CyberStorm Part 34

We weren't running the electric generator much anymore. The hallway was lit with lamps we'd made, using heating oil from the furnace in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was nearly the only thing we could use it for, as it was too viscous to run in the generator. Running the kerosene heaters on diesel alone created heat, but also nearly unbearable fumes, so we had to keep windows open when we ran it. This defeated the purpose.

"In a few minutes we'll be providing the latest updates on the cyberattack investigation, with-"

Crossing back to fill up the teapot, Susie turned down the volume on the radio.

"I think we've all had enough of that."

"I haven't," said Lauren, sitting next to me at our end of the hallway.

We'd removed half of the barricade but still kept most of it in place-an upturned coffee table and some boxes demarcating which end of the hallway other people weren't allowed into. Lauren was doing her best to keep our end clean, bleaching blankets and clothing. The strong smell of the bleach was nearly eye-watering.

Lauren sat upright.

"What I really want to know is, why didn't they just make the internet more secure?"

It was a question circling the meshnet, asked with rising anger, and most of the blame was coming down on an inept government that should have protected us more.

"I'll tell you why," croaked Rory from beneath his blankets in the middle of the hall. "You can try and lay blame, but the central reason the internet isn't secure is because we don't want it to be secure."

Hearing Rory speak, Chuck got into the conversation.

"What do you mean we? I'm all for a secure internet."

Rory sat up a little. "You might think you want a secure internet, but you really don't, and that's part of what makes this possible. In the end, a perfectly secure internet isn't in the interest of the general public or software producers."

"Why wouldn't consumers want a secure internet?"

"Because a truly secure internet wouldn't serve a common interest in freedom."

"Seems like it would right now," said Tony quietly. Luke was lying asleep on top of him on the couch next to Lauren and me.

"It does right now, but it comes down to what we were talking about before, about privacy being the cornerstone of freedom. More and more of our lives are moving into cybers.p.a.ce, and we need to preserve what we have in the physical world as we move into the cyber world. A perfectly secure internet implies a trail of information somewhere, always tracking what you're doing."

I hadn't thought of it like that. A completely secure internet would be the same as a world with cameras on every corner and in every home, recording our every movement, but it would be even more intrusive. A perfect record of every interaction we had would give someone the ability to peer into our very thoughts.

"I'd be willing to give up my online privacy to avoid this mess," snorted Tony, but quietly. Luke stirred in the blankets on top of him, and he whispered to him, saying he was sorry.

"Wait, doesn't this contradict your speech about needing to make the internet more secure?"

"The problem is that we're trying to use the same technology-the internet-for social networking and to run nuclear power plants. Those are two very different requirements. We need to try and make it as secure as possible without giving some centralized power all the responsibility," replied Rory in a tired voice. "What we're talking about is a balancing act, an attempt to make it difficult to abuse the rights of individuals in the cyber world of the future. Even this"-Rory waved his arms feebly around in the candlelight-"whatever is happening now, it'll be fixed soon enough."

Rory barely looked strong enough to stand, and yet he spoke with such confidence.

Hope was fading. "There's something they aren't telling us. They wouldn't be leaving us here to die like this," was the whisper on the meshnet. We didn't even really know what "this" was.

"Even all this suffering, we can't use this as an excuse to give up our right to privacy, to freedom. No matter how many people die here, infinitely more have died under the thumbs of dictators and secret police in the past. Human nature doesn't change, and we need to protect freedom, and privacy, and learn from our past. We should be protecting the right to privacy as much as our right to bear arms, and for exactly the same reasons."

Silence.

Rory's words made rational sense, but hunger and fear had a way of overpowering intellect.

"You may be right, but that's a philosophical issue," said Vince, breaking the silence. As ever, he was bent over his laptop, his face illuminated in the soft glow of its screen. He kept it running in low-power mode, charging it overnight when we ran the generator. "The bigger problem is that producers of software don't want consumers to be secure."

"So technology companies purposely want an insecure internet?" I said incredulously.

"They want it to be secure from hackers," replied Vince, "but they don't want consumers to be secure from letting them in. They hardwire back doors to update and modify software remotely-it's a fundamental security risk they purposely create. The Stuxnet cyberweapon exploited it."

"Of course they don't want consumers to be secure from them," snorted Rory. "They give us all that software for free specifically so that we aren't secure from them-so they can watch us, sell our information."

Vince looked absently into his computer screen. "If you don't pay for a product, then you are the product."

"How does someone tracking my online shopping affect security?" asked Susie, perplexed.

Vince shrugged. "It's all the little loopholes, all the hooks and ways to track and get inside that are purposely put there by software companies-that's a lot of what hackers exploit."

"And you would know, wouldn't you?" said Richard gruffly from the other end of the hall.

We ignored him.

The day before, it came out that he was the one who'd given the group on the second floor the kerosene heater in exchange for their generator, which he'd put in his own bedroom. He was adamant that he'd told them to ventilate, and for someone that was perhaps responsible for killing nine people, he wasn't apologetic.

Vince waved one finger in the air.

"Software companies have never accepted product liability like every other industry. If your car crashes because of a faulty pedal, you sue the car company, but if you're hacked because of poorly built software? Forget it. There's no incentive to make secure software, because there's no penalty. So you end up with buggy software that has intentional security holes."

"What about the government then, isn't it their job to protect against this?" asked Lauren. "What's happening now isn't just a hacked bank account."

