Then she’d ended up at FOB Grizzly, working as an “intelligence officer” alongside the military police. She’d been reprimanded for unauthorized “stress interrogations” of suspected terrorists and had overseen an arrest sweep that brought in more than five hundred suspects, all of whom had been released over the coming months as it emerged that they had nothing to do with terrorism.
It was around then that she left the military, and though she’d written a letter of resignation, there was also a memo from a commanding officer to Army Human Resources Command saying that she’d been “shown the door” after an “incident” involving “materiel.” Another memo was more explicit—she’d been involved in a plan that delivered American guns and ammo to private mercenaries working for a military contractor, and those guns and that ammo had been part of a massacre that killed over a hundred people.
From there, she’d gone private, working for the military “contractor”—hired killers, according to a quick search—and had distinguished herself with a very lucrative bid to take over the management contract for the FOB she’d been fired from.
It was ugly.
As I lay in bed with my thoughts swirling, I wondered if Carrie Johnstone had snatched Masha because the leaks file had so much embarrassing material about her, personally, or whether she’d been hired to retrieve them for the U.S. government. How could the Army fire her one day and then rehire her to do the same job at ten times her old salary a month later? Were they on crazy pills?
* * *
I couldn’t afford to drag my ass around work the next day, so I didn’t. I pounded the Turk’s coffee and munched chocolate espresso beans and finished my inventory and network map. Joe surprised me by scheduling me for lunch. The first I heard of it was when he showed up at my desk at 12:30 and stood over it, smiling expectantly at me.
“Hi, Joe,” I said.
“Lunchtime, Marcus?”
We went to a nice veggie place where they knew him by name and seated us right away. He knew their names, too, and greeted everyone from the waiter to the guy who filled up our water glasses personally, switching to Spanish as necessary and asking sincere, friendly questions about their wives and husbands and kids and health.
The sincere part was the weirdest thing. When I was really on fire and feeling very, very sociable, I might remember half of the names of the people I saw. I just sucked at names. And when people told me about their kids or parents or siblings or whatever, I tried to be interested, but I mean, how interested can you really be in the lives of people you barely know or have never met at all?
But Joe had the uncanny ability to seem really, genuinely interested in people. When he talked to you, you felt like he was also listening to you, carefully, thoughtfully, and not waiting for you to finish talking so that he could say whatever he was going to say next. It made him seem, I don’t know, holy or something, like one of those people out of a religious story who overflows with love for his fellow man.
And the weirdest part? He didn’t make me feel like a dick for not being that interested myself. Instead, he made me want to try to be more like him, more caring.
After our water glasses were full and we’d put in our orders, he said, “Thank you for making the time to see me today. I know you must be busy.”
If it was anyone else, I’d have thought he was blowing smoke up my ass, but he really sounded like he thought being the webmaster/sysadmin/net guy was the hardest job in the world and he felt lucky that all he had to do was run around and try to get elected.
“You’re welcome—I mean, it’s a pleasure. I mean, it’s wonderful. I’m so glad to have a job, and it’s such a cool job, too. Everyone’s really nice and interesting and I really believe in your platform, so, well, it’s just great.” I was babbling like an idiot and I couldn’t seem to stop—and he didn’t seem to notice.
“You remember when I spoke to you on the phone the other night, I mentioned how my campaign would need great technology to be successful. And I’m sure that when you and Flor chatted she had some pointed opinions about that and what her side of the campaign needed from you. You might be wondering who wins in a little struggle like that. I wanted to give you some context to help you resolve that.
“Flor is your boss—and she’s my boss, too. She’s in charge of the campaign from top to bottom, and I’m familiar with her ideas about what campaigns need vis-à-vis boots on the ground, knocking on doors, and raising money. She’s right as far as she goes, and that’s why I let her be my boss.
“But I’m the candidate, and I have some additional priorities. I say ‘additional’—not ‘different.’ Flor is right about needing money, boots, and door-knocking. But once you’ve got all that running to the best of your ability, there’s more that I want you to get thinking about. I want you to tell me how technology can help me reach people who would otherwise be beyond my reach. I want you to tell me how technology can transform the way that voters and their representatives collaborate to produce good, accountable government. Every wave of technology, from newspapers to radio to TV, has transformed politics, and not always for the better. Some people think that the Internet is a tool for politicians to raise money or coordinate volunteers, but I don’t think that’s even one percent of what technology can do for politics. I want you to help me figure out the other ninety-nine percent.”
Woah. “Okay,” I said. “Do you want, what, an essay or a website or something?”
He smiled. “Let’s start with a chat, like this one, tomorrow at the end of the day. I’ll have Flor put it in both of our schedules.”
It made me feel good and a little scared—I really didn’t want to let him down, but all I could think of was darknet sites and leaked docs. I wondered what he would say if I told him that I was sitting on more than 800,000 confidential, compromising government memos. But I also remembered what Flor had said: The first time I catch so much as a whiff of anything illegal, immoral, dangerous, or ‘leet’ I will personally bounce your ass to the curb before you have a chance to zip your fly.
