Homeland / Chapter 8.

PAUSED- done- wpm- acc

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 are different and what we need 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, 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 cats-paw feet while we were talking, and I jumped in my seat. "Woah, sorry, calm down there, 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."