Kill Process (7 page)

I remind myself the majority of people who’ve grown up under those conditions don’t become abusers. There’s a choice here, a surrender of humanity. At least, I want to believe that.

I lie there for a long time before fading back to sleep.

The next morning is Saturday, and I’m too tired to repeat all my usual processes, so I settle for a VPN connection to work, then SSH to a machine in the server clusters we run our news aggregation on. I search the database from the command line, and it doesn’t take long to find the news stories about the heart attack and subsequent death of Erik Copley in Tucson.

Mission accomplished, the pressure is off my shoulders. Jessica will not be hurt again, at least not by Erik.

There will be someone else. It’s the weekend, and since I have no work, I could profile the next person. I would go mad if this was all I did.

I push the keyboard away and will myself not to look at the code to see who is next. I grab my phone and text Thomas to see if he wants to meet for lunch.

I
ARRIVE EARLY
on Monday morning. I boot up my laptop, then disregard it and stare at the wall. Once an idea has been planted in my mind, it’s hard to let go. I’m still contemplating privacy, social networks, and the travesty of Tomo’s PrivacyGuard.

In polls, a third of Tomo users love us, citing reconnections to old friends and maintaining relationships. Another third have mixed feelings, citing benefits and costs. The last third claim to hate us, and yet still use Tomo.

Those with complaints talk about three classes of issues: privacy (who can see their data), data ownership (they’ve given all their data to us, and we monetize it), or the trivialization of human relationships.

I can’t do much about the last, unless society decides to give up computers and spend our time together; however, there’s a chance to do something about the first two. I head to the kitchen to refill my coffee. The pot is empty, so I refill the basket and wait for it to brew.

I go back to thinking about users and data. Data ownership is a big deal. Users stay on Tomo, even when they hate us, because their friends are here. If they want to remain in contact with their friends, they’re stuck with us. Everyone is jointly locked in together.

At the far side of the break area, a guy is trying to figure out why the big poster printer isn’t working. He’s wearing slacks and a button-down shirt, which means he’s marketing. A button-down shirt alone isn’t a giveaway, but the slacks are. He’s not in legal, because the shirt is a little too nice. Eventually he gives up fiddling with the printer and turns around, a man clearly in need of help.

Two men, programmers, are drinking coffee and talking at a table in the break area between the marketing guy and me. I can tell they’re programmers because they’re both wearing t-shirts, and nobody around here in marketing or management wears a t-shirt to work. That they’re talking about video games only reinforces the stereotype. If they’d been born twenty years earlier they’d wear neckbeards.

The guy at the printer looks at the two men, and sees me. Oh, no, here it comes. He has to walk around the guys right next to him.

“Oh, hi. My name’s Jerry.” He holds out a hand to shake.

I back away slightly, trying to keep my distance, judging angles so he can’t cut me off. I’m at work, I’m safe. The words seem weak in my head. I raise my coffee cup to show my hand is full. “Jerry.”

Once he realizes I’m not going to shake, he uses his outstretched hand to point back toward the laser printer. “Is there any chance you could help me out with the printer?”

My first job in tech, an older woman in the office came up to me at the end of the first week, as I washed the dishes for the third time, and told me to never make coffee for a man, never wash his dishes, and never help with the copier. The printer is close enough to count.

The temptation to avoid confrontation is strong. I try to embody how I felt when I was young, new to work, and full of verve. “What’s wrong with those guys over there?”

He looks back. “They seemed busy.”

“They’re talking about gaming. You could have interrupted them.”

The coffee gurgles as it nears the end of the brewing cycle.

He shakes his head and walks away. “Jeez, you don’t have to be such a . . .”

My shoulders relax as he moves away and the threat diminishes. I’m so relieved he’s gone, I almost don’t care he implicitly called me a bitch. Still, I can’t let behavior like that go on. I make a mental note: Jerry, from marketing, my floor. He’s overdue for an accident in payroll.