* * *
I went over to Ange’s after work. Jolu had already set up our darknet site and grabbed a copy of the docs off BitTorrent. I’d handed him a USB stick with the key on it, and by the time I got my computer up into a secure mode with a dead man’s switch and an anonymized, private network connection, the site was ready to go.
In fact, it was already going. Jolu had met with Van on his lunch break, and she’d plowed through more than fifty docs while I’d been bringing the Joe for Senate servers’ patch levels up to date. I wondered whether Van had had a chance to talk to Darryl. He’d been my best friend, as tight as a brother, but I hadn’t seen him in months. It was all too weird between us—the fact that he was with Van and that Van had confessed that she’d once had a crush on me; the unwordly fragility of his mind after his time in Gitmo-by-the-Bay; his constant struggle to keep up with even a half-time courseload at Berkeley. I thought of what seeing that nasty little waterboarding PowerPoint would do to Darryl.
It wasn’t just Van working on the docs, either. Jolu had enlisted some of his other trusted friends, people with cryptic handles like Left-Handed Mutant and Endless Vegetables. I hoped Jolu was right to trust them. I hoped he’d been cagey about where the docs had actually come from. Out of curiosity, I googled the strangers’ handles and confirmed to my satisfaction that they didn’t appear to have been used before. It would have been such a basic mistake to recycle a nickname that you’d already used someplace that could be linked to your real identity.
Endless Vegetables was working his (or her) way through a gigantic pile of documents on student loans, judging from the tags and summaries. I vaguely knew that the government guaranteed student loans made by universities, which were sold to banks that collected on them. The darknet docs went into disgusting details—like a series of jokey emails between a congressman who’d gotten a tearful letter from a constituent who’d been hit with crazy penalties that turned her $20,000
loan into a $180,000 loan and an executive at the bank who’d assessed the penalties. The congressman sounded like he was pretty good friends with the banker, and they made it sound like this girl’s problem was hilarious.
Jolu had added an “I’m feeling lucky” button to the spreadsheet that would bring up a random, uncataloged doc. I hit it and found myself looking at a cryptic set of numbers and acronyms. I tried to google the search terms but found myself getting nowhere, so I grabbed another, and then another. It was mesmerizing, like channel surfing on a massive cable network that only got heavy, strange programs about corruption, murder, and sleaze.
“Jeebus H. Christmas,” Ange said. “Have a look at the doc I just checked in.”
I resorted the spreadsheet by author and found Ange’s latest contribution, loaded it up. It was an instruction manual for a “lawful intercept” network appliance sold to cops and governments for installation at an Internet Service Provider. The appliance monitored all incoming requests for updates to Android phones, and checked to see if the phone’s owner was on a list of targets. If they were, the appliance took over the network session and sent a fake update to the phone that gave spies and spooks the power to secretly turn on the phone’s GPS, camera, and mic. I stared in mounting horror at the phone on the bed next to me, then flipped it over and took out the battery.
“Keep reading,” Ange said. She’d been following the autolinked documents and found a bunch of captured emails and phone sessions. One was a complaint from a DHS field operative about a target who’d installed “ParanoidAndroid” on his phone and couldn’t be gotten at.
“What’s ParanoidAndroid?” I asked.
“I’m reading up on that now,” Ange said. “Looks like it’s a fork from the CyanogenMod.” I knew about Cyanogen, of course—hackers had taken the source code for Google’s Android operating system and made a fully free and open version that could do all kinds of cool tricks. “It doesn’t accept updates unless their checksums match with other users and the official releases. Lets you tell whether an update is real or a spoof.”
“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s install it!”
Ange pointed at her phone, which was already cabled to her laptop. “What do you think I’m doing?”
“Do mine next?”
“Duh.”
There was more. Other lawful intercept appliances would disguise themselves as iTunes updates for Macs and PCs, and another one worked by sending fake updates to your browser. Then there were the saved emails between a senior DHS IT manager who’d worked at one of these companies before going to Homeland Security. His old boss was explaining how they were using a shell company in Equatorial Guinea—a country I’d never even heard of!—to market their products in China, Iran, and other countries.
It just got worse. Logs of law enforcement requests to install spyware bugs on people involved in peaceful protest groups. Reports of break-ins by suspected criminals who’d used the systems to spy on their victims.
I was trying to figure out how all this stuff could possibly work. After all, software updates usually went over SSL, which used cryptographic certificates to verify the identity of the sender. How were they spoofing connections from Apple and Google and Microsoft and Mozilla?
Oh, that’s how. A search on “certificates lawful intercept” brought up another email exchange, this one with a huge American security company that had one of the “signing certificates” that were trusted by all browsers and operating systems. They’d been supplying blank certificates to the DHS for years, it seemed—certificates that would give the government the power to undetectably impersonate your bank or your company, or Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Ange and I split up the remaining lawful intercept docs, getting deeper and deeper into the terrifying secrets of snoops and spies. Before I knew it, it was 2 A.M. and I could barely keep my eyes open.
“Want to stay over?” Ange said as I yawned for the tenth time in five minutes.
