Kill Switch

by William Hertling

  Angie knew they’d be thinking over the implications for Tapestry. They still wouldn’t be seeing the biggest picture yet, how this would essentially change the entire Internet. The days of centralized services and data stores would go away, to be replaced by an age of absolute security and total decentralization.

  No, they wouldn’t appreciate that, not yet.

  But someday soon everyone, including the government, would see that. The looming fight over the future of the net would be bigger than any yet fought.

  Chapter 19

  “I’m going to be fifty soon,” Angie said when she picked up Igloo in the morning. “Thomas insists I get more exercise.”

  “I don’t see why I have to be subjected to it,” said Igloo. If she was going to get exercise, she’d rather it come in the form of bedroom activity.

  “Because the middle portion of the hike is signal free. Great talking opportunity if we bring an EMF sensor.”

  Two hours in, they were deep inside an old growth forest in the sunken crater of Larch Mountain. The sky was nearly completely blocked by towering Douglas firs, and the light took on a dusk-like quality. The conversation finally turned serious.

  “Let’s talk about Tapestry 2.0.”

  “So that’s what this is all about.” Igloo said.

  Angie ran through a rapid explanation of the government visit, the FISA court order that mandated spying on their users, and her plan to completely decentralize Tapestry and distribute the code to user clients and browsers.

  “When every component is off our servers, there will be nothing left for the FISA court order to affect.”

  “My work on onion routing is part of this, right? But you had me start on that months ago.”

  “I knew it was only a matter of time before we got a court order forcing us to provide an NSA tap. The day was coming, and we had to get started before it was too late.”

  “How many people are working on it?” Igloo asked.

  “There are eight parallel efforts on T2,” Angie said. “Client-side containers, distributed ledger, onion routing, secure updating, and data synchronization are the biggest chunks, and then some smaller pieces. Eighteen people in total. But the browser containers are FUBAR, and I’m going to need to add people to that effort.”

  “Eighteen people is a lot to keep a secret,” Igloo said.

  “Twenty now that Amber and Maria know.”

  “How long have they known? It seems like they’ve been asking me questions forever.”

  “They’ve known about some of the individual efforts. I couldn’t keep the large chunks secret without them getting suspicious. But I didn’t give them the bigger picture until the court order came.”

  Igloo experienced a pang of jealousy that she knew from experience had to do with feeling left out. She should be used to Angie keeping secrets from her, but somehow it still hurt every time. That Amber and Maria had learned about T2 first didn’t make things any easier to accept.

  “Why’d you tell them?” How long would it take before Angie truly trusted her? That’s what she wanted to ask, but she was too afraid. She still didn’t know how Angie felt about her being kinky. It hadn’t come up since their last meeting, and she wasn’t about to bring it up now.

  “Because we need to pick up the pace, and having everyone work on components separately isn’t going to help us to make the deadline. We need everything to come together before we’re forced into compliance.”

  “That’s two months. You’re telling me the container technology isn’t ready. Ben, Diana, and I may not be able to have the onion routing ready either.”

  “Shit,” Angie said, breathing hard as they hiked up a steep section. “You’re working with Ben and Diana? I didn’t realize.”

  “You told me I could poach anyone I wanted. What’s the big deal?”

  “They’re working on the distributed ledgers.” Angie huffed and puffed, falling behind her as they rounded a switchback.

  “They said they weren’t busy.” Igloo looked at the trail ahead, which just went up and up.

  “I told them…not to let anyone know…what they were working on.”

  Igloo turned to check Angie. “You okay?”

  “Yeah…just out of…breath. Can we…rest?”

  Igloo nodded, and Angie leaned with her hand on her knee, breathing hard.

  “This is the problem with compartmentalizing,” Igloo said. “I had no idea you’d have Ben and Diana on the ledgers, or I wouldn’t have approached them about the onion routing. It’s not like we have thousands of engineers. We’re going to collide seeking out the same few experts.”

  Angie nodded. “My mistake. I wanted to keep as many parts secret as long as possible. I didn’t want anyone figuring out the end goal.”

  “But why? Secrecy comes at a cost.” Igloo felt like an imposter. She kept most of her life secret from everyone around her. Kink. Poly. She was hardly a role model for transparency. Half the time she couldn’t even talk honestly with Essie because she was worried about hurting her feelings.

  Angie looked back and forth. Igloo followed her gaze though it was pointless. They were completely alone. Still, Angie pulled out her phone and scanned for radio frequency emissions.

  Igloo tried to wait, but Angie was stressing her patience. “We’re surrounded by forest on all sides, in a crater with no signal. What are you looking for?”

  “They could be hitting us with satellite,” Angie said. “Or have hidden devices in the woods, recording us for later transmission. Come on, let’s keep hiking.”

  “They would have to have known where we were coming to have emplaced devices here. You didn’t disclose where we were going until we started up the trailhead. They might have planted stuff on us, but you scanned us in the car.”

  “I know. It’s just…I think there’s a government mole inside Tapestry,” she said, ignoring everything Igloo said.

