CZM Book Club: Escape, part two

Margaret reads the second half of an anonymously authored speculative fiction story about what people could do if large scale roundups began, and discusses it with an anarchist technology enthusiast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
Book Club Club, book Club, book Club club Club. It's
the Cool Zone Media book Club. Hello, Welcome to cools
On Media book Club, the only book club where you
don't have to do the reading because I do it
for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest

(00:26):
today to talk about tech security as relates to this
piece of speculative fiction is Greg Hi.

Speaker 3 (00:32):
Greg, Hi, Nice to see you again.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, nice to see you. I think we called you
an anarchist technology enthusiast.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
I believe I'm still enthusiastic. I think that's great.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
I'm a like, I'm of two minds all the time
about technology. I'm both very interested in it. It's like
one of my hobbies since I was very young. And
I also think it's bad and we should just distort
throw or laptops in the ocean. That's I go back
and forth about these several times a day. It's very
expensive to go back and forth about it. Spent a

(01:07):
lot of money on laptops, and the ocean probably doesn't
appreciate it much. No, it really doesn't. But you know,
it's like so big anything you put in there, it's
just it's fine.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Right, Yeah, Car batteries in the ocean. That's what I hear.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
What does that actually do.

Speaker 3 (01:26):
Putting a car battery in the ocean, Well, I imagine
it leaks.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Is it like electrify the ocean? Is there like like
a mass of water at which it can no longer electrify?

Speaker 3 (01:36):
I think that electric eels probably take care of that
enough for us. I think a single car battery is
not gonna do much. I mean, you're the one who
told me that you could just touch car batteries and
I was like, oh, yeah you can. Oh that's right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I like twelve olt DC electricity or even twenty four
volt DC electricity in general, that's the stuff I like.

Speaker 3 (01:56):
I mean, DC is the is the one that Tesla of,
right and Ace was the bad guy? Right? Or did
I make that up so much?

Speaker 2 (02:05):
I think Edison and Tesla had a pissing match. And
I'm going to lose all of my long lost seapunk
cred that I don't remember which one was.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
With jikes, Well, I know that Edison electricut in an
elephant and he's a nasshole.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
So he also filmed when sho Gosh got executed. Anyway,
so we are reading from a piece called Escape put
out by Crime Think, just a anarchist publishing collective, and
it's a piece of speculative fiction by an anonymous author.

(02:40):
We started with part one last week. You should really
go back and listen to it. And it is based
on the idea that all of anarchists and presumably a
lot of other sort of political and desirables are suddenly
rated and declared illegal within the United States, a reasonably
near future sort of a could happen tonight kind of timeline.

(03:03):
And I brought Greg on because this piece talks a
lot about a lot of different technological solutions to various problems,
and I wanted to talk through how realistic those different
solutions are if there's other solutions, but not to necessarily.
I like this piece because I like that people are
writing pieces like this, and I think that this is

(03:25):
a kind of conversation that we need to be having
more and more. I'm actually sort of hoping I get
to run more book clubs talking about kind of similar
things in the near future, or I'm hoping that everything
bad goes away and I'm just writing about the bad
old world anyway where we last left our heroes. There's

(03:45):
three different groups of people, and they've all gone on
the run, and they're all kind of going, now what
now that they've all just barely escaped. So this section chapter,
as it might be called, is called communications. Jake doesn't
have to trust the new app everyone's using while signals down.

(04:07):
Long ago, everyone in his Affinity group created GPG key pairs,
then verified each other's keys and signed them. They also
created private back up email accounts on other platforms, only
to be used in emergencies. Jake's rise up account may
be down, but his GPG keys or in the encrypted

(04:28):
folder on his cached USB, along with a list of
back up email accounts of his comrades. He goes through
each one, encrypting a message to that person's public key
and sending it to their back up email. After a
couple hours at the cafe, one of them sends a
message back to him. Ethan is still free. Jake asks

(04:50):
to know if he knows anything about Big C's supposed posts.
Ethan says he'll check with someone in Bigc's crew. He's
also in contact with. Ash. Ash emails back with a
public key for Big C. She signs his key with
her own. Ethan checks it and sees that it matches
the public key for Ash that he's signed. Then he

(05:11):
signs big C's key and sends it to Jake. Jake
messages Big C on the new app everyone is using.
I'm just gonna interject here. See how that's confusing Anyway,
it's hard to follow, Okay, anyway, back to it. On
the other hand, I end up writing meetings, so I

(05:31):
can't really talk shit. Writing meetings into fiction is very complicated.
Writing GPG into fiction is very complicated. Okay, now, Actually,
back to it. Ash emails back with a public key
for Big C. She signs his key with her own
Ethan checks it and sees that it matches the public
key for Ash that he's signed. Then he signs big

(05:54):
C's key and sends it to Jake. Jake messages Big
C on the new app everyone is using. Instead of
sending anything in clear text, he encrypts a message to
the key he has for Big C. He adds his
own public key on that same app. In the general
channel they're all using, someone's screaming that another account is

(06:15):
a honeypot. People stop posting if they move to a
different channel or a different app. They never send Jake
anything about it, but that doesn't matter because Big C
responds his message likewise encrypted using GPG and then pasted
within this new app. Jake decrypts and checks that it
was signed by the same key for Big C that

(06:37):
his friend Ethan certify. There's a time and location back
room of a donut shop a couple punks work app
eleven PM. Jake spends most of the day at the cafe,
trying not to attract attention, and he scarfs down some
fast food and gets a bus across town to the
doughnut shop. He gets off a couple stops early and

