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The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall. I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would. Bon Diddley Bon for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bon Diddley Bon!
A very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes, I'm here.
Hang on, if I can get all these buttons working properly. We have... Yeah, I know, I'm pressing the right button. Actually, I already pressed the button. I don't think I need this one.
We have Alex. Alex, can you hear me?
Good evening. I can hear you loud and clear.
It sounds like you're in a mausoleum of some sort.
No, I'm in my apartment, but thanks for that.
Okay, well this means you have a big spacious apartment. Rob T. Firefly?
Good evening.
Gila?
Greetings and salutations.
Both of you in Queens. And Voltaire is joining us.
Greetings from Brooklyn.
Brooklyn. We have pretty much all the boroughs represented. The ones that... Well, we don't have Staten Island, we don't have the Bronx, but we'll get there.
And we have a special program tonight. It's actually an extended program. We're going to be on for 90 minutes before the vice-presidential debate, otherwise known as an ass-kicking of Mike Pence, but we'll get into that a little bit later on.
We have a special guest who will be joining us in just a moment, Cory Doctorow, who has a new book out called Attack Surface.
I'd like to play something first before we actually start talking with him.
This is kind of a piece that he recorded concerning the book, concerning what it's about, what we're all about.
And we'll get right back into things in just a moment.
When I started working in technology, I was a technological optimist.
That is to say, I believed that with the right technology, we could create a kind of demimonde that lived alongside mundane reality, out of reach and out of sight of temporal authorities.
Then, as I got more experience and watched people suffer stinging defeats while trying this maneuver, I thought that perhaps technology could be a force multiplier for the powerless, a sling for the world's Davids to use on the world's Goliaths.
This, too, turned out to be a dead end.
Technology could topple Goliaths, but they wouldn't stay down.
You might be able to dump docs on a corrupt military contractor, or publish a video of a despicable mayor shouting racist things and smoking crack.
You can take the boy out of Toronto, but you'll never take the Toronto out of the boy.
I love you, YYZ. You're the city that never sleeps.
But then the FBI would flip your anonymous co-conspirators and get you sentenced to jail for 63 months, free Barrett Brown, or even 35 years, free Chelsea Manning.
Today, I remain a technological optimist, but a realistic one.
Technology can be a force multiplier for the powerful and powerless alike.
But the use of technology by the powerless is more salient than when it is wielded by the powerful, because giving power to the powerless is a change in kind, while increasing the power of the already powerful is merely a change in degree.
But that temporary power boost will be denatured by the powerful as quickly as they can manage it, so the advantage is not enough to make lasting structural changes.
To make lasting structural changes, you need to use technology to change politics.
In other words, technology is a tool for social change, because it can temporarily shelter you from the all-seeing eye of a corrupt state, and because it can temporarily give you a force multiplier to take on the powerful.
And what you need to do during that temporary, technologically dependent window is reform your society so that your government is just and responsive and transparent.
Technology cannot substitute for a just society, but it can help you create that society.
As this book is going to press, the world is riven by authoritarian politics, supercharged by technological surveillance and influence campaigns.
We stand at the brink of a permanent environmental cataclysm that threatens our very species.
We have never, ever needed shelter and force multipliers more than we do today.
To the technologists reading this book, your employers need you more than you need them.
You don't get massages and free kombucha because your employers are swell fellows.
You get them because they're terrified that you will go and work for someone else.
You have power. You can use it.
Tech workers at giant and small tech companies are unionizing and demanding that their employers confront their role in the climate emergency, the inhumane treatment of prisoners and migrants, their labor inequities, and their contributions to harassment and disinformation campaigns.
You are not alone in wondering whether your work is a force for good in the world, nor in desiring to make it so.
Organizations like Tech Solidarity are standing by to help you organize, to make your work a force for good.
To the users of technology reading this book, it doesn't have to be this way.
No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets reading,
Thou shalt stop rotating thine log files, and instead mine them for actionable market intelligence.
Social networks can connect you with your friends and people who share your principles and interests without commodifying those relationships or ginning up conflicts in order to increase page views.
There is nothing about providing a well-designed phone, or computer, or car, or tractor that necessitates that you be barred from installing a competitor's apps or getting it serviced by a third party.
Technology does not have to be extraction's handmaiden, nor surveillance's constant companion.
These are decisions that named individuals, billionaires mostly, took for their own purposes, and then they argued that there was no alternative.
There is an alternative. You have the right to technological self-determination.
If the companies that dominate the marketplace and the politicians who do not lift a finger to stop them refuse to give you that self-determination, then they must be stopped.
Not through individual action, but through collective action, organized through the internet, and projected into the real world through regulation and prosecutions.
This is a book about how people rationalize their way into doing things that they are ashamed of, and how they can be brought back from that brink.
I wrote it because I am as guilty as you are of that kind of rationalization, and it's only by confronting it that we can overcome it.
I had some fantastic help in writing this book. First, I had the support of my family, especially my parents, Gordon Ross, and my wife, Alice, and our daughter, Posie.
My agents, Russ Galen and Anne Behar, are indispensable, supportive, shrewd, responsive, pitbulls when fighting for you and cheerleaders in between.
My editor, Patrick Nielsen-Hayden, and the people of Tor, Molly McGee, Sarah Reedy, Alex Sarella, Fritz Foy, Lucille Rettino, and the Tor alums, notably Patty Garcia and Dot Lin, made this book and the ones that came before it possible.
Julia Ullman's editorial help with this book was indispensable. She showed me how to cut 40,000 words out of it.
Thanks to Juliet and to Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier for introducing me to her.
Michael Marshall Smith was good enough to let me borrow his swearing for the f*** right off and keep f***ing off soliloquy.
Smith is a brilliant writer, but he's also an unsuspected grandmaster of profanity.
In the 12 years since I published Little Brother, I have had occasion to meet people who work in the tech industry.
Security researchers, cyber lawyers, software developers, network administrators, tech ethicists, activists, who came to the field after reading that book and its sequel, Homeland.
I never know quite what to say when you folks introduce yourselves, and the truth is, it's because the pride and delight I feel when this happens is so huge and all-encompassing that I can barely choke out a response.
So for the record, let me say this.
To everyone who credits my book with getting them interested in technology as a force for good, thank you.
Not for flattering me with your praise, but for getting involved in a field where that kind of thoughtful, combative, sensitive, ethical posture is needed more than ever.
My sincere thanks also to my EFF colleagues past and present, and to our allies at other organizations, from the Free Software Foundation, to EDRI, to Fight for the Future, to Creative Commons, to the Internet Archive, to Wikimedia, to Mozilla, and so, so many more.
Thanks, finally, to the people who promoted Little Brother and got into so many greedy young hands.
Neil Gaiman, to be certain, but also the librarians, teachers, and mentors who did so much for me and my books over the years.
Folks, it's 2020. The world is on fire.
The web is five giant services filled with screenshots of the other four.
Present-day wealth concentration makes the Gilded Age look like a socialist paradise.
We can do better. We will do better.
We are an amazing thing, we humans, and we have done amazing things.
We will do more amazing things together, and we'll need a free, fair, and open Internet to coordinate us while we do them.
We fight on.
Indeed. Those are the words of Corey Doctorow, the author's note for his new book, Attack Surface.
