Page 4 of Nearly Roadkill
To:FBCS Investigations
From:DevilsOwn
Date:(transmission garbled)
Subj:Think about this, my fine-fettered friend…
“Of course the entire effort is to put oneself
Outside the ordinary range
Of what are called statistics.”
—Stephen Spender
Budge snorts once and hits SAVE. The hackers are getting downright poetic. At first he’d been alarmed by the ease with which some of these people could read his files, but he’s learned there is nothing you can do about them except collect what they send you, save their electronic signatures, and build a profile—those files are getting fat. Who knows, they might come in handy some day. He has, however, the persistent suspicion that the hackers are only letting him collect what they want him to collect.
It was easy enough to spot patterns in the old days: the object of everyone’s desire had been money, and money had very few possible pathways—into and out of banks, or into and out of the black market. Follow the money, and eventually you’d find your criminal. But money is on the way out, and the world is beginning to trade in information.
Information, Budge quickly discovered, can come from anywhere and can go anywhere else, be it cyberspace or real space. And there is no clearly defined black market for information. Well, none that the Registration Enforcement Task Force is aware of. That’s why Budge is humming happily: he’s discovered a pattern, and it’s finally starting to pay off.
Not that any of his supervisors had wanted to hear about it. A month ago, he’d tried to explain it to them:
“Most people sign onto the Net with whatever name they’re given by the system or whatever name pops into their head at the time,” he’d said to the roomful of FBCS brass. “They tend to go to more or less the same areas of the Net time after time.”
His audience had looked at him blankly. He was used to it.
“Okay,” he continued gamely. “Let’s say some Joe out there is going online using the name JoeBlow, and let’s say you’re going to find him night after night in a corner of the Net called, say, Flirt’s Corner. One guy, one name, one place to hang out and shoot the electronic breeze. With me?”
Heads nodding tentatively. The wordflirthad made most of the men nervous.
“Right,” Budge continued, buoyed slightly.
“Then there’s this other type: the guy who changes his name night to night from JoeBlow to JoeCool to CoolBlue to Blue Velvet to whatever, but that’s still him in that Flirt’s Corner room, no matter what his name is. He’s got a lot of names, but only one personality, like a core identity. He’s no different, really, from the first guy.”
The half-dozen faces bore the unmistakable look of “Yeah, so?” But Budge was on a roll.
“Finally, there’s the guy who keeps changing not only his name but also his entire identity—he doesn’t have a single, unshakable identity.”
His audience had looked decidedly uncomfortable with that one. Single, unshakable identities were, after all, the basis of any social grouping and key to their profiling techniques.
Budge forged ahead. “These folks might hang out in Flirt’s Corner one night, Bible Talk the next night, and Love My Puppy the next. If they’re doing that online,” he’d concluded triumphantly, “they’ll do that offline too. Those are the folks who will refuse to Register their identities with you all.”
It was the undersecretary of the Bureau who’d broken the uneasy silence.
“Even if that is true,” she’d said quietly, “how do you propose to find them? Follow every person on the Net to see how many names each of them has?”
“No, ma’am, no, we don’t have to follow these… what do we call these people? Criminals? Rebels? Freaks? Nah, they’re going to announce themselves to us loud and clear when they fill out their own profiles.”
He thought it was so clear, but nothing but blank stares.
A memo flashing on his screen shakes Budge out of the memory of that meeting.
To:FBCS Investigations
From:Inspections&Reports
Subj:quotas