"Protect what exactly?" asked Rory.

"Electricity and water for starters."

"The government doesn't own that stuff anymore. Not their responsibility to maintain."

"Isn't it the military's job to protect us?"

"In theory, yes, a nations' military is there to protect its citizens and industry from other nations-establish a border and then protect it-but that doesn't work anymore. Borders are nearly impossible to define in cybers.p.a.ce."

Rory took a deep breath.

"Where the government and military used to be responsible for protecting a factory from attack by foreign national governments, now they're asking private industry to take over that responsibility in cybers.p.a.ce."

He shrugged.

"But who's going to pay for it? And can a private company really protect itself from a hostile nation? Can all of us act as our own armed forces? And what happens when corporations become as powerful as nations?"

"That's a lot of questions," Tony laughed. "I don't know much, but I did do my tours, and I can tell you one thing-defensive security isn't s.e.xy."

Rory laughed too. "Defense is definitely seen as a cost center in America. Offense is the profit center. Over ninety percent of the NSA's budget is offense-it's just more fun and profitable."

"Profitable," said Chuck quietly, stretching the word out.

Rory nodded. "We don't have much of a leg to stand on. We complain about the Chinese and Iranians, but we're the ones that used cyberweapons, like Stuxnet and Flame, on them first, and the problem is that all the clever cyberweapons we build end up getting used against us."

That sounded familiar, and it made me think of something.

"If you decide to use fire in battle, make sure that anything you need yourself isn't flammable."

"Sun Tzu?" asked Rory.

I nodded, thinking to myself, The more things change, the more they stay the same.

"Well then," Rory laughed weakly, "we should have been more careful, because we're about the most cyber-combustible country on the planet."

n.o.body else in the hallway thought it was funny.

Day 24 January 15.

"DO YOU HAVE any food?"

The voice startled me, and I almost dropped the load of snow I was hauling up. I recognized the voice as Sarah's, Richard's wife, and I turned around, but then was startled again. The voice was Sarah's, but the person...

In the dim light of the stairwell, desperate eyes stared up at me from sunken sockets. Bending over, she pulled a stained and ragged blanket around her shoulders, exposing thin, gray roots in her hair that were littered with louse eggs.

She glanced furtively behind, and then turned to look at me, trying to smile from between cracked and swollen lips. Her teeth were yellow, caked with grime, and with a skeleton hand she touched an angry, red lesion on the side of her face. Her skin was so papery thin that I imagined it sloughing off as she rubbed at the sore.

"Please, Michael," she whispered.

"Ah, sure," I mumbled, horrified. I tied off the rope so the load of snow wouldn't fall. In my pocket I was holding a prize, a lump of cheese that I'd been saving for Luke. I handed it to her, and she greedily stuffed it into her mouth, nodding and thanking me.

"SARAH!"

Like a frightened animal she cringed. Richard appeared in the doorway, and she cowered down and away from him against the railing of the stairs.

"Come, Sarah, you aren't well," commanded Richard, reaching toward her and ignoring me.

She shakily held up one skin-and-bone arm, mottled with purple and black bruises, to fend him off. "I don't want to."

Richard stared at her, and then turned to smile at me with a mouthful of shining, white teeth. He was wearing a comfortable-looking fleece and North Face pants, and his pink, closely shaved skin radiated health.

"She's been sick," he explained with a shrug.

He moved forward and grabbed hold of the blanket around her. She mewled while he leaned down and picked her up. He turned to me, with her pinned in his arms.

"Do you think you could drop some water at our end of the hallway when you're done?"

Dumbly, I stared at him, and then he was gone.

"What was that about?"

Chuck appeared, walking up the stairs, holding a four-gallon tank of diesel in his good hand.

"Sarah wanted food."

"Don't we all," laughed Chuck humorlessly. He waggled the container in front of himself as he started up the last set of stairs. "Just a few more of these and that'll be it."

"She's not well," I said, still staring at the open doorway.

"None of us are well," replied Chuck, clunking up the stairs. "Have you seen what they're eating?"

Some of the hallway refugees had started catching rats in the downstairs lobby. Irena showed them how, by leaving ground-up sleeping pills and other poisons in garbage piles-they were too fast and aggressive to catch by hand. And if people were eating the rats, then they were eating the poisons in the rats as well. I'd found a large pile of well-cleaned rat carca.s.ses in a corner of one of the latrine rooms.

I heard another door close. It must have been the door to Richard's apartment.

"Have you been in their place lately?"

He looked at me and stopped, putting the container down.

"You sure as heck don't look good."

I wasn't feeling well, but then n.o.body was. The world began to spin, and I reached out to grip onto the railing to steady myself.

"Whoa, you okay?"

Taking a deep breath, I nodded.

"Just need to get this load of snow up and into the melt buckets, and I'll go lie down."

Chuck stared at me.

"Why don't you go lie down right now, and get some more to eat?"

That morning we'd pan-fried some of the chicken. Thinking about it made me start to salivate painfully. We'd tried to conceal what we were doing, cooking it up over a small butane stove in the corner of Chuck and Susie's bedroom, but I was sure that the smell of the cooking had permeated through the walls.

It was probably what brought Sarah out of her hiding place.

"Seriously, why don't you go and get some more to eat?"

I was in a daze.

"I'll finish this," offered Chuck.

He put down the container of fuel and looked over the railing at the bucket of snow I was hauling up. Vince and I were trying to bring up as much snow as we could.