. Mass e-petitions were organized against her. McKenrick turned that to her advantage, disparagingly representing the people who signed up to those pages as lily-livered liberals and mocking them as housebound sociophobes whose idea of action was a click of a mouse. She seemed to welcome each report of more people joining group pages against her, as if their abundance proved her case. A few group pages were set up supporting her as well, but never garnered many users. McKenrick cited the number of pages, but never the number of participants, and somehow made them out to be red-blooded Americans when a large number of them were actually government-sponsored users from repressive foreign regimes with a strong interest in seeing social networks curtailed.

  Fishbowl hired a PR consultancy to help it fight back. So did other social networks. They were all in danger if McKenrick managed to introduce the principle of criminal responsibility for activities that took place on their websites. But they were all speaking over each other without coordination or intent. It took a tech CEO in Silicon Valley to see that he and his rivals were shooting off too many shotguns in too many directions. If they could come together and speak with one voice, fire with one aim, they could convert their scattergun defence into one booming, targeted attack, which at least would give them a chance of countering the force that was sweeping towards them.

  He was a 41-year-old, ex-New Yorker called Jerry Glick and he ran Charitas, a social network that specialized in providing a community for workers in charities, aid agencies and other NGOs. He took the unprecedented step of convening a meeting of some of the most prominent tech CEOs in the country. Since the crisis had been sparked by the alleged involvement of Fishbowl in the planning of the Denver bombing, Andrei Koss was invited as well.

  24

  HALF A DOZEN people were already in the conference room at the Palo Alto Sheraton when Andrei arrived. Jerry Glick came over and shook Andrei’s hand, then introduced him to the others. Andrei knew who they were – a collection of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Even though by now Fishbowl was often spoken of in the same breath as their companies, Andrei, who avoided any kind of public appearances, had never met any of them or mixed in their circles. At the best of times, he was terrible at making small talk. Now he found himself standing awkwardly, watching these icons of the internet, saying nothing.

  The last few CEOs arrived, Mike Sweetman among them. ‘You’re with the big boys now, huh, Andrei?’ he said, without extending his hand.

  Andrei shrugged.

  ‘We’ll see,’ growled Sweetman.

  They sat. The CEOs were ten men and one woman, a ratio that would have surprised no one who knew the tech world. A pair of lawyers was also in attendance to take records of the meeting and ensure there could be no later allegation of trade collusion amongst the participants, many of whom were competitors with each other. Glick opened the meeting. The first thing he did was ask Andrei, as the leader of the company most under fire, to say a few words.

  Andrei hadn’t prepared anything. He tried to gather some thoughts.

  ‘Well, first,’ he said, ‘I think I should say that I feel like the least qualified person to speak in this gathering.’

  He looked around. Every eye was on him. Faces that he knew from photographs. The notion that they were all watching him, waiting to hear what he had to say, was so incongruous that his throat almost dried up.

  He coughed. ‘I’ll guess I’ll just say what I think. I’m not trying to do anything but build Fishbowl into a strong, flourishing operation, I guess like all the rest of you with your ventures. This campaign by Senator McKenrick affects each of us in the same way. She’s focused on Fishbowl but her bill takes in all of us. You probably all know that I put out a certain statement when Fishbowl was first identified as being possibly involved in the planning of the Denver bombing, and the senator has made quite a lot of that. I admitted we might have been the medium for some communications. Looks like we weren’t, not in any significant way. I know this may sound kind of odd, but even so, I don’t regret writing that. I think it’s important we admit it. If we don’t, it becomes the gorilla in the room. The truth is, stuff gets said and talked about on our networks that none of us would approve of.

  ‘I’ve been cooperating with the government in the investigation after the bombing, but there’s a world of difference between that and prior restraint. The reason I’ve been cooperating is because I think that’s the price you have to pay for avoiding prior restraint. Either we fight to the death to allow free speech on our networks, or we become agents of the state. That’s not why I founded Fishbowl. It’s not a fight I would ever have particularly wanted to have, and not now, but I guess it’s one that’s always been coming to all of us. And me, if it’s about free speech … I’ll fight to the death.’

  ‘I couldn’t care less if you fight to your death,’ rumbled Mike Sweetman ominously, ‘but you’re
fighting to ours too. Did you get any legal advice before you put that statement out?’

  Andrei didn’t answer.

  ‘Well, you screwed us all with that one. Damn right we’re all in the same boat – and it’s your statement that put us there.’

  ‘Mike,’ said someone else, ‘he’s right. It’s a fight we were always going to have.’

  ‘And I don’t think this is the time to start allocating blame,’ said Glick.

  ‘When is the time, Jerry?’ demanded Sweetman. ‘We’re fighting for our lives here. We’re fighting for our independence. If McKenrick’s bill gets through, you and I and probably every other person in this room will end up in jail unless we shut down. Laws get passed in the heat of the moment that allow the government to do terrible things and no one gets around to changing them back. You remember the Patriot Act? And who do we have to thank for this thing now? Mr Koss. That statement he seems to be so proud of is being used over and over and over against us, and the truth is, what Mr Koss over there runs is a parasitic excuse for a business that lives off the back of the business that I’ve built and you’ve built and half a dozen other guys in this room have built. And so he comes along and sits on the back of us and shits all over us with his statement. Only thing is that he shits on himself as well, which, frankly, is quite a feat.’

  There was silence again, part embarrassed, part supportive. There were a couple of nods around the table.