(07:00):
circles around it on backstreets, looking for any car or
person that could be staking things out. He decides to
wait a little longer in an alley, but the alley
isn't empty. Ethan's there, smoking a cigarette and also scoping
things out. They hug, You're the first person I've seen
in like two days. Man. Ethan's heard a rumor about

(07:24):
some kind of legal defense committee being set up, but
he can't stand one of the people he thinks is
in it. Jake quietly regales him with the saga of
his nearly new escape. They look at the doughnut shop
down the street. If it's a trap, maybe only one
of us should go. I'll go. If it's chill, I'll
come back out and get you. Maybe they raid us

(07:46):
only once we're all inside. Do you want to wait
out here all night? Fuck man? I don't know. Jake
goes in a punk he doesn't know ushers him through
the employee's side door. It's just three big c usually
known as Cookie, the unknown punk, and Ash. Ash is

(08:06):
chowing down on donuts. Nervously. Cookie gets up and extends
out a hand, then turns it into an awkward hug.
They don't really know each other like that, but Jake accepts,
surprisingly eager for physical touch. Are we waiting for anybody else?
Who'd you share this with? I don't fucking know. I
told Ash and Sydney, and Sidney said she just told

(08:28):
her band, But like, I don't trust them to Hey,
Mitch's cool. Yeah, sure, Mitch is cool. I'm just saying
I don't trust them not to tell someone random, you know, Jesus,
says the punk Jake doesn't know, looking out the cracked
open employee door. What it's Zoe. She's down the street,
but she's coming this way some shared glances. No one

(08:49):
wants to let Zoe in, Well let her in. Half
an hour later, the tiny donuts store back room is
swampy with seven nervous anarchists Ethan and Clue. What are
we fucking doing? Sid's running and hiding. I say we
make distractions, make them feel like they got the wrong folks.
They're not the threat, so what they've already grabbed everyone.

(09:13):
It's not like they're going to let them go to
get us. Instead, they'll just keep them detained and then
use all their resources on the few of us. No
last thing we need to do right now is remind
them they didn't get all of us to what fucking end.
Solidarity means attack. Look, if you think of some way
to bust people out, I'm all for it, But like

(09:34):
right now, we can't even keep ourselves safe. We bust
people out, we have no way to house them. They're
just rating random, totally apolitical squats. They just cleared the
last house lesson campment at the airport. Look, you can
run and hide if you want, honestly, honestly I mean that.
I don't judge, but I know if I was captured
right now, the number one thing I'd want to see

(09:56):
in this world would be cop cars on fire in
the county jail parking Lite. The meeting ends a couple
hours later. They have sorted into two groups and a
lone individual. One group will focus on risky active strikes.
The other group will try to build an underground capable
of keeping people safe. Ash is going to run a

(10:17):
clearing house email account to take submissions and push out
notifications only people within the signed network of gpgkeys. If
they shut down her email, she'll just pivot to a
different one using the same keys and sending to the
same recipients. They can't shut down email wholesale, too much
of capitalism runs on it. She'll try to maintain a

(10:39):
public counter info site for certain announcements marked to be public,
but no promises. Two of the punks present are going
to be showed how to use GPG. Jake and Ethan
head out into the night. Ethan's got a van they
can sleep in. Kat said that Vera could stay as
long as she needed, but they've never actually lived together before,

(11:01):
and as the weeks go by, little frictions keep coming up.
Vera forgot she sided with the bandmate of Cat's old
boyfriend that one time, but Cat hasn't. Cat doesn't approve
of the lengthy showers Vera takes. Vera had no idea
that Cat was such a morning person. Normally these would
be nothing, but the isolation in background stress is taking

(11:24):
a toll. Vera feels like it's hard to keep her
head together, hard to be her. Without the reference points
of her normal life, she feels unmoored and frazzled, always
a step behind saying things she would have thought through more.
Cat doesn't have a Netflix account, and Vera has nothing
to do all day but pace around Cat's basement and

(11:46):
read Cat's books. Cat doesn't use the internet much, and
Vera's trying not to suddenly flood Cat's router with a
ton of activity. Every morning around the time Cat said
she sometimes checks her work email, Vera takes the new
laptop Cat bought for her and connects to the internet.

(12:06):
In so far as the raids are getting attention, it
seems to be mostly because some prominent journalists got detained too.
It joins the background shrieking about journalists' rights being under attack,
but the news outlets mostly just want to use that
narrative to bolster their subscriptions. With social media effectively gone,
there's little coverage of the massed attentions of anarchists, save

(12:28):
some conservatives chortling that it was about time and see
the old establishment was deliberately choosing not to fight terrorism
the whole time. She's careful to build a profile of
Internet activity that doesn't match her prior use. She chooses
different websites for news, even to check weather reports. She
doesn't want to deviate too far from Kat's previous activity.

