by Ray Daniel
“No.”
“I let Gustav fight his own battles, let him get tough, learn how to take it from bullies.”
“Maria’s not a—” Another plane, then footsteps on the floor overhead.
Mrs. Olinsky said, “It’s even worse when the bully is a girl and he can’t punch her.”
“I’m sure Gustav is a sweet kid,” I said. “He sent Maria a private message telling her he was sorry.”
“Damn right he’s sweet. That girl called him fat, named him Gutso, invited him to a play date, and sent him to the wrong address. After she did all that to him, he still told her he was sorry for what happened to her. I would have laughed in her face.”
There was a bang overhead. Mrs. Olinsky looked up. “I told him not to tip his chair back.”
I followed her eyes. “Who?”
“My oldest, Peter.”
Here was a chance to bond. “How old is Peter?”
“Twenty.”
“That’s great.”
“Why? You think he’s too old to live with his mother?”
“No, I just think it’s nice that he’s still around for you.”
“You’re wrong. He’s too old to live with his mother.”
“I’m not here to—” Airplane.
“He just sits up there on that stupid computer.”
I sipped my coffee. Listened to a train rattle by. “Is he close to Gustav?”
“Sure. He’s his brother.”
“Did Gustav ever complain to him about Maria?”
“What are you asking?”
“Somebody hacked Maria’s account.”
Mrs. Olinsky narrowed her eyes. “Are you accusing Peter?”
I stood. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Olinsky.”
Adriana looked up at me in surprise. “What?”
“We appreciate your telling us about Maria’s behavior.”
Mrs. Olinsky stood. “It’s hard raising kids.”
“Don’t I know it,” I said.
“Don’t you know it?” Adriana said. Then to Mrs. Olinsky, “He doesn’t do anything.”
“Single mom, huh?” said Mrs. Olinsky.
“No, I have—”
“Me to help her,” I said. “Let’s go, Adriana.”
“At least you’ve got your boyfriend,” said Mrs. Olinsky to Adriana.
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Let’s go, honey.” I led the way out of the kitchen, leaving Adriana nothing to do but follow.
After a fast walk through East Boston, Adriana and I stood on the Wood Island platform, waiting for a train to take us home.
“What was that?” asked Adriana.
“I think I got what I needed,” I said.
“What?”
“A twenty-year-old guy who lives at home with his mother and spends all his time on the computer.”
“You’re profiling him?”
“There is a type.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
A plane roared over as a train entered the station. The noises combined into a high-decibel assault. The train rolled to a stop, the doors whooshed open, and we found seats inside.
“So,” said Adriana,“are you going to do anything?”
“I’m going to find out if he did it.”
“How?”
I had a plan. It was nasty, but Adriana wouldn’t understand how nasty and I didn’t want to explain.
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
Six
Boston has two ends, a North End and a South End. It once had a West End, but urban renewal destroyed it in the 1960s. The cozy streets and brick tenements that had been gentrified into prosperity in the North and South End never had a chance to flourish in the West End. Instead, developers evicted the tenants, bulldozed their homes, and put up high-rise apartment buildings. All that’s really left of the West End today is a sign on Storrow Drive that says, If You Lived Here You’d be Home Now.
I had left Adriana’s place in the North End and was heading for my home in the South End when I remembered that the Boston FBI office sat between the two. I pulled out my Pop-Tart-sized Android phablet and called my buddy, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Bobby Miller.
“You in the office?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got some dirty pictures for you.”
“Then come on up.”
I had crossed Government Center, another monument to urban renewal, and had gone on up. I now watched as the Internet rage overtook Bobby Miller.
“Motherfucker!” he said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Did Maria see these?”
“Yeah, she saw them, and so did all her little Facebook friends.”
“Isn’t she too young for Facebook?”
“Don’t you start.”
Bobby flipped through a few more pictures and said, “You know who’d like to see these? Mel.” He yelled into the hallway, “Hey, Mel! Get in here and check out these pictures!”
Mel: perfect name for a guy who’d love to see porn.
Bobby made eye contact with someone behind me. “Tucker, meet Mel Hunter.”
I turned, expecting to see the sweaty lips and fishy handshake of a porn-lover. Instead I saw the black hair and curvy suit of an FBI agent—a fresh-faced, female FBI agent.
She stuck out her hand. “Special Agent Hunter, Mr. Tucker.”
Bobby said, “Mel is just out of Quantico.”
I shook, noting the warmth of Mel Hunter’s hand and the confidence of her grip. “You can call me Tucker.”
She said, “You can call me Special Agent Hunter.”
“Okay.”
“You two wanted to show me some dirty pictures?”
“How did you know they were dirty?”
“Because Bobby was looking at them.”
Bobby said, “Nice.” He told her the story of the pictures.
