Rule 34 - Charles Stross [115]
“Twenty-four hours.” This from the delegate from Beijing, whose screen is an opaque black cube. “That is unacceptable.”
“I fail to see why. The operation is proceeding nominally.”
“The operation is out of control, Colonel. Sequestrating the assets of organized crime is acceptable. Creating a honeypot for international cybercrime in order to shut them down is acceptable. But sheltering murderers is not. There have been regrettable excesses. The younger brother of the chairman of a state party branch that I shall not trouble you with. The aunt of a Central Committee member. You must shut it down now—or we will.”
You grit your teeth. Your stomach churns: “It continues for twenty-four hours, and no more. The operation will conclude tomorrow, at twelve hundred hours, universal time, and not a second earlier.” Maryland and Brussels are opening their mouths: “We’ve got to let it run its course! If we don’t, the CDOs won’t be fully vested—the targets will not be bankrupted, but they will be annoyed with us.”
“They’ll be annoyed with you.” Brussels looks smug.
“Ah, no, I can see you misunderstand me. They’ll certainly be annoyed with me, but also with you, François, and you, Lorna, and you Li”—you stab a finger at Beijing—“because if any of you pull out of your side of the agreement prematurely, I will see to it that full details of this operation are published on the Internet, with all identifying names attached.” Your smile tightens. “Thank you for your help.” You stab a finger hard on the CALL TERMINATE icon before any of them have time to frame a reply, then curse them all for a donkey’s illegitimate get. “Fuck me, when will they learn?” You roll your eyes. “Fucking amateurs.” Jumped-up crime-control bureaucrats with delusions of special-operations grandeur.
You glance at your clock. It’s almost four in the afternoon, and the latest auction of national-debt futures leveraged against Issyk-Kulistan are due to close in an hour. The inflow is tapering off, as expected, but as long as the gangsters keep paying, there’s no reason to weld your wallet shut and go to the end game.
Eagle’s Nest had fucking better be pleased with this day’s work. You’re not sure how much more bullshit you can take.
ADAM: LOLspammers
You should have known it was too good to be true.
With twenty/twenty hindsight, the alarm bells should have started ringing three years ago, when Larry gave his presentation during that BOF breakout session on Network Assisted Crime Prevention at the Fourth International Conference on Emergent Metacognition. You can see him now if you put on your specs and tell your lifelog to retrieve him: enthusiastic, lanky, Midwestern.
“Realistically, we’re trapped between a rock and a hard place,” he explained to the room, hands moving incessantly as he spoke: “The trouble is, there are too many crimes. Three and a half thousand new offences were created in just ten years under one British government. The US Code is even worse—something like a third of a million distinct activities can lead to felony charges by some estimates. Nobody can be expected to keep track of that; it’s inhuman. But with the kind of filtering we’re having to apply to keep the communication channels open and relatively spam-free, it’s more than possible to envisage agent-based monitoring for signs of criminal intent.”
They’ve been keyword-filtering email for decades, looking for terrorist needles in a haystack. But what Larry proposed was different: trawling for patterns of suspicious behaviour online. Take, say, a disgruntled employee bitching about how they hate their boss online. That’s one thing. But if they start hunting the blacknets for templates for machine pistols