Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

  What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Security had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events—a person is a terrorist—with inaccurate systems.

  Is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess?

  I stepped out the front door whistling on a Tuesday morning one week into Operation False Positive. I was rockin’ out to some new music I’d downloaded from the Xnet the night before—lots of people sent M1k3y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope.

  I turned onto 23rd Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cut into the side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr. Wiener Dog. I don’t know Mr. Wiener Dog’s real name, but I see him nearly every day, walking his three panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette. Squeezing past them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and I always end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone’s front garden or perched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb.

  Mr. Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancy watch and always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that he worked down in the financial district.

  Today as I brushed up against him, I triggered my arphid cloner, which was already loaded in the pocket of my leather jacket. The cloner sucked down the numbers off his credit cards and his car keys, his passport and the hundred-dollar bills in his wallet.

  Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new numbers, taken from other people I’d brushed against. It was like switching the license plates on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. I smiled apologetically at Mr. Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. I stopped at three of the cars long enough to swap their FasTrak tags with numbers taken off cars I’d gone past the day before.

  You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious and conservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in the Chemical Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how to make a harmless substance out of kitchen products that would trip an explosive sniffer. They’d had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs’ briefcases and jackets, then hiding out and watching the same profs try to get into the auditoriums and libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that had sprung up everywhere.

  Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with substances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thought they were out of their minds. Luckily, it didn’t seem like they’d be able to figure it out.

  I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfaction as I saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police checkpoint, too, of course, and there were enough Xnetters working as interns and cafeteria workers and whatnot there that everyone’s badges had been snarled up and swapped around. I’d read the security checks had tacked an hour onto everyone’s work day, and the unions were threatening to walk out unless the hospital did something about it.

  A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops were walking up and down the line pointing people out and calling them aside for questioning, bag searches and pat downs. They kept getting sued for doing this, but it didn’t seem to be slowing them down.

  I got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to 22nd Street to get a coffee—and I passed a police checkpoint where they were pulling over cars for secondary inspection.

  School was no less wild—the security guards on the metal detectors were also wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with odd movements for questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weird movements. Needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later.

  Classes were crazy. I don’t think anyone was able to concentrate. I overheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to get home from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early that day.

  It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the false positive strikes again!

  Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the long way, circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars. BART stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs that wouldn’t dispense their money because they’d had their accounts frozen for suspicious activity (that’s the danger of wiring your checking account straight into your FasTrak and Fast Pass!).

  I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. It had been a good day. People from all over town were crowing about their successes. We’d brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. The news reports confirmed it—they were calling it the DHS gone haywire, blaming it all on the fake-ass “security” that was supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. The Business section of the San Francisco Chronicle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of the DHS security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. According to the Chronicle’s economist, a week of this crap would cost the city more than the Bay Bridge bombing had.

  Mwa-ha-ha-ha.

  The best part: Dad got home that night late. Very late. Three hours late. Why? Because he’d been pulled over, searched, questioned. Then it happened again. Twice.

  Twice!

  Chapter 9

  He was so angry I thought he was going to pop. You know I said I’d only seen him lose his cool rarely? That night, he lost it more than he ever had.

  “You wouldn’t believe it. This cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept saying, ‘But sir, why were you in Berkeley yesterday if your client is in Mountain View?’ I kept explaining to him that I teach at Berkeley and then he’d say, ‘I thought you were a consultant,’ and we’d start over again. It was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray.

  “What’s worse was he kept insisting that I’d been in Berkeley today as well, and I kept saying no, I hadn’t been, and he said I had been. Then he showed me my FasTrak billing and it said I’d driven the San Mateo bridge three times that day!

  “That’s not all,” he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really steamed. “They had information about where I’d been, places that didn’t have a toll plaza. They’d been polling my pass just on the street, at random. And it was wrong! Holy crap, I mean, they’re spying on us all and they’re not even competent!”

  I’d drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now I was watching him from the doorway. Mom met my eye and we both raised our eyebrows as if to say, Who’s going to say ‘I told you so’ to him? I nodded at her. She could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in a way that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit.

