Little Brother

he gigantic Borders on Orchard Road in Singapore and discovering ashelf loaded with my novels! For many years, the Borders in OxfordStreet in London hoste

ly h4wt — that is to say, hot. It was like looking at thatpicture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. I could see thatVan was just Van, but I could also see that she was hella pretty,something I'd never noticed.Of course, Darryl had known it all along, and don't think that I wasn'tbummed out anew when I realized this."You can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "You'd put us all at risk."Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with herbreath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way."Yeah," I said, glumly. "But the problem is that I know he's just totallyfull of it. If you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't achild-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. Totally off-the-rails. He hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill.Being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would givehim an aneurism.""They only get away with it because the normals feel smug comparedto the abnormals. If everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster.No one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questionedby the cops. Total gridlock."Woah."Van, you are a total genius," I said."Tell me about it," she said. She had a lazy smile and she looked at methrough half-lidded eyes, almost romantic."Seriously. We can do this. We can mess up the profiles easily. Gettingpeople pulled over is easy."107She sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. I felt alittle flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me."It's the arphid cloners," I said. "They're totally easy to make. Just flashthe firmware on a ten-dollar Radio Shack reader/writer and you're done.What we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, over-writing their Fast Passes and FasTraks with other people's codes. That'llmake everyone skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone lookguilty. Then: total gridlock."Van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and I realized she was soangry she couldn't speak."Good bye, Marcus," she said, and got to her feet. Before I knew it, shewas walking away so fast she was practically running."Van!" I called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "Van! Wait!"She picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her."Van, what the hell," I said, catching her arm. She jerked it away sohard I punched myself in the face."You're psycho, Marcus. You're going to put all your little Xnet bud-dies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn thewhole city into terrorism suspects. Can't you stop before you hurt thesepeople?"I opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "Van, I'm not the prob-lem, they are. I'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disap-pear. The Department of Homeland Security are the ones doing that. I'mfighting back to make them stop.""How, by making it worse?""Maybe it has to get worse to get better, Van. Isn't that what you weresaying? If everyone was getting pulled over —""That's not what I meant. I didn't mean you should get everyone arres-ted. If you want to protest, join the protest movement. Do somethingpositive. Didn't you learn anything from Darryl? Anything?""You're damned right I did," I said, losing my cool. "I learned that theycan't be trusted. That if you're not fighting them, you're helping them.That they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. What did youlearn, Van? To be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your headdown and hope you don't get noticed? You think it's going to get better?If we don't do anything, this is as good as it's going to get. It will only get108worse and worse from now on. You want to help Darryl? Help me bringthem down!"There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring downthe entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I plannedto do. No question about it.Van shoved me hard with both hands. She was strong from school ath-letics — fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports — and Iended up on my ass on the disgusting San Francisco sidewalk. She tookoff and I didn't follow.>The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it'show they fail.That was the first line of my first blog post on Open Revolt, my Xnetsite. I was writing as M1k3y, and I was ready to go to war.>Maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists.Maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later. The problem is that itcatches us too, even though we're not doing anything wrong.>The more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. If it catches toomany people, it dies.>Get the idea?I pasted in my HOWTO for building a arphid cloner, and some tips forgetting close enough to people to read and write their tags. I put my owncloner in the pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket withthe armored pockets and left for school. I managed to clone six tagsbetween home and Chavez High.It was war they wanted. It was war they'd get.If you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic ter-rorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. It's called"the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy.Say you have a new disease, called Super-AIDS. Only one in a millionpeople gets Super-AIDS. You develop a test for Super-AIDS that's 99109percent accurate. I mean, 99 percent of the time, it gives the correct result— true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. Yougive the test to a million people.One in a million people have Super-AIDS. One in a hundred peoplethat you test will generate a "false positive" — the test will say he hasSuper-AIDS even though he doesn't. That's what "99 percent accurate"means: one percent wrong.What's one percent of one million?1,000,000/100 = 10,000One in a million people has Super-AIDS. If you test a million randompeople, you'll probably only find one case of real Super-AIDS. But yourtest won't identify one person as having Super-AIDS. It will identify10,000 people as having it.Your 99 percent accurate test will perform with 99.99 percentinaccuracy.That's the paradox of the false positive. When you try to findsomething really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of thething you're looking for. If you're trying to point at a single pixel on yourscreen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller(more accurate) than the pixels. But a pencil-tip is no good at po