Corey joins us now, live on the radio. Corey, welcome.
Thank you very much. Your listeners won't know it, but I just did a very hasty reboot, and I'm so glad to be back and actually working.
We expect nothing less. People don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but technology-wise, it's always chaos, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
But, Corey, this book, we've all spent the last few weeks reading it, and first of all, I want to personally thank you.
I had a lot of important work I had to do that I didn't get done because I was so entranced reading Attack Surface.
Wow. It's a story that takes place in all different places with all different perspectives, the corporate perspective and the activist perspective.
It's the story of Masha Maximo.
Basically, she's a tech genius, I guess there's no other word for it, who works for various companies installing surveillance for dictatorial regimes and also kind of torn between friends in the activist world.
It's an incredible narrative that just takes you through the conflict, the internal dialogue, as well as what's really going on outside.
I just want to start by asking you, the book begins with a quote from Edward Snowden.
How much of an influence would you say his story was to the works you've written, and how much of him is in Attack Surface?
I'm really fascinated by Snowden because he's someone who went down a path that I find hard to imagine and then reversed course.
This is an area that, as a society, we're still reckoning with.
What it means to take a choice that seems right in the moment or rationalize your way into a choice that seems right in the moment.
Realize that you've gone down the wrong path and then try and find redemption.
I'm a science fiction writer, so there's a whole generation of science fiction writers who are dropping dead.
They're all wildly flawed vessels who have many virtues and many, many sins.
Whenever they die, we have this contest about their legacy.
Do we forgive them their sins because of their virtues?
Do we erase their virtues because of their sins?
Or do we find some way that the bad and the good can exist in superposition and that we can say that they're flawed, their flaws are unforgivable, their virtues are unerasable, and that is who they are?
Ed's one of those people. He was gung-ho. He was in the CIA. He wanted to be special forces.
He has become one of the most thoughtful critics of the point of view that he came from, which is about as alien to my own point of view.
I was raised by lefty Canadian refugees. I could not be any less like the young gung-ho Snowden.
Yet, here I find myself on the same side as him on all these issues.
I find that his perspective is invaluable. I don't know if you read his memoir, Permanent Record,
but it is a spectacular explanation of how you come to realize that you're on the wrong side of an important fight.
Really, that's what this book is about, someone who is having a moral reckoning.
The first two Little Brother books were young adult novels, and this is an adult standalone sequel.
People say, it's an adult novel. It must have sex in it. It's actually the only one of the three that doesn't have sex in it.
From my long experience now that I'm nearly 50, I'm here to tell you that teenagers think about and have more sex than adults,
but the thing that makes it an adult book is it's about a moral reckoning with your legacy.
Thankfully, not a lot of teenagers have to have those.
Early on, we're plunged into the scene of chaos and demonstration in a fictitious country known as Slovestokia.
Anyone reading this would swear that you were describing present-day Belarus.
You wrote this piece, though, before that nation's current situation.
Did you somehow foresee those events, or is this something that simply applies to numerous countries in the region?
I wrote this thinking mostly of the Maidan in Ukraine.
But, of course, there are elements of the story of Slovestokia that are actually lifted from Belarusian protest history.
My grandfather was born in a town in what was then Poland and is now Belarus.
It's a place that I feel a real connection to.
Some of the things that the protesters there have done to resist the dictatorship have been pretty intense.
They actually did have a protest where they all went and ate ice cream in the square
and let it be known that anyone eating ice cream was a protester
and dared the police to round them up, which they then did,
rounding up everyone who was eating ice cream on a summer day in the square.
Then they came back and said,
we're going to have a protest where anyone who smiles is a protester.
They all went down to the central square and just smiled at each other
and dared the police to arrest them, too.
This kind of game of chicken about what can we do.
You've seen right-wing provocateurs do this since,
where you'll have dumb-ass Nazis declare that milk is a Nazi symbol
or the OK symbol is a Nazi symbol.
A lot of those tactics were invented by pro-democracy activists in Belarus.
Certainly, if you follow the region, you're familiar with some of the patterns, for sure.
Have you been to Belarus?
No, never. I've been to Russia.
My grandmother was born in Leningrad and I still have family there in Petersburg.
I've been to other countries in the region.
I used to go to Hungary pretty regularly,
back when the Central European University was still there,
before right-wing paranoid conspiracy theories about George Soros caused it to close down.
Now, I've never been to Belarus.
It's one of those Iron Curtain countries that I haven't visited.
I've been there several times.
Kyle's been there once.
It's so strange and surreal.
It's like going back to the Soviet Union, which I've never been to.
Kyle had a nightmare just trying to order a pizza in a cafeteria and doing it the wrong way
and having to file the right paperwork and getting yelled at.
I think somebody got fired and their family might have been purged.
Who knows?
We really did see minivans pulling people off the street, too.
Yeah, all kinds of things like that.
I don't know if that magic still exists with all the pro-democracy that's going on now.
I hope it goes into a more positive way.
Alex, you have a question.
Along similar lines to yours, Emmanuel, I'm so curious, Corey, about when you wrote this book
because there seem to be so many themes and variations in themes
of things that could have been ripped from the headlines.
Specifically, one of the things that I thought was really fascinating
because it happened pretty recently was the Blue Leaks.
Blue Leaks sort of has an analog in your book towards the beginning,
I think, within the first few chapters with the Fusion Leaks
and all this information about cops doing terrible things coming out in Oakland.
I thought, my God, did he rip this from the headlines or was he incredibly prescient?
Which one is it?
Well, there have been so many leaks like that, and we have such a short memory for them.
If I can, Little Brother is a book that I wrote in 2006 and came out in 2008,
and it's a techno-thriller that still plays today.
People read it and they're like, wow, this feels ripped from the headlines.
Apart from the lack of social media in it, if I could go back, that would be the only thing I'd change.
The reason it feels ripped from the headlines is it made three really safe bets.
The first is that computer science would be pretty stable.
We're not going to invent a computer that can encrypt everything
except the things the police don't need to be encrypted.
We have different computer engineering, the chips get faster, whatever,
but the underlying theory, it's still like Turing, von Neumann, verse, verse, chorus.
The computer science of your grandpappy is the computer science of you.
The computer science would be stable, computers would be more important to our lives,
and governments and corporations would continue to fail to come to grips with them as they were
and continue to treat them as magical objects that they could project their will and desire onto.
Because of that, Little Brother remains a story that is absolutely about the things going on today.
In the same way, the idea that powerful people would over-collect data,
that they would over-retain data, and that they would lose control of the data
if they over-collected and over-retained, and that they would regret it forever,
is such a safe bet.
Think of, we forget about the OPM leaks.
Do you remember Office of Personnel Management leaks?
If you want to get classified status and you work for the government or a military contractor,
you have to give the OPM all of the potential compromising information.
Sorry, did you want to jump in?
On the topic of OPM, by the way, and you also mentioned CIA.
I actually used to work at CIA a long time ago in the general counsel's office,
and I was a clerk at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces,
and so I had TSSCI clearance in the intelligence community
and a secret clearance in the DOD for the Department of Defense,
and I got two data breach notification letters when the OPM breach happened.
Yeah, so they have, you know, you want to get cleared, you're like,
okay, I have to tell you all the things that might be used to blackmail me.