(12:52):
If Kat used bing for searching about mushroom harvests, so
will she. If Kat didn't use an ad blocker, she
won't add one. The goal is to slowly build up
Cat's Internet usage so she can use it more frequently.
While stuck at home, She holds herself back from checking
radical websites. In the last three weeks, Vera has almost

(13:14):
never left Cat's house. One afternoon, there was an unusual
car parked all day within view of the front door.
Even Kat was convinced it was sketchy. Cat's home cooking
is very cumin and vegetables oriented, but she picks up
the Thai food Vera loves a couple times with cash,
not card Vera is hesitant about booting Tails off the

(13:36):
USB she had on hand and connecting on the home
network because she's worried that will draw attention. Instead, she
gets Kat to go to a nearby cafe during the
day and write down the Wi Fi password. Then in
the middle of the night, she goes out with Cat's
crusty old laptop, sits behind the cafe's dumpster, boots Tails

(13:58):
and connects to the open inner. A lot of anarchist's
websites are gone, and the foreign ones are thin on
substantive reportbacks, meaningful news, or how two guides are overshadowed
by essays that triumphantly advocate one or another grotesque alliance
and declare the time of principles to be over. This provokes,
in turn, angry evocative screeds that fetishize death to survive

(14:22):
as a betrayal of our fallen says one. It's our
duty to die beautifully together. Someone else is aggressively promoting
a Patreon in her back up email account. There's an
encrypted message to her, signed by her old comrade, Matthew.
He survived the raids that got every other anarchist in
their town and has taken formal sanctuary in the basement

(14:44):
of a Quaker house. The cops seem to know he's there, though,
or at least suspect it. They keep a squad car
parked out front at all hours and have followed the
two old Quakers who come and go. He's heard from
a friend who escaped the raids in another city and
has been riding the rail. Matthew has a normy friend,
a former movement lawyer who has fallen off the radar

(15:05):
doing corporate work for a decade, but who he is
certain would put his other friend up. It's just that
he's got no way to contact him. He has another
friend who made it down across the southern border but
is penniless. Needs a money transfer to get an apartment
and look for a job. It could be cryptocurrency, even
a mailed check. Is it possible to get an anonymous

(15:27):
money transfer? When Kat gets home, Vera is ready with questions.
In the middle of the night, Julie and Maggie have
to leave the farm. They drive out with six of
their friends lying flat in the back of their truck,
supplies and blankets packed on top of them. Every time
they swerve around a bend on a back road and

(15:48):
see headlights. They flinch, waiting to see if it is
the cops or the local militia who promised to kill
all of them. The sudden collapse of two major cities
from back to back environmental disasters has killed but it
has also resulted in the establishment of an immense internal
refugee camp in the South. The rumor is that the
authorities can't demand id because so many people have lost theirs.

(16:12):
There are enough white people in the vast camp, with
enough friends and family outside that it looks unlikely they
will be purged like so many immigrants had been. If
they just keep their stories straight and avoid speaking with
an accent, they should be safer there than at the
farm where they have lived for the last year. The
roads are too chaotic, the internal border checkpoints too overwhelmed.

(16:35):
The eight of them make it south intact. They buy
taco bell and doughnuts along the way. When they get
to the camp, the armed guards shake them down, pilfering
whatever they think might be of value from the shoddy
posters everywhere. They quickly discover that there are out leftists
in the sprawling camp, the kind that want to be

(16:55):
an armed gang and won't countenance any organizing that isn't
under their umbrella. Every few weeks one of the men's
up dead, and it's rarely from the guards or conservatives.
The better relief organizations are all fatigued and finn on resources.
They keep getting squeezed out by Christian groups and political
organizations looking to gain contracts or legitimacy. It's unclear to

(17:19):
what extent this is the ruler's accolytes cannibalizing a federal
project in an orgy of corruption, and to what extent
the powers that be here deliberately inflicting pressure on the refugees.
Buses with corporate branding on the sides promise quick work
contracts to those in the camps. People come back bone weary,
but they do come back through the security cordons and

(17:40):
fencing that surrounds the camp. The ruler brags at this
program is finally providing jobs for real citizens. It's said
that Amazon is restructuring its national supply chain to center
around the concentrated, cheap labor that the refugee camp provides.
Julie and Maggie keep their head heads down, forming a

(18:01):
tight circle with their friends from the farm. When administrators
try to split them up into separate tracts of tin sheds,
they find a way to meet up again. When the
guards took their jewelry and cash, they left them with
their bulk filtration system, chemical water purifying tabs, and beaten laptop.
These turn out to be worth more than gems within

(18:23):
the camp. Being able to purify gallons of water every
day makes their crew self sufficient. What remains of the
Internet and the rest of the nation isn't much to
speak of, but there's almost nothing in the camp besides
a single app that takes over your phone, charges you dearly,
and pronounces news headlines from a single source. Julie and

(18:45):
Maggie ignore phones entirely, sticking to Maggie's Cassio watch in
their laptop. They disable the Wi Fi on it and
pretend it is just for showing pirated shows. Electrical power
is available in the camp for a hefty charge, but
folks rig up DIY tin can and magnet turbines in
the river that can recharge batteries if you wait long enough.

(19:08):
Once you're in camp, you can't leave, but smugglers promise
to get letters or even packages to and from the
outside world. Rumor has it that many of them steal
whatever you entrust to them and turn anything incriminating over
to the cops for rewards. Julie and Maggie have signed
GPG keys with everyone they lived with at the farm,
and those who didn't flee with them to the camps

(19:30):
are now vital relays to a wider network. The uncle
of the three girls they saved has left the adjoining
farm to join up with the family further east. His
white father's name and address is above suspicion. So far,
they operate a rudimentary onion network mailing USB's out with
the smugglers. First they encrypt a message to the final recipient.

