SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
thing about this stuff. It worked equally well for everyone: people who had leaks, people
who worried about leaks, people who leaked leaks. We were all smart enough to keep our
paranoid packets bouncing around the net like hyperactive superballs.
Certainly, the connection was slow enough. I waited interminably as my computer logged
into the backup at home. “This is my home drive,” I said. I typed in the passphrase that
unlocked the key on my hard drive and caused it to be sent to the disk on my desk at home.
I let the camera see my fingers enter the commands to securely delete the leaks file from
my primary backup drive, overwriting them with three successive passes of random (or
“random”) data, then did a search on the drive to show that that was the only copy. “That
drive synchs up to one at the hackerspace, Noisebridge.” I logged out and logged in to
Noisebridge's open shell, pwny, the connection crawling over its layers of misdirection and
encryption. “I'm nuking it here.” I did. “Noisebridge backs up to the cloud. It's not a drive I
can control, but Noisebridge re-synchs every five minutes, and here's where the process
logs.” I opened the logfile with the “tail -f” command, which let us see new lines as they
were being written to it. We waited in stuffy silence for the next synch, then watch as the
log showed the Noisebridge server being compared to the remote copy, noticing that I'd
deleted the leaks files and keys, and instructing that they be deleted on the other side as
well.
I logged out. “Done.”
“Do we believe him, Timmy?” said Knothead, in a teasing, mean way.
“Oh, I believe him, but you know what they say: `Trust, but verify.' Your turn, buddy.”
Knothead came around and opened the back door and swapped places with Timmy. He
brought out each piece of his high-technology lie detector, examining it minutely, making
sure I saw him do it. Back in the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the torturers had a thing
called “showing the implements” where they showed the heretic the weird cutlery they had
on hand to lift, separate and disconnect all the moist, tender, painful places in his body.
Knothead would have made a great inquisitor, and he even had the science background
for it. It's a shame he was born five hundred years too late to get the job.
He fitted me with a blood pressure cuff -- yeah, it was a tactical cuff, which clearly made
this guy as happy as a pig in shit -- and then started in with the electrodes. He had a lot
of electrodes and he was going to use `em all, that much was clear. Each one went in
over a smear of conductive jelly that came out of a disposable packet, like the ketchup
packets you get at McDonald's. These, at least, were non-tactical, emblazoned instead
with German writing and an unfamiliar logo.
That was when I started puckering and unpuckering my anus.
Yes, you read that right. Here's the thing about lie detectors: they work by measuring
the signs of nervousness, like increases in pulse, respiration, and yeah, sweatiness. The
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