Here's my mom's heroin habit. Here's the fact that my grandpa used to dress up in ladies' underwear.
Whatever, right? You have to give all that information to them,
and then they breached it to the Chinese military, right?
Like, you know, the idea that we can just blithely collect this stuff
and nothing bad will happen with it.
It's like the idea that, like, well, you know, plutonium doesn't take up that much space.
How hard can it be to contain?
We should just make some plutonium and keep it around in case.
So true, so true.
Now, in this – we lost Rob? Okay.
Oh, no.
We'll get him back. We'll get him back.
So you've got all kinds of amazing illustrations of the technological world in this book,
and one of my favorites was when you were describing the history of Slovstokia –
great name, by the way –
and the relationship their Ministry of Communications had with various phone companies.
You used the phrase, the thrice-brewed teabags of the telecommunications world.
What exactly does that refer to?
Yeah, so, you know, the Soviet version, the ex-Soviet version of Beltway banditry
was going into these countries that were opening up
and selling them the stuff that was being thrown away by telcos in the rest of Europe.
So, you know, whatever, like whatever tele was thrown away or Nokia or whatever,
and you'd sell it to them at these, you know, god-awful markups,
and you'd sort of half-configure it,
and then, you know, you'd put in whatever surveillance gear the oligarch
who was running the ministry wanted,
and then they would hire, like, someone like Deloitte or PwC
or some other, you know, consulting firm to come in who'd do it again,
you know, some massive markup, half-assed job configuring it,
lots of stuff just left wide open.
There was a lot of, especially, you know, with CALEA,
the mandate that switches have backdoors,
they would leave these backdoors open,
and, you know, you have this telcons infrastructure in Eastern Europe
that for a long time was just like, it was these, like,
alluvial layers of bailing wire and spit and discarded crap
from other countries that had been more fortunate,
and all of it wired together by people who didn't give a damn about their jobs,
and it really, like, made the Internet transition hard
for a lot of those countries because they had such bad infrastructure.
Voltaire, go ahead.
Yeah, I was going to say,
getting to the shoddy infrastructure with backdoors from CALEA,
in Greece, I think there was a major scandal
because a backdoor that was put in place for American police
when the things were sold to Americans was,
people were basically able to hack into that and leak confidential information,
and it led to a political scandal.
That kind of gets to the point of why having backdoors,
or mandated backdoors like the FBI wants is so problematic.
Yeah, that Greek leak was wild
because they had actually turned off the backdoor,
but someone broke into their telcom centers,
we learned from the leaks that it was US intelligence,
broke into their telcom center, turned it back on again,
and wiretapped the Prime Minister and the Parliament
for the most petty thing imaginable.
It was to try and rig the Olympic bid.
Can you imagine breaking into the Prime Minister's comms
because you want to rig the Olympic bid?
Something as socially useless as the Olympics to begin with.
Holy moly.
Wow.
Well, truth is stranger than fiction, many times.
We're speaking with Cory Doctorow about his brand new book,
Attack Surface.
Cory, it's not out yet, right?
It's coming out in the next few days?
On the 13th.
And yeah, this is the last day for the pre-orders
for the audiobook as well on the Kickstarter.
Okay.
Tell us about the Kickstarter because that's really important.
Yeah, sure.
So, you know, this book, by all rights,
should have like a fancy audiobook from the publisher
that bought it, Macmillan,
but I won't let Macmillan sell it via Amazon
because Amazon owns the largest audiobook platform.
It's called Audible.
And they have this requirement
that everything that you sell have DRM on it.
And when there's DRM on your book,
it means that it's locked forever to Amazon's platform.
It's a felony under U.S. law.
As you know from the Ramirez case,
it's a felony under U.S. law
to distribute circumvention devices
for technical protection measures
under Section 12.1 of the DMCA.
So what that means is that every time you spend a dollar
on my DRM audiobooks with Amazon,
that's a dollar you have to surrender
if I later break with Amazon
and go to one of their competitors.
And so that means that the more you buy my stuff,
the more leverage Amazon has over me.
And if you watch the antitrust hearings,
you know that when Amazon has leverage over you,
they're not shy about using it.
So, you know, understandably, Macmillan is like,
okay, we dig that you don't want to, you know,
have your stuff locked up with Amazon's DRM.
Fine, but they're 90% of the market.
We're not going to, you know,
give you money for the rights to an audiobook
that we cancel 90% of the market.
I was like, yeah, okay, fair enough.
So I produced my own.
I live in Southern California.
I'm like half a mile from one of the great audiobook studios,
Skyboat Media, and my friend Amber Benson,
who played Tara on Buffy, lives around the corner.
And she went in and recorded the audiobook.
She did this amazing job.
And I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter,
bundled with, you know, you can get it on its own
or bundled with the e-book or with the other books and so on.
And Kickstarter is about to close.
It's raised over $260,000.
And the idea is to prove both to my publisher
and to other best-selling writers
that if you decide not to go with Amazon,
you can take that appeal directly to your audience
and that they'll back you up.
And if they do,
then you can produce a different kind of Audible exclusive,
a book that is sold everywhere except Audible, right,
exclusive of Audible.
And if we can actually get, like,
a good fraction of the best-selling audiobooks
everywhere except Audible,
that will actually make Amazon cave, right,
because it's the only thing they care about.
And reversing that is really, really important,
not least because one of the things that Audible does
is it uses its monopoly to deny access for libraries.
So about half the best-sellers in the audiobook market
are not available in any library
because Audible publishes them exclusively
and will not sell to libraries at any price.
And so if you rely on libraries, you're just out of luck.
That's incredible.
Now, how do people get a hold of this Kickstarter?
If you just type Kickstarter Doctorow
into your favorite search engine,
you know, whether that's AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or Waze,
you know, you can go straight to it.
Okay. Go ahead, Voltaire.
Yeah, when you were talking about science fiction writers
that are passing being imperfect,
I was going to make a joke about Ursula Green being perfect,
but then I remembered how the fact that she was,
unfortunately, a copyright maximalist
and very, I would assume, very pro-DRM.
Have you had success convincing fellow authors and sci-fi writers
to give up DRM and maybe publish more, like,
freely licensed content?
Well, definitely giving up DRM was like a no-brainer.
You know, what I actually did was I convinced Tor,
which is Macmillan's science fiction imprint
and is the largest English-language science fiction publisher in the world,
to drop DRM on all its titles.
So every Tor e-book sold on every platform is DRM-free.
And it's one of the reasons that there's a DRM-free option
for publishers in the Kindle store, in iBooks,
in all the other stores where e-books are sold.
And writers are, in general, pretty clued in on this.
You know, like, you don't have to be a rock at science, right?
All you have to do is, like, type,
how do I remove Kindle DRM into Google
and see what comes back and go, oh, wait a second,
this isn't protecting me.
This is just locking my copyrights to Google's platform
forever and ever and ever.
You know, and Ursula had funny ideas about copyright.
We actually had lunch once and had a really big row about it
that she never forgave me over.
And I regret it to this day.
I wish we could have come around on it.
But, you know, there's this thing
that writers tend to view copyright as a labor law
and, you know, as a child of labor activists,
as a labor activist myself,
I'm in favor of protection for labor.