“I think I already have,” I said. We’d started staying over at each other’s houses that summer, and while it had been weird at first (especially over breakfast with the parents!), everyone had gotten used to it. My parents had more important stuff to worry about, and Ange’s mom was just one of those cool grown-ups who seemed to have an instinctive grasp of what mattered and what didn’t.
Chapter 8
Once upon a time, terrorists blew up a bridge in my city and killed over four thousand people. They told me everything changed. They told me that we didn’t have the same rights we used to, because catching terrorists was more important than our little freedoms.
They say they caught the terrorists. One of the guys, who had been killed by a drone in Yemen, supposedly thought the whole thing up. I guess I’m okay with him being dead if that’s the case. I hope it’s the case. No one would show us the proof, of course, because of “national security.”
But “everything is different” turned out to be a demand and not a description. It pretended to describe what the new reality was, but instead it demanded that everyone accept a new reality, one where we could be spied on and arrested and even tortured.
A few years later, everything changed again. It seemed like overnight, no one had jobs anymore, no one had money anymore, and people started to lose their houses. It was weird, because now that it was obvious that everything had changed, no one wanted to talk about how everything had changed.
When the streets are full of armed cops and soldiers telling you that everything is different, everyone can point at one thing, a thing with a human face, and agree, “It’s different, it’s different.”
But when some mysterious social/financial/political force upends the world and changes everything—when “everything is different now” is a description and not a demand—somehow, it gets much harder to agree on whether things were different and what we needed to do about it.
It was one thing to demand that the armed guards leave our streets. It was another to figure out how to demand that the silent red overdue bills and sneaky process servers with their eviction notices go away.
* * *
I was nearly late getting to work the next day, but I just squeaked in. I’d stolen back one of my T-shirts from Ange’s laundry pile (she liked to steal mine and sleep in them), and it smelled wonderfully of her and put me in a good mood as I came through the door and made a beeline for my desk.
“Dude!” Liam said, practically bouncing in place by my chair. “Can you believe it?”
“What?” I said.
“You know! The darknet stuff!”
All the blood rushed out of my head and into my gut and swirled there like a stormy ocean. My ears throbbed with my pulse. “What?” I said.
“You didn’t see?”
He leaned over me and moused to my browser, went to the front page of Reddit, a site where you could submit and vote on news stories. Every item on the front page talked about darknet leaks. Feeling like I was in a horror movie, I clicked one of them. It was a story on wired.com about a file that had been anonymously dumped into pastebin.com, instructions for using a lawful intercept appliance to take over Android phones and work their cameras. Whoever had dumped the file had sent an email to a reporter at wired.com saying that there were more than 800,000 documents like it on a darknet site and that volunteers were combing through them, and there was a lot more to come. It didn’t say where they’d come from or who the volunteers were.
I went back to Reddit and checked the others. How many darknet docs had leaked? It seemed like everyone had the same story, in different variants—800,000 docs, darknet, more to come, but nothing more. I started to calm down.
“You’ve got an Android phone, right?” Liam said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. But I run ParanoidAndroid—it’s an alternate OS that resists that kind of spyware.”
“Really?” Joe said. He’d walked up on us on cat’s-paw feet while we were talking, and I jumped in my seat. “Woah, sorry, calm down th
ere, Marcus. I’ve got an Android phone, too. Tell you what, I’ll order in pizza for lunch if you’ll give us a workshop on keeping our phones secure. Sounds like the kind of thing we should all know about.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Of course.” Though as soon as I saw the Wired story, I’d started scheming to take lunch off and find a WiFi network with weak, crackable WEP security so that I could hop on, tunnel into the darknet, and try to figure out what had just happened. I mean, I knew better than anyone that there was no such thing as perfect security, and I understood that it was likely that someone, someday, would get a look at the darknet docs who we hadn’t invited in. But I didn’t think that day would be the day after we set up the darknet!
But I couldn’t screw up my job. I’d been desperate for work for so long, and it was such a cool job. The fact that I might now be the target of a ruthless mercenary army didn’t mean that I didn’t have to help Joe get elected.
So I did my job, and when the pizza came, I stood with a slice in one hand and a whiteboard pen in the other and sketched out a little flowchart of how your phone could be taken over, and what could be done with your phone after it was pwned.
Joe munched thoughtfully at a slice, wiped his fingers and his mouth, and put up his hand. “So you’re saying that the police could take over our phones?”
“No!” Liam said, vibrating in his chair. “He’s saying anyone could—”
I put up my hands and Liam calmed down. “What I mean is, once the intercept appliance is installed at the phone company’s data center, anyone who has a login and password for it could use it.”
“But who has that login and password? The police, yes?”
“Probably not, actually. The leaks suggested that these appliances were managed by the phone company or ISP. So a police officer calls up the lawful intercept technicians and they set it up for him. So the list of anyone who could break into the ISP’s network, anyone who could bribe or blackmail someone at the ISP, anyone who can convincingly pretend to be a police officer to the ISP, anyone who can get a real police officer to give him access, or anyone who can pay someone to do any of the above.”
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