Margaret Killjoy (2:54)

Call zone media book Club. Book club. That'll never get old. Everyone loves it. Everyone loves thinking back to the era of when every conversation had to be on Zoom and you realized you couldn't sync anything. This is Cool Zone Media Book Club. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and this is the book club that you don't have to do the reading for, because I do it for you. And this time I mean that more than usual because I'm gonna do some reading and then I'm gonna talk with my friend about that reading. I'm gonna talk to my friend Greg. Hi, Greg. How are you?

Greg (3:39)

I'm doing well. How about you?

Margaret Killjoy (3:41)

I'm doing good. I'm up late, so I have, like, energy, which, of course is logical and will serve me well. No, it isn't. I'm gonna crash really hard after we're done recording, but other than that, I'm okay. So the story that I want to read to you, Greg, is a story that you've already read. And I know that because when I read this story, I reached out to you because my friend Greg, for anyone who's listening, is, let's call you an anarchist technology enthusiast. That's a normal thing to say. Is that a fair way to describe you?

Greg (4:18)

Yes. If it has a circuit, I probably opened it up or played with it or learned how it works.

Margaret Killjoy (4:25)

Awesome. This is a science fiction story, rather a speculative fiction story, that appeared on the website crimething.com earlier this week. It appeared on March 21. If you want to go and read it yourself, it's@crimething.com whatever stuff, I don't know, just search it. But don't Google it, as we'll talk about. You should probably duck, duck, duck. Go it. This is a story called Survival, a story about anarchists enduring mass raids. And it's a thought experiment. It's speculative fiction and kind of one of the oldest definitions of that, one of the oldest concepts of that, which is just literally, hey, what would happen if. And what kind of like science and technology can we use to address a set of problems? And before we start, I'll say what I overall think is that I find this a really interesting thought experiment, but one that I have, like, I had some maybe critiques of. And so that's why I decided to talk to my friend Greg. And so we're going to kind of read this story and then talk it through to you. And this is going to be a two week thing because this is a slightly longer than normal story. I don't know. Greg, what are your first thoughts going into this thing? That people don't know what we're talking about yet?

Greg (5:47)

Yeah, I would say that my first thoughts are about the same. I think that it's always good to write out things to imagine scenarios that you might be in so you can preemptively think through how you would deal with them. And I think that this story does a good job of that. And I think that part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this with other people is that I think we could go a little bit deeper and then maybe come out on the other end where people can think about it a little bit more an actionable way in their everyday lives as opposed to reading this and then going on to the next terrible thing of the day.

Margaret Killjoy (6:21)

Yeah, that's a good point. We had to start this late because I had just reinstalled everything on my computer and it's part of my process of de googling and I encourage people to not necessarily do exactly that. But this is a really good moment in your life. Whoever you are, you probably interact with technology. You actually do because you're listening to this and it's a good moment to readdress the ways that you do it. So this story, I'll just start reading it to you, starts with a little preamble. In November 1919, United States President Woodrow Wilson launched mass raids against the entire anarchist movement in the United States. Police simultaneously arrested thousands of anarchists in many different parts of the country, shutting down their newspapers, organizations and meeting halls. That part's not fiction, just to interject, that's just the thing that happened. If similar raids were to take place today, they would occur in a technological landscape involving mass surveillance and targeted electronic attacks. Those who survive would also have to adopt different tools. Section 1 escape when the police battering ram hits his door at 4:11am Jake is in his boxers on the floor, playing an emulated side scroller. The adrenaline hits and within seconds he has jammed his bedroom window open, sliding down into the backyard and off in a run, his socks instantly soaked in the grass. He hears shouting, but doesn't look back to check if there are pigs looking out his window or chasing him from the side of the house. He jumps the back fence more awkwardly than he imagined, getting a splinter deep in his left hand, but he ignores it and dashes over the roof of the neighbor's shed, trying to remember every detail of the surrounding blocks. In what feels like an instant, he's two blocks away, hiding behind some bushes as a squad car drives by. His breath sounds to him like the loudest thing in the world, and his mind spins as he imagines a neighbor coming out behind him. He's in nothing but boxers and muddy socks and his hand is dripping blood. Nothing happens. The squad car crawls down another block. Time to move. Vera is almost home from work, listening to music in her headphones, when she comes around a bend and sees the corner of a SWAT van outside her punk house. She pivots immediately down another street, casually continuing her walk while pulling out her phone. She knows she should immediately turn it off, but first she texts a group chat house being raided and then turns it off. Maybe that warning will help someone. Many phone batteries remain active even when the device is off. She knows right now some lazy junior officer could be noticing the GPS or her network connection triangulating her as she moves away. Should she throw it? Should she abruptly stomp on her phone out here in the street? There's a drainage vent coming up. She could toss it in and keep walking. Vera hesitates. Her phone is encrypted, but against everyone's advice, she uses a short password. If they dig it out of the drain, she doesn't know how to pry out the SD card. Stomping on the whole device might draw attention and not even destroy the main memory. Time is of the essence, so she makes a hard choice quickly and tosses the whole thing in the drain. She's just a normal person on a walk. As she keeps walking away, Vera hears a car rolling up behind her slowly. It takes every ounce of willpower to keep walking normally not to look back in terror. Maybe she should. Maybe she should just run for it. The car parks behind her and there is the sounds of a mom unloading young kids. She's not being followed. Where to now? Julie and Maggie sit at their dining room table. Just want to point out that I'm not only reading this story because it has a character named Maggie in it, but that was a consideration and a bonus. I really appreciate everyone writing in Maggie's Margarets and Magpies. Julie and Maggie are sitting at their dining room table, struggling not to reflect panic at each other. Only one news outlet is even reporting the nationwide raids and there's almost nothing there. Messages saying leave and then delete. This group chat keep popping up for both of them. Little spatters of reports on raids and then silence. A friend who is always too frantic is spamming everyone, asking for updates. Then suddenly she's silent. There's an hour of nothing. They trade terse updates with a friend who lives far away. Someone local suddenly appears online, but only to post a meme in a dead channel and then disappear. The same music plays on the same radio stations, the wind blows through the trees, a cousin asks for advice with a preschool situation. Totally oblivious. The local news does a puff piece about local business, the neighbors get a pizza delivery, and your favorite podcast is interrupted by advertisements. That's a thing that happens. It's totally in the story. I promise. I totally didn't just I added that. I added it right now. Here's the ads.