(19:54):
Then they encrypt that encrypted message plus a note about
how to relay it to them to a friend like
the uncle. This encrypted file they hide is a malformed
gift among other memes and similar drunk of the sort
that has passed around the internal refugee camp. If the
smugglers or anyone else inspect the USB on its way
to the uncle, they just see some memes in a

(20:17):
broken gift. It's crude and not every message makes it,
but enough do. Soon enough, Julie and Maggie are writing
reports on the camps that are getting to anarchist journalists
and infosites in other countries. One of the companies that
oversees the camp's most hated enforcement drones, gets its supply
lines attacked in the Mediterranean. The CTO is assassinated at

(20:41):
a gala. When news reaches the camp, even conservative Grannis,
who are always on about racist conspiracy theories, are suddenly
praising those anarchists. A communicate from distant Comrades makes its
way back through the laborious series of USB exchange solidity.
It reads means attack, dun, dun, dunn. But you know

(21:05):
what doesn't mean attack, but instead means shifting to advertisements.
It's when I shift to advertisements like now.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (21:23):
Okay, so that was a chapter. What's your take on
their onion network of USBs.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
It seems complicated, honestly, it's it's a little, it's a little.
So this this section starts to think get into a
little bit of science fiction y, just because I don't
really know what it would look like now, because it's
hard for me to sort of imagine it. But yes,
you could do this. I was thinking of a story though,

(21:55):
So during the Edward Snowden links he was trying to
get his stuff out to journalist and Glenn Greenwald now
has gone off the deep end, but back then he
was a person to talk to about these sorts of things.
And Edward Snowden and a researcher from the EFF both
tried to get Glenn Greenwald to understand GPG and they

(22:15):
couldn't do it. So I think that there's like, you know,
and these both very technical people and they're like, okay,
we're going to teach this journalists how to eat GPG.
They couldn't do it. So I'm very impressed in this
section of like how much they're like, oh yeah, we're
going to teach these two punks GPG in an evening,
and like maybe you can do that. But again, like
you as you interrupted yourself in the piece, this stuff

(22:38):
is complicated and it's complicated to get right and maintain.
Like I think that's also it's like you do it
and you're like, okay, it's done, and then you don't
think you have to think about it, but then you
lose your key, or you lose your private key, and
then everything's borked, or you sign somebody's key and they
change keys or something like. It's just it. It's very complicated,

(23:01):
and like this piece tries to break it down, and
I appreciate that, but I would really like to see
sort of like a broken down guide. And I think
that at the end of this piece they go into
it a little bit and I didn't go through that,
but I want to challenge, you know, people who aren't
really familiar with this stuff on a day to day basis,

(23:22):
go through that tutorial and see how easy it is,
because I don't know if you would make it through
the first first pass. Yeah, I know, what were your thoughts.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
I think that it's actually the kind of thing that's
a little bit easier with someone teaching you than reading
things on the internet about it. Yeah, which is sort
of ironic considering kind of what it's about. I can
imagine this kind of working. But I think that the
like lost nodes, like over all the Internet wants to

(23:54):
reroute around damage, right, Yeah, this system doesn't seem like
the way I understand. It doesn't seem like it can
really reroute around damage, and so it just has damage.
And they talk about not everything getting through and things
like that, and I think I think having signed gpgkeys
with your friends in affinity group and stuff like that

(24:14):
makes a certain amount of sense. I think that there's
a use case that actually is kind of interesting about GPG,
about how you can use it in these other apps. Right, Oh,
I don't trust this other thing that people are doing,
so I'm going to you know, use this thing. But
I also I think that it presumes like a complete

(24:36):
omniscient state actor.

Speaker 3 (24:39):
You know.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Actually, one of the things that I was thinking about
with this piece is like, you know, they're talking about
like being nervous, meeting up in the donut shop and
things like that, right, And that makes sense. I would
be too. I would be incredibly nervous. This sounds like
the most terrifying thing that anyone could have to well,
among the most terrifying things that people could have to
go through. But I also think that I don't know,

(25:01):
my touchdown is more history reading than anything else. Right,
because of my other podcasts, they should listen to cool
people did cool stuff. And one of the things that
I feel like comes up is that shit gets done
when people trust people more than they think they should. Yeah,
and this idea of like only trusting the most secure

(25:22):
and I'm not even saying the author is saying this,
but like this like level of like only the most
secure thing. Like, look, if you are planning certain kinds
of stuff, which spoiler they start planning in this story,
maybe that's the kind of thing you are planning with
like absolute complete opsee right, But like this getting news

(25:47):
in and out stuff, it might not need to be
so complicated, like I would suspect a more likely way
is that it is clear text and it comes with
a bribe, you know. Like, Yeah, I don't know. I
find the GPG USB thing really interesting and I think
it's like an interesting framework. But I also think that

(26:08):
like where's mesh networking in this where is well, I
guess radio is going to come up in a little bit,
but like mesh networking seems more interesting to me, right, Yeah,
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
I think mesh networking solves a little bit different of
a problem of more of just like being able to
put together sort of a quick ad hoc network. But
I agree with you, and I also think like I
was talking to a friend about this piece and they
were like, oh, I would just use a one time pad.
I'm not going to go into the details at one
time pad but yeah, but like one time pads are

(26:43):
a little bit more simpler, but still offer unbreakable encryption
as long as you're keeping the key together. And again
I guess it's you know, you don't get the advantage
of a public and private key, but you still get
some security. And I do think that like there may
be a technique though for this of like getting out
of information is maybe you want it as public as

(27:03):
possible sometimes because it sounds like in this world they're
in a space where it's like it's a media blackout
almost and it's like maybe it's a sticker you put
on every single package or something that's going out of
a particular place, or like my mind went to also
HF radio, which is with a very little wattage, you
can get across the world a message and then you
could at least get it out. Yes, there is ways

(27:25):
to triangulate a radio station if it was broadcasting all
the time, but I think that that would come up
as well. So yeah, there's something to be said with
like this is a little bit of like you using
technical terminology, but like having a data classification standard for
the types of messaging you're saying, so like you know,

(27:46):
like you got to consider like what's public information versus
private information essentially, So it's like, you know, you don't
want to put your social security number out there or
your name and address, but like information and news maybe
as something that's a different data classification standard and can
be like, oh, okay, these are the precautions that I'm

(28:06):
going to take at these different levels of the who
needs to know?