The problem with copyright as a labor law
is that in a monopolized market,
it's more like lunch money for your bullied kid.
So you've got this schoolyard that your kid has to enter
every day in order to get their education, right?
And that's the marketplace that Amazon
and the other intermediaries stand between authors
and their audiences with.
And at the gate is the bully.
Amazon, a big publisher, a big record label, whatever.
And they take your kid's lunch money every day.
And Congress is like your mom.
And Congress says, look at all these poor writers.
We need to give them more lunch money.
We'll give them more copyright.
And so they give us more copyright.
Well, what do the bullies do
if you give your kid more lunch money?
They just take that lunch money too, right?
And so every time we get more rights,
like a longer term of copyright or a broader copyright,
the non-negotiable contracts that we have to enter
into to deal in the entertainment industry,
which is now dominated by five publishers, four movie studios,
three record labels, with one bookstore,
right, one digital bookstore, one national physical bookstore
chain, and one movie theater chain left, right?
To get into that market, you have
to surrender all those rights.
So I'm all for labor protection.
I just think that we need to think about banning,
banning binding arbitration and allowing writers
to revert their copyrights after 35 years, which
is something that's in the copyright law
but impossible to use, and all of those other things that
would actually give us leverage instead of just giving us
more privilege in the hopes that those privileges won't
be taken off of us by the monopolists who sit
between us and our audience.
Go ahead, Rob.
So Corey, talking of the audio book, I love audio books.
I consume tons of them.
And I also work in the field when I can.
And you hear so many stories about authors
whose publishing company just basically took
the audio book away from them.
And they don't like the voice, or things weren't
pronounced correctly, whatever.
So did you have an active role in the production
of the audio book since you were rolling your own?
Oh, yeah.
Well, this audio book, I paid the bills.
So yeah, I was on the, like, we were actually
going to go into the studio to do it, but the plague hit.
And so Amber, luckily, her partner is a sound engineer.
And he just built a studio in their basement.
So she went into their studio.
The director, Cassandra DeQueer at Skyboat,
went into her studio.
And I sat in my office here.
And we were on a Zoom call for five days while Amber read.
And she just sent the dailies to my editor,
an amazing guy named John Taylor Williams,
who's been editing my podcast for, like, 16 years.
He composed the original music that's
at the beginning and the end of this, and so on.
He's a great editor, a great sound designer,
and a great musician.
And between the four of us, we were
able to turn out really just a kick-ass audio book.
Yeah, I can attest to that, having listened to it.
She is amazing with accents and different voices.
You can always tell who's talking when it's really good.
But of course, reading is also a good way to soak this in.
It's an amazing book.
Again, in addition to Corey's Kickstarter,
we're also offering it at WBAI, signed copies of the book,
signed autographed book plates, actually, of Attack Surface.
If you call 516-620-3602 and pledge $50 or become a BAI buddy,
you'll get one of, I believe, a dozen of these.
We only have a dozen, so they're going to go really fast.
But it's something that I think will definitely
get your imagination going and keep you
occupied for quite a while as you live through these adventures
of everywhere from Costa Rica to Oakland to Iraq,
and of course, Slovstokia, the fictitious name.
Now, I'm curious about that.
How did you decide when to use real names like Russia,
when to use fictitious ones like Slovstokia?
And you also used the word Boris to describe the Russian language
and even Russian people.
Why that choice?
The protagonist of this book, Masha,
she appears in Little Brother and in Homeland,
and she's something of an antagonist in those,
although she tends to save Marcus' bacon as well in both of them.
And she, as she narrates this book,
really distances herself from Marcus by saying,
look, I know what I'm doing and who I'm doing it to
and who I'm doing it for.
I know I'm doing wrong stuff, but I don't kid myself about it.
And she thinks that's the real sin is kidding yourself.
And one of the things that being a grown-up in her world means
is you don't blow your operation.
And so she's not going to reveal where she was doing wet work
or black work.
She's going to use aliases and code names for it.
And one of the things that she is wrestling with
through the whole book is her lifelong devotion
to compartmentalization,
to getting herself through things that she knows she shouldn't do
not by rationalizing, but by just turning a blind eye to it.
And one of the things that she does is she dehumanizes the people
that she's helping to spy on.
She calls them Boris' and she calls the attractive ones Mikhail's.
And she does that also in this way that,
speaking as a post-Soviet refugee kid myself
or a second-generation kid myself,
it's a thing that people who are a generation or two
from the old country do,
is we have this kind of love-hate relationship
with our cousins back in the old place.
Wow.
Now, Attack Surface has a really unique narrative structure.
First off, it's told from the perspective of a female tech,
which is so refreshing.
But was it a challenge to write in the first person as a female?
Was there anything or anyone who made that easier?
Is this an exercise you'd recommend to up-and-coming writers?
Well, certainly I think stretching yourself is always good.
Here's the thing, though.
You know, all fiction is in some important sense science fiction
because all fiction has the pretense
that you can know what another person is thinking or feeling.
And no one in the entire history of our species
has ever known what anyone else was thinking or feeling.
And so it's true that I don't know what it's like to be a woman,
and that is profound and it's a big gap.
I also don't know what it's like to be anyone except me.
And so every character that you write
is going to be a character that is...
where you have to engage in this imaginative exercise
where you try to do the impossible,
which is to imagine what it's like to be someone who's just not you.
And, you know, making that person more distant is more challenging.
But, you know, I'm also a science fiction writer
who periodically writes stories with aliens in them.
And so writing other members of my species,
even those with much more divergent experiences than my own,
is still going to be a lot less challenging than...
You know, I wrote a novella with Ben Rosenbaum
that was out for the Hugo Ones called True Names
that was just told from the point of view
of vast hive intelligences made out of entire planets
that have been consumed and reassembled as computing substrate.
But odds are you're not going to get confronted by an alien
saying, you got me wrong.
Fair enough.
And, you know, I apologize in advance
for the mistakes I doubtlessly made.
I did my best.
I was convinced because it was being read,
the audio that I was listening to
being read by a female narrator,
and I would never have guessed it was written by a man.
Well, I'm very blessed to also have close personal acquaintance
of some extremely powerful and articulate women
who work in security and cyber liberties,
whether that's Cindy Cohen, who represented you
in the Ramirez case,
or Eva Galperin, who runs EFF's Threat Lab,
or any of the other women who I have been so privileged
to know and work with.
In fact, you know, Rune Sandvik,
who wrote one of the afterwords for this,
you know, some of the experience that I drew on
or the inspiration that I drew on
was things that she talked about
when she was defending the NYT's newsroom.
Wendell Snyder, certainly some of her experience,
and she's doing a live event with me along with Rune.
You know, her work and her writing and her speaking
really helped me think about this as well,
as have all the women who've come forward
with Me Too stories about the hacker scene
and who've described what it's like to be a woman
in that male-dominated world,
and who were brave enough to talk about
this difficult situation where coming forward
could really do career and reputational damage to them.
Now, in addition to the story being told
from a female perspective,
the novel has a preponderance of strong female characters.
Let's see here, we have Carrie Johnstone,
Tanisha, Ilsa, Christina, Masha, Masha's mom.