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Margaret Killjoy (15:35)

And we're back. What ads, Greg, do you think that we should add here?

Greg (15:41)

Probably for Signal. Yeah, an ad for Signal and potatoes and sweet potatoes and wearing a mask. Those would all be good ads. I would support.

Margaret Killjoy (15:51)

All right, well, this is brought to you by all of those things. I know. We'll talk about it a little bit more later, but Signal is having a moment right now in the news because of some major OPSEC fails on the part of the government. But it doesn't mean that Signal itself is broken, everyone. Signal is the current most effective end to end encrypted thing. Honestly, the fact that our enemies use it is part of the evidence of that. All right, but the story. They're probably not going to come for us. We haven't done anything. Their confused dog is whining with shared nerves. Maggie keeps eyeing the go bag by the door they packed together months ago. That afternoon, Julie had made a show of being a good sport, humoring her need to prep. Now all Maggie can think about is everything they're missing. Julie's passport has just expired. Can they get across the border. If only they had done a dry run. They take the dog out on a walk, leaving all devices home, whispering potential plans to one another, trying not to draw attention as a jogger passes them by. When they get home, there's a private message on Instagram from a friend saying they're putting together a legal defense committee. First meeting will be public at a public park. They're inviting some local liberal journalists as shields. Somebody at the local alt weekly says she's writing a story. There's a lawyer coming from a big name liberal thing. The Internet keeps being really slow. Signal doesn't deliver messages and then suddenly delivers three all at once. Loading. A lot of websites just returns errors. They're so sleep deprived with stress that when they finally crash together on the couch, they sleep right through the defense committee meeting. A friend knocks loudly on their door and they nearly die of heart attacks. Assuming it's the cops. His report back is terse. Almost no journalists showed most of the folks who went have been grabbed. One was driven down off her bike on her way home. An old liberal lawyer went to the county jail with a court order and the cops just laughed and arrested her. He's going underground and he suggests they do too. But Julie and Maggie have a life. They have jobs, at least for now, as they've both called out sick. And they have a house. They're normal now, even law abiding. Burn a few posters, donate a few books to the neighborhood, little libraries, delete a few accounts. Maybe they can pass as upstanding citizens. If we leave our shit here and stop paying, we'll lose everything we've built since poverty, plus have to pay some ridiculous fine. If they do get raided, maybe it'll just be a few days in lockup, in and out, just a performance of a crackdown. The libs will get mad about the lawyers. Surely neither of them has been able to cook since the raids first started, so they drive out together to grab pickup. Waiting for a light, Maggie stares at something on the side of the street and then leaps out of the truck's passenger side door without a word. Julie is frightened at first, then furious, but when she pulls the truck over and heads back to Maggie, she sees her partner kneeling next to a homeless man lying at an odd angle. We don't have our phones. We can't call a paramedic, she reminds Maggie. But then recognition dawns on her. It's one of their friends. Under the mess of blisters and swollen bruises, his eyes are open, staring at nothing. He lived in One of the first punk houses that was raided. He never went to anything besides some hardcore shows. He was just a baker. They don't pick up their meal, they head home. Dog, go bag some last minute additional ideas. Camping gear, encrypted backup drives, medicine, dry food, clothes, blankets, phones and leftover devices. Smashed house key hidden somewhere in the yard for a friend. Maggie looks at her cheap Casio watch. That's time. We need to go. That's the end of Section One. And we're going to read Section Two today too. But first we're going to talk about Section One and what should we talk about with it?

Greg (20:15)

So one thing that came up for me initially is that I'm not really familiar with the 1919 raids. And so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Margaret Killjoy (20:25)

Yeah, okay. So there is one of the things that about this particular piece that I think kind of stood out to me is like, not necessarily. It's a thought experiment. Right. And it's projecting the idea of like, what if they came for the anarchists? And I think actually as we go further into the piece, we'll learn that it's talking about like what if they came for the radicals in general. Right. In a big mass roundup that includes anarchists. But there is a historical precedent for specifically coming after the anarchists. The first red scare was 19. 19 19. I want to say maybe 18 as well, I'm not certain. And they often get called the Palmer Raids. And I don't have all my notes in front of me, which is terribly embarrassing because I had all the time in the world to have my notes in front of me, but I did not. But basically these were raids that came after primarily an immigrant anarchist group across the country, but especially in New York City, and specifically Russian anarchists and Russian labor organizing around New York City. And there's all these great photos you can look up of like. Well, there's one. There's this great photo of these like super dapper anarchists hanging out in their like nice wool coats and nice hats and stuff, waiting for deportation. Fashion is probably not the most important thing when you look at that particular photo. But they do have nice fashion.

Greg (21:50)

That's really cool. Not the raids, but the fashion. Yeah, that's good context because yeah, I think that this piece tries to open with that and contextualize. I believe also international policing was invented to hunt down anarchists around the world.

Margaret Killjoy (22:03)

Yep.

Greg (22:04)

But nowadays, do we really feel that this is sort of like are anarchists a threat in this same way that they were in 1919.

