SiSU: - Homeland - Cory Doctorow

“You didn't see?”
Homeland
He leaned over me and moused to my browser, went to the front page of Reddit, a site
where you could submit and vote on news stories. Every item on the front page talked
about “darknet leaks.” Feeling like I was in a horror movie, I clicked one of them. It was
a story on wired.com, about a file that had been anonymously dumped into pastebin.com,
instructions for using a lawful intercept appliance to take over Android phones and work
their cameras. Whoever had dumped the file had sent an email to a reporter at wired.com
saying that there were more than 800,000 documents like it on a darknet site, that volunteers
were combing through them, and there was a lot more to come. It didn't say where
they'd come from or who the volunteers were.
I went back to Reddit and checked the others. How many darknet docs had leaked? It
seemed like everyone had the same story, in different variants -- 800,000 docs, darknet,
more to come, but nothing more. I started to calm down.
“You've got an Android phone, right?” Liam said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. But I run ParanoidAndroid -- it's an alternate OS that resists that kind
of spyware.”
“Really?” Joe said. He'd walked up on us on cats-paw feet while we were talking, and I
jumped in my seat. “Woah, sorry, calm down there, Marcus. I've got an Android phone,
too. Tell you what, I'll order in pizza for lunch if you'll give us a workshop on keeping our
phones secure. Sounds like the kind of thing we should all know about.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Of course.” Though as soon as I saw the Wired story, I'd started
scheming to take lunch off and find a WiFi network with weak, crackable WEP security so
that I could hop on, tunnel into the darknet, and try to figure out what had just happened.
I mean, I knew better than anyone that there was no such thing as perfect security, and I
understood that it was likely that someone, someday, would get a look at the darknet docs
who we hadn't invited in. But I didn't think that day would be the day after we set up the
darknet!
But I couldn't screw up my job. I'd been desperate for work for so long, and it was such a
cool job. The fact that I might now be the target of a ruthless mercenary army didn't mean
that I didn't have to help Joe get elected.
So I did my job, and when the pizza came, I stood with a slice in one hand and a whiteboard
pen in the other and sketched out a little flowchart of how your phone could be taken
over, and what could be done with your phone after it was pwned.
Joe munched thoughtfully at a slice, wiped his fingers and his mouth, and put up his hand.
“So you're saying that the police could take over our phones?”
“No!” Liam said, vibrating in his chair. “He's saying anyone could --”
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