Breaking and Entering

by Jeremy N. Smith

  Alien sang along with the music—“Don’t dream it . . . be it!”—as she rolled back from printer tray to computer terminal. Her to-do list had had her chained all night to her problem sets, but Alien had yet to begin them, and, for the moment, she did not care. If she could pull off the idea she’d had at SIPB, her social problems would be solved for the year.

  The concept was straightforward even if it had taken her hours to get the exact details right. First, pressing Plitman into duty beside her, Alien had searched SIPB’s online file system until they found a one-page document labeled “Topology Overview,” mapping physical locations to Internet addresses across the MIT campus network. The public cluster in Building 10—halfway through the Infinite Corridor from either end—had addresses 18.90.0.1 through 18.90.0.21, for instance. The cluster in Building 14—Hayden Memorial Library—had an equal number of addresses starting with 18.51. A few blocks away, the cluster in Building E55—Eastgate Residence Hall—had addresses starting with 18.97. Close to two thousand addresses were included in all.

  The analogy to physical buildings was obvious. If someone who had never been to MIT needed directions to Senior House, you couldn’t just tell him or her the name. You had to say the full address: 70 Amherst Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. The finger command worked the same way, but better. Given a full machine address, it turned into a virtual census taker. Knock, knock, finger said. And then the networked computer on the other end said who was there.

  As midnight had come and gone, Alien had written her first computer script, or automated series of commands. She called it f.

  Alien told f to finger each machine address, one by one. That accomplished, the script checked to see if any of her friends were logged in. Finally, it formatted and presented the findings in a simple list:

  Splotz is @ 64.

  Vanessa is @ 14.

  Heston is @ E15.

  And so on, through any contacts Alien chose, connecting virtual address to physical location (Building 64, the east side of East Campus; Building 14, Hayden Memorial Library; Building E15, the Media Lab) for everyone logged in anywhere at MIT.

  Or so she hoped.

  Alien considered how to proceed. Her f script was starting strong, but slowing pace as it tried to cover the entire campus, like Alien herself trying to chase down Patrick.

  The lab door opened. Alien shot up, startled, and killed the music. A guy in his late thirties entered, six feet tall with shaggy hair and a scraggly beard, dressed in a knitted red-, white-, black-, and gray-patterned woolen poncho and a floppy brown canvas hat, as if he had just been herding sheep.

  “Jake,” Alien said, excited. Her friend looked like a hippie but split his time between Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he had some kind of staff position, and MIT, where he was a visiting scientist. Jake was a brilliant computer programmer and an ardent believer in free software, meaning any program people could use, improve, or alter to their own ends, without cost or restriction. Computing, to him, had taken a wrong path with the development and popularization of commercial operating systems, particularly Apple and Microsoft products, which locked you in to a limited way of doing things and hid a computer’s underlying power and flexibility from its users.

  His idealism extended to other areas. Her second night in the lab, Alien had found him sleeping here on a wooden table. “I hate hotels,” Jake had said, and Alien had shown him to a basement bathroom below the Infinite Corridor where he could shower.

  “Hey, kid,” he said warmly now. “How’s it going?”

  Alien cleared her terminal window before waving Jake over. “I’m trying to write this script,” she said, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “Say I have a really long nested number series. How would I iterate through it quickly?”

  “You can condense this into a single ‘for’ loop,” Jake said. “May I?” he asked, leaning over to type three lines of sample code when Alien nodded.

  “There,” he said smiling. “Quite efficient.”

  Alien took his word for it, unwilling to try the code while Jake might see her purpose. He lingered beside her, though, seemingly bubbly with energy himself, though Alien knew he took no drugs—not even pot—appearances notwithstanding.

  She checked the time: 2:04 a.m. Tonight the lab had her sharing the night shift with another undergraduate intern, who took over at two thirty.

  Alien stood. “Want to see something cool?” she offered.

  “Sure.” Jake straightened. “Hat or no hat?” he asked.