Margaret Killjoy (22:14)

So it's kind of less about whether or not we are a threat and whether or not we're perceived as a threat. And a few years ago, like last Trump term, he absolutely was mentioning anarchists by name. Although kind of in that catch all way of like these anarchists and antifa, you know, without any. Like the whole thing that the government is always trying to do and everyone's always trying to do is sort of pretend like we're not actually a specific ideological branch of socialism. It's just a catch all word like terrorist or whatever. And why was I going on about that? Mostly because it bugs me. But like, I think it's completely possible that they would come for like antifa. I think personally a much more realistic threat model is what we're seeing now, which is coming after organizers, coming after people who are specifically related to specific protest movements, which of course very much includes an awful lot of people that we know and care about who may be anarchists.

Greg (23:15)

Yeah, that's fair.

Margaret Killjoy (23:17)

But okay, what else? Okay, so we've got the context. Okay, so in the first scene, the.

Greg (23:22)

Person jumps out the window with no shoes and no pants and no shirt. And it got me thinking sort of around how when we do preparedness, we're usually prepared for a disaster. And I think of it like one of the things that I keep in my bedroom is a fire extinguisher. Because I figure for most scenarios a fire extinguisher is going to be useful, but in this case, maybe I need a pair of slippers by my bed, which if I'm woken up in the middle of the night, do I know where my shoes are or do I have the right pants on? Definitely something to consider, I think, if you're preparing with this particular threat model. And then how do we think about go bags a little bit differently? I think most of the time when we do go bags, it's like, okay, you're going to be in a vehicle, you're going to be going to a shelter. But how does this change with this particular threat model?

Margaret Killjoy (24:15)

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's nice about go bags is that they theoretically are useful for all kinds of situations. And most of the time for most people and in general, I think, including right now, the primary purpose of a go bag is for disaster stuff. Right? A wildfire is still a more realistic threat model for most people. Including most people probably listening to this or like earthquakes or I don't know, you just like really are antsy and want to get out of town or whatever. Or like, your friend calls you frantic and needs your help, and they are two states away, and they're like, or, you need to get here now. Please come. And you're like, well, fortunately, everything I need to sleep in my car is in this bag right here. Plus my car. So you can throw it into your car and get going. But I do think it's kind of interesting to think about this particular threat model with go bags and preparedness of the idea of kind of a more urban camping model, which is actually. I mean, it's literally my own background. As a former travel kid or whatever. I slept on a lot of rooftops and things like that. The idea of traveling with a tent was completely nonsensical to me because I was like, tent? You put up a tent, they know where you are. Because I was just always sleeping illegally in different places. And so the sleeping bag was the only object that really mattered to me. Out of all of that, maybe a tarp, if it's gonna be really wet. But I wouldn't even string up the tarp. I would just taco in it. I'm not recommending this. I was, like, 20 years old. But reading this particular piece has made me think more about threat models, where you're like, okay, well, I gotta go, and I might need to sleep rough for a couple nights in different places. You know, what do I need for that? The shoe thing is really interesting to me. I wear boots, and so, like, I'm not throwing on my boots to run away or whatever. And I'm like, oh, maybe my Crocs. You know, maybe that's the move. Or maybe, like, kind of slip on running shoes or whatever. But something that you brought up when we were talking about this beforehand was the kind of like, well, it's not, like, crazy realistic to get out a window and out into the backyard during a house raid.

Greg (26:28)

Yeah, I mean, I feel like in house raids, they surround the house and they try to shock you into compliance. So, yeah, this person seems like they're very good at parkour, which is something I wish I was more limber for.

Margaret Killjoy (26:42)

I get the impression that this particular character is a graph kid and is a little bit used to. I'm going to move very quickly and stealthily. And I actually wonder, because when I watch videos of house raids, because I have a normal person's brain and do normal hobbies, I don't think they always surround the house. I think that if they're doing, like, the full swat or whatever, they might. Right. But I don't know. And so I think that there is a little bit of a, like, I mean a lot of this is just pure luck, right? This, this character is playing emulated side scrolling games at 4:14am or whatever it is. But yeah, I don't know. I do like thinking about this like sort of different threat model as relates to our go bags. But I would actually say with this piece in general, right. This is less about, we need to change our threat model to include this as what we're doing now and more like thinking about, well, this might come up. You know, we'll talk about it more when we get into the other sections about the different methods of communication and stuff. But it's like, it's not stuff that we should start doing now. Like, I don't think that I'm going to have to start sleeping with clothes on. I'd hate to start sleeping with clothes on. That's really just the main problem for me.

Greg (28:01)

Makes total sense.

Margaret Killjoy (28:02)

Yeah. Yeah. All right. And then, okay, there was another thing that I was thinking about right at the very end. They're like I'm. And then he puts on. I think it's a, I don't remember which character it is. Someone has their Casio watch and specifically I think they're flagging that it is a like full function non smartwatch. I thought that was kind of clever.

Greg (28:21)

Yeah, I mean I prefer a calculator wristwatch if I have to pick.

Margaret Killjoy (28:25)

But wait, do you really have a calculator wristwatch?

Greg (28:27)

I don't. I'm posing right now. But I think it is useful just to think of like, okay, how can I tell time without my cell phone? And I think the cell phone does occupy a very large space and I think as we're thinking about and we can go into sort of the phone and like being attached to your phone, but it's like, do you have a map in your car? I've thought about getting sort of a road atlas, for example, just in case I don't have GPS service. And also I've been in situations where GPS has thrown me on the road that is completely covered in snow. And I'm like, uh, oh, maybe I need to know how to get out of here.