Speaker 2 (28:10):
That makes sense to me. I actually think one of
the things that I liked about this particular piece, this
chapter of it, the part where they're just changing where
I think it's Verra is just using cats Internet and
doesn't want to like change the way that the Internet
gets used and change the way that the algorithm sees
it and stuff like that. I feel like there is

(28:31):
like understanding threat models at different levels. I think that
like sometimes you're like, oh, I just kind of need
to make sure the algorithm doesn't catch like I don't
trigger any like flags of like an AI that's snooping
on me and looking for algorithm like looking for changes
in behavior or something like that.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
Do you know about like browser fingerprinting?

Speaker 2 (28:52):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
So there's this thing that exists that is basically like
your browser can be a unique identifier for an individual
based on things as minute as like the window size.
And this is one of the reasons that TAILS has
a standard window size that it does not change, like

(29:13):
it always gives a certain resolution, so it's the exactly
the same So anybody using TAILS shows up in exactly
the same way, because there are like you give up
when you go to a website, your device gives like
the the browser, you know, the version number, and like

(29:34):
you have cookies in your browser that tell different information.
And then also it's like things like they can determine
different people based on like they're your screen size. Yeah,
and so I did appreciate it that part, and its
like she understood this threat model, like Okay, these are
the different ways that like things can be tracked, and
I'm just going to use it exactly like this person,
so it doesn't look like anybody else. I think that's

(29:56):
there are more technical ways to implement that, and I
think TAILS does that, of course, But thinking about that,
I think is a good idea, especially if you and
again I don't think it's saying this in the piece,
but I think we're supposed to be expecting that, like, yes,
we're in a very heightened monitoring state, which maybe we
don't exist in today, but like I know, like Chinese Internet,

(30:19):
for example, is more heavily monitored than United States Internet,
at least at an explicit level.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
And so yeah, I mean, I feel like in the
US we're just being monitored in a way that they
just sell our information advertisers.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
But I feel like, yeah, that.

Speaker 2 (30:34):
Threat model could change or is changing. One more thing
I want to say about this chunk of it. I
don't think that hitchhiking and hopping trains is a good
way to move around when you want to avoid police. Yeah,
I understand why that was used, and I even suspect
just literally based on the outlet that is crime think
that the author might have experienced with both of those
forms of travel. But I also have experienced both of

(30:56):
those forms of travel, and in my mind, hitchhiking is
the easiest way to interact with police. I can't think
of a hitch hiking trip I went on where I
didn't end up searched or at least stopped and had
my ID run, you know, And that's without living in
like fascist dystopia. Look for the anarchist land and riding

(31:19):
trains is a really good way to go to jail
in the modern world. I've read a lot of fiction
where people are like, we gotta go off grid. I know,
let's ride the rails, and everyone's like yeah, And I'm like,
there isn't a good easy way to get around without
drawing attention to yourself or being surveilled like bicycles or
you know, draw some attention to yourself anyway.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah, I felt there was another part of this, like
around the legal defense, and like I felt there was
like a moment of infighting too. It's like there was
like an individual who was coming who was like I
don't like them. Yeah, yeah, And I thought that was
very on point, because yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
Like the realization that you're like, sometimes you just got
to get over that shit exactly, even though like some
of that stuff is real, but it's like there's just
a scale. There's just a scale of like how much
is this person in your enemy. It's the thing that
I always go on and on about is de escalate
all conflict that isn't with the enemy. And people are like, well, well,
how do you define the enemy? And I'm like I
kind of defined the enemy as if there was a
shooting war, they'd be shooting at me. Yeah, you know,

(32:23):
not that they are currently that that's currently what's happening,
But if there was one, they'd be shooting at me.
I'm like, okay, well it's the enemy, you know. Yeah,
And if they're not that, then it's not ignore the conflict.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
It's de escalated, all right, exactly.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
You're ready for attack, yes, attack, okay, but you know
what else you're ready for?

Speaker 3 (32:42):
So solidarity means attack, right.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
And solidarity means ads.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
Oh that's what that's the old saying I forgot.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
Yeah. Did you know that I learned this more recently? Well, no,
I learned this a bit ago, but I've been very
happy about it since I'm someone who accidentally sells ads
for a living through radical content. Do you know that
all the old radical news papers they alsold ads?

Speaker 3 (33:02):
Makes sense to me.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Yeah, they're like this local barber is down with the
like you know, socialist organizing in this town or the
you know whatever. Anyway, here's ads and if they're for gambling,
don't do it. Oh man sel get away with saying that.
And here they are.