  “Drew,” she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalking back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street preacher.

  “What?” he snapped.

  “I think you owe Marcus an apology.” She kept her voice even and level. Dad and I are the spazzes in the household—Mom’s a total rock.

  Dad looked at me. His eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. “All right,” he said at last. “You’re right. I was talking about competent surveillance. These guys were total amateurs. I’m sorry, son,” he said. “You were right. That was ridiculous.” He stuck his hand out and shook my hand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug.

  “God, what are we doing to this country, Marcus? Your generation deserves to inherit something better than this.” When he let me go, I could see the deep wrinkles in his face, lines I’d never noticed.

  I went back up to my room and played some Xnet games. There was a good multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every day or two to wind up your whole crew’s mainsprings before you could go plundering and pillaging again. It was the kind of game I hated but couldn’t stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren’t all that satisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat (scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many cool puzzles that you had to figure out
. Mostly, playing this kind of game made me homesick for Harajuku Fun Madness, which balanced out running around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles and strategizing with your team.

  But today it was just what I needed. Mindless entertainment.

  My poor dad.

  I’d done that to him. He’d been happy before, confident that his tax dollars were being spent to keep him safe. I’d destroyed that confidence. It was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. Seeing him now, miserable and broken, I wondered if it was better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in a fool’s paradise. That shame—the shame I’d felt since I gave up my passwords, since they’d broken me—returned, leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself.

  My character was a swabbie on the pirate ship Zombie Charger, and he’d wound down while I’d been offline. I had to IM all the other players on my ship until I found one willing to wind me up. That kept me occupied. I liked it, actually. There was something magic about a total stranger doing you a favor. And since it was the Xnet, I knew that all the strangers were friends, in some sense.

  > Where u located?

  The character who wound me up was called Lizanator, and it was female, though that didn’t mean that it was a girl. Guys had some weird affinity for playing female characters.

  > San Francisco

  I said.

  > No stupe, where you located in San Fran?

  > Why, you a pervert?

  That usually shut down that line of conversation. Of course every gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though I sure hoped there weren’t any cops on the Xnet!). An accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of ten times.

  > Mission? Potrero Hill? Noe? East Bay?

  > Just wind me up k thx?

  She stopped winding.

  > You scared?

  > Safe—why do you care?

  > Just curious

  I was getting a bad vibe off her. She was clearly more than just curious. Call it paranoia. I logged off and shut down my Xbox.

  Dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, “It looks like it’s going to get better, at least.” He handed me a copy of the Chronicle open to the third page.

  A Department of Homeland Security spokesman has confirmed that the San Francisco office has requested a 300 percent budget and personnel increase from Washington, DC.

  What?

  Major General Graeme Sutherland, the commanding officer for Northern California DHS operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the Bay Area prompted the request. “We are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts.”

  My eyes crossed. No freaking way.

  “These false alarms are potentially ‘radar chaff’ intended to disguise real attacks. The only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead.”

  Sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were “unfortunate” and committed to eliminating them.

  I had a vision of the city with four or five times as many DHS enforcers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. Van was right. The more I fought them, the worse it was going to get.

  Dad pointed at the paper. “These guys may be fools, but they’re methodical fools. They’ll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve it. It’s tractable, you know. Mining all the data in the city, following up on every lead. They’ll catch the terrorists.”

  I lost it. “Dad! Are you listening to yourself? They’re talking about investigating practically every person in the city of San Francisco!”

  “Yeah,” he said, “that’s right. They’ll catch every alimony cheat, every dope dealer, every dirtbag and every terrorist. You just wait. This could be the best thing that ever happened to this country.”

  “Tell me you’re joking,” I said. “I beg you. You think that that’s what they intended when they wrote the Constitution? What about the Bill of Rights?”

  “The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining,” he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. “The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn’t the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you’re hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?”

  “Because it’s an invasion of my privacy!” I said.

  “What’s the big deal? Would you rather have privacy or terrorists?”

