SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
“Or someone's rooted your computer, or mine, or Ange's.”
“Yeah.”
That was the possibility that had been going through my head all morning. Someone with
total control over my computer, someone with the power to light up the camera and the
mic, to grab text off my screen or files off my hard drive. It wasn't a possibility I liked to
think about. The darknet docs showed that Fred Benson had grabbed over eight thousand
photos of one student alone, some poor kid the old bastard had a hate-on for.
How many times had my computer been compromised? 0? Or eight thousand?
And more importantly: if my computer had been pwned, had it been “random” -- someone
scanning for vulnerabilities discovering my computer in a rare, unpatched moment and
grabbing control over it -- or had it been “special”? That is, had someone targeted me? Like
Godel, I wasn't sure I knew the difference between random and special any more.
-..-
I don't know what Jolu told Restless Agent and the rest of his buddies, but there was no
darknet chat accusing me or Ange of being the leak. I still didn't know who Jolu's people
were, and didn't want to know, but I kind of assumed that they were people he worked with
and that he'd gone back from lunch and had a little chat with them -- hopefully away from
any computers that might be covertly running their mics and cameras.
But of course, no one wanted to do much chatting at all on darknet, not without knowing
who and how someone or someones were eavesdropping on us.
Long after the last person -- Liam -- had left Joe's campaign office, I sat at my desk, staring
at my computer like it might have a live, venomous snake hiding inside it. I had stayed late
at my desk, theoretically to finish up the day's work and make up for my little lunchtime
face-to-face meeting, but also because I didn't want to try to deworm my laptop at home,
not when I had an office filled with so many spare and useful computers lying around.
In theory, it should be easy to secure (or re-secure) my laptop. Find another hard drive
and create an encrypted filesystem on it. Boot up my computer -- or any computer! -- with
a boot disk downloaded fresh from the Internet, after carefully validating the checksum to
make absolutely, positively certain that I was using a clean, uninfected, pristine version of
ParanoidLinux. Then I'd install a fresh build of ParanoidLinux on the new drive, copy over
the user data from my old disk to the new one, and I'd essentially have given my computer
a fresh brain with all the memories of the old one, but with a high degree of certainty about
the brain's reliability and trustworthiness. It all worked best if you had a couple of spare
laptops and hard drives lying around, which the Joe campaign had -- old laptops are one
of those things that no one really wants to throw away, so we'd accumulated a lot of semiantique
machines that had been donated by Joe's supporters.
Figuring out whether the old machine had been infected at all was a harder, more subtle
problem. If someone had infected the machine and altered the kernel -- the nugget at the
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