Speaker 3 (33:32):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
Attack. It's actually pretty hard to live in the forest.
Jake and Ethan knew it would be when they drove
their van far off an abandoned logging road and began
burying it with dirt and branches to avoid detection by
overhead drones. But they couldn't live in the city anymore,
not after the attack on city hall. Every night they

(33:55):
laugh about the video of the supposedly progressive mayor, the
one who had approved the executions of so many of
their friends in black saides or ditches, screaming as he
emerged from the burning ruins. Every night, we are still
alive to cherish this as a gift, they tell each other.
It makes freezing on a punctured air mattress and throwing
centipedes out of their bedding a little more tolerable. Before

(34:18):
they had escaped the city in their increasingly suspect van,
stencils had started appearing of the dying Mare's face on
the newsreel. Printed underneath was no pity. Food is a problem.
Though they rapidly pick the surrounding valleys clean of dandelions, miners, lettuce, chickweed,
and blackberries. After they almost get caught rating a dumpster

(34:42):
for something with calories in it, they realize they need
a better system. Once a month they make their way
through the forest to the outer suburbs of the city.
Cookie leaves two plastic bags of food and stove gas
canisters for them to pick up in a forested nook
just outside an army graveyard. Peanut butter, chocolate, granola, olive oil,

(35:03):
instant rice chili. Sometimes there's also a book or a
board game. There's never any tea for Ethan, though it's
impossible to get hormones for anyone these days. Back at
the buried van, they carefully ration their laptop use, laboriously
rebuilding battery charge from a damaged solar panel. They hook

(35:23):
up to the Baufang radio at specific times. With email
effectively banned, Ash is now running communication bursts in the
region via radio. About once a week. She bikes out
to random locations around the edge of the city and
fires off a blast of noise over ham radio before
taking off. A few drones now circle the city, taking

(35:45):
pictures triangulating her signal each time she sends it. She's
in a race against time with them. This noise is encrypted,
of course, and decrypted via private keys now shared by
a wider set of anarchist survivors. Each communication bursts includes
the time of the next burst, though not the place.

(36:06):
Jake and Ethan connect their radio to a program on
their laptop each time, waiting to read and to crypt.
Most nights, it's just news from the wider world ferried
in via underground networks, warnings of systemic sweeps planned for
certain neighborhoods or local highways being closed by militias. But
one night it's something new. The ruler of the new

(36:30):
regime is coming for a photo op. They're going to
drag out one of the comrades that kept alive from
the original raids and execute her as the mastermind of
the attack on city Hall. There will be a ton
of security, but maybe not enough for six different shooters.
It's dangerous to keep connecting to the Wi Fi in

(36:51):
the middle of the night at the same cafe, so
Via rotates cafes, making sure that Kat doesn't get the
Wi Fi password on the same days and doesn't bring
a phone or device when she does go with tour blocked.
Vera knows that every time she uses the Internet at
a cafe to check sketchy websites, it's a signal to
the authorities. There's a radical still running around her town.

(37:14):
She tries not to check sketchy websites the same nights
at the same cafes where she checks the backup email
account she's been using to message with Matthew. She writes
most of her emails ahead of time to minimize time
on the ground, no more than three minutes connected, then
back into the night. The cops could catch her if
they really put resources into it, but she's banking on

(37:34):
their laziness. Then one day her emails are blocked. All
email seems to be blocked. There's new idea legislation that's
gone into place. This is the last night Vera goes
out to a cafe, but by that point she's already
helped build a relay network across town. Every Monday, Matthew

(37:54):
hands a USB to one of his Quaker hosts, who
slips it down the side of a bench while sipping
coffee in a park. Cat checks on the side of
the same bench a couple hours later and brings it
home to Vera, who decrypts it. Relay points and drop
spots now exist across town because Matthew's efforts to rope
in the former movement lawyer have succeeded. There are now

(38:17):
two anarchists hiding out on the lamb from other cities
in his house. One lives in the attic. The other
has changed her hair color, removed some piercings, added a
full face of makeup, and is working a job under
the table. A month ago they helped relay the complete
archives of a major anarchist collection that had supposedly been
purged from a university. It went south with an anarchist

(38:40):
backpacking a long mountain trail. Our drives with copies of
the collection are now squirreled away in various places. Another
anarchist that their new network loosely knows, has set up
a hidden camp on an island in the river, taking
a little canoe back and forth into a national park
in the wee hours once a week and getting supplies.

(39:01):
Kat and the lawyer are finding ways to slip an
extra hundred a month to him. Conservatives have been screaming
about demolishing the little libraries on people's lawns because liberals
stuck a few banned books in them. They have no
idea that Vera's network uses them as flags to notify
couriers about drops. A pulp sci fi book with a

(39:22):
spine turned inward placed on top of a certain little
library means to surreptitiously pick up a USB from a
Burger king bag and a trash can down the street.
They're getting a whole system going. Vera doesn't need to
know the network beyond her immediate circles. With her pre
existing GPG public keys for certain distant comrades, she can

(39:44):
just send encrypted messages with a distant city as a
public destination and wait for couriers and swaps to copy
and circulate it until her recipient can decrypt it. Messages
get lost, but some get through through the network. Distant
strangers trade tips and tricks they have learned keeping their
local networks up. With so much of the Internet down,

(40:06):
normies have started engaging in wider swap networks for saved files.
It's almost like the libs are making their own little,
really really free markets. It doesn't matter that Kat doesn't
have a Netflix account, because now Vera has access to
every show once torrented by local nerds. She keeps the
new laptop that accepts such USB as air gapped from

(40:27):
everything else, even if it's not the show she'd prefer
Vera can watch TV again, have something to do, knowing
they can make a difference helping other anarchists as Cat
and Vera in a much better mood. Their city is
a locust point in an emerging national underground railroad. That
friend of Matthew south of the border that Kat sent

(40:48):
cash to he has a job now and his apartment
is packed with anarchists who have survived the dangerous trek
across the border. They still have internet down there as
Vera's little sneaker net devices. Folks begin to loop in
around the edges, certain liberals from the pirate networks who
have proven they can be trusted, at least with some things,