Then I let it go. It’s small beer, and I have enough karmic debt. I grab my coffee and go back to my desk, forcing myself to put the incident out of mind and focus on social networks.

Every once in a while, a new competitor comes along, like Ello, the social network that says they won’t sell data. I checked it out. What are you going to do there? You visit and none of your friends are around. So you leave. A new social network has to offer an incredible benefit to get people to stick around long enough to overcome the empty network problem. Sure, maybe I check it out for a day or two, then I give up. By the time a few friends come along, I’m gone.

It’s a variation of Drake’s Equation or maybe Metcalf’s Law. I’ll call it Angie’s Equation:

P
_adoption
= B × (nN × fEA × fAT × nL) ∕ (nB × nF)

B = The benefit of the new social network

nN = Size of my network (number of friends)

fEA = Fraction of those friends who are early adoptors

fAT = fraction of those with available time to try a new network

nL = Average length of time people stay on the network

nB = Average length of time it takes to see benefit of the new network

nF = Number of friends needed to see benefit

What it basically says is enough friends have to show up and stick around long enough and at the same time I do for me to see the benefit of the new social network. That doesn’t happen very often.

It would be easy enough to fix if social networks were open. If I use Tomo and you want to use some new network, and there’s still some way to communicate and connect across those networks, then you’re free to go use your new network and keep your connections to your friends. The empty network problem goes away.

Of course, Tomo doesn’t want that. They don’t want competition. They want barriers to entry, which they achieve by owning your social graph and social connections.

It’s this barrier to movement that keeps people stuck on Tomo. You can hate our privacy policies, and our data ownership, and our manipulative ad techniques, but what are your alternatives? To quit Tomo?

In today’s age that means choosing isolation. Nobody chooses isolation. That’s why they use it as a punishment in prisons.

S
AM
B
EKINS
,
thirty-nine years old, lives in Bend, Oregon, a five-hour drive from Portland, over the Mount Hood pass and into the desert highlands.

I debate taking the Accord. It predates computers, so there’s no track of where it’s been, except for photos of it. I can swap out the license plate, and I’ve made sure there are no distinguishing marks on the vehicle. Although I worry about taking it so far from home. Will I unwittingly bring home compromising evidence it’s been to Bend, a smidgen of dirt or wisp of leaf caught in a crevice that would tie it specifically to that geography? All the cool kids get car washes these days, but you never know what forensics will turn up even after a machine wash.

I reserve two nights at Timberline Lodge, the highest place you can stay on Mount Hood. It’s a beautiful old place made of thick beams and heavy stones. Snowboarding season ended many weeks ago, yet plenty of people stay up there during the summer to explore the mountain, hike, or fish. Timberline Lodge itself is seven miles up a twisting and turning road away from Highway 26, the main path across the mountain and primary way to Bend.

I take three days off work, and wake up very early on Wednesday morning. I check into Timberline mid-morning, enjoy the lunch buffet, and go for a short walk. By three, I’m back into my hotel room and launch an app on my laptop to start a preprogrammed sequence of emails, web browsing, and video streaming. I swallow a dose of Benadryl, shower, and lie down for a nap.

My phone wakes me at eleven, and I change into a set of clean clothes. I head down to the parking lot, where my chariot awaits: an old Jeep Wrangler belonging to a couple staying overnight.

I drive down the mountain, pulling over briefly near a trailhead to swap the license plates with a spare set and disconnect the speedometer cable where it plugs into the transmission. I lay my flashlight on the ground, trying to aim it toward the license plate. Of course, the beam hits way too low. I grab the flashlight between my teeth, and pick up a nut and wrench in my hand. I fumble and the nut rolls away.
Scheisse.
Dear universe, I’d like another hand, please, at least for a few minutes. The license plate is easy compared to the speedometer cable. Twenty minutes and plenty of curses later, I’m back on the road and by 3 A.M., in Bend.

Sam Bekins lives on the outskirts, in a cul-de-sac of identical suburban homes, every third house a mirror image floor plan. He drives a Ford Explorer, his wife drives a Taurus. Both are parked in the driveway. They don’t seem to travel much. I called both Ford dealerships in Bend, and the second had done the service.