  “Gloves,” said Alien. The Center for Space Research lab was located in Building 37, in whose old walled-up freight elevator shaft she had cut her hands. Alien turned off her computer screen. “I’m going to take you on a real tour of MIT,” she said.

  Five hours later, Alien stepped outside Building 37, grimacing in the sudden sunlight. Jake, at last, was curled up on a couch. Time to test her f script. Unsurprisingly, almost everyone Alien knew was fast asleep too. The only person she knew who was awake and online at seven a.m., f reported, was Fred, one of the guys she’d danced with at the Warehouse party.

  Given that Fred lived on Fifth West, Alien would have expected him to log in from there, if anywhere, this morning. Moments earlier, however, f had knocked at the student center, on the opposite side of campus, and gotten back his name.

  Was that right? Alien wondered. Or had her program failed?

  Blading hard now across MIT, she’d see if her discoveries had taken her as far as she thought.

  Alien’s charge ended at the student center lobby. Using the only occupied public terminal, she saw, was a short, squat woman wearing jeans and a red flannel shirt, the top of her shoulder-length straight black hair encircled by a rainbow bandana. Definitely not Fred.

  Alien looked left and right. Shit.

  “Hey!” Someone tapped her shoulder. “Alien?”

  She turned. A familiar smile greeted her.

  “Fred!” Alien embraced him in a hug that felt like fate. Her script had crisscrossed campus to connect them! “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  Fred, dressed in a maroon mesh shirt and cute white athletic shorts and sneakers, pointed outside, toward the athletic center. “I finished a run by the river and I’m headed to the weight room,” he said. “Just checking my email in between. What about you?” he asked.

  Alien smiled. “I’m Rollerblading,” she said, pulling down her T-shirt where it had ridden up in her sprint.

  Fred followed the brief glimpse of bare skin appreciatively. “Want to get breakfast or something after I work out?” he asked.

  “Sure,” said Alien.

  They made plans, and then Fred jogged out, waving. Alien waved back.

  The f script was a little bit addictive. Where were Alien’s friends? Her boyfriends? Her dorm mates? Who was hanging out together? Who was hooking up?

  You could tell a lot by watching who was logged in from where.

  The power to see through walls let Alien maximize her social life. But if she could peer out at everyone, she realized, everyone—at least in theory—could peer right back.

  Take the week before Halloween. Tuesday, just after her unified engineering lab let out at five p.m., Alien found Patrick, her Senior House crush, in the Athena cluster in Building 56. Wednesday evening, she Rollerbladed over to TEP when she saw Eddie, the second of her chiseled Warehouse party dance partners, was logged in there. Thursday, Alien realized that Fred had come to see her when he connected from the public terminal in Senior House. Friday, Patrick, Eddie, and Fred were all MIA, but Cal, she saw, was up late at a student center ground-floor Athena terminal, so Alien walked down from the SIPB office, surprised him, and they took a “for old times’ sake” hike up to the Little Dome.

  Saturday afternoon, a friend on Fourth West, the floor below Fred’s, emailed Alien to say he had “new CDs” to share if she wanted some. That night she Rollerbladed to East Campus and into the dorm room of a tan, greasy-haired guy dressed in co
rduroys and a baggy black T-shirt, carefully stocking a white mini-fridge. “Hey!” she called.

  The guy turned. “Good timing,” he said, offering Alien a fresh foil-covered five-strip of LSD, or forty microdoses—more than enough to keep her focused through finals.

  “Thanks!” said Alien, handing him a folded wad of bills. Then she passed the five-strip back. “Can you keep it cold for me? I’ll grab it later.”

  Next door, another friend, Walter, had drawn a half-dozen people around his computer. Taking advantage of the height boost her Rollerblades gave her, Alien angled to see what he was showing them.

  Onscreen was Walter’s personal Web page on the MIT servers. “WELCOME TO THE MOOD RING,” it said. “I made it for my art class elective,” he explained.

