The TSA agent had just finished running their fingers through my hair, and begun to pat down my shoulders and outstretched arms.
“So… do you live in Washington D.C.?” they asked.
I shook my head, no. They asked what I was doing in the capitol. I responded, in my politest, most innocent, most mousy-little-girl voice:
“I’m just going to talk to some of our nation’s senators about my work.”
The TSA agent jumped back a bit.
“Oh? What do you do?”
“I’m a programmer and computer security researcher.”
“Oh! Are you like really smart? I saw things about this on TV. Do you like break code and stuff?”
“Perhaps, sometimes. But, you know… I can’t really talk about it.”
I forced my face into what I hoped was a kind and knowing half-smile.
They seemed utterly shocked.
“Well then, good luck with your talks, miss, and you’re free to go.”
they said, forgetting to pat down the remainder of me, swab the baby blue latex gloves, and put the swab into the machine that purportedly checks for chemical compounds used in explosives.
I coolly walked away, holding my nose up in the air, as if I believed I had every right in the world to not be humiliatingly groped, holding all my snickering giddiness inside until I got around the corner of a head-high dividing wall. Then I shook my head, shocked at myself and feeling somewhat bad and for the multiple lies² that had just fallen out of my mouth before I could even think about them, and I laughed out loud, wondering how long it would take for that person to realise they still hadn’t checked their gloves.
· · ·
That evening, arriving at the hotel in Washington D.C. for the Open Tech Fund summit meeting, I spotted Moxie in the lobby through the glass doors; I ran inside, dropping my backpack, and flung myself upwards at him to wrap my arms around his shoulders. Moxie had been talking with two others: Trevor from the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Zooko of Tahoe-LAFS. I awkwardly waved a friendly hello at Trevor, and since I’d only “met” Zooko over videochat before, I awkwardly hugged them for the first time. Inwardly, I mentally kicked myself again for my shyness around people I should be able to call comrades and cohorts, yet haven’t interacted with as much AFK.
We sat down in the hotel lobby, exhausted and idly chatting. Moxie and I, as usual, got to one of our lifelong favourite topics.
“So I was down in Malibu, and I ran into Laird Hamilton… you know that guy?” Moxie asked.
Yep. Dude surfs crazy huge waves. I’d run into him before. Moxie continued:
“I just finished this book about rogue waves — they’re these monster waves, hundreds of feet tall, pretty much unpredictable. There’s whole conferences that people go to — people like us — but instead of talking about crypto, all they do is talk about rogue waves.”
Moxie’s eyes lit up as he said,
“Some people even survive these things… but the folks who survive, they’re always the lunatics who saw the wall of water coming, and made a mad dash straight for it.”
I think the rest of us could sense one of Moxie’s sailor stories coming, so we smiled, nodded, and let him monologue. If someone were to follow Moxie around and collect his sometimes-rather-dubious-but-you’re-willing-to-suspend-all-doubt-for-the-sheer-entertainment-value¹ sailor stories, they’d have a NYT Best Seller in no time.
“So this one wave, something like sixteen hundred feet high, hit the coast of Alaska in the 1960s… and there are still survivors alive today to tell the tale. Can you imagine? Sitting there in the harbour, on your little fishing boat, and you see a sixteen hundred foot wall of water coming towards you, and you’ve still got the wherewithal to jet the engines and head directly into it?”
Moment of silence in reverent awe.
“This Laird Hamilton guy and his buddies, they get wind that sometimes, in very special storms, this break called ‘Jaws’ on the northside of Maui would get up to one hundred feet.
“Sure enough, one day, a storm hits, and Laird calls his buddy up: ‘Dude, it’s happening, we gotta get out there!’ and so they grab a Jet Ski and a surfboard, and sure enough: Jaws is breaking with hundred foot waves. His buddy tows him in on the Jet Ski, and he begins the drop. At some point, he realises: he’s not falling; he’s standing on a board on a vertical surface of water, trying to drop in, but the wave is building so fast that while trying to drop he’s actually rising. So Laird panics, and bails by diving out the back of the wave. When he surfaces, there’s another monster wave coming right for him. His friend Jet Skis in to grab him, but they wipe out from the second wave, and Laird’s buddy’s leg is badly gashed open by the razor sharp fins on the bottom of Laird’s surfboard. He’s already passed out, bleeding out. There’s often sharks in waters in this region. Laird rips apart his wetsuit, making a tourniquet to try to stop the bleeding.