Neither of them work. When I ran a standard financial check a few weeks earlier, I found Sam gets a monthly disability check from the New Hampshire State Police. Forty percent of all women married to police officers are abused.
Forty percent!

Of all groups of victims, the wives of police officers are stuck with the least options. They’re scared to report it, and even the agencies that normally help battered women are hesitant to become involved when a police officer commits the abuse. If the victim does report it, they’re almost never believed. Even when they are believed, neither police nor prosecutors are likely to do anything. They protect one another. Cops are fired for failing a single marijuana test, but remain on the job after battering a spouse.

Like homelessness, abuse of power in authority is a complex problem without a simple fix. Except in this case. I’m here now.

Sam’s wife, Kelly, has been in the hospital six times. I know this despite the fact that neither he nor his wife use Tomo. Both of their identical phones came with the Tomo app preinstalled, an arrangement Tomo pays the cellphone providers three bucks per device to ensure. The Tomo service runs in the background, reporting geospatial and other data, even though the user never signed up.

Some imagine they can avoid us simply by not using Tomo. It’s not that easy. We track the non-users too, in the hopes of figuring out what makes them tick and how to convert them to active users.

At any rate, I’m here now because Kelly is out of town. She got a text on Monday about a sick relative, flew out on Tuesday, and isn’t expected back until Saturday. I had nothing to do with it, but I’m not going to overlook a gift when it shows up.

Sam’s in the house alone, which opens up a world of opportunities.

In a more ideal case, I’d be able to use a remote exploit, but they don’t own any smart appliances directly connected to the Internet I can exploit. They do have a wireless diagnostic interface on their furnace and a local network of connected smart detectors for smoke, fire, and carbon monoxide.

It’s 3:30 when I pull up in front of their home. Lights are off, as they are for all the neighbors. I pull a clean laptop out of my bag, attach a directional antenna, and brute-force attack the smart detectors.

It takes six minutes before I’m in, exploiting the lousy random number generator the detector manufacturer uses at the factory, leaving the attack space for encryption keys way smaller than it should be. Once I’m in, I trigger the detectors’ programming mode, a setting normally used only in R&D. All this learned thanks to DEF CON, the annual hackers’ conference, where someone shared this exploit in an after-hours party room. In programming mode, although the LEDs flash, the audible alerts don’t sound. Presumably the firmware developers didn’t want to listen to blaring alarms while they were testing devices.

Next I go after the installed furnace, a smart device like every household appliance built in the last five years. Although the Bekins household never connected it to the Internet, the embedded computer still runs a hidden wi-fi hotspot to make it easier for service technicians to connect to. With the detectors effectively disabled, I redirect my laptop connection to the furnace, creating a peer-to-peer network with the same directional antenna. The furnace doesn’t possess any protection at all besides the original factory password they’ve never bothered to change. I download a firmware update, and five minutes later, the furnace reboots. I’ve changed the combustion settings, and now the furnace is generating copious quantities of carbon monoxide as it also runs the ventilation fan backwards with the cleaning duct open. These three things should never happen at the same time, but they are now.

My rough calculations predict the house will hit 600 ppm carbon monoxide, a lethal level, in twenty minutes. After ten, the levels are at 250 ppm. Even if Sam woke now, he’d be too befuddled to rescue himself. At twenty minutes, the levels reach 500 ppm. Not wanting to risk a botched job, I wait a whole hour. The carbon monoxide crosses over 1,000 ppm, and I back out my changes, leaving only the cleaning ducts open.

Without ever getting out of my car or even cracking the window, my work is done. It’s 4:45. I’ve got two and a half hours of driving to look forward to. Back near Timberline, I’m utterly exhausted and try not to think about the work ahead of me. I refill the gas in Government Camp, then drive up the long, winding road. At the trailhead, I swap out the license plates and reattach the speedometer cable, then drive the last mile to the parking lot.