It's really awesome, and I just wonder,
do you see us moving more in that direction overall
with books, movies, TV shows,
and if so, what's helping to drive that?
Well, I think there is something to that,
but I also think that you have to take into account
that there is a high degree of homophily, right,
that people hang around with people like them.
And so, you know, it's not unusual
for men to be surrounded by men
and for men to have been mentored by men
and for men to work with other men and so on.
Likewise, it's not unusual for that to be on the other foot.
And in particular, one of the things that
you see with women who are successful
is they tend to seek out other women to mentor.
And so, one of the things that she grapples with
is the fact that neither of her mentors are very nice, right,
that both of them, you know,
one is a former East German intelligence colonel,
one is a Beltway bandit who wants to clean up
by, you know, soaking Uncle Sam for surveillance services.
And both of them have taught her a lot
about her sources of strength
and how to navigate a man's world,
but neither of them are good people.
And one of the journeys she's on
is to figure out how to resolve
the way that she thinks about these women
who have been in some way mothers to her,
including her own mother,
who, like so many of us, she holds with a lot of affection
but also a kind of dismissive contempt
as someone who's out of it
and doesn't understand what she does and so on.
And that's one of the major themes of the story
is her resolving these mentorship relationships.
And if I could,
and I know other people want to ask questions,
I just want to stick with the narrative style
just for a little bit longer
because it really is that unique.
You could be in the middle of some really
incredibly tense drama,
whether it's Oakland or Iraq or Sovstokia,
and suddenly Masha will just explain to the reader
how Tor works or how a particular exploit functions.
It's almost like you've combined an adventure
with documentation on how to be a smart cyber citizen.
Is that what you intended?
Well, I mean, that's a thing that came out of Little Brother,
and it's a kind of techno-realism.
You know, one of the things that you'll be familiar with
is the tendency of storytellers
to treat computers as metaphors, right?
And not just storytellers, Congress,
to treat computers as metaphors
and to project their desires and their fears
and their hopes on them.
You know, in the shorthand we have for this
in policy circles is nerd harder, right?
Like whenever someone says,
I'm sorry, we can't design a computer
that can detect copyright infringement.
The answer is nerd harder.
You know, I have faith in you, right?
And instead of doing that,
instead of doing a story in which someone needs
to decrypt a thing that is well-enciphered
that turns out to be impossible
until there's only 10 minutes left
and then turns out to only take 9 minutes and 59 seconds,
I wanted to start with the things that computers do
in the world as real things.
Not computers as metaphors, but computers as they are,
computers that are so important to our lived experience
and then find the stories that fell out
of the real capabilities and constraints, right?
To trust that computers were actually interesting, right?
Rather than to write Moby Dick
in which like whales can fly if that makes the story better,
to write Moby Dick the way Melville did
where you actually like lean in
to the logistics of harpooning a whale, right?
Where the actual technical detail
becomes significant to the story.
Volter?
Yeah, I think that was something that Mr. Robot
was so applauded for with their attention to detail,
but I think Little Brother is 2009,
so that outdated that.
Yeah.
And then speaking of Davidson and Machine,
Little Brother and this book later in the series,
Little Brother was told from the perspective
of Margaret Susan, an activist outsider.
And whereas this book is told from the perspective
of a collaborator in the surveillance industry.
I remember you, I feel where it's one of your interviews
where you discuss speaking to a young person
that said they wanted to make a change
from the inside in the surveillance industry.
And then you explained to them
that how Edward Snowden tried to go through numerous
quote unquote official outlets
and kept getting turned down at every step.
I was wondering, A, have you heard any updates
on that story and what they decided to go?
And B, have you heard from any outside collaborators
that have had their views changed
or people that are inside the surveillance industry
that have had their views and career trajectory changed?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question.
So Little Brother definitely one of its legacies
that I'm very proud of is the number of people
who've come up to me and said,
I read your book in high school or middle school
or as a young adult, didn't know what I wanted to do.
And when I read Little Brother,
it convinced me on the one hand
of the transformative and liberatory power of technology
and on the other hand of the urgency
of keeping it from being used for control
and ensuring that it was used primarily
for liberation.
And there's like cyber lawyers and security researchers
and human rights activists who said this to me.
And at first it was shocking because time had gone by
and I was like, how can this grown ass human
be referencing this book that feels to me
like I wrote it last year?
But then over time, it just became this incredible sense
of honor and responsibility to those people
who came into the field with an ethical center
as a result of this.
And the story that you related,
one of the places where they teach Little Brother
is the Cyber Institute at West Point.
And so I was invited in to give a talk
and it's not my normal milieu, right?
Like I grew up in the anti-nuclear proliferation movement.
I was arrested protesting an arms bazaar as a kid
and I never would have had anything to do
with the military.
But they're teaching it as a book
to think about insurgency and cyber warfare.
And they invited me and they're really interesting characters
and incredibly gracious and generous hosts.
And the kids were whip smart.
I mean, one of the things about the US military
is that it's universities,
it's elite training institutions
are the only meritocratic institutions in America, right?
Like to get into an Ivy, you need to be rich.
To get into West Point,
you need to be willing to die and very smart.
And so if you wanna know what America would look like
if all of its elite institutions of higher learning
were meritocratic, go to West Point.
It's full of brown kids.
It's full of smart poor brown kids, right?
And so this kid came up to me after I did my talk
and he hung back because I'd signed everyone's books.
And he hung back and he said,
look, I just think you should know I wanna join the NSA.
I heard everything you said about the risks
of our badly secured cyber infrastructure.
My family don't understand this stuff at all.
And they're in enormous jeopardy
as a result and someone needs to protect them.
And I figure I can reform the agency from within.
And as you say, I said like,
okay, but you need to look at Snowden, right?
Like it's fine to go and try and do something ambitious,
but you have to look at what other people
who've tried to do it before have done
and see how they fared.
And like, if you're just gonna do the same thing
that Snowden tried to do that ended up with Snowden
basically being willing to face a firing squad
because he couldn't see any other way around it,
then I think you're gonna be heartbroken.
I've never heard from that kid.
I hope someday he gets in touch with me.
But this book is aimed at a different audience
because a lot of those people who read that book,
at least by their own account,
they read that book and their approach
to their field was changed
and they've spent their careers
trying to build liberatory technology.
But there are a lot of people who use computers,
experience the liberatory power of them
because that's why we get involved with computers.
You use them, you're like, hello, beautiful,
where have you been all my life?
I write code and the computer executes it perfectly.
I get on the network and it's a society of the mind
where I can meet anyone in the world.
And you're so enthralled with this
and then you get into the industry
and your career somehow becomes
taking away that from other people.
Making sure that no one else
has the experience that you had.
You turn it into a system of control
and manipulation and surveillance.
And those people are starting to ask themselves
what they're doing.
There's the tech won't build it movement
that's asking technologists to just down tools
and not do facial recognition,
not do mass surveillance,
not do predictive policing.
There was the Googler rock out last year.
20,000 Googlers walked off the job last year
over workplace conditions.
So many of these moments
where technologists are confronting themselves
and I thought we need a story about redemption,
about technologists who have taught themselves
into a gilded cage,
into a place where you're very well compensated
and you get massages at work
and there's kombucha on tap
but your day job is figuring out
how to destroy people's lives.
