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But first, I had to harden our infrastructure.<br />
<strong>Homeland</strong><br />
I figured the first thing to do was get us spanned out across a lot of cloud servers. My<br />
predecessor had gotten us hosted on Amazon's cloud, which was as robust as they came,<br />
an inconceivable network of humming racks in data centers all over the world, overseen<br />
by labcoated priests who could diagnose and swap out a faulty component in two minutes<br />
flat, fed by twisted fiber-optic bundles as thick as my arm, and cooled by enormous chillers<br />
with carbon footprints the size of cities. Amazon was a great choice if you wanted to get<br />
hosted by someone who'd keep your servers online no matter how popular they got.<br />
However, they were a terrible choice for hosting your data if you were worried about the<br />
police going bugnuts on you. You see, the police don't necessarily know how to seize<br />
just one customer's data from a global network of server racks. If you're doing something<br />
with your data that was going to really interest the cops, then you had to be prepared for<br />
someone powerful calling up Amazon's lawyers and saying, “We need to investigate one of<br />
your customers, and since we don't know how to take one customer's data off your servers,<br />
we're coming over with a couple of sixteen wheelers and taking it all away until we finish<br />
our investigations.” Or, as the Godfather might have said, “Nice cloud; it'd be a shame if<br />
something were to happen to it.”<br />
Amazon had a lot, so they had a lot to lose, and while they'd been a good choice for our<br />
nice, boring campaign site, they sucked at providing infrastructure for ground zero in the<br />
new infowar. I'd heard a seminar about this from some of the Tor hackers at Noisebridge,<br />
and they'd mentioned a bunch of ballsy, free-speech-oriented cloud providers that would<br />
take us on. They were the projects of eccentric weirdos, free-speech nuts; bashed-together<br />
hackerspace side projects; sketchy-sketchy services with one foot in the porn industry and<br />
the other in organized crime. Most of them couldn't take a credit card payment because<br />
they'd been cut off by everyone from American Express to Visa to Mastercard to PayPal.<br />
Instead, they received payment through wire transfers, Western Union money orders, and<br />
other weird and cumbersome measures. I groaned and facepalmed and went and talked<br />
to Flor about this.<br />
I'd been afraid to face Flor. I remembered her warning about dragging the campaign into<br />
anything “leet” and had a feeling that she was probably already furious with me. But I hadn't<br />
bargained on what it meant for the idea to come from Joe. Joe and Flor may have argued<br />
about this, but once Joe won the argument, Flor was behind him a hundred percent. Like<br />
most of us, she was ready to march into the sun for him, and as soon as I made it clear<br />
why I needed her to take the campaign credit card down the street to a liquor store and<br />
buy a Western Union order for a random dude -- I didn't even know where he lived -- she<br />
agreed.<br />
“Just let me talk to him first,” she said. I had a moment's impatience, because I felt like<br />
my parent wanted to look over my homework -- finding bulletproof web hosting was my<br />
<strong>SiSU</strong> www.sisudoc.org/ 231
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