  Below the title was what seemed like a simple smiley face. The face was animated, however. Alien watched for close to a minute as the line of the mouth moved from grin to flat expression to outright grimace, then back up a bit to frown, and then another brief smile, and back to flat solemnity before briefly changing up again.

  “What is it?” she asked as the other onlookers wandered back to the party.

  Walter, a skinny kid with puckish blue eyes, chuckled. “It’s the mood of the dorm,” he told her. “Here.” He opened a new terminal window underneath the Web page and typed rapidly for a few seconds. “See for yourself.”

  His screen filled with seemingly meaningless characters. In the middle, though, Alien recognized two words as they scrolled by: “need sex.”

  Walter hit the space bar. New text replaced the old. This time Alien made out the phrase “depressed a lot lately.”

  “This is everyone’s traffic, unfiltered,” Walter said. “Their email, their Web browsing. And their Zephyr”—instant message—“sessions. You name it.”

  Alien studied the streams of raw text. “You’re sniffing packets,” she said.

  The dorms at MIT delivered Internet traffic—packets—back and forth via basic routing devices called hubs. When you plugged your computer into a port on the wall, everything you did online traveled down the hall to that hub before being directed to the broader network. And everything everyone else on the hall did traveled the same way.

  By default, each computer listened only to traffic about itself. But changing that was as simple as flipping a single setting on your dorm room machine. Promiscuous mode, manufacturers actually called it. MIT banned the practice, but technically it was easy. Plenty of times on Fifth East, Alien had heard François and Heston shouting across Bemis, loudly announcing each other’s most prurient Web surfing stops. “If it’s not encrypted, it’s public,” François had said.

  “Sniffing, aggregating, and averaging,” Walter said now. He explained: “Using smiley face emoticons, the Mood Ring counts as happy points. Using sad faces, it counts as unhappy points.”

  “So if happy points are greater than the unhappy points, the face smiles?” Alien guessed. “And if the points are about equal, it’s neutral?”

  “Right,” Walter said. “Of course, this is MIT . . .” He gestured back at the Web page. By the face’s current expression, you’d guess someone was feeding its fingers to piranhas. “Happiness never wins for long.”

  When she got home that night, Alien logged into Athena via her personal computer. Using f script to track everyone had been a touch too stalker-ish for her to tell anyone about it. But Walter’s Mood Ring, cute and clever as it was, was a million times more intrusive.

  Imagine Fred reading the instant messages she’d sent to Patrick, Alien thought. Imagine her mother reading her emails from either guy. Imagine MIT administrators or her boss at the Center for Space Research hearing every song she listened to or viewing every image she loaded online.

  Using a free program called GPG—GNU Privacy Guard—Alien already encrypted any confidential emails. But not other private digital information, like photos, diary entries, and the rest of her online communications. Not until now.

  “gpg -e -r,” Alien typed, followed by the names of her most sensitive files.

  06 / /

  I Spy

  When Alien wrote her f program to find friends, she never thought what she was doing was hacking. She just wanted to be efficient and approach life creatively. Look at Frostbyte and Walter. One made art out of programmable light bulbs, the other out of packet sniffing. Or Brett and Ben, the bowling ball boys, putting engineering work worthy of a Ph.D. into a ridiculous prank. These were the examples that surrounded Alien at MIT. Fitting in, paradoxically, meant emulating no one else. If Alien was a hacker, it was in large part because she rejected the label. “Objective: To learn interesting things, do interesting things, and be happy,” her résumé declared throughout the remainder of her college years.

  But the longer she stayed at MIT, the further away happiness seemed.

  Mid-fall 2000, new construction started across the street from Senior House. Monday through Friday, jackhammers jolted Alien awake at seven thirty a.m., only a few hours after she had gone to bed. As far as her formal schooling went, aerospace information systems was nothing like the imaginative adventure she had thought it would be. The rewards for having survived the unified engineering prerequisites were more courses she didn’t care about, with a smaller, even more intense student cohort, and regular recruitment “opportunities” with Boeing and other straitlaced companies that supplied the airlines and armed forces.