Special Agent Hunter flipped through the woman-on-woman action, her eyes flitting around each picture before looking at the next. She seemed to be looking at the pictures without looking at their subject.
“Yeah,” said Hunter, “these are in the database.”
“Database?” I asked.
“Our porn database,” Bobby said.
I said, “Why not keep them in a folder like normal people?”
“We’d lose the indexing,” said Hunter.
“What indexing?”
“You know those websites that track currency?” asked Bobby.
“No.”
“Those ones where you take a buck from your wallet, put the serial number into the site, and it tells you where your money’s been.”
“They have those?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
“The FBI does the same thing with porn.”
“You do?”
“Yeah,” said Special Agent Hunter. “We originally wrote it to help with child-porn investigations. Then we expanded it. We web-crawl all the porn sites, download the porn, and store it in a database. Then we can track where it’s appeared on the web and who posted and commented on it.”
“Isn’t that spying?”
“Spying shmying,” Bobby said.
“It’s really just collating public data,” said Hunter.
“But if we do get a warrant for some terrorist’s computer, we can use the porn to make connections to other people,” said Bobby. “Porn is a universal tracking system.”
“But it only works for men,” I said.
“Exactly,” Hunter said. “It’s a great filter.”
“That’s creepy on so many levels.”
Hunter tapped on her phone. “Yup. Found them. They were on 4chan.org.”
Bobby asked, “On that /b/ thing?”
“Yeah.”
Bobby said, “Figures.”
“The 4chan/b/ board?” I said. “Gross.”
“Yup,” said Bobby. “The anus of the Internet.”
In 2003, an unassuming student named Christopher Poole got a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. The fifteen-year-old Poole created a website called 4chan.org that let users anonymously post images to the Internet and discuss them. He had imagined that it would be used for anime. He was mostly right, and wildly wrong.
The site provided a variety of discussion boards. Poole named the discussion board for anime 4chan.org/a/, and the board for video games 4chan.org/v/. But as in fairy tales, one board was different from all the other boards, a chaotic board without rules or reason. This was the random board: 4chan.org/b/.
Imagine a website where images that generate a long string of comments and replies float to the top of the message board, while ignored pictures drift down and disappear from view. Next, imagine that you’re a lonely kid who’s desperate to post an image that will keep people talking. What will you post? It probably won’t be kittens in a basket. Unless, of course, the basket were on the Niagara River and the kittens were about to go over the falls. You could also post naked pictures hacked from a celebrity’s phone, an uncensored picture of a gruesome suicide, or unique porn.
4chan.org/b/ really was the anus of the Internet.
“Those pictures were all on 4chan?” I asked Hunter.
“Yup. They were posted two days ago. I can trace them back further if you want.”
“The timing’s right. Maria got hacked yesterday. Can you see who downloaded them?”
“No. That would be spying.”
“I just don’t see how little Gustav got pictures like that.”
Bobby asked, “Who’s Gustav?”
“Gustav Olinsky is Maria’s classmate. He apologized to Maria for the hack. I think his brother Peter might be involved.”
Hunter and Bobby exchanged a glance.
“What?” I said. “You know a ten-year-old named Gustav Olinsky? He on the most-wanted list?”
Bobby looked at his watch. “Don’t we have a meeting, Mel?”
Hunter pulled out her phone, glanced at it. “Crap, you’re right.”
“Yeah, Tucker. We’ve got to get going.”
“We’ll look at those pictures for you and see if we can find anything.”
“Yeah, absolutely. You know the way out, right?”
With that, Bobby and Hunter skedaddled out of the room and down the hall.
I stood in the empty office.
What just happened?
Pulled out my phone. Tweeted:
@TuckerInBoston: That #awkward moment when you clear a room.
Seven
Geographically, there are two Bostons. One is “original Boston,” which is the Boston the settlers landed on in 1630, and the other is “landfill Boston,” which actually makes up most of the city. Back Bay, Logan Airport, and big chunks of the North End are parts of landfill Boston, created by filling in mudflats.
Milk Street is part of original Boston. The birthplace of Benjamin Franklin, the little street had undergone transformation after transformation as the city churned and even burned around it. Today Milk Street sits in the Financial District, where captains of finance chart the course of our mutual funds while high-tech start-ups sputter to life in incubators.
My buddy Huey coded in one of those incubators. Huey and I had worked together at MantaSoft a hundred years ago. Since then, I had taken an enormous severance package and MantaSoft had closed its New England office. Huey had been cast off, but had landed well. A prodigious feat for a man of his size.
I stepped into Max’s Deli Cafe and saw Huey looming over a Formica table next to the window. I waved, got myself a chicken soup with a gigantic matzo ball, and brought it over to Huey, who had already gone through almost half of a Dagwoodesque sandwich piled high with luncheon meats.