Margaret Killjoy (29:08)

But yeah, I keep a road atlas in my vehicle. I actually use it as my example whenever I watch because again, I have normal person hobbies. Whenever I watch like right wing people's vehicle bug out vehicle Prep stuff on YouTube, which to be clear, I don't look for the right wingers. It's Just an overwhelming majority of the people who are like, check out my truck, it's full of stuff, are right of center. And they all like have these like back of seat mounted AR15 mounts to put their AR15 on the back of their seat. And I'm like, that's the pocket that the atlas goes in. Think in your life about the number of times you've needed an atlas versus the number of times that you've needed not only an AR15 but a truck AR15 ready for rapid deployment. Like that's a non thing. As far as I can tell. If you are going to be rapidly using your rifle in a vehicle, you're in a war and you're not the driver. So yeah, whenever I see those, I always am like, the map pocket. You covered the map pocket. So yeah, get a road atlas.

Greg (30:26)

This podcast is brought to you by.

Margaret Killjoy (30:27)

Road atlases and Rand McNally or whatever.

Greg (30:31)

Yes, exactly. But yeah, I think we can go into the section so they forgetting the character's name, but they see the houses being graded and they automatically realize that like, oh wait, I'm carrying a tracking device on me. And then there's this tension within the piece around what should I do with this? So they first talk about the phone being encrypted but using a short password, which the good advice is use an alphanumeric password that is sufficiently long. Now for our phones, you mostly open it one handedly. You probably are doing something else. And like most of us probably either use face unlock, there's fingerprint ID unlock, which those are pretty secure except for if somebody physically takes your face or your finger and puts it on there.

Margaret Killjoy (31:14)

Also, I believe that the police are allowed to force you into biometric unlocking a phone, whereas they're not allowed to. Well, they're like theoretically not supposed to force you into passwords.

Greg (31:27)

Yeah. So I mean I think the reality here is that most people probably have like a four digit passcode for their phone. And then the piece also mentions an SD card I'm unaware of. I think there's like four phones that are currently on the market that have SD cards. Most of the mainline phones don't. And so the data is on the phone. It is not removable. You can't remove the battery of a phone. Even when a phone is off. It can be tracked. These are just facts. So one thing, and kind of going back to the go bags and I think having a Faraday bag is something that would be useful as well for people is like if you want your phone to be more off or at least not traceable. Being able to just throw it into a bag could help it at least not contact other radios. But there's also operating systems. So these are all Android based iOS is what it is. And there is questions of whether or not the standard encryption algorithms have backdoors that the police can access. But there is an OS called grapheneos that is commonly recommended, but it does de Google you. So if that is what you're trying to do, you're trying to get away from Gmail and all that, you will get there. And GrapheneOS only runs on the latest Google hardware like the Pixel line of phones, just because they want to keep it very up to date and not have to support a ton of phones. So it's like the three latest phones or something like that. So if you are sufficiently paranoid and you want to play around with this kind of stuff, I recommend that. But there's also other ones, like there's Lineage OS which is another alternative OS for Android phones that you can, you can choose not to download Google Apps or not. And then Calixos, which is another project that's doing similar goals.

Margaret Killjoy (33:11)

So I think it's interesting with phone security because none of the things that you're talking about, to my understanding, none of those, stop the basic your phone is a tracking device thing. Right. Theoretically all they're capable of doing is limiting bad actors from accessing the data on your phone. Is that a fair way to put it?

Greg (33:32)

Yeah. And I would say that data encryption in general is really good for maybe not always like, oh, I'm trying to avoid law enforcement, but if my phone is stolen, I don't want my credit card or my files in the hands of somebody who could use it.

Margaret Killjoy (33:47)

Right.

Greg (33:48)

And I think there was a piece I was reading that was related to phone security that suggested treat your phone like encrypted landline and only connect to it over WI fi, not cell phone networks. Then that particular device would never get that triangulation data from the cell networks, which is interesting. And then it would have you have signal on that phone and then it just never leaves your house and then it's never on your person. But again, I think that that is a perfect scenario when most of us are going to. We like the convenience of having a cell phone. We like to be able to look up things and talk to our friends.

Margaret Killjoy (34:27)

I also think it's a different threat model. I think that's the threat model of which many, maybe you, dear listener, in the current context are a person who does valiant crime, let's say. Right. And in which case, absolutely. But like, and I recognize the point of like, the more people have secure practices, the more that they can't pick people out. It's like, ah, this person probably does crime because they do this thing. But I would say that like, for most people, I think in the current threat model, the odds of me needing to take a call from my sick family member while I'm out for 12 hours is like, that's more important to me than that. My cell phone hasn't pinged off of any towers recently in the average scenario. And so, and I think that that's what's interesting about this particular thought experiment piece is that it's presenting a like, well, all of that shit's out the window. And if all of that stuff's out the window, then you're just like in a totally new terrain. And so I think that there's. I don't know, it's complicated. But I really do like that. I like that they point out that they're like, okay, I'm gonna throw my phone down the sewer now. And all of that.

Greg (35:48)

Which I don't think is a bad idea if that is what you're paranoid about. I didn't, I didn't have sort of an issue with that exactly.

Margaret Killjoy (35:56)

Yeah.

Greg (35:56)

But I do think sort of understanding the limits of the technology you're carrying on you, I think is important and totally be aware when you are bringing a listening device to somewhere.

Margaret Killjoy (36:08)

Yeah, I think that's just.

Greg (36:09)

Yeah.

Margaret Killjoy (36:10)

On a place that just keeps track of everything you do. Although all cars from like what, 2014 onwards also do that. But we could. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Maybe a different point.

Greg (36:20)

Yeah.

