SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
But this was here. This was San Francisco. America. The 21st century. I had been in that
crowd. It had just happened.
And yet life was continuing the way it had. The world didn't stop. No one declared that
“everything was different now.” No one was going to remember September 24th as “the
day everything changed.”
If some foreign power, some religious terrorist, had gassed hundreds of thousands of
Americans in the streets of San Francisco, they'd be rearranging all the furniture in government
to make way for the new agencies that would swoop in to make sure that “never
again” would such a thing happen “on U.S. soil.” Why did the fact that we'd all bought the
gas with our tax dollars make the gas acceptable?
I wanted to put this online, but I didn't have the energy to do it all over again, make another
darknet site, try to get people interested in it. I was about to go back to bed when it hit
me: I didn't need to do anything with the darknet this time. This video was ours, mine and
Lemmy's. It wasn't a secret who recorded it or where it was recorded. I laughed. I could
stick this on YouTube. I could tweet it from my own account! I'd gotten so used to operating
in secret that I'd forgotten that I didn't have to.
I posted the video to the Internet Archive, YouTube, and popped a torrent on The Pirate
Bay for good measure, wrote a paragraph explaining that I'd shot this at the demonstration
after the HERF event, pasted it in, tweeted it, and crawled beneath the covers.
-..-
Ange woke me up at 6 A.M. by ringing my phone. When I'd set it up the night before,
I'd forgotten to configure it to stay silent before 7 A.M., so the ringing drilled into my ears
at oh-dark-hundred and dragged me back from the land of nod. “Morning, beautiful,” I
said.
“You could have told me you had video of the gassing,” she said.
“I forgot,” I said. I was still half asleep.
There was a long pause at the other end of the line. “You forgot?”
“I forgot I'd made the video.”
Another silence. “Okay, under any other circumstances, that would be really lame, but I
guess you've been pretty distracted lately. Fine. You get a walk. This time. Still -- holy
shit, dude, what the hell?”
“Are people talking about it?”
“It got a million YouTube views before it got taken down. The Archive version's still up and
the torrent's being seeded by about a thousand people.”
“Taken down, huh?” I tried to find some reservoir of naiveté in me that could be surprised
to discover that the SFPD had ways of taking down files that embarrassed it.
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