(41:08):
at least to help relay GPG messages. One of the
liberals in the network finds a way to tap into
the credit card reader communications network and sneak packages of
information back and forth with the programmer friend in another country.
When the Quaker house is raided and Matthew is summarily
shot inside, it hardly breaks anyone's stride, and soon enough

(41:31):
the network of safe houses and dead drop couriers is
so well established that a subsection of it can risk moving.
Not just people and money, but guns. Julie holds the
wound closed while Maggie applies the glue, a contraband gift
slipped into the camp via their smuggler friends. The fallen
striker is cursing up a storm, but at least he's

(41:52):
not fainting. Where's that blasted Red Cross worker? The crowd
around them isn't howling or chanting. They're just jumping up
and down in waves, a tactics somehow revived from decades
ago in apartheid South Africa. It makes the earth seem
to shiver and shift, an avalanche of people, a force
of nature. The usually sandy ground of the camp is

(42:16):
already muddy with the reins of the flash flood. All
the jumping makes it squelch in a way that adds
up to something like the roar of the ocean.

Speaker 3 (42:25):
This is it.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
More bullets are going to fly, but the Guards don't
have enough, and the camp knows it. The gangs have disappeared.
The leftists who talk endlessly about a mass strike are
nowhere to be seen. The ruin tattooed fascists who work
hand in hand with the guards are magically gone too.
A scrawny white boy who usually proudly hawks black market items,

(42:47):
is beating his chest wildly as he jumps alongside the
grizzled Latina dyke who drives the aid workers around. Maggie's
cassio watch is beeping with some irrelevant reminder. Their mud
soaked dog is jumping excitedly too, deciding the vast crowd
is playing a game with her. Maybe the three of

(43:07):
them will survive this too. If that video of the
ruler's photo op that was smuggled in is to be believed,
anything is possible. Dun dun dune. And also it is
worth pointing out that crime Think has attended a specific
note the publishers endorse Signal as the most secure, widely

(43:29):
used option for encrypted messaging. But yeah, all right, the
fourth and final chapter.

Speaker 3 (43:35):
What you're thinking, Well, one of the things is just
this is probably my piece punk roots of just like
I don't think I would be one to be repetively
watching a video of somebody dying and laughing about it.
I know, and I think like shit sucks, and it's
really important that we keep our humanity in times of crisis,

(43:58):
and I don't know if I would be able to
do that. But I do think it's important. Yeah, but
I'm not sad when you know, like Nazis get hurt.
But I don't know, No.

Speaker 2 (44:10):
There should probably be a heaviness to it, even when
it's necessary, yeah, in the science fiction story.

Speaker 3 (44:17):
But yeah, then they started talking about this like radio
noise encryption thing, which I was thinking a lot about. Like,
I don't know, so a bow thing is a analog
radio and so you would have to connect it to
a computer of course, which they do talk about. But
I don't know of any current protocols that you could
send in that way that they're describing. But if there

(44:39):
was a sort of a network of it sounds like
they're just talking about two individuals, which I was doing
a little bit of research, and it looks like if
you have two people holding a radio at like head
height that are they're both like about six feet tall,
you get about six miles of distance. So that's your
area of communication. Now, if you're on top a mountain.

(45:01):
I've known people to get like, you know, halfway across
the state through a handheld radio. It's kind of pretty amazing.
So you'd have to put that into account as well.
And so maybe these people are relatively close by, and
then they're using some technology that doesn't exist yet to
communicate crypted messages.

Speaker 2 (45:20):
I thought you could transmit data, like, I know, isn't
there a thing where you can like get pictures on
your phone from the space station that they send down viral?

Speaker 3 (45:31):
Yeah, so that's slow scan television, So that would be
a way to do it. Is you could use slow
scan television send images, but again those aren't encrypted.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Right, But if you can send data, can't you send
encrypted data potentially?

Speaker 3 (45:44):
Yeah? I just don't know what exactly that would look
like today. Like I don't know if there's a way
to like put GPG into audio, So I'd have to
look up that. But if anybody knows, maybe they can
tell us.

Speaker 2 (45:57):
I think you can transmit data over an ANALOGO and
if you can transmit data, you can then you can
transmit encrypted data.

Speaker 3 (46:04):
Yeah, I know you know more about radios than me.
I'm just like you definitely can. I just don't know
what protocol they would be using. That's what I'm curious about.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
Yeah, Like the like the encryption protocol that's used by
police is digital. It's P twenty.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Five basically, it's like that's not something a bo fan
can do, is what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (46:23):
No, Yeah, it also depends on sort of what you're like,
if you connect an analog radio to a computer, there's
a lot you can do, Like there's one of the
main ways that ham radio operators communicate today is through
computer to computer communication over high frequency bands. Okay, Like, yeah,
the email blocking thing was interesting to me. I don't

(46:46):
know if commerce would allow emails to be blocked, but
maybe like businesses maybe would be exempt. But I that
one was a little bit like I just feel like
there's so much commerce that up and see a email.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Yeah, it would have to be like I mean, you know,
we're obviously I'm out a fairly different society. I feel
like society changes very dramatically from the start of the
story to the end of this story. Yeah, and I
guess I could imagine, like, well, if there's just like
other ways that commerce is like communicating, just like different channels,
different different protocols that are being developed for it or whatever.