Margaret Killjoy (36:21)

Anyway. All right, well, is that it for section one? You want to start on section two? Yeah, let's read section two resources. Jake has been tagging and dumpster diving for years, so he knows his neighborhood pretty well. Just as he's noticed what gets cleaned and what does not. He's noticed what gets moved and what does not. What gets paid attention to and what does not. There's a moss covered rock in a local park that never gets moved. No one even goes near it. There's a roof of an abandoned building littered with garbage long ago. Jake took two plastic bottles and sealed each inside a ziploc bag with a small amount of cash and two USBs each. Then he buried one bottle in the dirt underneath the rock and taped another bottle underneath a non functioning vent on the roof of an abandoned building in each bottle one USB contains an encrypted KeePassX database with the distinct login information of every online account he has, as well as a Veracrypt encrypted folder with various files he wants to make sure he never lost. Scans of his IDs, photos of friends, including a GPG key pair he has encrypted both with a passphrase of 5 randomly chosen dictionary words committed to memory. Veritable Sasquatch Humdinger, Locality Peeps. He has practiced this every night for weeks, building all kinds of associations and mnemonics. Unencrypted on the drives are executable files to install keepass x veracrypt and and GPG on any new computer. On the other USB is a full install of the TAILS operating system. Jake knows he looks a mess in his boxers and muddy socks, but he gets to the park and digs up the bottle without a squad car seeing him or some vigilante neighbor raising a fuss. The 20 and 2 tens inside will have to be enough. Luckily there's a small houseless encampment nearby and and an old lady is willing to part with a sweater for 10. A free box happens to have a too large pair of sneakers. He desperately tries to make his boxers look like shorts and walks to a thrift store, quickly emerging with a backpack, a T shirt, a baseball cap and a pair of pants. A visit to a corner store bathroom with a razor and hair dye and his appearance is at least a little different. He buys a cheap first aid kit for the splinter in his hand. With his cash broken into change, he can catch a bus across town. When Jake gets near the first house of comrades, not only are the cops there, but his friends are still in their underwear and hogtied. On the lawn, a cop is violently molesting a friend of his under the pretense of a search. While others laugh, Jake keeps moving. At the second house there are no squad cars, but the front door is visibly missing. Jake notices someone sitting in an unmarked car across the street. He keeps walking. The third house he tries belongs to a largely apolitical friend. It's a struggle to try and get him, not to proclaim surprise loudly on the front porch and not to talk near devices. I just need to borrow a couple hundred, man, then I'll be out of your hair. I never saw you. You never saw me. Please. Jake leaves with a hundred, a filled water bottle, a better hoodie, a better pair of shoes with dry socks, and a dusty old laptop. It's not enough. Bus fare. To get to the border he needs a sleeping bag, but REI has been implementing stronger anti theft policies and the longer he fucks around town the more likely he is to get stopped. He's terrified of facial recognition and tracking software on the buses and his thrift store baseball cap isn't going to protect him forever. He scopes out the city bus terminal from some distance, but it looks like this one checks ID and there's a cop wandering around. Instead he catches a city bus out to a distant suburb on the edge of rural two lane roads trying to hitch. Hopefully the cops out here aren't actively looking for him and won't harass a hitchhiker. A state patrol car passes him without incident. He has no success for hours and it starts to grow dark. So it's back to the city worried about cash in the middle of the night he climbs the roof of his second stash, but it's missing. Probably the tape eroded months ago and it fell off. Hope the person who found it could use the cache if they opened one of the USBs it would just prove cryptic. No way to ever learn what was encrypted. It's a cold night sleeping rough without a sleeping bag and in the morning Jake takes refuge in the back of a cafe where he still has enough cash for a warm drink. He takes out the dusty old laptop from his friend and the tails usb, booting it and accessing the Internet over Tor. The connection to the Tor network has trouble so he chooses configure connection and selects different bridges until he finds one that works. A few anarchist counter info sites are reporting the raids, but a surprising number of sites are down entirely. Local news says almost nothing besides statist blather. Social media is trash with speculation from those least informed. Foreign noblogs and indie media sites have the most relevant reporting. Signal is down, something about centralized architecture. Comments speculate about international law, but it doesn't matter right now. Riseup allegedly melted their servers with thermite during a raid and were all arrested. ProtonMail has apparently been collaborating injecting spyware onto users devices and some people are surprised by this. Wire is temporarily unavailable. A few people leave links urging people to use the various apps or tools Jake's never heard of. But do you know what they should use Greg? For all of their secure communication they should use whatever's advertised. Next.

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Margaret Killjoy (46:19)