“As he jets towards the shore, holding onto his buddy, he takes a look behind him, and there’s a roaring, fifty-foot wall of pure whitewash from the broken wave. They rush in to the shore, Laird packs his friend into an ambulance, and more friends show up. They’re not even sure if the friend who had been driving the Jet Ski was going to make it. And you know what they do?”
Moxie’s eyes were fervently glowing like a right proper madman.
“They go back out there.”
I smiled my appreciation at Moxie’s energetic storytelling, and sat quietly, wondering if the similarities between the cypherpunks and these people obsessed with giant waves extended beyond just the conferences.
· · ·
I mentioned that I lied² multiple times to that TSA agent.
I don’t³ work for any government agency. As hilarious as I think it is that the TSA agent actually believed I worked for (presumably) the NSA, I haven’t. Nor have I worked for any other agency of the U.S. government, nor any other government.⁴
And I also lied about visiting Congress. I’ve already written about my previous experience visiting senators and representatives on Capitol Hill. The head of OTF kindly poked me to attend their “Hill Day” again — the yearly field trip which led to those previously mentioned adventures, where a bunch of crazy internet-freedom hackers go to Capitol Hill to explain their work to U.S. senators, representatives, and their aides — but seeing as there was limited space for the Hill Day, I opted out of diving through that wave for the second time in order to give someone else⁵ a go at it.
What I didn’t realise was that many people had read my previous post and
expected Capitol Hill to be full of trolls. While this is mostly true, and
while I really, really want to be able to say nothing more than that
Congress is full of a bunch of asshats who accidentally open their
passwords.txt file on the monitor in front of me⁶, instead I’d like to tell
the story of a positive interaction I had on that day two years ago…
· · ·
It was a full day, playing the part of a door-to-door salesman selling
censorship-circumvention and privacy software, like some futurist’s worst
nightmare — straight out of a Gibson or Doctorow novel — trudging through
metal detectors and underground tunnels beneath the Rayburn House and other
Congressional office buildings, before I arrived in that Senator’s office. I’d
been busy spouting my well-rehearsed introductions to anyone important-looking
who would hold still for thirty seconds. I’d entertained myself mostly by
snickering at the sheer abundance of ridiculous articles of clothing which I
was encountering — a photograph of some of these things could have made a
tweet all in itself, perhaps complemented, drily, wittily, writhingly, by the
simplicity of a #wtf or a #onlyindc hashtag: American flag high heels,
pink and baby blue powersuits, and chintzy red-white-and-blue 1970s-styled
silk neckties.
And, of course, the entertainment value provided by pretending to be legitimately concerned over the rumoured possibility of Reptilians in the underground tunnels of the nation’s capitol should not be left unstated. I kept my eyes very widely and very noticeably peeled, such that any casual observer or surveillance camera which might happen to spy on me in those tunnels couldn’t help but instantly understand that I was comprised of nothing but the most utmost awareness of my surrounding environment: a single glimpse of a scaly green tail whisking around a corner, a set of pupils converting to the yellowy narrowed slits of a reptile in between blinks, the slightest hiss from an underground chamber whose door was mistakenly left unlatched — I would make certain that any secrets that were down here, they’d know that I knew about them.
The Senator’s office reeked of Folgers coffee, clean carpets, and paperwork. We walked in, greeted by a tall, Texan man in his mid-twenties. He was dressed in faded Levi’s and a plaid flannel shirt. His biceps said he’d once quarterbacked for the high-school football team. My first thought was,
“Oh, fuck me. Today’s gonna end with me hitting this dude in the face.”
Our funder had split all us hackers up into smaller groups that morning. As should be expected from anyone familiar with the normative ratios in hacker circles, I was the only female-bodied person in my group, which neither bothered⁷ me nor surprised me in the slightest. It’s just a FactOfLife™.⁸
What did surprise me was this plaided Texan. Speaking directly to me, he said,
“Hi! You must be Isis, from the Tor Project. I’m a big fan of your work!”
