SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
the entire yak pen at the zoo, and pretty soon traveling to Tibet to shave foreign yaks you've
never seen before and whose barbering you know little about.”
That's the territory I was heading into. It was time to decrypt the file.
-..-
It had been a while since I'd decrypted an encrypted ZIP file with a very long password.
There was a specialized command you could use to specify that the password was in a
file, and I couldn't remember it at first. I looked up how to do it. I did it. The list of files
scrolled past faster than my eye could follow. Lots of files. LOTS AND LOTS of files.
810,097 files.
What had Masha said? Eventually, you come across something so terrible, you can't look
yourself in the mirror anymore unless you do something about it.
That was a lot of dirty laundry, yo.
I could tell at a glance that they had human-generated file names -- weird punctuation,
weird capitalization, and both were all over the place. Computers might do weird capitalization,
but every file would have been weird in the same way. Some had pretty descriptive
names like “bribes paid to senate Def Cttee.doc” and others were more cryptic, like
HumIntAfgh32533. There was a file called WATERBOARDING.PPT, a set of PowerPoint
slides. My stomach curdled into a hard ball just looking at it.
I double clicked it. The first slide was just a title: “STRESS INTERROGATION SEMINAR
4320.” The next slide was a long confidentiality notice, naming a bunch of private military
contractors who, apparently, had been involved in producing this presentation. And the
next slide --
-- showed a boy, about my age, restrained in padded cuffs at the ankles, wrists and chest,
strapped to an angled wooden board that held his head lower than his feet, mouth covered
tightly in saran-wrap, having water poured down his nose in a splashing stream out of a
bucket with a spout, held by two large, clean, white hands. The boy's body was arched up
like a bow, straining against his restraints, pulling so hard that every muscle in his body
stood out. He looked like an anatomical illustration.
No.
He looked like a torture victim.
The saran wrap was an evil touch. The water is poured down the nose, but it can't go into
the lungs, because the body is tilted backwards. His body is tilted backwards. The body -his
body -- knows that there's water going into the windpipe and it's desperate for air. His
mouth gasps, but the saran wrap only lets the air go out, because every time he tries to
suck air in, the plastic makes a tight seal. The only place air could enter is his nose, and
the water is pouring into his nose and so he can't breathe that way.
SiSU www.sisudoc.org/ 77