Little Brother

She blushed. “Um. Yeah.”

“Holy crap!” I said. It had been huge news. The Board of Education said that its No Child Left Behind tests had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and that they’d have to spend it all over again now that they’d had the leak. They called it “edu-terrorism.” The news had speculated endlessly about the political motivations of the leaker, wondering if it was a teacher’s protest, or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled government contractor.

“That was YOU?”

“It was me,” she said.

“And you told Jolu this —”

“Because I wanted him to be sure that I would keep the secret. If he knew my secret, then he’d have something he could use to put me in jail if I opened my trap. Give a little, get a little. Quid pro quo, like in Silence of the Lambs.”

“And he told you.”

“No,” she said. “He didn’t.”

“But —”

“Then I told him how into you I was. How I was planning to totally make an idiot of myself and throw myself at you. Then he told me.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say then. I looked down at my toes. She grabbed my hands and squeezed them.

“I’m sorry I squeezed it out of him. It was your decision to tell me, if you were going to tell me at all. I had no business —”

“No,” I said. Now that I knew how she’d found out, I was starting to calm down. “No, it’s good you know. You.”

“Me,” she said. “Li’l ol’ me.”

“OK, I can live with this. But there’s one other thing.”

“What?”

“There’s no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so I’ll just say it. People who date each other — or whatever it is we’re doing now — they split up. When they split up, they get angry at each other. Sometimes even hate each other. It’s really cold to think about that happening between us, but you know, we’ve got to think about it.”

“I solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me that would cause me to betray your secret. Nothing. Screw a dozen cheerleaders in my bed while my mother watches. Make me listen to Britney Spears. Rip off my laptop, smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-water. I promise. Nothing. Ever.”

I whooshed out some air.

“Um,” I said.

“Now would be a good time to kiss me,” she said, and turned her face up.

#

M1k3y’s next big project on the Xnet was putting together the ultimate roundup of reports of the DON’T TRUST party at Dolores Park. I put together the biggest, most bad-ass site I could, with sections showing the action by location, by time, by category — police violence, dancing, aftermath, singing. I uploaded the whole concert.

It was pretty much all I worked on for the rest of the night. And the next night. And the next.

My mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. They sent me dumps off their phones and their pocket- cameras. Then I got an email from a name I recognized — Dr Eeevil (three “e”s), one of the prime maintainers of ParanoidLinux.

 > M1k3y
 > I have been watching your Xnet experiment with great interest. Here in Germany, we have much experience with what happens with a government that gets out of control.
> One thing you should know is that every camera has a unique “noise signature” that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. That means that the photos you’re republishing on your site could potentially be used to identify the photographers, should they later be picked up for something else.
> Luckily, it’s not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. There’s a utility on the ParanoidLinux distro you’re using that does this — it’s called photonomous, and you’ll find it in /usr/bin. Just read the man pages for documentation. It’s simple though.
> Good luck with what you’re doing. Don’t get caught. Stay free. Stay paranoid.
> Dr Eeevil

I de-fingerprintized all the photos I’d posted and put them back up, along with a note explaining what Dr Eeevil had told me, warning everyone else to do the same. We all had the same basic ParanoidXbox install, so we could all anonymize our pictures. There wasn’t anything I could do about the photos that had already been downloaded and cached, but from now on we’d be smarter.

That was all the thought I gave the matter that night, until I got down to breakfast the next morning and Mom had the radio on, playing the NPR morning news.

“Arabic news agency Al-Jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand accounts of last weekend’s youth riot in Mission Dolores park,” the announcer said as I was drinking a glass of orange juice. I managed not to spray it across the room, but I did choke a little.

“Al-Jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on the so-called ‘Xnet,’ a clandestine network used by students and Al-Quaeda sympathizers in the Bay Area. This network’s existence has long been rumored, but today marks its first mainstream mention.”

Mom shook her head. “Just what we need,” she said. “As if the police weren’t bad enough. Kids running around, pretending to be guerrillas and giving them the excuse to really crack down.”

“The Xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimedia files from young people who attended the riot and allege that they were gathered peacefully until the police attacked them. Here is one of those accounts.