Black Hat Blues (6 page)

Chloe was having mixed feelings about Washington D.C. On the

one hand it was so alive with ripe possibilities that she couldn’t

turn her head without seeing delicious new targets. On the other hand,

it was ground zero for those nasty law enforcement agencies like the FBI

and NSA that she’d spent the majority of her adult life avoiding at all

costs. On the third hand, she was about to con a fucking Congressman,

which was at once thrilling and terrifying as hell. Of course the strang-

est thing was that it wasn’t even her first time conning a Congressman,

although this time around he’d be much more personally involved in

the chaos they were going to be bringing down.

She was glad to be out of the hotel room and on the streets, even

though the February weather was, to say the very least, brisk. She’d

never lived somewhere with real winters—mostly California and now

Florida, and she’d been worried about the cold. But Paul had bought her

some fur lined leather gloves that went well with her tailored, dark wool

business suit and Bee had sewn some extra lining into her wig to provide

added warmth. The thick, brown curls even kinda sorta worked like ear-

muffs. Except when the wind blew, which it did a lot. But she decided to

let the cold invigorate rather than refrigerate her, and she marched down

the busy street from the metro stop towards Capital Hill with a bounce

in her step. She had to remind herself to calm down as she rounded the

corner and saw the target Starbucks come into view. She was a bearer

of bad news, a serious business woman with serious business to do.

She took off her gloves for the last block, wanting her handshake to be

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chilled and maybe even off-putting when she met him.

Chloe slipped into the warm coffee shop, a nice older gentlemen

holding the door for her. Inside, it was crowded with a line of seven

impatient looking customers waiting to order and another half-dozen

clustered around the pass-through, waiting for their lattes or whatever

it was they’d ordered. Most of the tables and seats were taken, some

with laptoppers, others with people peering at the tiny screens on their

smart phones. One quaint woman was even reading the paper, bless her

heart. She recognized two people in the room, although she pretended

not to see either of them as she joined the line for hot caffeine. Only

five minutes later, when she had her black coffee, did she start scanning

the room in an obvious way, as if looking for someone.

He finally noticed her. Good, he wasn’t that observant. Even better,

he wasn’t very observant because he’d been locked onto his Blackberry.

As he stood up and smiled at her, he was still thumbing some e-mail

or message into his phone. She smiled back and walked over to him,

extending a hand. The long wait and the hot coffee had warmed it some,

but her firm grip still got his attention, judging by the slight bulge of

surprise in his eyes.

“Danny?” she said. “Nice to finally meet you in person.” He looked

like a high school kid, although she knew he was in his late twenties.

Pudgy faced, and less than expertly shaven, he had short brown hair

and dark bags under his eyes. His suit was about a size too small and

fraying at the cuffs. She was pretty sure it was one of the two his credit

cards showed he’d bought at Sears last year. The small smears of red

paint on his shoes and the few droplets splattered on his cuffs were

only hours old.

“Yeah, great to put a face to those e-mails and phone calls finally,” he

said. They sat down and he picked up his half-empty cup and sipped at

it. “When did you get into town?”

“Early this morning,” Chloe said. “I took the red eye in from LAX.

I really need this coffee, I’ve been mainlining it all day as I run around

the Hill.”

“Lots of meetings, huh?”

“I’m afraid I’ve got a lot of bad news, and I prefer to give that in

person. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I’ve dropped all my other

clients at this point. There’s just so much going on with my entertain-

ment industry clients that I had to let my partners pick up my other

consulting work. The industry is in freefall here and we’re looking for

some solutions from Congress.” Chloe sighed and shook her head a

couple inches left and right.

Rick Dakan

27

“Congressman Wolverton has always supported the film and music

industries, I can assure you of that.” Danny narrowed his eyes and nod-

ded in rhythm with Chloe’s shaking.

“We know he has, and that’s why I wanted to make sure I got a

chance to talk to you in person while I was in town.”

“So, then, what’s got your clients so worried? The DMCA revisions

are in committee and are going to sail through with everything they

asked for, including that college music service requirement we talked

about.”

“It’s not that, it’s something else that we’re even more worried about.

Something our investigators came up with recently that’s really got

everyone worried.”

“Well if you’re worried, I’m sure my boss will be worried too.” Danny

leaned back in his chair and held his palms up. “Hit me with what

you’ve got.”

“First of all we’ve got internal numbers—and these are very secret,

very internal numbers that we can’t let our clients’ stockholders hear—

that music sales are down by an additional 32% just in the last quarter.

That’s 32% on TOP of the steady decline we’ve seen in the past few

years. It’s a huge spike. Not a spike—the opposite of a spike. It’s a

plummet. And I’m talking all sales, CDs and downloads both. For the

first time download sales are down as well. The bottom is falling out

from under the industry. More and more artists are leaving their labels

to sell direct to customers, which is bad enough, but there’s something

new at work here.”

“That is bad,” the aide told Chloe, moving his head slowly up and

down and biting his lower lip in what she took for false empathy. She

doubted he really cared at all about her fictional lost revenue beyond

how it affected his ability to raise money and leverage influence on

behalf of his boss. “But I’m not sure what else we can do to help from

the Congressional end. We’ve raised fines and even jail time for piracy.

The ipod tax is moving through the Senate right now, but it’s got enough

votes, so you guys will have that revenue coming in from every music

player purchased. What more do you need?”