How do you come back from that?
There's one part in the book
that I thought was ingenious
where you describe using technology
to change politics
and using politics to improve tech
and comparing the whole thing to parallel parking.
I thought that was brilliant.
You just have to keep moving a little bit
in each direction.
That's a riff I took off of Lessig
at least a little bit.
Lessig talks about how the world changes
through code and law and norms and markets,
the things that are legal,
the things that are technically possible,
the things that are profitable
and the things that are socially acceptable.
As someone who's a transplant to LA
who's really bad at parallel parking,
I spent a lot of time yanking the wheel
as far as I can in one direction
to get a half an inch
and then yanking in the other direction
to get a half an inch.
I think that sometimes
we're trying to change something with tech
and we just run out of headroom,
but if we can make a legal change,
just even a little one,
we can open up the space for more tech
and then the tech can open the space
for more law or a new normative conversation.
Anyway, I see Rob wants to get in on this.
Yes, go ahead, Rob.
Thank you very much.
I'm really interested in the passage of time
around this because
like other notable book series we could mention,
it seems the characters and the world,
time passes when we're not reading about them
and things are still going on
and we get to the next book
and we're catching up
with all these old characters
and what's going on in that world.
I'm wondering what made this a story
that you wanted to go back
to the Little Brother Homeland world
and tell with those characters
versus starting it
just as its own self-contained thing?
Yes, that's an excellent question.
Those are my favorite kinds of series,
the series where the time passes
in the series as well as in the world.
There's a British series of comedy books
called The Secret Diaries of Adrian Mole
aged 13 and three quarters
that I grew up on.
I first read it,
it came out when I was about 13,
so I was the same age as the protagonist.
Sue Townsend, who wrote them,
who was just one of the most brilliant satirists
of her generation,
she would just every five or ten years
just pop one off
and Adrian would have aged up with me
and it was in the form of his diaries.
The last one came out,
I guess I was probably in my late 30s
and it was his last one too.
She died shortly thereafter.
She actually lost her eyesight to diabetes
and dictated the last two or three of the books.
It's really, they're remarkable books
and I loved that experience
of aging up with the characters.
I think that Little Brother
made an intervention in the world.
Little Brother actually changed the way
a bunch of people think about their technology.
There's a scene in Citizen Four,
the Academy Award winning documentary
that Laura Poitras made about Snowden
where you see him fleeing his hotel room in Hong Kong
and he's gathering up the things
that he needs to go into exile
and one of the things he takes
is his copy of Homeland.
It was a force in the world
that changed the world
and whenever I think about the problems
of Little Brother,
I think about that Little Brother grapples with,
I think about those characters
and ask myself how they would be reacting
and in particular,
you guys go to the same things I go to.
You go to Hope,
you go to CCC,
you go to DEF CON
and you meet these people
who seem like right on people.
They're like our tribe,
black t-shirts that say things
that judges don't understand.
You ask them what they do
and they're like,
I work for Palantir.
I develop malware for the NSO group
and I wrestle with the question,
first of all,
if I had taken another turn,
is that where I'd be?
I started at .com in the late 90s
the way everyone did
and at one point,
Microsoft wanted to buy it.
It was like this weird thing
and the job that they had for me
if the sale had gone through
was to be a DRM evangelist for them
and instead,
the sale fell through
and I was ready to leave San Francisco
and move back to Toronto
and the moving van was on its way
from Toronto to San Francisco
to pick up my stuff and move me home
and EFF offered me a job
and I was flying back to Toronto
to scout the apartment
I was going to live in
when I moved back
and I got the job offer in the airport
and I flew back to Toronto
and spent the weekend
looking at this house,
seeing my family,
thinking about whether
I was going to move back to Toronto
and work for this company
where I almost ended up
a Microsoft DRM evangelist
or stay in San Francisco
and become an EFF activist
and I look at these folks
and I think
I'm not morally better than you
I'm not a better person than you
what would it be like
to rationalize your way
one tiny decision at a time
to working for the NSO group
to like helping
the Saudi government
kidnap and dismember
Jamal Khashoggi
As you mentioned in the book
it's very easy to convince yourself
that you're doing the right thing
and I see that all the time
I see people making decisions
and I can't fault them
because you don't know
what people are going through
in their lives
you don't know the situation
they're in where they can't
they don't really have any choices
or any lucky breaks
that come through
but as you conclude
it's about making good choices
and there's a certain value
you can't take back
the bad things you've done
or the evil you've participated in
but you can do positive things
and become a better person
and help others based on that
we're speaking with
renowned author
Corey Doctorow
who has a new book
Attack Surface
coming out
and to help support WBAI
we are offering it here
tonight
only tonight
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give2wbai.org
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Attack Surface
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and all kinds of
interesting conversations like this
we've been speaking to Corey
since 7 o'clock
and we can speak to him
until midnight
except we have a
vice presidential debate
that's going to get in the way
so we can't really do that
but we could
there's so many fascinating things
to talk about
and it's such an honor
to be able to share
these ideas
and these experiences
but please
if you support WBAI
and this kind of
talk
and technology in general
and by the way
today is
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32nd anniversary
do you know that?