And we're back. Other people debate the technical merits, but he has a hard time understanding one new app is blowing up pretty quickly. Lots of people attest to it being good, but this seems mostly based on them finding it easy to use. One person says they are still trying to use a smartphone, but then goes quiet. One account that was quiet for a while starts speaking differently. In the comments section on a formerly obscure site, someone says this is Big C. I'm free. A group of us are forming up at a secure location. Contact me through a secure channel. Jake knows that this is Cookie, a local organizer After a little struggle, Jake manages to get the most popular new encrypted communication apps temporarily installed on his tails instance, he joins one of the public channels that some comments encouraged using. It's basically like Telegram or Discord, a flood of posting and arguing. Folks who survived the raids using these new accounts try to imply who they are without saying it openly. It's an amateur hour shitshow of oblique flailing. Remember that one time we did that one thing? I was the one that wore green. Turns out one of the worst assholes in the scene was still free, and he is using the opportunity to crow even when the crude only you would know X Games imply an account is a given. Comrade Jake knows that such details could simply be copy pasted from a compromised device via some man in the middle attack, where the cops sit between two parties, relaying their messages back and forth as if they're the other person there is not enough to trust in an Internet post to meet up, Vera walks immediately to the house of her old friend Cat. She scopes the front from down the street, notices Kat's Subaru is missing, and makes her way in through the backyard. Vera has held on to a spare key for years, but their friendship is almost entirely offline. They don't even bring devices when they hang out. As far as the outside world knows, Cat is just another park ranger doing ecological restoration. Ten years ago, they burned down a condo together. Vera cries and trembles the second she closes the back door behind her, falling into a fetal position. Cat's House is pristine, beautiful, safe. Vera rocks back and forth, trying to remember breathing exercises. Has her heart always been this loud? Is she dying? After an eternity, she gets up and starts doing stretches and exercises. She pictures herself punching through the faces of the cops back at her house. She knows she needs to work out the adrenaline. Kat's house is like a warm security blanket. Everything is just right. Vera lies on the floor of the living room for hours, not moving, listening way too attentively to the sounds of cars going by. Is Cat even in town? Should she make something from her food in the pantry? The slow crunching sound of Kat's Subaru coming to rest in the driveway is an immense relief. Cat is surprised about the raids, but she grasps the severity, hugs Vera, and tries to throw lentils and veggies in an instapot while listening and asking questions. While dinner cooks, Kat brings out an old laptop she rarely uses, and they check the major news sites together, careful not to enter search terms or anything that might flag. In some sense, it's a relief to learn the raids were beyond just Vera's house. They're not targeted at Vera specifically, but no one seems to have been released yet, so it's clearly not safe to leave. Kat makes up a futon for Vera in the basement. Of course you can stay the night. You can stay as long as you need. Vera takes off her earrings and places them carefully beside her work bag. In each earring is a tiny sliver of a USB stick. Each of them is just like Jake's encrypted KeePass X database, encrypted file system, GPG keys, installation executables for VeraCrypt and KeePass X. In the morning, Vera will investigate what can be done with Kat's laptop. Julie and Maggie make three stops before heading out of town. First at Julie's bank, where she successfully empties most of her account into 5,000 in cash. But at Maggie's bank, the teller disappears for a long while and doesn't come back. You know what? Never mind. I'll go to a different bank, maggie says to another teller, using her best imitation Karen voice. They drive off, heads on a swivel for cop cars. Finally, they slip a note into a friend's mailbox explaining where to find their house key and some instructions for their lease. They collect every credit or debit card they have and tape them together under a seat, never to be used again. They take off quickly back roads to avoid license plate readers than long country roads. It's hard to navigate without their phones. Each of them picks a personality type and fashion style that signals no political or subcultural allegiance. They make up a backstory about how they're friends and try to bicker in convenience stores to avoid looking queer. They pick up a bumper sticker they'd otherwise be livid at and slap it on. At a campsite 200 miles away, they go through all their remaining belongings. They have a tarp, a tent, two sleeping bags, a gallon jug of water, a Sawyer microfiltration water purifier, a five gallon bucket of rice and beans, a camp stove, a couple pads, trashy books for boredom. They end up buying basic comforts like folding chairs. With their cash reserves. It's just a camping trip until it isn't. They go on a hike with their dog and talk about communities they can flee to. A land defense occupation that became permanent. A log cabin, squat built deep off of any path on federal land. A friend's organic farm with some partially abandoned yurts. They discuss the pros and cons of various cults they know. In the end, they drive to the furthest option, the organic farm. The drive is long. On a thin, winding back road, they stack up behind a long line of cars. Local vigilantes are performing an inspection to check for antifa. A middle aged white lady with an AR waves them through cheerily. Stay safe out there. The next town has a small rally for democracy along the central drag. Besides an Arby's, a couple dozen liberals in folding chairs hold cardboard placards making puns about the suspension of a cable news channel. At a gas station, Julie overhears two men confidently talking about the investment opportunities in real estate being opened up as all the cockroaches are removed. One night they sleep in their car in a Walmart parking lot on the advice of a friendly night auditor at a cheap motel. New regulations. I can't take a cash deposit and there's this thing I gotta enter your IDs into that wires them nationally. When they finally arrive at the farm and are allowed past the gate, there are already 15 other people there. Extended family of the owning couple, plus a couple of woofer hippies and two coteries of obvious radicals who are cagey and cold to anyone they don't know. Everyone is antsy. Different groups cook different food. Panicked envy flickers in some eyes. Two weeks in and Julie keeps to herself. Maggie spends her time trying to suck up to the owners and befriends an autistic nerd with one of the other radical groups, an old balding white dude in A black hoodie keeps snapping at their dog. A trip into town for bulk food goes badly after the nerd insists on wearing a mask and a confrontation breaks out with a local. A backed up toilet in the farmhouse makes the owner's dower for a couple days. One night, the situation boils over and folks start openly talking about the raids. There's fury over who has a device and who can be trusted to have a device, who is putting everyone else in danger, who has a right to be here, who has a right to anything. After someone brings up land back, someone else screams, who do you think you're fooling? Who are your people exactly? You're not indigenous, you're as, well, white as me. And an awkward physical fight breaks out. The next morning, there are immigration police visible in the distance at the neighboring farm. One of the hippies finds three young girls hiding down by the river and rushes them into one of the plastic yurts everyone else is hiding in. Dogs bark in the distance. Julie joins the couple that owns the farm in meeting the immigration agents. Her dog barks at theirs and they put them away. The immigration agents are some of the newly deputized conspiracy heads that barely have any training, and Julie is able to find common cultural ground with them, ranting about how genetically modified organisms are poisoning the land. Leaning hard into the Persona she studiously built on the road, the wannabe genocide heirs laugh at her jokes and leave, waving back to her. The girl's white uncle was allowed to remain, a nasty gash across his forehead. The rest of the family is being taken to one of the deportation camps, where people die of dehydration. He's profoundly grateful for the rescue of his nieces. Over the next month, the adjacent farms begin to merge. A dugout hiding spot becomes a tunnel network. Maybe it'll suffice to hide folks if cops return. Some new folks arrive, fleeing other things. Tensions break down. Relationships begin to form across the groups. One of the quieter members starts opening up, giving lectures on syntropic agriculture. And an array of projects rapidly consume all the spare land across the farms. As people get busy developing personal domains and projects to be invested in, the overall vibe improves dramatically. Food gets pooled. People become more open about what devices they held onto. But it doesn't matter as much because all of the old Internet is gone. A few specific corporate sites remain accessible, whitelisted by telecoms for the sake of commerce. But almost everything else is gone. You can get Amazon deliveries and send Gmail, but it's impossible to reach Wikipedia, much less Athens. Indie media or any noblogs. The Farm establishes a consensus on how devices are to be used. The owners maintain all of their devices in the farmhouse, air gapped from everyone else. News stories and everything else are downloaded to a USB by one person for an hour every day, then passed around the three laptops everyone else shares. There's one burner cell phone for the whole farm, bought with cash at one of the last Walmarts where that is possible. It's kept turned off and wrapped in plastic bags under a rock five miles away along the side of the road. It's for emergencies and strictly overseen usage. No one will put its SIM card in or turn it on near the farm or its stash location. Having swapped out plates and tags, Julie and Maggie occasionally drive into the local town. They sit behind a cafe in their truck while it's closed at night and tap into the still active WI fi with their laptop running. Tails signal is long gone. Tor is totally inaccessible. Even using the latest smuggled bridges on the plain Internet, they've managed to register two Gmail accounts using the Farm's collective burner phone. How can they find other comrades? How can they talk with them? Well, if you want to know, you're going to have to wait till next Sunday. But what you don't have to wait for is me and Greg talking about this chunk. Okay. And so section two that we just listened to, so much more happened. And okay, the first thing I want to say just sort of flag. There's a piece where they're like, oh, the autistic nerd. And I'm like, okay, we've all met that. Or maybe we are that, or whatever. And then it was like, oh, then they wore their mask to the store and refused to not. And I just want to flag that. I'm like, could have been phrased a little differently about making the autistic character be the one who does that. I don't know, whatever. Maybe that's me being too Twitter brained about it. And I don't know the. I have no idea about the neurodivergence or non neurodivergence of the author of this piece. Yeah, but okay, I have a bunch of questions about this part. And this is kind of the part where I'm like, that's part of why I brought you on.