(47:25):
It seems like if they can block the tour network,
they could probably block sketchy websites from other countries.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
Yeah, but that's like maybe nitpicky.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
I like that they use the underground Railroad. I actually
like this section a lot. This might be my favorite
of the four sections in terms of partly because it
starts breaking out of and now maybe even just being
critical of it, like as a piece. Again, I like
this piece. I wouldn't have read it if I wouldn't
find it interesting. But there's a lot of like ideological

(47:58):
like us anarchists or the good ones and all the
like everyone else's kind of a bunch of dumb dumbs
or whatever implied until you get to this part. You know, Yeah,
and now you have liberals who are like part of
the dead drop system, and you have like in Quakers. Yeah,
that's true, and like it almost makes sense. This most

(48:18):
hopeful section is when they stop only talking to other
anarchists and like start working with a broader coalition of people. Yeah,
and I really like that the one of the main
references points that they use at the underground Railroad. I
actually think that when it comes to this country, we

(48:39):
have an incredibly rich history in this country of what
resistance to a system that's even worse than what's presented.
And this story is like the like genocide, slave nightmare,
country that this country was slash is built upon, you know,

(48:59):
and like the underground Railroad wasn't. I mean, yeah, I
had a disproportionate number of Quakers, right, but they weren't like, yeah, hey,
you better be Quaker or the following type of abolitionist
in order to be part of this. You know, there
was a lot of trust, and there was a lot
of like just being like, well, we're going to do
it's right, you know, and like finding people who are

(49:22):
going to do it's right. And so I think the
underground railroad is a really brilliant touch point.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
Yeah, and I wanted to talk about that a little
bit too, because like at the end of the piece,
it seems like they're sort of like having a gorilla war,
and you know, we have the example of Spain, the
Spanish Civil War of having a period of you know,
at least winning or progress or not being completely annihilated.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
But like.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
I just get really, I guess despondent about the fact
that like win fascism has been sort of like stamped out.
It's been because of other states, like in World War Two,
like there was a lot of resistance movement, but if
it weren't for the other governments what would have happened.

(50:11):
And I think that, like the it's a two tiered
system that needs to happen. I'm not trying to say that,
like the only resistance to fascism is more state, but.

Speaker 2 (50:20):
Certainly the fascist governments that fell quickly, you know, Italy
and Germany, And by quickly I mean twenty years and
ten years yeah each you know, my numbers aren't exact, sorry,
And those fell because they andrew to war that they lost, right, Yeah.
A lot of times dictators last until they die, but

(50:42):
dictatorships do fall, just often a generation or two later,
and often because of this upswell of social movements. Yeah,
and especially when the social movements are not afraid of
being down with the people who are also doing violence,
like for that cause, you know. And I haven't done

(51:03):
as much reading about the resistance apartheid South Africa as
I would like to, but everything I've read about it,
you have groups that are working both above ground and underground,
and like, yeah, and you're pulling in political pressure from elsewhere.
And a lot of the Latin American dictatorships that I've
read about have fallen in similar ways, you know, where
like combination social movement. But then like the people kind

(51:26):
of keeping the flame alive are often the people who
are burning things down, you know.

Speaker 3 (51:32):
Yeah, well, and the burning things down and feeding people
and taking care of people's kids and like totally, Like
I think that there's definitely totally I like to see about,
you know, the network. You know, that it's not just
one thing that is needed. And what this piece I
think does really well is kind of calls out like
we do kind of need everybody to do whatever they're

(51:53):
good at or whatever they yeah, you know, feel like
is important totally.

Speaker 2 (51:58):
And You're looking at our three protagonists groups doing three
different things. Two of them are like burning stuff and
shooting people, one of them is you know, two of
them are just moving information around, and two of them
are like participating in a broad coalition social like movement. Yeah,

(52:19):
which I do think is a strength of this piece.
And seeing how like the three of them relate, well,
hopefully all that stays science fiction. When I look at this,
this is not quite my threat model. And I'm more
concerned about things going very badly than most of the
people I know, to be honest, But this is not
quite my threat model. But I think it is absolutely

(52:40):
worth thinking about a lot of possibilities and thinking about
like how we prepare. And I really appreciate this piece
is like attempt at just breaking down like I don't know,
here's an idea of how to do some technological stuff,
and like, I think there's a lot of good ideas
in it. And hopefully it never comes to any of that,

(53:02):
but you know, we'll see.

Speaker 3 (53:06):
I mean, I think it's always good to practice. And
I think that if you're somebody who isn't as familiar
with these technologies, or haven't done your own threat models,
or you know, have had a passing interest in this
stuff but never sat down with it, it's totally useful
to just say, like, I think one good piece of
homework would be try to learn how to use PGP,

(53:27):
you know, and understand at least what's going on under
the hood. When somebody mentions it, you're like, oh, yeah,
I'm familiar with that. I know what's going on. Or
try to send your b rend a message. I don't know,
but yeah, I think if we constantly are sort of
I guess it is a form of play. If you know,
we're we're playing around with these technologies, we're trying to
see what works and what doesn't. And you know, in

(53:49):
low stake situations where we're just sending each other cat memes,
we can maybe figure out how to do things when
it does matter.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
Yeah, And I would say in general, I think radio
communications and a lot of these things can be fun
to play with. Also, those people who lived in a
van would have done great if they had cashed a
bunch of stuff in the woods ahead of time, or
kept their van more prepared if their van had is
a very good place to cash things is a van.
You have many five gallon buckets of beans and rice

(54:16):
you can fit in a van. How many I don't know,
but I have a fair number of Anyway. Yep, that's
it for cools on Media book Club, and next week
I will probably get back to my book. The barrel
will send what it may unless something like this comes
up and then it gets interrupted again, but who knows.
Talk to you all soon.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (54:35):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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