Only one thing for it.
I went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already. I unrolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white LEDs I’d scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. I punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it.
I’d built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good restaurant dinner these days, so they’re showing up everywhere. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their customers — sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks’ worth of parts into a camera-detector is just good sense.
This is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. They have tiny lenses, but they reflect light like the dickens. It works best in a dim room: stare through the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. If the reflection stays still as you move around, that’s a lens.
There wasn’t a camera in my room — not one I could detect, anyway. There might have been audio bugs, of course. Or better cameras. Or nothing at all. Can you blame me for feeling paranoid?
I loved that laptop. I called it the Salmagundi, which means anything made out of spare parts.
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you’re really having a deep relationship with it. Now, though, I felt like I didn’t want to ever touch it again. I wanted to throw it out the window. Who knew what they’d done to it? Who knew how it had been tapped?
I put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. It was late and I should be in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep now, though. I was tapped. Everyone might be tapped. The world had changed forever.
“I’ll find a way to get them,” I said. It was a vow, I knew it when I heard it, though I’d never made a vow before.
I couldn’t sleep after that. And besides, I had an idea.
Somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing one still-sealed, mint-in-package Xbox Universal. Every Xbox has been sold way below cost — Microsoft makes most of its money charging games companies money for the right to put out Xbox games — but the Universal was the first Xbox that Microsoft decided to give away entirely for free.
Last Christmas season, there’d been poor losers on every corner dressed as warriors from the Halo series, handing out bags of these game-machines as fast as they could. I guess it worked — everyone says they sold a whole butt-load of games. Naturally, there were countermeasures to make sure you only played games from companies that had bought licenses from Microsoft to make them.
Hackers blow through those countermeasures. The Xbox was cracked by a kid from MIT who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the 360 went down, and then the short-lived Xbox Portable (which we all called the “luggable” — it weighed three pounds!) succumbed. The Universal was supposed to be totally bulletproof. The high school kids who broke it were Brazilian Linux hackers who lived in a favela — a kind of squatter’s slum.
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.
Once the Brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. Soon there were dozens of alternate operating systems for the Xbox Universal. My favorite was ParanoidXbox, a flavor of Paranoid Linux. Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of “chaff” communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you’re doing anything covert. So while you’re receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
I’d burned a ParanoidXbox DVD when they first appeared, but I’d never gotten around to unpacking the Xbox in my closet, finding a TV to hook it up to and so on. My room is crowded enough as it is without letting Microsoft crashware eat up valuable workspace.
Tonight, I’d make the sacrifice. It took about twenty minutes to get up and running. Not having a TV was the hardest part, but eventually I remembered that I had a little overhead LCD projector that had standard TV RCA connectors on the back. I connected it to the Xbox and shone it on the back of my door and got ParanoidLinux installed.
Now I was up and running, and ParanoidLinux was looking for other Xbox Universals to talk to. Every Xbox Universal comes with built-in wireless for multiplayer gaming. You can connect to your neighbors on the wireless link and to the Internet, if you have a wireless Internet connection. I found three different sets of neighbors in range. Two of them had their Xbox Universals also connected to the Internet. ParanoidXbox loved that configuration: it could siphon off some of my neighbors’ Internet connections and use them to get online through the gaming network. The neighbors would never miss the packets: they were paying for flat-rate Internet connections, and they weren’t exactly doing a lot of surfing at 2AM.
The best part of all this is how it made me feel: in control. My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.
My brain was really going now, running like 60. There were lots of reasons to run ParanoidXbox — the best one was that anyone could write games for it. Already there was a port of MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, so you could play practically any game that had ever been written, all the way back to Pong — games for the Apple ][+ and games for the Colecovision, games for the NES and the Dreamcast, and so on.
Even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specifically for ParanoidXbox — totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run. When you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games that could get you free Internet access.
And the best part — as far as I was concerned — was that ParanoidXbox was paranoid. Every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch of its life. You could wiretap it all you wanted, but you’d never figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they were talking to. Anonymous web, email and IM. Just what I needed.
All I had to do now was convince everyone I knew to use it too.
Chapter 6
This chapter is dedicated to Powell’s Books, the legendary “City of Books” in Portland, Oregon. Powell’s is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. They stock new and used books on the same shelves — something I’ve always loved — and every time I’ve stopped in, they’ve had a veritable mountain of my books, and they’ve been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. The clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there’s even a Powell’s at the Portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money!