Little Brother

"The Xnet isn't pure," I said. "It can be used by the other side just as readily as by us. We know that there are DHS spies who use it now. They use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves so that they can bust us. If the Xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep them from spying on us. We need a network within the network."

I paused and let this sink in. Jolu had suggested that this might be a little heavy learning that you're about to be brought into a revolutionary cell.

"Now, I'm not here to ask you to do anything active. You don't have to go out jamming or anything. You've been brought here because we know you're cool, we know you're trustworthy. It's that trustworthiness I want to get you to contribute tonight. Some of you will already be familiar with the web of trust and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, I'll run it down quickly

"

Which I did.

"Now what I want from you tonight is to meet the people here and figure out how much you can trust them. We're going to help you generate keypairs and share them with each other."

This part was tricky. Asking people to bring their own laptops wouldn't have worked out, but we still needed to do something hella complicated that wouldn't exactly work with paper and pencil.

I held up a laptop Jolu and I had rebuilt the night before, from the ground up. "I trust this machine. Every component in it was laid by our own hands. It's running a fresh outofthebox version of ParanoidLinux, booted off of the DVD. If there's a trustworthy computer left anywhere in the world, this might well be it.

"I've got a keygenerator loaded here. You come up here and give it some random input mash the keys, wiggle the mouse and it will use that as the seed to create a random publicand private key for you, which it will display on the screen. You can take a picture of the private key with your phone, and hit any key to make it go away forever it's not stored on the disk at all. Then it will show you your public key. At that point, you call over all the people here you trust and who trust you, and they take a picture of the screen with you standing next to it, so they know whose key it is.

"When you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys.

This is going to be a lot of work, I'm afraid, but you'll only have to do it once. You have to be supercareful about typing these in one mistake and you're screwed. Luckily, we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: beneath the key will be a much shorter number, called the 'fingerprint'. Once you've typed in the key, you can generate a fingerprint from it and compare it to the fingerprint, and if they match, you've got it right."

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/66 They all boggled at me. OK, so I'd asked them to do something pretty weird, it's true, but still.

Chapter 11

This chapter is dedicated to the University Bookstore at the University of Washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty stores, thanks to the sharpeyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, Duane Wilkins. Duance's a real science fiction fan

I

first met him at the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto in 2003 and it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. One great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally handlettered) staffreviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss. The staff at the University Bookstore have clearly benefited from Duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the University Bookstore are second to none.

The University Bookstore http://www4.bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/ShowTitleUBS.taf?

ActionArg=Title amp;ISBN=9780765319852 4326 University Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105 USA +1 800 335 READ

Jolu stood up.

"This is where it starts, guys. This is how we know which side you're on. You might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted for your beliefs, but if you have beliefs, this will let us know it. This will create the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. If we're ever going to get our country back, we need to do this. We need to do something like this."

Someone in the audience it was Ange had a hand up, holding a beer bottle.

"So call me stupid but I don't understand this at all. Why do you want us to do this?"

Jolu looked at me, and I looked back at him. It had all seemed so obvious when we were organizing it. "The Xnet isn't just a way to play free games. It's the last open communications network in America. It's the last way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS. For it to work we need to know that the person

Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/67

we're talking to isn't a snoop. That means that we need to know that the people we're sending messages to are the people we think they are.