  Igloo didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. This wasn’t the first time Angie had made this accusation. Last time they’d spent months cross-checking employees, using every backdoor and conduit they had to probe the government, and they’d never uncovered even a hint that there was a government mole inside Tapestry.

  “We never turned up any evidence that anyone was spying on us,” Igloo said. “But with each month, you’re becoming more paranoid about it. Has something changed, or is this just more of the same general anxiety?”

  Angie had grown increasingly indignant any time Igloo brought up the topic of her paranoia. But there was no way someone could live with the lies and pressure Angie had to deal with and not jump at shadows. Yes, back when they founded Tapestry, a rogue government agent tried to kill Angie, but he’d been hired by the CEO of Tomo. And yeah, they’d found the occasional government tap monitoring Angie and Tapestry, but that was fairly run-of-the-mill for the intelligence community. There was nothing to indicate the kind of targeted focus that preoccupied Angie so much. Sure, they had to avoid the mass monitoring the government routinely did. But it wasn’t like there were hundreds of government employees investigating Angie around the clock.

  “That’s just the thing,” Angie said. “There is no evidence of spying. Nothing to suggest our Internet connectivity is tapped. No probing of our machines. No attempts on my home.”

  “Soooo….there’s no evidence?” Igloo wondered where she was going with this line of thinking.

  “Exactly. Logically, we know there have to be government agencies tracking us, tracking me, specifically. But there’s no digital trail pointing to it happening electronically. If it’s not happening electronically, that must be because they’ve got a person on the inside. An employee who is spying for them, and then reporting out of band.”

  “You’re concluding that the lack of evidence of government spying is evidence that the government is spying?”

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Angie said.

  “That’s because it is crazy. I hate to bring it up again, but this is the definiti
on of paranoid delusions. How many hundreds of times have we put surveillance detection procedures in place and discovered no hint of anything? Can’t it just be possible that the government isn’t interested in you anymore? That what happened two years ago was just a one-off thing?”

  “I’m not paranoid. The government—” Angie stood with her fist on her waist. “Why are you crying?”

  Igloo wasn’t sure what had come over her. Suddenly she realized what she was feeling all along. Angie had been her foundation these past few years, and if Angie cracked, then what would she have? She’d be on her own. And that was exactly the same thing that she’d been feeling about being left out of Angie’s plans: alone in the world. She wanted to be close to Angie, to feel that sense of companionship and fighting together as a team that they had back when they founded Tapestry. But how could she give voice to all those feelings?

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Angie said, continuing down the trail.

  “You can barely hike up this hill.” Igloo walked side-by-side with her.

  “So now you’re questioning my physical condition in addition to my mental health?” Angie smiled, one eyebrow raised. “I’m out of shape. You try hiking after spending all your time sitting on planes and in meeting rooms. Besides, this is more than a ‘hill’.”

  They crested a rise, and suddenly the faint trail they were on joined a more heavily trafficked one. In the distance, the trees opened up to a clearing.

  “It’s not about that, really. I’m worried about you, about whether you are having delusions when you get preoccupied with the government. And I just don’t know. I have to either trust you, when there’s no evidence of what you suspect, or doubt you—in which case, I’m basically on my own here, and both options suck.”

  Angie reached out, put her hand on Igloo’s shoulder. “I hear you. I’ve been doing this a long time. I may be cracked in a few places, but I’m not broken. I know the no-evidence thing sounds wonky, but lack of something you can reasonably expect to be present is evidence as much as the presence of something you don’t expect. We need as many precautions as possible. If the government knew everything we had planned, they’d take steps to stop us.”

  “What sort of steps?”

  “I don’t know,” Angie said, “and that scares me.”

  They came to the edge of the trees, and the clearing was revealed to be a sparsely occupied parking lot. A family with a baby and a small child extracted a baby stroller from their trunk and started toward a paved pathway to the top of the mountain.

  “We could have driven here?” Angie said, gesturing with defeat at the parking. “What was the point of hiking it?”

  “I thought you wanted the exercise and the quiet and the signal-free zone.”

  Angie’s only reply was a grumble.

  “Let’s see what’s at the top.”

  They followed the family, avoiding further discussion of Tapestry by silent agreement until they were back in the bowl where the chance of eavesdropping decreased substantially.

  After a few minutes of increasingly exposed hiking, they came to a rocky outcropping, and ascended a flight of concrete stairs to the summit of Larch Mountain.

  “Holy shit,” Igloo said.

  The mother with the child gave Igloo a dirty look.

  “Look at this!” Igloo rushed to the railing.

  Angie followed slowly and joined her.

  Mount Hood stood majestic, looming large on the eastern horizon.

  “What mountain is that?” Igloo asked, pointing in the misty haze.

  “Mount Rainier. Look at the plaques.” Angie pointed out markers in the concrete, indicating Rainier, Hood, Adams, Jefferson, and Saint Helens.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Igloo said.

  “Would you please watch your language?” The mother pulled her child closer.

