what we
Kemal interrupts again. You do a double-take: In this corner of the academic metaverse he’s come over all sinister, in a black-and-silver suit with peaked forage cap, mirrored aviator shades. “Stop right there, please. You’re implying that this, this field is mature? That is, that you routinely do this sort of thing?”
MacDonald blinks rapidly. “Didn’t you know?”
You take a deep breath. “We’re just cops: Nobody tells us anything. Humour us. Um. What sort of, uh, general cognitive engines are we talking about? Project ATHENA, is that one?”
“Loosely, yes.” He rubs at his face, an expression of profound bafflement wrinkling his brows. “ATHENA is one of a family of research-oriented identity-amplification engines that have been developed over the past few years. It’s not all academic; for example TR/Mithras. Junkbot.D and Worm/NerveBurn.10143 are out there now. They’re malware AI engines; the Junkbot family are distributed identity simulators used for harvesting trust, while NerveBurn . . . we’re not entirely sure, but it seems to be a sand-boxed virtual brain simulator running on a botnet, possibly a botched attempt at premature mind uploading . . .” He rubs his face again. “ATHENA is a bit different. We’re an authorized botnet—that is, we’re legal; students at participating institutions are required to sign an EULA that permits us to run a VM instance on their pad or laptop, strictly for research in distributed computing. There’s also a distributed screen-saver project for volunteers. ATHENA’s our research platform in moral metacognition.”
“Metacognition?”
“Loosely, it means we’re in consciousness studies—more prosaically, we’re in the business of telling spam from ham.” He shrugs apologetically. “Big contracts from telcos who want to cut down on the junk traffic: It pays our grants. The spambots have been getting disturbingly convincing—last month there was a report of a spearphishing worm that was hiring call girls to role-play the pick-ups the worm had primed its targets to expect. Some of them are getting very sophisticated—using multiple contact probes to simulate an entire social network— big ones, hundreds or thousands of members, with convincing interactions—e-commerce, fake phone conversations, the whole lot—in front of the victim. Bluntly, we’re only human; we can’t tell the difference between a spambot and a real human being anymore without face-to-face contact. So we need identity amplification to keep up.
“The ATHENA research group is working on the spam-filtering problem by running a huge distributed metacognition app that’s intended to pick holes in the spammers’ fake social networks.”
MacDonald magicks up a big diagram in place of the graphs; it looks like a tattered spider-web. “Here’s a typical social network. Each node is a person. They’ve got a lot of local connections, and a handful of long-range ones.” Thin strands snake across the web, linking distant intersections. “Zoom in on one of the nodes, and we have a bunch of different networks: their email, chat, phone calls, online purchases . . .” A slew of different spider-webs, cerise and cyan and magenta, all appear centred on a single point. They’re all subtly different in shape. “Spambots usually get their networks wrong, too regular, not noisy enough. And we can deduce other information by looking at the networks, of course. You know the old one about checking the phone bills for signs that your partner’s having an affair, right? There are other, more subtle signs of—well, call it potential criminality. Odds are, before your partner snuck off for some illicit nookie, there was a warm-up period, lots of chatter with characteristic weighted phrases —we’re human: We talk in cliches the whole time, framing the narrative of our lives. Or take some of the commoner personality disorders: pre-ATHENA, we had diagnostic tools that could diagnose schizophrenia from a sample of email messages with eerie accuracy. Network analysis lets us learn a lot about people. Network injection lets us
“Can you give me an example of what you mean by steering people?” Kemal nudges.
“Hmm.” MacDonald’s chair squeals as he leans back. “Okay, let’s talk hypotheticals: Suppose I’m wearing a black hat, and I want to fuck someone up, and I’ve paid for a command channel to Junkbot.D. First, I build a map of their social connections. Then I have Junkbot establish a bunch of sock puppets and do a friend-of-friend approach via their main social networks—build up connections until they see the sock puppets’ friend requests, see lots of friends in common, and accept the invite. Junkbot then engages them in several conversation scripts in parallel. A linear chat-up rarely works—people are too suspicious these days—but you can game them. Set up an artificial- reality game, if you like, built around your victim’s world, with a bunch of sock puppets who are there to sucker them in to the drama. Finally, you use the client-side toolkit to hire some proxies—neds in search of the price of a pint—who’ll hand your target a package and leg it, five minutes ahead of your colleagues, who have received an anonymous tip-off that the quiet guy living at number seventy-six is a nonce.”
Kemal is rapt, listening intently. He nods, perhaps once every ten seconds. MacDonald has got him on a string with this spiel. You look back at MacDonald. “You wouldn’t dream of doing that,” you say.
MacDonald grins and nods. “Indeed not. Morality aside, it’s stupid small-scale shit. What’d be the point?”
You peg him then. He’s not your typical aspie hacker, and he’s not a regular impulse-control case. MacDonald’s the other, rare kind: the sort of potential offender who does a cold-blooded risk-benefit calculation and refrains from action not because it’s wrong, but because the trade-off isn’t right. You won’t be seeing him in the daily arrest log anytime soon, because he kens well the opportunity cost of a decade in prison: It’d take a bottom line denominated in millions to lure him off the straight and narrow. But
“What do you use ATHENA for?” you ask, bluntly.
“Right now we’re tracing spammers. ATHENA can scope out the fake networks: It can also tell us who’s running them.” There’s something about MacDonald’s body language that puts you on red alert. Something evasive. “ATHENA then probes the spammers to determine whether they’re human or sock-puppet. We’re working on active countermeasures, but that’s not green-lit yet; I gather there’s a working group talking to some staff at the Ministry of Justice about it, but—”
“What kind of active countermeasures?”
“Spoiler stuff, but more active than usual: using their own tools against them. You know it’s an international problem? Crossing lines of jurisdiction—a lot of them live in countries that aren’t signatory to or don’t enforce anti- netcrime treaties. So we’re examining a number of tactics that’d need to be approved by a court order before we could use them. So far it’s just theoretical, but: reverse-phishing the spammers to grab their control channels and shut down the botnets. Fucking with their phishing payloads to make them expose their real identity so you folks can arrest them. Stealing their banking credentials and applying civil-forfeiture protocols. Using their ID protocols to fuck with their personal lives—hate mail to the mother-in-law, that kind of thing. Having their computer report itself as stolen. In an extreme instance, ask the USAF to send a drone to zap them.”
“Uh-huh.” You glance down and try to look as if you’re making notes, so that he can’t see your face. One by one, the alarm bells are going off inside your head. “But you haven’t done any of this yet.”
“No.”
“But?”
“ATHENA is an international effort.” MacDonald leans forward on his elbows, fingers laced before him. “
ANWAR: Bluebeard
As soon as you open the front door, you know something’s not right.
“Honey? I’m home . . .”
