Hieroglyph (38 page)

Robert expanded several of the maps to look at them more closely. That land-claims overlay was a dirty trick, and some of the Canadas showed the effect it might have if this was just the opening salvo in a more sophisticated information war. The scariest one was where the electorate somehow woke up to the fact that only 16 percent of the eligible voters had cast their ballots for the sitting government. Robert's party had muzzled Elections Canada back in 2014 so the bureaucrats couldn't even study the actual numbers, much less tell the public that less than 50 percent of them had voted last time. Rob only knew because the Party could afford to pay for private studies.

The more he looked at the sims, though, the more puzzled he became. “The only scenarios where we can win the next election are ones where we finally negotiate binding land-claims settlements with the Haida and the other First Nations,” he said. “How do they get to extort us and pull a propaganda stunt like that overlay, and still make us look like the bad guys if we don't come to the table?”

Krishnamurti exchanged a glance with the prime minister. “Demographics,” said Bill Michener, who had been prime minister for four years and was comfortable in the job. “The aboriginal population's booming, while the rest of us are in decline; and lately, they're turning out to vote in record numbers.”

“But there's more to it than that,” added the CSIS director. “Five years ago only we could afford the processing power for something like this.” He nodded at the SimCanada maps. “And only we had the data. Now . . . so much information is publicly available, and with block chains running on mobile phone meshnets . . . we think the Haida are running their own SimCanadas. They've been war-gaming this scenario, maybe for months. This isn't just a bunch of boys who got all fired up and decided to make a roadblock. It's a calculated power play directed against the federal government of Canada.”

“It's not about either of these stunts on their own,” said Bill. “It's the overall pattern. They want to do our jobs for us.

“They represent a clear and present danger to Canadian sovereignty. That is why we're having this meeting.

“If the Haida win, there's going to be a domino effect. The First Nations have land claims on
one-third
of Canada's landmass. They're experiencing a baby boom and are growing far faster than the rest of the population. We're aging, retiring, and hopelessly mired in debt while they're debt-free, young, and just entering the workforce.

“Put it all together; the math is easy.

“This is a power grab.”

THEY'D BEEN FLIPPING THROUGH
scenarios for an hour when Bill sent Rob a back-channel request. Rob accepted, giving himself and his old friend an encrypted private channel.

“Bill, what are we really going to do about this?” said Rob before the prime minister could speak. “This isn't Quebec and whoever they are, those hackers aren't the FLQ. They're not trying to separate; they want something else. But what?”

“Yeah, as to that . . .” Bill stared pensively off to his left, which for Rob was a blank wall but was probably the window on Bill's end of the connection. “You know I used to go to the Davos conferences. Couple years back, the president of Paraguay comes up to me and he says, ‘Do you have any power?' I mean, I wasn't the PM yet, I had your job, but . . . At first I just stared at him. But he says he's been talking to prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, you name it, and they all say the same thing. Ten years ago, they could have done things. But now? There's international treaties and grassroots watchdogs, NGOs, churches, even reality shows all tramping around in what used to be our space. Most of all, there's the block chain, this thing they say runs Bitcoin. If you're, I dunno, some kid living in Africa, and you've got a smartphone, you don't need to use your nation's currency, you can use Bitcoin. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can register anything with the block chain: property ownership, health status, laws, citizenship . . . That kid in Africa doesn't
need
his government—he's got the Internet.

“Miguel said that everybody's having the same experience. Either they've finally gotten to the place where they expected to have real power only to discover they don't have it, or they've been in power for twenty years and watched it drain away over that time.”

“Yeah.” Rob shrugged. “I thought that's why the NSA tried to take over the Net. 'Cause it was a threat.”

“Sure.” Bill had a rueful look on his face. “Problem is, the block chain and all that other stuff—like that ownership overlay—really has little to do with what's happening. It's more about economics, education, mobility . . .”

Rob sat down so he could get a better look at Bill without the interface shaking. They'd talked about the need to clean up the Canadian political landscape before, but mostly back in university. The subject hadn't come up since they'd actually risen to become the country's leadership. Both of them had been laying the groundwork for a purge for years, secure in the knowledge that the other had his back. So what was this bullshit about the president of Paraguay?

“Look, there's nothing going on we can't manage,” he said. “You know we have something on everyone. Journalists, activists, housewives—anybody who ever used the Internet. It's in the Criminal Leads database, and Krishnamurti has it. Everybody's accidentally stumbled into a kiddie porn website or pirated movies or exchanged dirty e-mails with a coworker. Everybody's done something we can hang over their head.”

“I don't think that'll help,” said Bill, but Rob smiled.

“What I'm saying is we don't need to impose the War Measures Act to deal with something like Haida secessionists. A while back I had the NSA/CSEC database cross-linked with the enemies list in CIMS.”

“You what?” Bill sat up straighter. “You combined the files?”

The Party's Constituent Information Management System was the confidential database where all its friends and enemies were listed: at its simplest, it noted who'd donated to the Party, and who had told the canvassers to go to hell. Previous governments had not had enough foresight to divide up a constituents list so neatly into friends and enemies—remarkably naive of them.

“The NSA was more than happy to give us the data and CSIS mined it for incriminating patterns. I covered our asses by using the Freedom of Information Act to do a ministerial request with another pretext. You could say the data fell off the back of a truck and into the Party database. All it takes now is a single query to produce a list of enemies plus the grounds for issuing warrants for them. They can all be rounded up by tomorrow, if you want.”

