SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
Internet through AT&T, a scumbag phone company with a track record of handing over
their customers' data to the cops without court-orders. Grabbing sensitive files off the net
through them was like calling up the director of the DHS and saying, “Hey, are you missing
any sensitive data? Because I'm small, defenseless, and unarmed, and I got `em. Want
my address?”
Which is why, no matter what, I always scraped up the money to pay for a subscription to
IPredator, the proxy service operated by the Pirate Bay folks. IPredator was specifically
designed to make it impossible for anyone else to tell what you've been downloading.
It ping-ponged your data between Copenhagen and Stockholm, across an international
border, and kept no logs or records of who was doing what. It was blazing fast -- for a
proxy, which are never as fast as a naked net connection -- and it was run by some of
the world's baddest-ass hacker anti-authoritarians, people who made me look like a goody
two-shoes obedient toddler who could barely turn on a computer. If anyone could make
my download anonymous, it was those cats.
While the file trickled in, I hit my email. I've never been much of an email user -- it's not
like my friends and I used it to figure out when to hook up, we all used Twitter and Xnet's
Facebook overlay (which scrambled our updates and messages) -- but all my profs had
used it while I was at Berkeley, and then everyone I was hitting up for work expected me to
give them an email address. God, but email was tedious. People expected you to answer
all of it, and there was: So. Much. Spam. When it came to Twitter and Xnet, I could just
take everything that had come in while I was at Burning Man and mark it as read, and no
one would get pissed off at me. But people who sent you email took it personally if you
didn't reply. It was just how email worked. Even I felt put out if someone didn't reply to my
email.
Download download download. Spam spam spam. Delete delete delete. The stupid email
ritual, so beloved of my parents. So boring. When I finally whittled down the huge log of
crap to a little toothpick of actual mail, my eye jumped to one sent by “Joseph Noss.” Of
course, it was probably a fund-raising appeal, since my email address seemed to have
found its way into the mailing lists of every political candidate in the state. But in my
notebook, there was the email address for Joseph Noss's campaign manager, carefully
copied after Mitch Kapor had written it on my arm with his Sharpie. The coincidence
was...interesting.
I opened it.
> From: Joseph Noss
> To: Marcus Yallow
> Subject: Webmaster
> Dear Marcus,
SiSU www.sisudoc.org/ 59