Little Brother

multi-storey universe of papery smells and toweringshelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves —something I've always loved — a

fore, butmost of them had stopped using them. The games were really expensiveand not a lot of fun. I took them aside between periods, at lunch andstudy hall, and sang the praises of the ParanoidXbox games to the sky.Free and fun — addictive social games with lots of cool people playingthem from all over the world.Giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor bladebusiness" — companies like Gillette give you free razor-blade handlesand then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. Printercartridges are the worst for that — the most expensive Champagne in theworld is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of apenny a gallon to make wholesale.Razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the"blades" from someone else. After all, if Gillette can make nine bucks ona ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makesonly four bucks selling an identical blade: an 80 percent profit margin isthe kind of thing that makes your average business-guy go all droolyand round-eyed.So razor-blade companies like Microsoft pour a lot of effort into mak-ing it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. InMicrosoft's case, every Xbox has had countermeasures to keep you fromrunning software that was released by people who didn't pay theMicrosoft blood-money for the right to sell Xbox programs.The people I met didn't think much about this stuff. They perked upwhen I told them that the games were unmonitored. These days, any on-line game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. First thereare the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location sothey can go all weird and Silence of the Lambs on you. Then there are thecops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs.Worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying onour discussions and snitching on us for violating their Terms of Service,83which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no "clear or masked languagewhich insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality."I'm no 24/7 horn-dog, but I'm a seventeen year old boy. Sex does comeup in conversation every now and again. But God help you if it came upin chat while you were gaming. It was a real buzz-kill. No one monitoredthe ParanoidXbox games, because they weren't run by a company: theywere just games that hackers had written for the hell of it.So these game-kids loved the story. They took the discs greedily, andpromised to burn copies for all of their friends — after all, games aremost fun when you're playing them with your buddies.When I got home, I read that a group of parents were suing the schoolboard over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'dalready lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them.I don't know who came up with the name Xnet, but it stuck. You'dhear people talking about it on the Muni. Van called me up to ask me ifI'd heard of it and I nearly choked once I figured out what she was talk-ing about: the discs I'd started distributing last week had been sneaker-netted and copied all the way to Oakland in the space of two weeks. Itmade me look over my shoulder — like I'd broken a rule and now theDHS would come and take me away forever.They'd been hard weeks. The BART had completely abandoned cashfares now, switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you wavedat the turnstiles to go through. They were cool and convenient, but everytime I used one, I thought about how I was being tracked. Someone onXnet posted a link to an Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper onthe ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paperhad tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at theBART stations.I used the Xnet for almost everything now. I'd set up a fake email ad-dress through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hated Inter-net surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret fromeveryone, even the cops. I accessed it strictly via Xnet, hopping from oneneighbor's Internet connection to the next, staying anonymous — Ihoped — all the way to Sweden. I wasn't using w1n5ton anymore. IfBenson could figure it out, anyone could. My new handle, come up withon the spur of the moment, was M1k3y, and I got a lot of email frompeople who heard in chat rooms and message boards that I could helpthem troubleshoot their Xnet configurations and connections.84I missed Harajuku Fun Madness. The company had suspended thegame indefinitely. They said that for "security reasons" they didn't thinkit would be a good idea to hide things and then send people off to findthem. What if someone thought it was a bomb? What if someone put abomb in the same spot?What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Banumbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!I kept on using my laptop, though I got a skin-crawly feeling when Iused it. Whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why I didn't use it. Ifigured I'd just do some random surfing with it every day, a little lesseach day, so that anyone watching would see me slowly changing myhabits, not doing a sudden reversal. Mostly I read those creepy obits —all those thousands of my friends and neighbors dead at the bottom ofthe Bay.Truth be told, I was doing less and less homework every day. I hadbusiness elsewhere. I burned new stacks of ParanoidXbox every day,fifty or sixty, and took them around the city to people I'd heard werewilling to burn sixty of their own and hand them out to their friends.I wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because I hadgood crypto on my side. Crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," andit's been around since Roman times (literally: Augustus Caesar was a bigfan and liked to invent his own codes, some of which we use today forscrambling joke punchlines in email).Crypto is math. Hard math. I'm not going to try to explain it in detailbecause I don't have the math to really get my head around it, either —look it up on Wikipedia if you really want.But here's the Cliff's Notes version: Some kinds of mathematical func-tions are really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in theother direction. It's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together andmake a giant number. It's really, really hard to take any given giant num-ber and figure out which primes multiply together to give you thatnumber.That means that if you can come up with a way of scramblingsomething based on multiplying large primes, unscrambling it withoutknowing those primes will be hard. Wicked hard. Like, a trillion years ofall the computers ever invented working 24/7 won't be able to do it.There are four parts to any crypto message: the original message,called the "cleartext." The scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." The85scrambling system, called the "cipher." And finally there's the key: secretstuff you feed into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext.It used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. Everyagency and government had its own ciphers and its own keys. The Nazisand the Allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambledtheir messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramblethem. That sounds like a good idea, right?Wrong.The first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, I im-mediately said, "No way, that's BS. I mean, sure it's hard to do this primefactorization stuff, whatever you say it is. But it used to be impossible tofly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytesof storage. Someone must have invented a way of descrambling the mes-sages." I had visions of a hollow mountain full of National SecurityAgency mathematicians reading every email in the world andsnickering.In fact, that's pretty much what happened during World War II. That'sthe reason that life isn't more like Castle Wolfenstein, where I've spentmany days hunting Nazis.The thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. There's a lot of math thatgoes into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses themhas to keep them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have tofind a new cipher.The Nazi ciph