we went on the air
October 7th, 1988
yeah
that's kind of scary
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also support
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non-DRM
audio books
and just non-DRM
non-DRM in general
we struggle with this
all the time
you know
we come out on the Kindle
and we're kind of
forced into DRM
as a magazine
but we print information
on how to bypass it
so I think we're the only
we're the only
Kindle book
on DRM
that tells you
how to defeat it
so
that hasn't gotten
us kicked off yet
but
we'll see
and I think you should know
for your listeners
that being a
hacker radio show
that you only celebrate
anniversaries
that are powers of two
so this is the last birthday
you celebrate
until you turn 64
oh wow
okay well that makes
it especially significant
it's an important one
give a call now
it's a special event
516-620-3602
Alex I believe
you have a question
yeah
I want to say
I'm so delighted
with this conversation
this evening
Corey
I think we need to
have you back
more
I try to get
these guys
to talk about
philosophical things
like morality
and
doing the right thing
and just
you know
it's hard sometimes
let me tell you
but
we have no morals
Alex
we can't do this
that's true
but
I was really
taken by what you said
about West Point
Corey
I want to
sort of jump back
to that
and that it wasn't
your milieu
and
you know
having grown up
with Emmanuel
you know
hanging out with him
since I was about
15 years old
right
so about 27 years now
you know
when I
it wasn't where
I had expected to end up
as a 15 year old hacker
either
and then
you know
having joined the
intelligence community
after that
you know
was also not where
I expected to be
every single day
that I went into the CIA
I couldn't believe
that they were actually
letting me into this place
especially since
part of the polygraph
was I had to discuss
some
misuse of information
technology
which was quite interesting
it was a bit long
so the
did you try
clenching your anus
do you know that
I use no
countermeasures
no
what an
opportunity
squandered
however though
however though
they did
they did try
some nonsense
on me
when they claimed
that you know
they didn't believe
my statements
about drug usage
and then
I wouldn't answer
the control questions
and so that's how
that was the
countermeasure
that I employed
was that you know
I refused to answer
the security
there's no way
I'm going to get
a security clearance
certainly not
TSSCI
but I did
shockingly
in any event
the point I wanted
to make though
about it
is you know
the character
that you mentioned
that was over
at this point
and what I had
in my mind
at the time too
was that sometimes
there is an argument
to be made
that you can do
more good
from within
than from without
if you had taken
that DRM evangelist
course
but you know
ultimately
I decided not
to go back
into the government
for a number
of different reasons
you know
pay was one of them
but I think this is
like a running theme
you know
within the book
as well
and it sort of
starts out there
and it's almost like
carbon offsetting
right where
you're doing some harm
and so you need to go
and help activists
you know
on the side
but then there's
this great line
that I remember
and it stuck with me
when a hobby
becomes a moral imperative
and I feel like
that almost describes
the hacker community
itself right
wherever you find yourself
you may be doing good
you may be doing bad
but at the end of the day
that hobby of yours
has become who you are
as a hacker
and it is
your moral imperative
to do some good
whether it's from within
or from without
Corey I'll let you address
that in a second
but legally
I have to say
this is WBAI
New York
and you are listening
to an extended edition
of Off the Hook
which is coming
to you soon
it's an extended edition
of Off the Hook
we're going to be on
until 8.30
at which time
Gloria J. Brown Marshall
comes on with a special
pre-vice presidential
debate edition
of Law of the Land
so stay tuned for that
and stay tuned
after that
for the actual
vice presidential debate
where you will hear
live over FM radio
Mike Pence
getting his ass kicked
I'm looking forward
to that
although you should
tune in
because they're going
to use those
that like spectrum
of lasers
to spot all the
aerosol droplets
and then slide
into Kamala Harris's
side of the screen
and back again
it's going to be
awesome
you said Joe Biden
you meant Mike Pence
I meant Mike Pence
Freudian slip
Corey can I ask you
that little trick
about defeating
the polygraph
did you get that
from the Americans
I just saw that
recently
no I got it from
so the polygraph.org
guy
or defeat polygraph.org
I forget what it's called
it's that
there is a guy
yeah he gave a talk
at Hope
he gave a talk
at Hope
about the 2600
DCSS guy
of polygraphs
who
you know
is like
god damn it
I'm going to
publish how to
defeat this thing
that it's illegal
to publish information
about how to defeat
and become a cause
celeb
which you know
he has and does
and is very committed
to
and you know
it's interesting
I mean no disrespect
when I say
that the people
who get into
this kind of trouble
tend to be
cranks
like you and me
right
that like
the kind of person
who is like
god damn it
my digest size magazine
needs to explain
how to
crack DVDs
and I'm willing
to like
risk felony
prosecution for it
that is not
the activity
of a normal person
who goes along
to get along
and a lot of the times
when we
when we see
people
who do these
extraordinary things
they are
a little
off
you know
present company
and
and sometimes
we focus on that
and I want to
and maybe this is
getting back to Snowden
sometimes we focus on that
we're like
look at this weirdo
right
as opposed to
look at this revelation
we're like
look at this weirdo
who's being a weird guy
not look at
the information
he's brought us
about how the polygraph
is a house of cards
how we you know
ground our national security
and junk science
and witchcraft
and ruin people's lives
with it
and you know
one of the things
about Snowden
and that makes me
have so much respect
for him
is he kept himself
out of the story
that he actually
he is
of all the whistleblowers
and cranks
and you know
glorious freaks
who've come out
and made the world
as good as it can be
under the circumstances
he is the one
that seemed to understand
best
that the story
needed to be about
the leaks
and not about the leaker
and he took such pains
to stay out of the public eye
and when he came in
he was at such pains
to like
reveal the parts
of himself
that he knew
were compromising
and say look
this is me
it is who I am
I am imperfect
let's talk about the leaks
and to bring it back
to the leaks
and if you read
Permanent Record
if you read his memoir
he is really clear
that this was a deliberate strategy
and I remember
when the leaks happened
you know
sitting around
with other EFF folks
and other people
who cared about this stuff
not knowing
who Snowden was yet
and just going
oh please
please don't let him be an a-hole
like please
you know
because
not because it matters
but because
that will make this story
about him
and these leaks
are so important
and
you know
not only was he not an a-hole
but
he
it wouldn't have mattered
if he was
because he was smart enough
to stay out of the story
and make the story
about the leaks
and not him
one other parallel story
is Chris Wiley's
book
about working
for Internet Research Agency
I find some parallels
there as well
but Snowden
lays out so perfectly
the
contractor
element
of
work
for
entities like
the CIA
and the government
and one point
I would
I would put forth
kind of in response
to what Alex was saying
is that
this stuff has grown
when you start
getting into
ad networks
and
private entities
trading in
people's information
and so on
it's not
necessarily
something you're
duty bound to do
it's more about
will I be employed
or not
and
and
the kinds of sacrifices
people are
sort of having to make
to go for
their
their dream
of being involved in
in X or Y industry
than realizing
halfway down
oh my gosh
I'm building something awful
and I think
another thing that leaps out
in this audio book
is the compartmentalization
because that's how
the workers are treated
by these entities
whether it's government
or a private company
so anyway
I don't know if
there's a question there
but I
was wondering
like
what is this doing to us?
That would be my question
like
I know so many of these people
that really don't have
a lot of opportunities
they get clearances
they get involved
in private
or government entities
at a certain point
but
I felt like
is this
further dividing us
is this more
heterogeneous
fodder
for our
hacker community
or are we
are we able to
get past this
like is this
something
is this something
we're getting away from
something
we're
only beginning
to see
as people have
really
fewer and fewer
careers
or they're not
really inspired enough
to go out on their own
and do
like run a magazine
or do something on their own?
Right
well you're definitely
getting into an area
that I'm really concerned about
I just want to go back
quickly and say
Wiley worked for
Cambridge Analytica
not Internet Research Agency
I'm sorry yes
that was a great slip
that was an awesome slip
the
the
you know
one of the things
that
gets people
to do the wrong thing
is a foreclosing
on their opportunities
and
one of the areas
where opportunities
have been thoroughly
foreclosed upon
is in labor markets
right
there's a great quote
by the New Zealand
software developer
Tom Eastman
I'm old enough
to remember
when the web
did not consist
of five giant websites
filled with screenshots
of text
from the other four
and
the
transformation
of
so many
other industries
from beer
to pro wrestling
to eyeglasses
into these
monopolized markets
mean that
you can't tell your boss
take this job
and shove it
because there isn't
anywhere else to go
right
when you
when you look at
say the entertainment
industry
you know I
I live here
in in Southern California
I live in Los Angeles
County
and
for
more than a year
the Screamers Guild
was on strike
against
big talent
agencies
because
the four big talent
agencies
they bought all their
competitors
which is a thing
that used to be illegal
until the Reagan era
they bought all their
competitors
they took a bunch of
private equity money
so there's just four big
games in town
and then they started
structuring these deals
where
they would be your
agent as the writer
but they would offer
the studio a break
if they would also
bring in a director
and a star
who they also represented
and they would take
a piece out of
your
paychecks
rather than as a commission
they would just
accept a lower fee
for you
and then take a
packaging fee
from the studio
so this is your
agent
who's agreeing that you
should get less money
so they can get more money
and
two of
two of the four agencies
have caved
all the mid-sized
agencies
which are really small
cave pretty quickly
but two of the big
four agencies have caved
two of them haven't
uh
William Morris and CAA
are still
not in there
and you know
if there's only four
big agencies
why would they cave
right
why should they
and you know
those four big agencies
they do business
with four big movie studios
and so
you know
that like
it's not like
those
there's a lot of ways
to shop around
or get around them
either
so when there's only
a few games in town
it becomes a really big deal
and of course
you know
the big news today
apart from the presidential election
all the rest of it
is that congress
dropped a 420 page
bill
which is
it's a
much control over, again, the only game in town.