Greg (59:38)

I think I'm going to be a USB drive kingpin now and that's what I'm investing in. So it's going to be after the raids. We'll all need lots of USB drives.

Margaret Killjoy (59:49)

I know, and it's interesting because we're going to need lots of mostly small USB drives.

Greg (59:53)

Small USB drives.

Margaret Killjoy (59:54)

I think we're going to need a couple big ones to have lots of legally purchased media on.

Greg (60:00)

Yeah.

Margaret Killjoy (60:00)

And okay, so there's a bunch of different programs. They talk about. They talk about Keepass X, they talk about VeraCrypt, they talk about GPG, and they talk about Tor. Where do you want to start?

Greg (60:14)

Well, and they also talk about Tails, which is just. We can go through. Why don't we talk about what each of these things are, just for the uninitiated. So keepassx, which is to be clear, is defunct now. Thanks for pointing that out. KeepassX has turned into a new project, KeepassXC. So if you're looking around for it, it's now called that. And so that is generally a password manager. And so I strongly recommend that anybody listening to this start using a password manager. Use a different password for every single one of your accounts. And this is not advice as a radical. This is advice as a person who uses computers.

Margaret Killjoy (60:47)

Yeah.

Greg (60:48)

If one of your accounts gets popped and you use the same password for everything, all your accounts are popped. And also use two factor authentication. Okay, spiel over. But KeepassXC is an encrypted database of all of your passwords. So you use one big password password that you hopefully memorize, and then you never have to remember your other passwords. Now, there's some advantage to this from another perspective is you don't really know your passwords. So if somebody were to ask you, hey, what's your email password? You're like, I don't know. And you can legitimately say that you don't know. But I think it's good practice to use a password manager. So that's what KeePassX or KeePass XC is. VeraCrypt is an application that is used to encrypt files or drives. And so if you wanted to encrypt like a large piece of something, you would use VeraCrypt and be able to decrypt it like that. GPG is another way to encrypt messages or files. That the emphasis is on asymmetric encryption, which I will go a little nerd moment. In asymmetric encryption, you have a public key and a private key. You keep the private key to yourself and you're able to share your public key out to anybody. And then they somebody else will use your public key to encrypt something intended for you. Now, one of the most common ways that this is used is through email. There's been applications in the past like enigmail to make this more easy for people. But just know that GPG is used for encrypting files or messages and that sort of thing. But it's quite manual. It's a process where you have to set up your keys, you have to set up and maintain a public and a private key pair.

Margaret Killjoy (62:29)

It's also kind of like a pain in the ass, just frankly. And the reason it's fallen out of favor. If you ever hear anyone talking about pgp, pretty good privacy. That's kind of the closed source version of this. And what people actually use is gpg, which stands for. Wait, you told me what it stands for.

Greg (62:49)

GPG is GNU Privacy Guard, which the difference is PGP is closed sourced, GPG is open source. So the code for my understanding is that they're functionally the same under the hood, but one is open source and one is not.

