SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
suggestion that we should work with those total creeps. As it was, my creepiness scale
had been radically recalibrated in the last day or so, and while the spooks who'd rooted my
machine might have rated a nine the week before, now they were about a six, and falling
fast.
Ange spoke up for me, though. “I don't think that's fair to Marcus, Darryl. They were spying
on him, after all. They violated his privacy all the way, from asshole to appetite. I don't
think that's the kind of people we want to work with.”
I relaxed a little. Good old Ange.
“So what do you propose?” Darryl said. His body language was noticeably more on edge
than it had been a second before. I remembered his confession in the park, his desire
to get a chance to be the star of his own movie for a change. I'm sure it sucked to have
someone else second-guess his awesome action-hero plan. But screw it, those guys were
still creeps.
“We tell it to the press. Mail a link to Barbara Stratford, anonymously, tell her how to access
the darknet. Of all the journalists in the world, she's probably the most likely to be able to
figure out how to use a Tor darknet site. And if she can't figure it out, she'll know lots of
hairfaces who can help her out.” Barbara Stratford was a muckraking journo who wrote for
the Bay Guardian. She was an old friend of my folks', and had led the effort to spring me
from the clutches of Carrie Johnstone's torturers. But she was a traditional print journalist
with a lot to lose, and she moved with a lot of plodding caution.
“That sounds slow,” Darryl said. “What's she going to do, read all those docs, call up a
second source to corroborate them, run it past legal, write a story, and file it for publication
in next week's issue? We need this stuff to go live now.”
Ange opened her mouth to argue, but Jolu held a hand up. “No reason we can't do both.
We tell your reporter friend about it, but we also post the darknet address where anyone
can find it.”
“How?” I said. I'd been thinking about this. How do you publicize something while staying
anonymous?
Jolu shrugged. “Create a new Twitter account, use it from behind IPredator. Create a new
Wordpress blog, do the same thing. Make a new Facebook identity, put it there, too.”
I shook my head. “That'll never work. Who pays attention to a Twitter account that's just
been created?”
“Well, you could retweet it, you've got thousands of followers. Or I could.”
“Yeah, and I could just make a blinking EL wire sign that says `That anonymous account?
It's really me.'”
“Good point,” Darryl said. “So we find someone we trust, and ask that person to ask their
friends to big it up, link to it, retweet it, friend it, whatever. Make it hard to trace it back.”
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