So there's just so much there that I really brought away.
And I really thank you for your insight
on some of that stuff.
Thank you.
Corey, a couple of chilling things from the book.
We're speaking with Corey Doctorow, author of the
forthcoming book, Attack Surface.
There is, on the subject of the corporate landscape as
far as employment, at one point, Masha gets a visit
from her corporate representatives, I guess, a
security force.
They do this really invasive search of her apartment,
where she can't even leave the room.
And they're going through all her personal effects.
That was a nightmare.
And it was all in her contract that she
had to abide by that.
And there was nothing she could do to get out of it
without incurring substantial penalties.
That's still fantasy, right?
Or is this based on something real?
Well, I think that there are lots of people who work in
industries where that is the rule, but they tend not to
work in white-collar industries.
So if you're crew on a cruise ship, that's the regime you
labor under, right?
If you're a contractor in a forward operations base, that
might be the regime that you labor under.
And digitally, it's becoming far more common.
The growth of workplaces that expect you, even before the
pandemic, that expect you to be on call 24-7, that issue you a
laptop and a phone like they're doing you a big favor, and then
put man-in-the-middle certificates, intermediate
certificates that let them intercept your encrypted
traffic on that device, add spyware, add bossware to that
device, to do the digital equivalent of it, right?
And today, with the lockdown, there's been a boom in
bossware, which is software that remotely operates the
camera and the microphone, takes screenshots, plunders
your hard drive.
And they say, well, just don't use your work device for this.
But it's not your work device at that point.
It's this thing you're tethered to all day long, and that is
in your home, which you have turned into a rent-free branch
office for your boss.
The other chilling thing that really resonated with me, and
it gave me a legitimate nightmare too, by the way, this
is when the autonomous cars turn against people.
Basically, they're programmed by the authorities to mow down
demonstrators.
I mean, your mind, I just worry about giving people ideas.
This is my response to the trolley problem, right?
So I'm sure you're familiar with it.
Like every idiot who thinks they're smart about AI says,
well, what about the trolley problem?
What if your Mercedes has to decide whether to kill the
millionaire behind the wheel or the six
kids crossing the road?
And maybe it decides to kill you, and maybe it decides to
kill them, or whatever, right?
The problem with this whole conception is it starts from
the prospect that we're going to have autonomous vehicles
that will periodically decide to kill their drivers, and
that this will somehow be stable.
And the only way this can possibly be a stable situation
is if it's illegal to modify your car.
Because the circumstances under which I want my car to
kill me is never, right?
That is the rule I want for my car, never kill me.
And so if you design a car that runs programs that the
person who is trapped inside the car can't override, then
anyone who can figure out how to take control of that part
of the car that runs programs that the person in the car
can't override can do terrible things to that person.
It's such like an obviously terrible idea.
When we talk about back doors and switches being a bad idea,
having cars that have like a ring minus zero, having
essentially robots, 6,000 pound robots that you trap
your wet, squishy body inside of to travel at 100 miles an
hour down the highway, that is also like pre-rootkitted, and
anyone who can seize control of it, the closest analogy you
probably saw Pentest partners just release this report that
there's this bondage toy where you lock your subs' genitals
in this cage.
And the cage is made of hardened steel, and it needs
an angle grinder to remove it.
And the only person who can open it is you with the app,
and it's for BDSM play.
And they just didn't bother to secure it so anyone could just
hack into it and lock it forever, right?
And that's the only thing I can think of that is in the
same range of stupid as designing a car that is
deliberately designed so that the driver can't override the
software.
And so as soon as I, you know, I wanted to dramatize that.
I wrote something else for Deakin University in Australia
called Car Wars that was just a series of vignettes about
this, and I knew I wanted to put it in the book.
Voltaire, I think you had a question.
Go ahead.
Or an intervention.
We're down to our last two minutes, by the way.
OK, on the, when you're discussing bossware and
chicanization, especially chicanization seems to happen
to stereotypically blue-collar workers and bossware you see
even with white-collar workers.
So I think that it's not just a problem of like monopsony when
it comes to employers.
It's also a question of labor laws and lack of unionization.
I think that's why it's encouraging.
We see organizations like Tech Workers Coalition and here in
New York we have DSA, Tech Action Working Group.
And then you mentioned earlier the 20,000 workers showing
Google Walkout, and that was able to cancel their AI for
the Defense Department initiative.
I think that's a really important reform too, not just
monopoly power, but also labor law.
Yeah, 100%.
And you know, there's a crappy technology adoption curve.
If you want to know what technology blue-collar workers
are going to be subjected to in five years, look what we're
doing to students.
If you want to know what students are going to be
subjected to in five years, look what we're doing to
prisoners.
And if you want to know what white-collar workers are going
to be doing in five years, look what we're doing to blue-collar
workers.
That's the gradient that our bad technology ascends.
We have been talking with Corey Doctorow, author of the
forthcoming book, Attack Surface, which will be, when is
it officially coming out, Corey?
October the 13th.
All right, that's right around the corner.
You can get your autographed bookplate copy from WBAI by
calling 516-620-3602.
If there are any left, we only have a dozen, and pledging
$50 or becoming a BAI buddy, go to give2wbai.org if you'd
rather do it that way.
Corey, any links or sites or things you want to give out?
Go right ahead.
Totally.
If you go to pluralistic.net, that's my daily writing on the
web, and one of the things you'll find in every day's
edition this week is a link to the upcoming Attack Surface
virtual tour, eight nights and eight bookstores, including at
the Strand, with guests from across all the different
disciplines that the book touches on.
Every one of those tickets to those events comes with a
signed book, so if you can't get one of the copies that
Tor was kind enough to donate to WBAI, you can get one from
one of these tour stops.
They're all going to be super dope.
We're talking about intersectionality,
surveillance, and race.
We're talking about science fiction.
We're talking about tech.
We're talking about all the good stuff.
Corey, it has been a delight talking to you.
We could talk to you all night long.
Thanks for everything you do.
Thanks for that great keynote you gave at the HOPE
conference this summer, one of nine keynotes that we had, and
we look forward to seeing what you come up with next, but I
hope lots of people read this book.
It really is an incredible piece.
Yeah, thank you.
Best of luck in everything you do.
Thanks, guys.
Everyone wear a mask.
Yes, and stay tuned for the debate and for our special
programs.
Good night.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It's going to be a bright, bright, bright,
sunshiny day.
I think I can make it now, the pain is gone.
All of the bad feelings have disappeared.
Here is that rainbow I've been praying for.
It's going to be a bright, bright, bright,
sunshiny day.
Look all around, there's nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, nothing but blue skies.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It's going to be a bright, bright, bright,
sunshiny day.