Pirate Cinema

Chapter 7

Raided!/Landlord surprise/Taking the show on the road

I bought more WiFi on the coach, but there was something wrong with it. I couldn't access Confusing Peach or any of the secret sites that lived inside of it --they just timed out. And two of the webmail accounts I used were also kaput, along with the voice mail site I liked. I poked around and decided that the censorwall on the bus-company's Internet had been updated with a particularly large and indiscriminate blacklist, so I tried some proxies I knew, but they didn't help. I folded away my laptop and looked at the motorway zipping past, the dark night and the raindrops on the window, hoping for sleep or at least some kind of traveler's trance, but my mind kept going back to the soap in the bathroom, my dad's sad, missing teeth, my mum's sagging skin and hollow, wet eyes.

I had the seat to myself, so I took out my mobile and called 26. I'd sent her a steady stream of texts from my parents' place, until she'd sent me back a stern message telling me to stop worrying about her and pay attention to my family, damn it. But I'd missed her fearsomely, with a pang like a toothache, and now that I was headed home -- ha! London was home now, there was a turn-up for the books! -- I found myself trembling with anticipation of having her next to me, spooned up against her on my bed on the floor of the Zeroday, my face buried in the fragrant skin where her neck became her shoulder.

“Cecil?” she said. “Have you heard?” Her voice was tight, hushed.

“Heard what?”

“They've raided Confusing Peach. Took all the servers right out of the rack.”

“What?”

“They went at it like cave-men with stone axes! Took two hundred machines down -- there's thousands of sites offline!”

I felt the blood drain all the way to the soles of my feet. There were any number of reasons I could think of for the coppers to go after Confusing Peach -- the drugs, the parties -- but the timing of the raid made me think that this had more to do with our screening, and all the coverage it had garnered. Sam Brass from the MPA had looked like he was ready to blow a gasket before; now that I was on the front of the paper exhorting people to violate copyright, he must be in full-on volcano mode.

“Why'd they do it?”

26 sighed and didn't say anything and I knew that I was right.

“It should be okay,” she said. I couldn't figure out what she meant -- how could it be okay? The sites that we used as our hubs and gathering place were down, and so were all those other sites. “I mean, the Confusing Peach people always said they kept the logs encrypted, and flushed them every two days in any event. And the main databases were all encrypted -- remember last year when there were all those server crashes because of the high load from the encryption, and they were doing all that begging for us to send them money for an upgrade?”

I did remember it. I hadn't thought much about it at the time, just been annoyed. But now I knew what 26 meant when she said it was okay. She meant that they wouldn't be able to use the Confusing Peach logs to figure out who we all were, where we all lived, what we were all up to.

I'd never given much thought to encryption, for all that I'd used it every day since I was a little kid putting together my first private laptop drives. Depending on how you looked at it, the theory was either very simple or incomprehensibly hard. The simple way of looking at it was that encryption systems were black boxes that took your files and turned them into perfectly unscramble-able gibberish that only you could gain access to. But, of course, I knew that it was a lot more complicated than that: crypto wasn't a perfect and infallible black box, it was an insanely complicated set of mathematical proofs and implementation details that were incredibly hard to get right.