Margaret Killjoy (63:04)

The reason people have moved to things like signal or end to end encrypted email. Things like ProtonMail, which is only end to end encrypted if the originating source is also an encrypted mail provider. But the reason people have moved to that is not just so that they can invite journalists into their chats. But that's going to be a dated reference soon. It might already feel dated to you. You might be sick of people talking about it anyway is that signal is just so much easier to use. And I actually think that there is a. For most people in most situations the ease of use isn't just a like convenience. It's actually literally more secure because it's harder to fuck up. It's really easy to fuck up gpg. However, as the rest of this piece is going to later get into, there might be situations where it's kind of the only thing going. Yeah, because you kind of can't. You can't kill this one.

Greg (64:07)

Yeah. And then also the piece mentioned Tor, which stands for the onion router. It's bundled as a browser, but it is a way to route your traffic through many different other computers that are on the Tor network. So your where your traffic is coming from and where it exits is not easy to track. And then tails. OS is a operating system that runs as a live USB drive that enables you to utilize Tor without having to install it onto a computer. You plug in the USB drive, you boot it up and it launches the operating system. And when you turn the computer off, everything is wiped. So it doesn't leave data behind unless you tell it to.

Margaret Killjoy (64:49)

But yeah, yeah. So a lot of tools are brought up. Okay. My other big question about this section is they talk about the big, easy, convenient tools going down. For example, they mentioned ProtonMail has been injecting spyware onto people's computers. And, and to be clear, ProtonMail doesn't really have a. They're not really our comrades, you know, but they're also not American. And so from my point of view, and maybe I'm being naive, I'm a little bit like, stuff that's not American is going to have, like, way less of an interest in cooperating with a fascist American government. But maybe I'm being naive about that.

Greg (65:36)

Yeah, I don't know about that. I do know that ProtonMail was involved in some court cases where they gave up IP information, but they didn't give up message data because again, they didn't have it. Because ProtonMail is an email provider that does end to end encrypted emails by default. You don't even have to think about it if you're emailing another ProtonMail account, which is nice. The theme of security in this day and age is that it's a lot of like, you don't see it, but it's happening behind the scenes. Signal does this. ProtonMail does it, but again, it's a centralized service and we don't know what pressure they may get in the future.

Margaret Killjoy (66:13)

Yeah, no, that's a good point. Okay. And then specifically the talking about signal going down like that is kind of one of the key pieces to this particular thought experiment is that signal, as a centralized thing has gone down. And I want to ask you about how realistic is that?

Greg (66:35)

So my understanding is that in 2019, that signal was taken down in Iran, and I think it had been taken down other times before, along with the entire Internet at times in Iran. Iran has the advantage, at least from the government's standpoint, of having an Internet that's very easy to turn on and off. My understanding is that in the United States that'd be a lot harder. And so a general Internet going down scenario would look a lot more like the ISPs themselves, either blocking or throttling traffic. The cell phone providers are actually easier to shut down. And there's an example. In 2011, during the Oscar Grant protests in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, BART shut down their cell phone service on the underground tunnels because they thought that activists were using that to coordinate their protests. They were able to do this because they own the entire cell phone network that was underground. You don't get cell phone networks from above ground. And so people had no service at that time. Signal itself going down, though. Again, I don't know the details of how Signal is hosted, but if it's not distributed enough, you could just shut down a few of the servers, depending on it. But I do imagine, given the fact that Signal is open source, that if something like that were to happen, you might see people be spinning up their own versions of Signal. And I think that the piece also talks about, oh, there's these other apps that come up and who knows if they're good or not. And you would definitely see that there's reasons to assume that in crisis people are going to try to figure out other ways to get around things. And you'll have to use your best judgment. But I don't think it's unwarranted that Signal could go away. But I think it would, given the fact that we've seen also government officials utilizing Signal. Maybe that's an advantage in the realm of. Maybe it is critical infrastructure in this way where we wouldn't see it attacked in that way. And Tor, for example, is used by the CIA. They have a vested interest in not shutting down the Tor network.

Margaret Killjoy (68:41)

Yeah, yeah. I'm under the impression that Signal is both an app that you can use and also a protocol, like a system by which to do similar things, and that the Signal protocol is used in other end to end encryption.

Greg (68:55)

Well, like WhatsApp, for example.

Margaret Killjoy (68:57)

No. Yeah, fair enough.

Greg (68:58)

Yeah. So WhatsApp uses the signal protocol, which is the encryption protocol that Signal uses. And it's actually the largest deployment of the Signal protocol because in the US WhatsApp is used a little bit less, but across the world it's much more prevalent.

Margaret Killjoy (69:14)

Okay. And then actually, it's probably worth distinguishing then why is Signal more secure than WhatsApp?

Greg (69:18)

I think it's an issue of trust for me. I don't have the details right now, but WhatsApp is owned by Facebook. And so there's reasonable suspicions of are they keeping things the right way? That's personal paranoia. And I think one of my caveats to this whole piece is that you all should be doing your own research. If you're listening to this and trying to take advice like this is we express some opinions, we express some details, but at the end of the day, you're going to make your own choices. And maybe WhatsApp is actually the better option for you because you have family internationally and having access to that encryption is super important.

Margaret Killjoy (69:58)

Okay, well, I think that kind of covers these two sections. Is there anything I'm missing? Anything we're missing?

Greg (70:04)

No, I think that that's good. It's always fun to talk about this stuff.

Margaret Killjoy (70:08)

Yeah. All right, we'll come back next week and we're going to talk about the second half of this story. And also if you're listening and you're like, wait a second, this isn't the Barrow will send what it may. That's because I interrupted my own book to talk about this because it felt more timely. But within a couple weeks I'll get back to telling you the adventures of Danielle Cain on Book Club. But in the meantime, take care of each other because we gotta talk to you soon. It Could Happen Here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly@coolzonemedia.com sources thanks for listening.

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Greg (73:39)

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