Little Brother

ng allacross the land. Stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstoresand grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) andkeeping long hours that were convenient to fam

dance, and the guards led me away. As the doorclosed, I saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in.I wish I could say that I'd anticipated this possibility in advance andcreated a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partitionon my phone, but I wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever.You might be wondering at this point what dark secrets I had lockedaway on my phone and memory sticks and email. I'm just a kid, after all.The truth is that I had everything to hide, and nothing. Between myphone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of whomy friends were, what I thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done.You could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd carriedout and the electronic reconciliations we'd arrived at.You see, I don't delet stuff. Why would I? Storage is cheap, and younever know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. Espe-cially the stupid stuff. You know that feeling you get sometimes whereyou're sitting on the subway and there's no one to talk to and you sud-denly remember some bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said?Well, it's usually never as bad as you remember. Being able to go backand see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you're not as53horrible a person as you think you are. Darryl and I have gotten overmore fights that way than I can count.And even that's not it. I know my phone is private. I know mymemory sticks are private. That's because of cryptography — messagescrambling. The math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and meget access to the same crypto that banks and the National SecurityAgency use. There's only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: cryptothat's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. That's how youknow it works.There's something really liberating about having some corner of yourlife that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudityor taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyonehas to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weirdabout either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every timeyou went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glassroom perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body — andhow many of us can say that? — you'd have to be pretty strange to likethat idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it inuntil we exploded.It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing somethingprivate. It's about your life belonging to you.They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to mycell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rulesall my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this wasjustice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had beenwhere I was because I'd snuck out of school.I got my shower. I got to walk around the yard. There was a patch ofsky overhead, and it smelled like the Bay Area, but beyond that, I had noclue where I was being held. No other prisoners were visible during myexercise period, and I got pretty bored with walking in circles. I strainedmy ears for any sound that might help me understand what this placewas, but all I heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversa-tions, a plane landing somewhere nearby.They brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni piefrom Goat Hill Pizza, which I knew well, up on Potrero Hill. The cartonwith its familiar graphic and 415 phone number was a reminder thatonly a day before, I'd been a free man in a free country and that now Iwas a prisoner. I worried constantly about Darryl and fretted about my54other friends. Maybe they'd been more cooperative and had been re-leased. Maybe they'd told my parents and they were frantically callingaround.Maybe not.The cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. I fantasized that thewall opposite my bunk was a screen, that I could be hacking right now,opening the cell-door. I fantasized about my workbench and the projectsthere — the old cans I was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, theaerial photography kite-cam I was building, my homebrew laptop.I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to go home and have my friendsand my school and my parents and my life back. I wanted to be able togo where I wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing.They took my passwords for my USB keys next. Those held some in-teresting messages I'd downloaded from one online discussion group oranother, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me outwith some of the knowledge I needed to do the things I did. There wasnothing on there you couldn't find with Google, of course, but I didn'tthink that would count in my favor.I got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others inthe yard when I got there, four other guys and two women, of all agesand racial backgrounds. I guess lots of people were doing things to earntheir "privileges."They gave me half an hour, and I tried to make conversation with themost normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my agewith a short afro. But when I introduced myself and stuck my hand out,he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners ofthe yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression.But then, just before they called my name and brought me back intothe building, the door opened and out came — Vanessa! I'd never beenmore glad to see a friendly face. She looked tired and grumpy, but nothurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. Wehugged each other hard and I realized I was shaking. Then I realized shewas shaking, too."Are you OK?" she said, holding me at arms' length."I'm OK," I said. "They told me they'd let me go if I gave them mypasswords.""They keep asking me questions about you and Darryl."55There was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stoptalking, to walk, but we ignored it."Answer them," I said, instantly. "Anything they ask, answer them. Ifit'll get you out.""How are Darryl and Jolu?""I haven't seen them."The door banged open and four big guards boiled out. Two took meand two took Vanessa. They forced me to the ground and turned myhead away from Vanessa, though I heard her getting the same treatment.Plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then I was yanked to my feetand brought back to my cell.No dinner came that night. No breakfast came the next morning. Noone came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more ofmy secrets. The plastic cuffs didn't come off, and my shoulders burned,then ached, then went numb, then burned again. I lost all feeling in myhands.I had to pee. I couldn't undo my pants. I really, really had to pee.I pissed myself.They came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and goneclammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. They came forme and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door withits own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. They walked medown the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it waslike a different planet when I entered there, a world where things werenormal, where everything didn't reek of urine. I felt so dirty andashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what I got came back to me.Severe haircut lady was already sitting. She was perfect: coifed andwith just a little makeup. I smelled her hair stuff. She wrinkled her noseat me. I felt the shame rise in me."Well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? Aren't you afilthy thing?"Shame. I looked down at the table. I couldn't bear to look up. I wantedto tell her my email password and get gone."What did you and your friend talk about in the yard?"I barked a laugh at the table. "I told her to answer your questions. Itold her to cooperate.""So do you give the orders?"56I felt the blood sing in my ears. "Oh come on," I said. "We play a gametogether, it's called Harajuku Fun Madness. I'm the team captain. We'renot terrorists, we're high school students. I don't give her orders. I toldher that we needed to be honest with you so that we could clear up anysuspicion and get out of here."She didn't say anything for a moment."How is Darryl?" I said."Who?""Darryl. You picked us up together. My friend. Someone had stabbedhim in the Powell Street BART. That's why we were up on the surface.To get him help.""I'm sure he's fine, then," she said.My stomach knotted and I almost threw up. "You don't know? Youhaven't got him here?""Who we have here and who we don't have here is not somethingwe're going to discuss with you, ever. That's not something you're goingto know. Marcus, you've seen what happens when you don't cooperatewith us. You've seen what happens when you disobey our orders.You've been a little cooperative, and it's gotten you almost to the pointwhere you might go free again. If you want to make that possibility intoa reality, you'll stick to answering my questions."I didn't say anything."You're learning, that's good. Now, your email passwords, please."I was ready for this. I gave them everything: server address, login,password. This didn't matter. I didn't keep any email on my server. Idownloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloadedand deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. They wouldn'tget anything out of my mail — it got cle