Re: The Story

[ABLE1 <somebody@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/3/2023 12:44 PM, Bob La Londe wrote:
> I don't think that I'll ever finish it.  I started writing it back in
> the early 90s.  It had a tremendously different build up and didn't
> progress much further than the initial chase. The start was on another
> never ending story board on Timelords BBS where I got annoyed with
> stupid little story breakers and silly twisters.  I started writing
> pages at a time, and everybody else stopped trying to be clever with
> stupid twists.  The original was based on the new way phone lines were
> being installed to more easily facilitate wire tapping, the advent of
> AT&T System 4, a book called "The Great Hacker Crackdown," and credible
> reports that AT&T security was working hand in glove with the Secret
> Service in a manner almost indistinguishable from law enforcement. About
> that same time we were just started to see instances of how bad the RICO
> act and Civil Asset Forfeiture was going to be abused by law enforcement
> to steal from people never charged with a crime.
>
> I borrowed from many contemporary snippets of reality to create a great
> hacker adventure with motorcycle chases, people abducted in the night,
> the ridiculous seizures of everything connected to the public network
> (like your refrigerator), old tech data storage that seemed silly to
> people who hadn't actually done it, and the horror of the ultimate big
> brother spying system.
>
> The grand reveal was always planned to be that the government in
> cooperation with the researchers at Bell Labs (think voice recognition),
> AT&T, and a dark arm of the Secret Service were coordinating to create a
> sleeper program to become the ultimate big brother automatic spying
> system that could monitor all broadcast and wired voice communication,
> search it for keywords, and store communications for human evaluations
> of threats, crime, and disloyalty.
>
> Stuff like this exists today.  How bad its abused I have no clue. **
>
> Yes, I am aware the NSA seems like a more likely candidate than the
> Secret Service on the face of it.  In the real world at that time the
> Secret Service was coordinating in a much more likely manner to be
> involved in something like this.  I borrowed heavily from reality.  I
> wanted people to be stimulated by the adventure, but I wanted the hair
> on the back of their neck to stand on end when they could see elements
> of it in their personal everyday lives.
>
> The wrap up could have gone either of two ways:
>
> Either that all the key players who could expose it were subject to
> extra judicial rendition, or it was mass communicated to the media.  The
> end result would be the same.  The program would continue.  In the event
> of mass exposure by the media two sub plots of the wrap up could occur.
> The realization it was a faite accompli consolidating the power of "big
> brother" over communication between people so no consolidated effort to
> overcome it could form much less prevail.  Nothing could be done.
> Alternatively, it would quickly be moved to a page two story by a Bill
> Clinton -esque "Wag the Dog" type personal war to take over page one...
> Until final steps were in place to... make it a faite accompli.
>
> I could still write that story.  I could tell it from the original story
> line of brave ill fated grey hat hackers persecuted by the government,
> or this new more rich and complex story line of the straight shooting
> family man working for the Secret Service trying to do what's right.
>
> Either way its weak and predictable in the end, but a complete story.
> Asimov would have hated it.  If you read Asimov you may recall he picked
> the final solution in his universe not because it was the right one, but
> because it was the only one that allowed for the universe to change its
> mind.
>
> The last few days I've seen variations on this headline, "AI Kills
> Operator and Destroys Control Tower."Â  It was a simulation, but my first
> thought was..  Remember I borrowed heavily from reality in my story...
> In my story the only possible thought wass, "HOLY FRACKING PERFORATED
> POOP!  AT&T and the Secret Service created Skynet."
>
> After Timelords BBS went off line I continued writing the story for a
> while.  I had visions of creating the the fictional work to face off
> against the mostly documentary "Great Hacker Crackdown."Â  Mine would
> have been titled something silly like, "Hackers & Phreakers & Things
> That Go Bump In The Night."
>
> As I started seeing secondary stories in the news, and hearing other
> similar stories of people being raided and all their assets stolen by
> law enforcement for creating video games and writing stories about some
> of the same hacking elements of reality I had included in my story I
> stopped.  I was building a business, I had a wife, and my son was born.
> On top of that I had some "mostly legal" hacking credibility, I was a
> licensed communication contractor, and I had a bit of experience in
> telecommunications from prior employment.  The real bits of what I was
> writing made the hair on the back of MY neck stand on end.  Is it
> reality.  No of course not, but to many bits of reality thrown in with
> artistic abandon could well have made me a target at the same time in my
> life when I was starting to see some success.
>
> I didn't finish the story back then because I was afraid of real world
> repercussions, and I probably won't finish it now because I've told the
> story in my head a hundred different ways in the last nearly 30 years.
>
> I called Les on the phone some time back and explained some of this back
> story, but maybe not all of it.  Sorry Jim.  You probably won't be
> asking me for a signed copy of Hackers & Phreakers and Things That Go
> Bump in the Night" any time soon.
>
> The story was always fiction, but told around real events and real
> people.  If you want to discredit what is real and what was just the
> story feel free.  It was always intended to be a work of fiction.
>
> ** Your hand held cell phone can spy on your conversations in the old
> way described in my story (even if you have a "dumb" phone), but it can
> spy on your finances, internet history, and even on your reality.  You
> likely have aps on your phone that can turn on your camera and
> microphone and read your files.  I think its illegal in the USA to
> manufacture or import one now that doesn't have built in GPS.  The only
> assurnace you have that its not actively spying one you is because
> Alphabet (Google/YouTube/Android/Etc) tells you what permissions you are
> giving those aps.  Google.  The absolute biggest known data harvester
> and reseller in the world perhaps even dwarfing the Chinese spybot,
> Baidu.  Its not lost on me that the one entity that eclipses all the
> alphabet agencies for spying and data harvesting is named Alphabet.
>
> The previous paragraph is the only thing I have good to say about Apple,
> but remember this.  The FBI did drop their case to force Apple to help
> them break Apple encryption.  The last time I recall a sudden loss of
> interest like that was about PGP.  In both cases I beleive its because
> they cracked it on their own.
>
> Meh, its all fiction.  Enjoy the read.
>
>