SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
I shrugged. “Probably. I mean, most of it sounds like it's just a quick tweak of some of the
free/open campaignware out there. But I don't think anyone's done it for elections yet. I
could build something, get it running.”
“So if you could build it, then my opponents could, too?”
“Can't see why not. But that sounds like a reason for you to build it first.”
He laughed. I had an idea, though.
“So, but I've also been thinking of ways you can use the net that your opponents can't.”
“Go on.”
The same remote part of my mind wondered why he didn't say, “Can't this wait until Monday?”
But then, he was Joe. He was the candidate. He didn't get weekends. He was
here, with one of his campaign workers, and that meant that he was, fundamentally, at
work.
“You know the darknet docs, right?” It took everything in me not to look around at that
moment to see if anyone was watching.
“I'm familiar with them,” he said. His face was unreadable, the same mask of listening he'd
slipped into when I started talking.
“Well, they're hard to get at right now. You have to do a lot of stuff with Tor, which is this
anonymizing technology that's kind of tricky. On the plus side, it's really hard to take them
down or even figure out where they are. On the other hand, they're hard for normal people
to go and see. That's because no one's hosting them on a regular, boring old Internet site,
as a collection of documents that anyone with a web browser can see and link to.”
“Yes,” he said. “I think that's right. The main reason I didn't go and look at them myself
is that it seemed altogether too complicated for someone who wasn't a dedicated technoninja.”
I started to say, It's not that hard -- and was about to launch into a little tutorial about how
to use Tor, but I stopped myself. It didn't matter, and besides, if Joe felt like it was too
complicated, it was important to acknowledge that he had the right to feel that way.
“Well, I have looked at these documents, and from what I've seen of them, they're full of
corruption, crime, and sleaze. And by and large, this corruption, crime, and sleaze has
been committed by the big parties and their pals. So it seems to me that if you want to
convince people that they should risk voting for an independent candidate, it'd help if you
could show people that they're not `wasting their votes' when they vote for you, because
any other vote is going to give power to the same dirtbags who did all this bad stuff.”
“You think we should host all the darknet documents,” he said. He didn't look like he thought
it was the worst idea in the world, but he also didn't throw his arms up and give me a bear
hug and shout, Marcus, you've done it!
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