SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
“Or maybe they're about to do something to the electronics,” Ange said.
Lemmy and I both looked at her. She had a pitbull look of determination on her face and she
was digging through her bag. She pulled out two pairs of swim goggles and a stack of paper
painter's masks. She pulled one pair of goggles over her eyes and passed the other to me,
then used her free hand to produce a quart of milk of magnesia that she used to douse the
painter's masks. She put one on, I put one on, and I handed one to Lemmy, but he wasn't
paying attention. Instead, he'd crouched down and buried his face in his backpack and he
was all but throwing its contents on the ground as he dug for something.
“Lemmy,” I said, shaking the dripping mask under his nose. The liquid would neutralize
some of the sting in any kind of pepper spray, and if they used some other chemical agent,
the wet mask would trap more than a dry one. “Lemmy!”
He stood up so fast he caught me on the chin a little and would have sent me backwards
on my ass if there'd been room for it. As it was, the people behind me caught me and
steadied me, and I waved a quick thanks at them and turned back to see Lemmy holding
a silver ziploc bag.
“Phones,” he said. “Quick!”
I recognized the bag: a Faraday pouch, the kind of thing you put your RFID-emitting ID,
transit pass, toll road transponder, or passport into if you didn't want strangers to be able
to read it.
But Faraday pouches weren't just good at keeping the stuff inside from communicating
with the outside world: they were also good at keeping radio waves from the outside world
from getting inside them. I yanked out my phone so fast I turned my jeans pocket inside
out and scattered small change on the ground around our feet. Ange already had hers out.
We dropped them in the bag and Lemmy shoved his in and sealed it and dropped it back
in his backpack, then he took the mask from me and dug out his own goggles and pulled
them on.
The people around us had seen this weird behavior and some of them were following us.
Others were starting to push and panic, trying to get out, and I thought Oh god, there's
going to be a stampede, we're going to die --
And at that moment, there was a crack like the sky was a sheet of paper being torn in
two by enormous, divine hands, and every electronic device in the vicinity sputtered and
died.
They'd HERFed us.
-..-
HERF stands for High Energy Radio Frequency, and it basically means a big, nasty pulse
of raw radio energy. You can build a HERF gun that will tune the power from a standard
car battery, focusing it into a pencil-beam of ugly brute force by means of a mini satellite
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