  Does this excite me? Alien asked herself. The answer was no. Moving fast got her adrenaline going again. She joined the women’s ice hockey team. Zap! Pow! Alien loved the rush of speed and physical contact. Yet hockey, too, proved to be a terrible reminder of the MIT grind. The Sunday before Thanksgiving, a friend and teammate committed suicide.

  In early December came what MIT students called “hell week,” the last days of classes, when any uncompleted assignments were due. After “hell week” came “dead week,” when you were supposed to be studying for finals. Instead, Alien walked to the office of the dean of undergraduate education. On one wall inside the office were boxes containing forms for a range of academic options.

  Alien had come to complete the paperwork necessary to withdraw from MIT. She knew how fortunate she was to have gotten in, and how much her parents had invested in enabling her to pursue her education. She didn’t want to waste this chance or let them down. At the same time, she couldn’t stand life at the Institute anymore.

  Alien looked at the box with the withdrawal forms, but couldn’t bring herself to actually reach up and take one. She couldn’t disappoint her parents.

  Then another form caught her eye: “Application for Study Abroad.”

  In January 2001, Alien entered the drama program at Trinity College, Dublin—a situation as close to the opposite of MIT as she could picture. Alien had told her parents the time abroad would be just one semester and a summer. Secretly, though, she imagined leaving Cambridge behind forever.

  Going from the United States to Ireland, and from the tech nerds to the drama kids, represented two simultaneous culture shifts. Her first week in the new program, the entire class turned and stared at her whenever they heard her accent. “America? That’s really dangerous, isn’t it?” a girl with gorgeous bright red hair asked. (Alien’s mother had asked the same question about Ireland.) Another demanded, “Are you Catholic or Protestant?” When Alien said “Jewish,” the class gawked at her.

  At MIT Alien had felt out of place for being more artistic than technically minded. At Trinity the reverse was true. Naturally enough, her drama classmates all wanted to be actors. When Alien mentioned her past space research lab job, or casual interests in virtual reality and robotics, they looked at her like she was, well, an alien.

  In June, Alien traveled to the tiny, isolated Aran Islands, population twelve hundred, off Ireland’s western coast. Walking along the islands’ ancient stone walls, visiting homes without electricity or running water, listening to the Irish language spoken and sung, taking in the gray-
blue sky, she thought: I could live here for years. Immediately, though, came the next thought: No, I couldn’t. I would get bored.

  When she returned to Dublin, Alien saw an email from the Senior House mailing list, soliciting ideas for Rush recruitment. She replied immediately. Two months later, back in Cambridge after all, Alien dangled her legs from a fourth-story roof overlooking the Senior House courtyard. Simultaneously with other upperclassmen, she turned over one of six suitcase-sized cardboard boxes ordered from the Rhode Island Novelty Company.

  Thousands of tiny multicolored bouncy balls poured down on the gathered freshmen.

  Either MIT had changed her or Alien had belonged here all along.

  Alien was back, but on what she hoped were more tolerable terms, though the time away from technical classes meant she had three more semesters until graduation. In August 2001, she switched majors to Course 6-2—electrical engineering and computer science. Now she just needed a new job.

  Alien wanted to work in the MIT Media Lab—a world-renowned research hub for everything from holography to digital music, electronic ink to emotionally responsive robots—where she thought she could build things and be creative. Before she could apply, though, another, perhaps even more attractive position presented itself. “Do you like eating pizza and staying up late?” the posting said. “Come work at I/S.”

  I/S stood for MIT Information Systems, an administrative rather than academic department. They ran Athena and other IT services and infrastructure at MIT. The document Alien had found at SIPB, matching campus physical locations to Internet addresses, mapped their territory. And by the first night of the fall semester, it was hers to help protect as a newly hired member of I/S’s network security team.