He calmed down somewhat when he talked to Pluto. Pluto, as it turned out, had for a couple of years been employing several lawyers full-time, looking for ways to set this thing up so that he wouldn’t run afoul of any of the laws that had been established to inflict draconian punishments on persons identified as hackers.
In one sense, APEs had been decades in the making. In a tightly compressed, fast-forward style of discourse, Pluto reminded Corvallis of a lot of history that he already vaguely knew. Pluto, as it turned out, was part of a loose group of like-minded persons calling itself ENSU: the Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking. The APE was his personal baby but others had been working on it too, cross-breeding his code with filter-evading, CAPTCHA-spoofing spambots built to flood Wikipedia with bogus edits and Amazon with fake product reviews.
ENSU’s vision in the long term was noble and beautiful: they wanted to make a new thing called the Trusted Internet. Short term, the way they wanted to get there was to bury every old-school blog in fake comments, follow every legitimate Twitter account with a thousand fake ones, clone and spoof every Facebook page with digital myrmidons, and bide their time for weeks or months before suddenly filling their victims’ feeds with garbage.
“I can see why you hired lawyers,” Corvallis remarked after he’d heard that.
Pluto chuckled. “Only for the APE part of it. There are many participants on the ENSU list. Some more extreme than others.”
“And all anonymous, untraceable, et cetera.”
“Well, we use PURDAH.”
Corvallis sighed. “I’ll bite. What is PURDAH?”
Pluto was delighted that he had asked. “Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”
Corvallis leaned back and thought about it for a bit. Some parts of it were obvious, others less so. “How does holography enter into it? That’s a way of making three-dimensional pictures, right?”
“That’s the modern usage. It’s a very old word. Academically, ‘holograph’ means a manuscript written entirely in one hand.”
“One hand?”
“Manu. Script. Hand. Writing,” Pluto said, incredulous at his slowness. “How can you tell if an ancient manuscript was written entirely by one person? The handwriting is the same all the way through, that’s how. The author’s name might not be known, but you can identify them, in a sense, by their handwriting—with greater certainty than could ever be conferred by their name alone.”
“I’ll give you that much,” Corvallis said. “Writing a name on a title page is easy. Forging a whole document written in a consistent hand is hard.”
“It is damn near unforgeable evidence that one specific person wrote the whole manuscript. That’s what a holograph is—it’s what the word denoted before it came to be used to mean three-D image technology.”
“So ‘holography’—the H in ‘PURDAH’—is shorthand for ‘creating documents that are provably traceable to a given author.’”
“Documents or any other kind of digital activity,” Pluto corrected him.
“And just like a holograph doesn’t need the author’s name on the title page—”
“Anonymous Holography,” Pluto reminded him, with a satisfied nod.
“Run the whole thing by me again?”
“Personal Unseverable Registered Designator for Anonymous Holography.”
“It’s just an anonymous ID,” Corvallis said, “dressed up with a fancy name.”
“Well, yes and no. Anonymous IDs aren’t registered anywhere. PURDAHs are registered using a distributed ledger, so their veracity can be checked anytime, by anyone. ‘Unseverable’ means that no one can take it away from you, as long as you take reasonable precautions.”
“And Personal?”
“Just there to make the acronym work out, I guess,” Pluto said. “But each PURDAH is linked to a ‘person’ in the legal sense of that term, meaning a human being, or a legal person like a corporation.”
“So anyway,” Corvallis guessed, “all of the people involved in this Ethical Network Sabotage Undertaking are talking to each other and posting documents using some kind of PURDAH system.”
“It’s not very systematic. Really clunky to use. We could use some help from an investor to clean it up, put a UI on it.”
“Pluto, you just told me a few hours ago that you have nineteen times as much money as I do, why don’t you fucking invest in it?”
“It’s not in my wheelhouse.”
Corvallis sighed. “Here’s what I’m getting at, Pluto. This thing that just happened? The Moab hoax? It was really well done. Like, eerily well pulled off. I mean, maybe when we’re done sifting through the wreckage we’ll find a place where they put a foot wrong, but overall, it was a masterpiece. I’m wondering who is smart and well organized enough to do something like that.”
“I already told you it wasn’t me.”
“And I believe you. But I wonder if you know the perpetrator. Not personally but through their PURDAH. I’m wondering if they are part of your loose ENSU network.”
Pluto shrugged. “There’s a lot of interest in the topic of distributed organizations. Which means, a network of PURDAHs that operates by an agreed-on set of rules just like a normal company, but with no identifiable center.”
“You’re saying that the people who ran the Moab hoax could have secretly set up one of these distributed organizations to do it. And they didn’t invite you, because you didn’t know the secret handshake or you said the wrong thing once in a discussion thread.”
“It’s possible. But I doubt it.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Russians again?”
“What’s their upside in running something this big, though?” Corvallis asked. “Who benefits from Moab?”
“What’s your opinion?” Pluto asked.
“ENSU benefits. People who hate the Miasma for being so unreliable, who have been dreaming of replacing it with something better, more secure.”
“I can’t argue with that!” Pluto said, with a delighted chuckle. And something in that childlike expression of enjoyment twigged Corvallis to a flaw in his own argument. Pluto had an infinite amount of money, sure. So he had means. But did he have a motive? Well, sort of. He and thousands of other hackers, including all of his ENSU buddies, were perpetually annoyed with the Miasma’s security deficiencies. But was that alone sufficient motive to perpetrate a hoax on the scale of Moab? People had died. Thirty-one, at last count, had perished in traffic accidents or of heart attacks and strokes suffered while fleeing from imaginary bombs. Who would do something like that?
The obvious motive was money. Someone had figured out a way to profit from the hoax, most likely by short-selling stock. And no doubt the SEC was already investigating that angle, combing through stock exchange records for suspicious patterns of activity in the days leading up to it. Or maybe it was a more subtle play, something that the SEC wouldn’t be able to pin on anyone.
But it seemed like a roundabout and uncommonly irresponsible way to get slightly richer. Anyone with the brains and the technical acumen needed to pull this off would have other opportunities.
Corvallis pondered it as the jet winged south and west, across the equator, across the international date line.