Little Brother

What he wanted me to say was:

“I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice.”

He drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twisted off the cap.

“There’s something else,” he said.

“What?”

“I wasn’t going to mention it, but I want you to understand why I have to do this.”

“Jesus, Jolu, what?”

“I hate to say it, but you’re white. I’m not. White people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. Brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. White people see cops on the street and feel safer. Brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they’re about to get searched. The way the DHS is treating you? The law in this country has always been like that for us.”

It was so unfair. I didn’t ask to be white. I didn’t think I was being braver just because I’m white. But I knew what Jolu was saying. If the cops stopped someone in the Mission and asked to see some ID, chances were that person wasn’t white. Whatever risk I ran, Jolu ran more. Whatever penalty I’d pay, Jolu would pay more.

“I don’t know what to say,” I said.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “I just wanted you to know, so you could understand.”

I could see people walking down the side trail toward us. They were friends of Jolu’s, two Mexican guys and a girl I knew from around, short and geeky, always wearing cute black Buddy Holly glasses that made her look like the outcast art-student in a teen movie who comes back as the big success.

Jolu introduced me and gave them beers. The girl didn’t take one, but instead produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse and offered me a drink. I took a swallow — warm vodka must be an acquired taste — and complimented her on the flask, which was embossed with a repeating motif of Parappa the Rapper characters.

“It’s Japanese,” she said as I played another LED keyring over it. “They have all these great booze-toys based on kids’ games. Totally twisted.”

I introduced myself and she introduced herself. “Ange,” she said, and shook my hand with hers — dry, warm, with short nails. Jolu introduced me to his pals, whom he’d known since computer camp in the fourth grade. More people showed up — five, then ten, then twenty. It was a seriously big group now.

We’d told people to arrive by 9:30 sharp, and we gave it until 9:45 to see who all would show up. About three quarters were Jolu’s friends. I’d invited all the people I really trusted. Either I was more discriminating than Jolu or less popular. Now that he’d told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was less discriminating. I was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with other people. But he wasn’t stupid. He knew what was going on. I could see that he was really bummed. Good.

“OK,” I said, climbing up on a ruin, “OK, hey, hello?” A few people nearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. I put my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. Eventually I hit on the idea of turning my LED keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then at me. Gradually, the crowd fell quiet.

I welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them to close in so I could explain why we were there. I could tell they were into the secrecy of it all, intrigued and a little warmed up by the beer.

“So here it is. You all use the Xnet. It’s no coincidence that the Xnet was created right after the DHS took over the city. The people who did that are an organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the network to keep us safe from DHS spooks and enforcers.” Jolu and I had worked this out in advance. We weren’t going to cop to being behind it all, not to anyone. It was way too risky. Instead, we’d put it out that we were merely lieutenants in “M1k3y“’s army, acting to organize the local resistance.

“The Xnet isn’t pure,” I said. “It can be used by the other side just as readily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now. They use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves so that they can bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep them from spying on us. We need a network within the network.”

I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be a little heavy — learning that you’re about to be brought into a revolutionary cell.

“Now, I’m not here to ask you to do anything active. You don’t have to go out jamming or anything. You’ve been brought here because we know you’re cool, we know you’re trustworthy. It’s that trustworthiness I want to get you to contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar with the web of trust and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I’ll run it down quickly —” Which I did.

“Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and figure out how much you can trust them. We’re going to help you generate key-pairs and share them with each other.”

This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptops wouldn’t have worked out, but we still needed to do something hella complicated that wouldn’t exactly work with paper and pencil.

I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from the ground up. “I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by our own hands. It’s running a fresh out-of-the-box version of ParanoidLinux, booted off of the DVD. If there’s a trustworthy computer left anywhere in the world, this might well be it.

“I’ve got a key-generator loaded here. You come up here and give it some random input — mash the keys, wiggle the mouse — and it will use that as the seed to create a random public- and private key for you, which it will display on the screen. You can take a picture of the private key with your phone, and hit any key to make it go away forever — it’s not stored on the disk at all. Then it will show you your public key. At that point, you call over all the people here you trust and who trust you, and they take a picture of the screen with you standing next to it, so they know whose key it is.

“When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. This is going to be a lot of work, I’m afraid, but you’ll only have to do it once. You have to be super-careful about typing these in — one mistake and you’re screwed. Luckily, we’ve got a way to tell if you’ve got it right: beneath the key will be a much shorter number, called the ‘fingerprint’. Once you’ve typed in the key, you can generate a fingerprint from it and compare it to the fingerprint, and if they match, you’ve got it right.”

They all boggled at me. OK, so I’d asked them to do something pretty weird, it’s true, but still.