Huey had always been a large man, a guy who could fill a small office. Yet when motivated, either in playing Ping-Pong or saving my ass, he could be surprisingly nimble.
He took a big swig of Diet Coke. Burped a greeting. “Hiya.”
“Hello to you too,” I said. “One sec.” I took a picture of my soup. Put it up on Twitter.
@TuckerInBoston: That’s a big ball! #lunch
“You’re still on Twitter?” asked Huey.
“Yeah, I like it.”
“You’re still not on Facebook?”
“No, but that’s a good thing. Now we have something to talk about.”
“What?”
“We can catch up on each other’s lives.”
Huey shoved part of his sandwich into his considerable maw, washed it down with Diet Coke, and followed that up with a pickle. “Why aren’t you on Facebook?”
“I don’t like it. I like it even less now.”
“Why?”
I told him about Maria.
“Why is she on Facebook? Isn’t she too young?”
“Another quarter heard from.”
“I mean, kids don’t do Facebook.”
“They don’t?”
“No. It’s for old people.”
“What do kids do?”
“A lot of Snapchat and Yik Yak. A lot of texting. A lot of emoji.”
“How do you know?”
“My company is going after the young market. I get all this research.”
I took a spoonful of soup, then attacked the matzo ball, averting my eyes as Huey jammed the two-fisted half sandwich into his mouth and took a bite. He looked like an orca eating a beach ball.
“I want to catch the guy,” I said.
“Why?”
“Make him apologize.”
“Hmm … How is Maria taking it?”
“She’s mostly upset about being banned from Facebook.”
“They banned her?”
“No, we banned her.”
“You and your cousin?”
“Yeah.”
Huey took another bite. Chewed and cogitated. “Must be tough with no parents.”
I poked at my matzo ball. “You’d think the parents at her school would get that.”
“Get what?”
“That she’s gone through a tough time. That maybe it’s not the worst thing if Maria is mean to their precious pumpkins. They could cut her some slack.”
“Maria’s being mean?”
“Just kid stuff. Called one kid an asshat. Called another one Gutso.”
“‘Cause he’s fat, right?”
“Um … right.”
Huey sipped his Coke. Took another bite of his sandwich. Looked out the window.
“You’re not saying she deserved it, are you?”
“I’m not saying anything,” said Huey, continuing to look out the window.
I changed the subject. “How’s your sandwich?”
“How’s your soup?”
“It’s good.”
“Just like Mom used to make?”
“My mom was Italian. She made gravy, not soup.”
“Oh.”
More silence.
“I think I know who did the life ruin,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“The older brother of one of Maria’s classmates.”
“The fat one?”
“Um, yeah.”
“And you want to make this brother apologize.”
“Yeah.”
“To the mean girl who called his little brother fat.”
“Did she deserve to be cyberbullied?”
“Did the fat kid deserve to be called fat?”
“No, but it’s not right.”
“It’s k
ids, Tucker. Stay out of it.”
“The older brother is twenty. That’s not a kid.”
“Barely not a kid.”
“He needs to grow up.”
“And you want to expose him? Maybe dox him?”
“Doxing” or “getting the documents” on someone is like outing them, but with nicknames. You find out their real name and tell everyone, ruining their anonymity. It has the same effect on hackers as crosses do on vampires.
“Dox him?” I said. “I don’t even know his nickname. I need to know his nickname before I can expose who’s behind the nickname.”
“But then you’d dox him.”
“Maybe. I’ll admit, unmasking a guy is a shitty thing to do. Still, he deserves it.”
Huey shook his head.
“What?”
“This is how people get hurt.”
“C’mon. He just gets another nickname.”
“So do you want him to apologize, or do you want to dox him?”
I crossed my arms. “Look, are you going to help?”
“I think you have bigger problems.”
“Like what?”
“Like a mean little girl who wasn’t mean a year ago.”
“Look at who’s the parenting expert now.”
“It sure isn’t you.”
I stood. Picked up my half-eaten soup. Threw it in the trash. Walked back to Huey. “I don’t need this bullshit.”
“Could you sit down?”
“We’re doing our best, you know.”
“I know. I know. I’m sorry.”
I sat. Watched Huey take another bite of sandwich. “When did you get so wise?”
“I just have some experience with getting bullied.”
“Yeah, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. You were probably one of the popular kids.”
“Me? I was a nerd.”
“That’s changed?”
My stomach growled. I wished I’d kept my soup. “Probably not.”
“Have you ever heard of PwnSec?”
There’s all sorts of ways for words to get into English. In the case of “pwned,” a kid tried to type an instant message to another after winning a video game. He wanted to say “I owned you!” but mistyped and got “I pwned you!” Suddenly, English had a new word that rhymed with owned.
“What’s the Sec stand for?”