A bit shocked that anyone from Texas had heard of either me or the Tor Project, I thanked him and shook his hand. Some other members of the group tried to introduce themselves. He shushed them with a handwave and continued speaking directly to me:
“So… you write Python, yeah? And, of course, you’re really good with security… I’m releasing this web app for the Senator tomorrow, and I’m really nervous about it and kinda wondering if you could take a look at my code?”
Inside my brain, there were some noises like frantic footsteps on a hardwood floor and some confused shuffling of papers, and then a chorus of voices all saying in unison: “Wat.” This kid? Write code?
Sceptical, I followed, sitting in the mahogany leather chair studded with brass rivets he had pointed me into, next to him, behind a giant, darkly-stained oak desk. His Macbook was sitting open on the desk. A couple of Vim buffers lay open before me. I hated absolutely everything he stood for.
“It’s a perhaps a little bit late for an audit, if you’re deploying tomorrow.” I warned.
“Well, it’s already live on the server… it’s just that we decided to open-source it, so I’m making it public on Github tomorrow.”
I stared at his cowboy boots. Two of the voices in my brain were whispering back and forth to each other:
“Open source?”
“Did he just say ‘open source’?”
“I dunno… we probably just misheard him.”
“Perhaps he meant ‘Congress is a bunch of open sores’… ?”
My own inner-voice interrupted, telling them to STFU.
One of the other hackers from the group tried to introduce themselves and their project again. More handwaving from the plaided Texan. Silence again.
We started looking over the code, a mixture of Python, Django templates, and Javascript. I pointed out a bunch of little things as I spotted them, like moving to a more recent version of Django to better avoid some of the then-recent CSRF, XSS, and DoS vulnerabilities. I complimented him on his clean use of Javascript scopes and avoidance of global variable manipulation, pointed out some places where perhaps the Python code could be more functionalised to avoid code duplication, and suggested adding a bit more developer documentation and recommended trying Sphinx. Just little things. Overall, it looked pretty good.
The whole time, he was kind and patient when I appeared to misunderstand something, intelligent in his explanations for particular segments of code and rationales for overarching design choices, and slightly nervous, as if he was sincerely worried that I might find some issue and rail against him for writing shitty, insecure code. He wasn’t just showing off his perfectly-cultivated pet project to me to try get attention. Even more impressive: he spoke directly with me the entire time. In a room full of boys. Boys who concern themselves primarily with coding and security, no less. And — not to be misandrist — boys who continually tried to interrupt the conversation to provide their own input (which, I should add, was more than welcome on my end… after all, it’s possible I’d missed something). In a good way, I was shocked. And impressed. And then further shocked at myself that I was impressed.
“So… this is some sort of app for collaborative editing, like a wiki, right?”
I probingly asked out of curiosity, wondering why anyone would feel the need to reinvent that particular wheel again.
“Yep! It’s a site which allows members of Congress to upload proposed legislature for the public to collaboratively edit, mark up, and make suggestions for. Experts too can point out new and relevant research in their fields which might be pertinent to the amendment and creation of laws, lawyers can highlight sections which are confusingly or troublingly worded, and anyone can voice their opinions.” he explained.
I thought of bills like SOPA.
“Hmm… so if someone were to login, click to edit a bill, highlight the whole text input field, hit BACKSPACE, and then click SAVE… what would that do?”
He cocked his head sideways and stared at me inquisitively. “That… would create a revision… in which the whole bill would be erased.” he answered, slowly, seemingly not understanding why someone might wish to make such a political statement.
We got to talking about login and authentication schemes, and, in some sense, matters of identity. Who should be permitted to edit this legislature? Currently implemented mechanisms were, of course, poorly-designed and insufficient to prove requisite authorisation to edit a proposed bill. And even worse in the case that such a system were to be used for smaller scales, like state or city legislature. Requiring an image of a U.S. passport or state-issued driver’s licence would pose enormous data-retention and privacy issues.
“But is there actually crypto that can do authentication like that safely?” he asked.