Chloe was well aware of just how much the Congress was already

doing for the music industry, which was part of why they’d chosen this

Congressman as the focus for their attack. The fact that the RIAA had

managed to get so much ridiculous, anti-customer legislation through

already made them the perfect cover for the Crew’s plan. Why not one

more ridiculous request? She felt her phone buzz in her coat pocket and

pulled it out.

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

“Excuse me one second,” she said, looking down at the text message

on her screen from Sacco. “I need to take care of this quickly.”

“No problem,” he said. As she hoped, he took the opportunity to

pick up his own Blackberry from the table and start doing some work

of his own. Chloe keyed in some benign messages and waited for one of

two pre-arranged replies from Sacco. She couldn’t help but think of the

time that Paul had e-mailed her while they were lying in bed together

and how much shit she’d given him at the time for it. Sacco was only

five feet away, sitting behind the target, eyes locked on his laptop. She

knew he was trying to access the target’s phone through its Bluetooth

connection. Most people didn’t bother to activate the Blackberry’s built

in security features, and even those might not be enough to stop Sacco

from owning the guy’s phone. If it went that easy, there was almost no

point in her being here in person. It wasn’t like they couldn’t count on

the guy using his phone.

It wasn’t that easy. This was after all a Congressionally issued phone,

and Sacco sent her a message letting her know that the target’s shields

were at full. Time for plan A. Chloe put her phone away and fixed her

sights back on the target.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“No problem. I understand completely. So, what can I do for you

today, Ms. Kross?”

“I mentioned that our investigators had uncovered something.

When we saw the sudden drop, we went digging around for causes,

and turned our investigative unit loose on the subject. Our agents in

the field…”

“Agents in the field?” he asked, sounding surprised. Chloe had no

reason to believe the RIAA had actual investigators or agents on staff,

but she had no reason to believe that they didn’t. Either way it sounded

scary and impressive, and those were the impressions she wanted to

leave in his mind.

“We’ve got investigators working online, trolling the message boards

looking for places where people download music. We’ve got others out

there in the streets checking up on bootlegs and so forth. We’re in a

battle to the death here, Danny, and it’s win or die.”

“Wow, OK. Well, what did they dig up?”

Chloe leaned in close towards him, lowering her voice. “There’s a

new piece of piracy software out there. It’s called Mobbitt, and it’s

the new Napster. Maybe even worse than Napster in the long run,

because it’s impossible to trace. It’s made for mobile phones—works

on Iphones, Android phones, Blackberries, any kind of data enabled

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29

phone which, these days, is pretty much every phone. You put it on

there and it broadcasts out your music and video library, stripping away

any DRM in the process. Any DRM. And in return it downloads stuff

from other people’s phones near you. It’s a mobile peer to peer network

that’s impossible for the phone companies to trace or stop. It’s been

spreading through Asia for the last six months and is hitting us here

in the US and in Europe now. It’s all over LA. I tell you, I installed it

on my phone and it filled up with pirated music in just a few hours of

normal driving around.”

“That’s amazing,” Danny said. “And it just strips away the DRM

without any problems?”

“It does. So anyone can copy the files freely. You need to see it in

action to really understand it.” She looked down at his phone on the

table and acted as if an idea had just occurred to her. “Here, let me send

it to you so you can see.”

Danny picked up his phone and smiled. “Wouldn’t that be violating

the DMCA? We could go to jail,” he joked. “Go ahead, are you going

to send it via e-mail or Bluetooth it to me.”

“On Blackberries it’ll install right from the e-mail.”

“Better not send it to my Congressional account. Send it to my RNC

e-mail address instead. Those tend to have ‘server problems’ when

needed.”

Chloe had both addresses and the attachment already queued up

and ready to go. Sacco had made the program small—smaller than

something that did everything Chloe had described could probably

be, but then again the scenario she’d described was pure fiction. Paul

had come up with the cover story after reading some Cory Doctorow

novel. It sounded plausible enough to her, and she was certainly more

tech savvy than this guy was. She sent the e-mail and watched him as

he opened it.

“OK, I’ve opened the attachment.”

“It’ll install itself on your phone. It might take a few minutes. In the

meantime, let me tell you what we’d like to see happen here. First of all,

even though this Mobbitt thing already violates the DMCA and a host

of other laws, we would like some targeted enforcement. For starters

we were thinking about a bill mandating that cell phone manufactur-

ers install measures that prevent this software from working on their

phones. Second we want them to monitor the data traffic between their

phones, looking for any sign that this thing is running and then can-

cel the service if detected. Finally we want to make it a felony to even

install the software on your phone in the first place.” Chloe knew the

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

requests were ridiculous, although not all that more ridiculous than

some of the laws already in place.

“There will be resistance from the telecoms,” Danny said, his gaze

floating towards the ceiling as he seemed to mull over the implications

of her requests. “They hate being told what to do.”

“We considered that. We think you could sell it as an anti-terror-

ism measure as much as an anti-piracy one. We’ve already seen some

traction on our campaign saying that piracy helps fund terrorism. In

this case, we could argue that this kind of software enables terror-

ist cells to communicate and send files in secret without any way for

law enforcement to effectively monitor them. But even so we know it’s

going to be an uphill fight. That’s why I’m talking to you in particular,

Danny. There’s something you can do for us that no one else we work