  “Sorry,” Igloo said, and ran to another section of railing.

  “You haven’t seen this before?” Angie asked, clearly puzzled.

  “Just in photos,” Igloo said, still in awe. “Why don’t pictures look the same?” She held her hands up, making a smartphone-sized rectangle with her fingers, and peered through the center to see Mount Hood.

  Angie shook her head but said nothing.

  On the way back down the mountain, Igloo bounced with energy, rejuvenated by the view up top, but Angie trudged along, subdued.

  “If there’s a mole,” Angie said, “if we even suspect a mole, we can’t let on that we know.”

  “Why?” Igloo was tired of fighting with Angie. She’d just play along. She pulled a chocolate bar out of her pack and offered a piece to Angie.

  Angie shook her head. “If we know who the mole is, we can feed them the information we want. But we can’t change our behavior or they’ll know we know, and they’ll take other steps to monitor us.”

  “We’re letting them find out all of our inside plans?” Igloo said.

  “That’s the risk we have to take. We let them get inside information now in exchange for figuring out who they are and being able to manipulate them later. If we root them out right now, then we’re ahead in the short term, losing in the long term.”

  “I don’t like it.” Igloo said.

  “I don’t either,” Angie said, “but I’ll live with it. Now, I want you to lead the T2 release. We need to discuss what has to happen to merge these the parallel efforts so you can deliver before the FISA deadline.”

  “No way. I’m already handling onion routing and content filtering. Plus, I’m still doing stuff with the chat AI in my spare time. You can’t really want me to also know about, let alone manage, all the other efforts. I need to be able to focus on my own deliverables.”

  “Look, this is just the tip of the iceberg.” Angie pointed at her own head. “I’ve got an entire revolution planned up here and delivering Tapestry 2.0 is key. Besides, you’re my backup in case anything happens to me. I need you to know this stuff.”

  “Don’t talk that way.” Igloo said.

  “Don’t fret overmuch. I have backups for everyone, including you.”

  “Who’s my backup?”

  “That’s on a need to know basis,” Angie said, with a wry smile.

  “I need to know!”

  “Does that mean you’re willing to hear what needs to happen to merge the work streams?”

  “I walked right into that, didn’t I?” Igloo sipped from her water bottle. “Fuck. Just go ahead and tell me.”

  “Fine. When you’re done with the onion routing, you need to test it at scale to see what effect it has on available bandwidth and latency.”

  “Ben and I wrote a traffic simulator. We already have those numbers.”

  “You have an idealized simulation. What happens when ISPs throttle our traffic, or—”

  “We included throttling in our simulation.”

  “It’s not the same thing,” Angie said. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you have levels of throttling being controlled by random number generators.”

  “Well, yeah. We model system-wide throttling, ISP throttling, last-mile throttling, you name it.”

  Angie shook her head. “Trust me. Your simulation isn’t going to tell you everything. ISPs are running on top of physical hardware. They have constraints in the backbone, in neighborhood feeds, and on the interconnects with other service providers. It matters whether each endpoint is cable, fiber, or DSL, what the percentage is, and where the interconnects are.”

  “We have that simulated, too.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Fuck, I’m not a twenty-year-old college graduate, Angie. I know what I’m doing.”

  Angie shrugged. “Maybe you do, in this case. But you have to be able to admit what you don’t know. Refusal to admit what you don’t know is the first barrier to learning, and it sinks more efforts than almost anything else…”

  Igloo felt her pulse pound and forced herself to tune out whi
le Angie continued. This was going to be one of those days where Angie would treat her like a child all day. Most of the time she appreciated Angie’s advice, but sometimes it rankled her for no specific reason she could determine. Today she decided she would suck it up and let Angie keep going, or she’d never get out what she needed to say.

  Angie finished her lecture.

  Igloo nodded agreeably to whatever it was Angie had said and redirected. “So after we swap out the onion routing, then what?”

  “The containers, distributed ledgers, and data synchronization have to be integrated. Our partners will need to integrate these changes. They aren’t going to like it, but if they’re using Tapestry Core libraries, then we should be able to swap out the library implementation, and it won’t be that big a deal. It’s the people who are directly calling the REST APIs that will be the problem, so you need to get them switched over to the standard libraries as soon as possible.”

  “All within the next few weeks? That’s going to require notifying them of our planned change,” Igloo said. “Hmm… We don’t have to tell them why. We could report a security risk in the APIs without being specific. We can tell people we’re shutting down the REST API—they’ll think we’re crazy, but who cares—and tell everyone to switch over to our client libraries. We can make those libraries self-updating, so we can push out updates at any point and get the behavior we want.”

  “That would work,” Angie said. “At some point, we will do a final delivery of our reference clients and libraries using the new secure update. After that, the client will only self-update from signed update packages, so it becomes more important than ever that the keys are kept from the government.”

  “How do we keep those keys out of their hands?” Igloo asked. “If the government got the keys, they could develop their own compromised version of Tapestry with whatever backdoors they wanted, then digitally sign it with the keys so that it appears to be legit.”