SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

Homeland
prompt. They start to rubber-hose you for the password, but you gut it out. Whoosh, the
dead man's switch trips, the VM takes itself down, the data is scrambled.
“But then what happens?”
I chewed my lip. I had thought this through this far before and hadn't liked what came next.
“They try to get the password out of me to decrypt the file.”
“Right.”
I said, “And if you're here, they can work on you, too.”
“Which is why we're doing this. Because right away we can give them a password, and
that password will unlock this copy of the VM. It's got a full set of the leaks. But that's not
the copy we work with. That's the one we hide in the plausible deniability partition. And
that's where we keep all our notes, any mailing lists of people who know about this and
work on it with us. We never give them that password. Our story is, we kept the leaks on
this encrypted VM, and we didn't keep notes on them. We didn't know what to do about
them. It's believable. I mean, we don't know what to do with them.”
We did that. We came up with two long, crazy passwords and practiced them on each
other until we had them memorized. Then we stared at each other.
“Now what?”
“We need Jolu,” I said again. “He's all about wholesale data these days.”
Ange nuked the VMs, turning them back into random-seeming gibberish. “Those speakers
are driving me crazy,” she said. “Are you sure they'll stop this laser-listener stuff?”
I shook my head.
“Fine,” she said. “Let's turn them down for a while, anyway.
“So, Jolu. You know that bringing Jolu into this is pretty much the same kind of dick move
that Masha pulled when she brought you into it.”
“I know. But it's different with Jolu. He's my friend. One of my best friends.”
She chewed on some words for a while. “Marcus, no offense, but is that still true?
When was the last time you guys actually hung out? When was the last time you even
talked?”
I squirmed. She was right. “Okay, point taken, but that doesn't mean we're not still friends.
We don't dislike each other, we're just, you know, busy with our own things. I've known
Jolu for most of my life, since I was a little kid. He's the right guy for this.”
“I don't mean to make you all defensive, all right? It's just that you're about to put Jolu
into a really hard spot, and it's the kind of thing that you should be really, really sure about
before you do it.”
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