I remember that, somehow, through a series of questions and answers, I wound up explaining things like Bitcoin’s demonstrated solution to the consensus issues posed by the Byzantine General’s Problem, the basics of some of my favourite anonymous credential schemes, and how such schemes combined might someday be used to create anonymous electronic identification cards for a system of global, opt-in, techno-panarchist States:
“So, for example, you could be a member of the Republican State, protected by it and paying taxes to it, regardless of where you live, travel, or work. You’d be free to discuss and vote on issues anonymously, truly speaking your mind, unhindered by any worries that your political views might one day become unsavoury and be used against you. And conversely, someone like me: I would be able to opt-in (or out) of whichever State, or collective association, as I saw fit, and be taxed accordingly for my use of whatever public services I’d signed up for. Most importantly, each person could have strong, cryptographic protection of their identity, their associations, and perhaps even proof that they had payed whatever taxes they had opted into.”
I remember shyly looking up from the stitched patterns on his cowboy boots at this point, slightly embarrassed that so many words which might easily convince someone that I was mentally unstable had poured out of my mouth. And I remember the look on the Texan hacker’s face: eyes wide, head tilted again to the side, mouth agape, mind completely blown. He said nothing. He continued to say nothing, and it seemed like this was probably going to take him a while.
This was painful. I really liked this guy. And I absolutely hated that I couldn’t help liking him. I wanted to hate him, goddammit. He was like, you know, the enemy.
But so what if maybe he didn’t understand my crazy-anarchist politics or my decision to never brush my hair and grow dreads down to my knees? I didn’t agree with his Macbook or understand how he could maintain any typing accuracy with his bulgy quarterback biceps. But differences aside, this guy was a good coder, was extremely respectful of female-bodied people and willing to engage them on a technical level, and was willing to write a web app which permitted — as ineffectual as I suspect such a statement would be — people like me to voice their opinions, publicly and equally.
I guess I suppose grumble that maybe there are grumble a few decent people grumble on Capitol Hill.
For what it’s worth, I don’t remember the name of the plaided Texan I spoke with on that day two years ago, so please correct me if I’m wrong, but I strongly suspect that it was Jeremy Carbaugh of the Sunlight Foundation, and that the web app in question was PublicMarkup, the code for which is available on Github.
¹ I’m thinking specifically the one with the cop trying to arrest Moxie for carrying a closed wine bottle onto a sailboat in a harbour, while an ongoing Navy exercise in the water is using trained dolphins strapped with explosives to rocket a scuba-driving Navy Seal out of the water and up into the air, where other Navy Seals on a boat practice gunning him down.
² Upon proofreading this post, a friend suggested that I not retroactively “misterm” actions which were not, legally speaking “lying” per se, in a way which could potentially be considered an admission of the crime of lying to a federal agent, and suggested that I should instead say that “I insinuated misinformation to the TSA agent.” While I am slightly anxious about making a blog post containing what could be construed as an admission to a crime which I didn’t commit… on the other hand — because I can’t say the phrase “insinuated misinformation” with a straight face without making an IngSoc doublespeak reference — I’m going to leave my post as-is.
³ Unless, of course, you’re one of the rather annoyingly naïve conspiracy theorist assholes who just got on the Internet for the first time to write drivel for Pando, and you happen to count contracting to non-profits like the LEAP Encryption Access Project and the Tor Project as somehow “working for the U.S. government”, despite both projects being very clear about whom they receive grant funding from and for what purposes.
⁴ And following Mike Perry’s frequent examples, I’d also like to take this opportunity to hold my I’ve-never-received-a-National-Security-Letter card high in the air while I still can.
⁵ I hear that Mike Perry enjoys getting his feet wet. Perhaps he’ll write something about it.
⁶ Story for another time.
⁷ Because I can hear the other feminists yelling at me as I write this: by “not bothered” I mean that “I’ve become much too much accustomed to this to feel personally offended at this particular incident.”
⁸ Where the word “life” is instead taken to mean “the current deranged sociocultural arrangement in which female persons are coerced in innumerable ways to assume that they are intrinsically ill-adept w.r.t. skills in various technologies, sciences, and other areas of interest and study which are commonly considered by those afflicted with Historiological Retrograde Amnesia to have ‘always been’ primarily male.”