  Agh. I hated arguing with my dad like this. I needed a coffee. “Dad, come on. Taking away our privacy isn’t catching terrorists: it’s just inconveniencing normal people.”

  “How do you know it’s not catching terrorists?”

  “Where are the terrorists they’ve caught?”

  “I’m sure we’ll see arrests in good time. You just wait.”

  “Dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? You were ready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over—”

  “Don’t use that tone with me, Marcus. What’s happened since last night is that I’ve had the chance to think it over and to read this.” He rattled his paper. “The reason they caught me is that the bad guys are actively jamming them. They need to adjust their techniques to overcome the jamming. But they’ll get there. Meanwhile the occasional road stop is a small price to pay. This isn’t the time to be playing lawyer about the Bill of Rights. This is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our city safe.”

  I couldn’t finish my toast. I put the plate in the dishwasher and left for school. I had to get out of there.

  The Xnetters weren’t happy about the stepped-up police surveillance, but they weren’t going to take it lying down. Someone called a phone-in show on KQED and told them that the police were wasting their time, that we could monkey-wrench the system faster than they could untangle it. The recording was a top Xnet download that night.

  “This is California Live and we’re talking to an anonymous caller at a pay phone in San Francisco. He has his own information about the slowdowns we’ve been facing around town this week. Caller, you’re on the air.”

  “Yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? I mean, like, we’re just getting started. Let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint on every corner. We’ll jam them all! And like, all this crap about terrorists? We’re not terrorists! Give me a break, I mean, really! We’re jamming up the system because we hate the Homeland Security, and because we love our city. Terrorists? I can’t even spell jihad. Peace out.”

  He sounded like an idiot. Not just the incoherent words, but also his gloating tone. He sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of himself. He was a kid who was indecently proud of himself.

  The Xnet flamed out over this. Lots of people thought he was an idiot for calling in, while others thought he was a hero. I worried that there was probably a camera aimed at the pay phone he’d used. Or an arphid reader that might have sniffed his Fast Pass. I hoped he’d had the smarts to wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up and leave all his arphids at home. But I doubted it. I wondered if he’d get a knock on the door sometime soon.

  The way I knew when something big had happened on Xnet was that I’d suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted M1k3y to know about the latest haps. It was just as I was reading about Mr. Can’t-Spell-Jihad that my mailbox went crazy. Everyone had a message for me—a link to a LiveJournal on the Xnet—one of the many anonymous blogs that were based on the Freenet document publishing system that was also used by Chinese democracy advocates.

  > Close call

  > We were jamming at the Embarcadero tonite and goofing around giving everyone a new car key or door key or Fast Pass or FasTrak, tossing around a little fake gunpowder. There were cops everywhere but we were smarter than them; we’re there pretty much every night
and we never get caught.

  > So we got caught tonight. It was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we got busted. It was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the rest of us. They’d been watching the crowd for a long time and they had one of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed the rest.

  > The truck was JAMMED like a can of sardines with every kind of person, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were two cops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing in more of us. Most people were trying to get to the front of the line to get through questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours in there and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less.

  > At like 8PM they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren’t you doing anything here. They had a real fight and then the two old cops left and the new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for a while.

  > Then one cop stood up and started shouting EVERYONE JUST GO HOME JESUS CHRIST WE’VE GOT BETTER THINGS TO DO THAN BOTHER YOU WITH MORE QUESTIONS IF YOU’VE DONE SOMETHING WRONG JUST DON’T DO IT AGAIN AND LET THIS BE A WARNING TO YOU ALL.

  > A bunch of the suits got really pissed which was HILARIOUS because I mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there and now they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up your minds!

  > We split fast though and got out and came home to write this. There are undercovers everywhere, believe. If you’re jamming, be open-eyed and get ready to run when problems happen. If you get caught try to wait it out they’re so busy they’ll maybe just let you go.

  > We made them that busy! All those people in that truck were there because we’d jammed them. So jam on!

  I felt like I was going to throw up. Those four people—kids I’d never met—they nearly went away forever because of something I’d started.