Chapter 8

This chapter is dedicated to Borders, the global bookselling giant thatyou can find in cities all over the world — I'll never forget walking intothe gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering ashelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in OxfordStreet in London hosted Pat Cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings,where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about sci-ence fiction and meet their fans. When I'm in a strange city (which hap-pens a lot) and I need a great book for my next flight, there always seemsto be a Borders brimming with great choices — I'm especially partial tothe Borders on union Square in San Francisco.
Borders worldwideI wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. There arelots of people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage pat-terns. Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.
The Xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and theTV news. Husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives werecaught cheating on their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out withillicit girlfriends and boyfriends. A kid who hadn't told his parents hehad AIDS got caught going to the clinic for his drugs.
Those were the people with something to hide — not guilty people,but people with secrets. There were even more people with nothing tohide at all, but who nevertheless resented being picked up, and ques-tioned. Imagine if someone locked you in the back of a police car and de-manded that you prove that you're not a terrorist.
It wasn't just public transit. Most drivers in the Bay Area have aFasTrak pass clipped to their sun-visors. This is a little radio-based"wallet" that pays your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, savingyou the hassle of sitting in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. They'dtripled the cost of using cash to get across the bridge (though they104always fudged this, saying that FasTrak was cheaper, not that anonym-ous cash was more expensive). Whatever holdouts were left afterwarddisappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to just one perbridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer.
So if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency,you've got a FasTrak. It turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only placethat your FasTrak gets read, though. The DHS had put FasTrak readersall over town — when you drove past them, they logged the time andyour ID number, building an ever-more perfect picture of who wentwhere, when, in a database that was augmented by "speeding cameras,""red light cameras" and all the other license-plate cameras that hadpopped up like mushrooms.
No one had given it much thought. And now that people were payingattention, we were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that theFasTrak doesn't have an off-switch.
So if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by anSFPD cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips tothe Home Depot lately, and what was that midnight drive up to Sonomalast week about?
The little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing.
Fifty thousand people marched down Market Street after a week of thismonitoring. I couldn't care less. The people who'd occupied my citydidn't care what the natives wanted. They were a conquering army. Theyknew how we felt about that.
One morning I came down to breakfast just in time to hear Dad tellMom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount"to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to makedrivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. I wonderedwhat would happen to the information about who took which cabswhere.
I realized how close I'd come. The new indienet client had beenpushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad,and Jolu told me that 80 percent of the traffic he saw at Pigspleen wasnow encrypted. The Xnet just might have been saved.
Dad was driving me nuts, though.
"You're being paranoid, Marcus," he told me over breakfast one day asI told him about the guys I'd seen the cops shaking down on BART theday before.
105"Dad, it's ridiculous. They're not catching any terrorists, are they? It'sjust making people scared.""They may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure gettinga lot of scumbags off the streets. Look at the drug dealers — it saysthey've put dozens of them away since this all started. Remember whenthose druggies robbed you? If we don't bust their dealers, it'll only getworse." I'd been mugged the year before. They'd been pretty civilizedabout it. One skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the oth-er one asked me for my wallet. They even let me keep my ID, thoughthey got my debit card and Fast Pass. It had still scared me witless andleft me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks.
"But most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong,Dad," I said. This was getting to me. My own father! "It's crazy. For everyguilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocentpeople. That's just not good.""Innocent? Guys cheating on their wives? Drug dealers? You're de-fending them, but what about all the people who died? If you don't haveanything to hide —""So you wouldn't mind if they pulled you over?" My dad's histogramshad proven to be depressingly normal so far.
"I'd consider it my duty," he said. "I'd be proud. It would make me feelsafer."Easy for him to say.
Vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smartabout it for me to stay away from the subject for long. We'd get togetherall the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then,somehow, I'd be back on this subject. Vanessa was cool when ithappened — she didn't Hulk out on me again — but I could see it upsether.
Still.
"So my dad says, 'I'd consider it my duty.' Can you freaking believe it? Imean, God! I almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if hethought that was our 'duty'!"We were sitting in the grass in Dolores Park after school, watching thedogs chase frisbees.
106Van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one ofher favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibid?o — the forbid-den guy from Rio. She'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone totwo years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the CowPalace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rodeup her tummy, showing her flat little belly button.
She lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades,her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. I'd known Van since forever, andwhen I thought of her, I usually saw the little kid I'd known with hun-dreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who playedthe piano and couldn't dance to save her life. Sitting out there in DoloresPark, I suddenly saw her as she was.
She was totally h4wt — that is to say, hot. It was like looking at thatpicture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see thatVan was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty,something I'd never noticed.
Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn'tbummed out anew when I realized this.
"You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk."Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with herbreath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way.
"Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totallyfull of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't achild-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill.
Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would givehim an aneurism.""They only get away with it because the normals feel smug comparedto the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster.
No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questionedby the cops. Total gridlock."Woah.
"Van, you are a total genius," I said.
"Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at methrough half-lidded eyes, almost romantic.
"Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Gettingpeople pulled over is easy."107She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt alittle flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me.
"It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flashthe firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done.
What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, over-writing their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'llmake everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone lookguilty. Then: total gridlock."Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was soangry she couldn't speak.
"Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, shewas walking away so fast she was practically running.
"Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!"She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her.
"Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away sohard I punched myself in the face.
"You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet bud-dies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn thewhole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt thesepeople?"I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the prob-lem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disap-pear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'mfighting back to make them stop.""How, by making it worse?""Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you weresaying? If everyone was getting pulled over —""That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arres-ted. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do somethingpositive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl? Anything?""You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that theycan't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them.
That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did youlearn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your headdown and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better?
If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get. It will only get108worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bringthem down!"There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring downthe entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I plannedto do. No question about it.
Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school ath-letics — fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports — and Iended up on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She tookoff and I didn't follow.
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The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it'show they fail.
That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnetsite. I was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war.
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Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists.
Maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later. The problem is that itcatches us too, even though we're not doing anything wrong.
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The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches toomany people, it dies.
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Get the idea?
I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips forgetting close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my owncloner in the pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket withthe armored pockets and left for school. I managed to clone six tagsbetween home and Chavez High.
It was war they wanted. It was war they'd get.
If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic ter-rorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called"the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.
Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a millionpeople gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99109percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result— true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. Yougive the test to a million people.
One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred peoplethat you test will generate a "false positive" — the test will say he hasSuper-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate"means: one percent wrong.
What's one percent of one million?
1,000,000/100 = 10,000One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million randompeople, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But yourtest won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify10,000 people as having it.
Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percentinaccuracy.
That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to findsomething really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of thething you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on yourscreen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller(more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at pointing ata single atom in your screen. For that, you need a pointer — a test —that's one atom wide or less at the tip.
This is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies toterrorism:
Terrorists are really rare. In a city of twenty million like New York,there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside.
10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent.
That's pretty rare all right. Now, say you've got some software that cansift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit re-cords, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists 99 percent ofthe time.
In a pool of twenty million people, a 99 percent accurate test willidentify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. But only ten ofthem are terrorists. To catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and in-vestigate two hundred thousand innocent people.
Guess what? Terrorism tests aren't anywhere close to 99 percent accur-ate. More like 60 percent accurate. Even 40 percent accurate, sometimes.
110What this all meant was that the Department of Homeland Securityhad set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rareevents — 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 weekinto the Operation False Positive. I was rockin' out to some new musicI'd downloaded from the Xnet the night before — lots of people sentM1k3y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope.
I turned onto 23d Street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cutinto the side of the hill. As I descended, I passed Mr Wiener Dog. I don'tknow Mr Wiener Dog's real name, but I see him nearly every day, walk-ing 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 al-ways end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, orperched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb.
Mr Wiener Dog is clearly Someone Important, because he has a fancywatch and always wears a nice suit. I had mentally assumed that heworked 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 clonersucked down the numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his pass-port and the hundred-dollar bills in his wallet.
Even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new num-bers, taken from other people I'd brushed against. It was like switchingthe license-plates on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. Ismiled apologetically at Mr Wiener Dog and continued down the stairs. Istopped at three of the cars long enough to swap their FasTrak tags withnumbers taken offall over cars I'd gone past the day before.
You might think I was being a little aggro here, but I was cautious andconservative compared to a lot of the Xnetters. A couple girls in theChemical Engineering program at UC Berkeley had figured out how tomake a harmless substance out of kitchen products that would trip anexplosive sniffer. They'd had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs'
briefcases and jackets, then hiding out and watching the same profs tryto get into the auditoriums and libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that had sprung up everywhere.
111Other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with sub-stances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thoughtthey were out of their minds. Luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able tofigure it out.
I passed by San Francisco General Hospital and nodded with satisfac-tion as I saw the huge lines at the front doors. They had a police check-point too, of course, and there were enough Xnetters working as internsand cafeteria workers and whatnot there that everyone's badges hadbeen snarled up and swapped around. I'd read the security checks hadtacked an hour onto everyone's work day, and the unions were threaten-ing to walk out unless the hospital did something about it.
A few blocks later, I saw an even longer line for the BART. Cops werewalking up and down the line pointing people out and calling themaside for questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. They kept gettingsued 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 22ndStreet to get a coffee — and I passed a police checkpoint where they werepulling over cars for secondary inspection.
School was no less wild — the security guards on the metal detectorswere also wanding our school IDs and pulling out students with oddmovements for questioning. Needless to say, we all had pretty weirdmovements. Needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later.
Classes were crazy. I don't think anyone was able to concentrate. Ioverheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to gethome from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early thatday.
It was all I could do to keep from laughing. The paradox of the falsepositive strikes again!
Sure enough, they let us out of class early and I headed home the longway, circling through the Mission to see the havoc. Long lines of cars.
BART stations lined up around the blocks. People swearing at ATMs thatwouldn't dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozenfor suspicious activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking accountstraight into your FasTrak and Fast Pass!).
I got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the Xnet. Ithad been a good day. People from all over town were crowing abouttheir successes. We'd brought the city of San Francisco to a standstill. Thenews-reports confirmed it — they were calling it the DHS gone haywire,112blaming it all on the fake-ass "security" that was supposed to be protect-ing us from terrorism. The Business section of the San Francisco Chron-icle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of theDHS security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. Ac-cording to the Chronicle's economist, a week of this crap would cost thecity 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 ithappened again. Twice.
Twice!