The prime minister shook his head. “The NSA didn't dismantle American privacy because they thought the Net might
become
a threat. They felt the power slipping through their fingers for years by that point. They did it 'cause they were scared. And it would have worked during the dot-com boom—but by the time they did it, secrecy wasn't where power hid any longer.

“If the bastards we're dealing with can make an overlay like the one you just saw, they can also make one based on your list. They may not
have
the list, but they'll have a pretty good idea who we're likely to be watching. And you can bet there's buggers out there who data-mine arrest reports looking for patterns just like the one that'd show up if we did what you're suggesting. They'll stick the data in the block chain where we can't censor it, even with War Measures in place and your man in the RCMP on side. Once the dust settled there'd be a nonconfidence vote and we'd be out of power.

“The fact is we're going to negotiate.” He laughed at the expression on Rob's face. “To start with, I mean. It'll go wrong, it always does. And when it escalates—and we both know it will—we'll have our pretext and the approval of the public when we come down on them like the proverbial ton of bricks. Your job is going to be to do the negotiation.”

And keep the status quo,
thought Rob. Well, of course; stalling on land-claims settlements was a great Canadian governmental tradition.

“We have to get a handle on these hackers first. That's . . . another reason I wanted to talk to you.”

“Because of the CSEC data?”

“No. Listen, Rob, I don't think you have anything to do with what's going on here, but you know somebody who does—somebody, in fact, who's a silent partner bankrolling a goodly portion of the Haida Gwaii meshnet. The money's in Gwaiicoin, but we were able to follow it.” Bill told him where the trail had ended. Rob leaped to his feet, swearing.

“You've got to be kidding me!”

“There's a traitor in your house, Rob. I'm going to trust you to take care of it.”

Rob shook his head. He'd come to expect betrayals in his long career, but this one . . .

“I'll deal with it, Bill. Tonight.”

“YOU REALLY DIDN'T HAVE
to come, the tanker thing's all over the news,” said Terry as he made to close the door; then he noticed the RCMP security squad on the steps and scattered down the walk. “Oh. I guess you're not staying for supper . . .”

“Hi, Dad!” Margaret emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray of deviled eggs. “You heard we bought the place?”

“That's not why I'm here. Listen, I need to talk to you,” he said to Terry. “About the Haida negotiations.”

Terry glanced at the security team. He went down the hall to his little home office and Rob followed. Once they were inside, Terry shut the door and leaned on the computer desk, crossing his arms.

“What can I do for you, Dad?”

Rob had thought about how he would handle this. Krishnamurti had some damning information—but not enough. His relationship with Terry hadn't exactly been . . . comfortable, the past few years. If Krishnamurti was wrong, and Rob blew his stack at Terry . . . he made sure he smiled as he said, “The Haida don't want to use the usual conference format. They're insisting the negotiations happen in public and on the Net. I spent the afternoon having website addresses and acronyms thrown at me until my head spun. I don't understand this stuff, and I need somebody who does.”

“Oh.” Terry smiled. He looked genuinely happy. “What tools are they using?”

Rob rummaged in his coat pocket for the paper he'd been writing on during this afternoon's briefing. Of course CSIS and CSEC had people who could explain this better than Terry. “They're picking delegates via sortition from a pool that's developed using something called”—he squinted—“dynamically distributed democracy. What the hell?”

“Ah.” Terry waved a dismissive hand. “That's just where people delegate other people to represent them. Rather than voting for some candidate, you might delegate me because you don't have time to look at the issues but you trust me; other people might do the same, and then I might delegate my aggregate to somebody who
I
trust. It sounds cumbersome, but you can use a networking protocol called Promise Theory to implement it right down to the hardware level—”

“Whatever. And what about this website, Wegetit.com? They're insisting that I register. Something about using it during the negotiations. Is this something they're gonna use to manipulate the process?”

Terry shrugged. “No more than Robert's Rules manipulates a meeting. Less so, actually. I can help you set it up.”

“I'm gonna end up with a
profile,
” grumbled Rob, “and then they're gonna use it against me. This is like those damned Dorians you and Maggie were using this morning, isn't it?”

“Nobody's using the Dorians against us, Dad. Dorians are just little pictures of yourself, one for each major decision you're thinking of making. Let's say you're thinking about quitting smoking. Your Dorian takes the data you give it—your age, health, and if you use a sports tracker it'll take your fitness levels, if you buy through a grocery delivery site it'll know your diet—and compares it to known outcomes for that demographic. Those little pictures of you—the Dorians—look happier or sadder, richer or poorer or sicker depending on the outcome. The Dorian for you in ten years if you smoke like a chimney is going to look different from the one where you quit cold turkey right now. And your Dorians get combined, so if you quit smoking but take up, I dunno, marathon running, then the good might counterbalance the bad. The game is to get your Dorian looking better and better—healthier, richer, and happier. If I want to do something like, say, buy a house, I tell my Dorians, and they look at outcomes for people like me and draw me a spectrum of faces based on usual choices.”

© 2013, Nina Miller / ASU

“That's ridiculous,” said Rob. But Terry shook his head.

“People have a huge amount of neural wiring dedicated to reading faces, so if you want to map a complex set of data in such a way that people can recognize tiny but significant changes between versions, the best way is to chart it as two or more faces where the differences are in how close together your eyes are, or how many crow's-feet you've got. A difference that's so minuscule that you'd never see it on a chart will be instantly visible as a face.