SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
“What do you mean? Like the cops or the FBI or something?”
“Well, I mean, sure, yeah, of course they can do all this stuff.” And more, I thought, imagining
what you might dig up with a lawful intercept appliance. “But what about, I don't know,
some CEO? Or a private military contractor?”
“You mean, is there someone like Anonymous out there, but doing it for the money instead
of the lulz? Like hackers for hire or whatever? Oh, man, I'm totally sure there are. It's not
like you have to be an angel or a genius to learn how to do an SQL injection or crack a
crappy password file. I bet you half the creeps who used to give me noogies at recess are
laughing it up at private intelligence outfits these days.”
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered how many of those particular kinds of creeps were drawing a
paycheck from Carrie Johnstone and whether any of them might be hanging out in our
darknet, messing with our heads.
-..-
I took a long lunch (feeling like a total slacker for grabbing extra time off on my third day
at work) and asked Ange and Jolu to meet me in South Park, which was about the same
distance from Ange's school and Jolu's and my offices. It was a slightly scuzzy little park
right in the middle of SoMa -- south of Market -- but it had been ground zero for a whole ton
of dotcom start-ups and tech companies and it was always full of the right kind of nerds. I
felt comfortable there.
Jolu arrived first, looking cool and grown-up as usual. A couple of the people eating their
lunches on the benches around us recognized him and waved at him.
“How do you do it?” I said when he sat down.
“What?” he said, smiling like he and I were in on some enormous joke together.
“I don't know; how are you so cool? I'm crapping myself over this darknet stuff, I look like I
dressed myself in the dark, I can't figure out how to cut my hair so I don't look fifteen years
old, and you, you're so totally, I don't know, you know, styling.”
He gave me that easy smile again. “I don't know, Marcus. I used to be kind of anxious
all the time, did I look ”cool,“ was I going to get in trouble, was the world going to end or
whatever? And then one day, I just thought, You know, whatever's happening, I'm not going
to improve it by having a total spazz attack. So I decided to just stop. And I did.”
“You're a Zen master, you know that?”
“You should try it, pal. You're looking a little freaked out, if you don't mind my saying
so.”
“Well, you know: `When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.'”
“Yeah, I've heard you say that before. I guess what I'm asking is, how's that working out
for you?”
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