Bikini Mudwrestling: Alfie v. Big Brother

The first thing they teach you about the spy trade is don't get caught. Not Alfie, of course, since they never bothered to teach him anything useful. He was now, by the end, a useful fool who had gotten out of control.

But Alfie had his own philosophy on this topic. It was one he adopted from the beginning: built-in obsolescence. Under this premise, in a world where everybody is sharing information and new technologies are busy stripping away layer after layer of privacy or secrecy, you are inevitably going to get caught, no matter what you do.

And the hard work of battling state and non-state enemies still had to get done, so one had to just get on with it and accept the fact that someday you're going to be exposed. It's just that rather than be killed by the enemy, you're given hair dye, a flag pin, and exiled to the suburbs.

Alfie had received that morning a call from an old acquaintance on a disposable number. He left a message asking Alfie to ring him back, but the reality is that the two weren't supposed to be talking. Alfie sent the fellow a few text messages in response, and finally the guy responded

"Wa-tup?" he asked, as if Alfie had been the one who initiated the contact, and not him.

Alfie responded: "Nothing. You?" Then he added. "Usual unfunded mandate. No $$"

Alfie just had to dip that financial oar in the water in the off chance his buddy had money for a project and maybe they could finally get something going. The guy didn't bother to reply. What was the point? He was like Alfie, another penniless operative carrying The System around his neck like a dead albatross.

Obviously Big Brother had asked his pal to give Alfie a bell. The purpose of this little interaction was to conjure up his face in Alfie's mind's eye, all droopy mouthed and dour, bloodshot eyes: "Please don't burn us," was what he was saying.

At least they weren't threatening him anymore, and after a time weren't even that mean. Of course nobody feared Big Brother much anymore because they knew he had feet of clay. Who could fear an entity that couldn't even arrange for the thugs who exposed Valerie Wilson to come to a bad end in a car accident?

It was the dawning of the age of obsequiousness.

Alfie was shaken from his musings by a coded message. Like all of these messages he had received over the years, he couldn't figure it out. This was because Big Brother had never bothered to take five minutes to teach him how to communicate properly with the Mother Ship.

There was a time when Alfie, the patriotic bonehead, would spend weeks trying to figure out what it was his handlers were trying to say to him, but now he wouldn't even bother: He knew it was just chaff. The handlers hoped he would squander some precious moments trying to decipher it. Not this time.

Instead Alfie opened a digital vein to Big Brother."I have put up with a lot," he opined. "I'll admit I played a bad hand badly, but those were the cards. Now it's a new deal and you have nothing to ante up, do you?" He paused, as if he actually expected a response, then added. "You have an endless capacity to suppress and I have an endless capacity to make trouble. Neither of us is especially good at building things."

He shut down the computer and pulled out the CAT-5 cable. There was no point keeping it online although disconnecting it meant little either. It would be well-trashed by some military or government hacker by the end of the day and he would have to reinstall the operating system. Who knows, this time they might even get pissed off enough to launch a denial of service attack against him again, once he tried to show his face back online. Archie would then call up the help desk at his ISP with a well-worn chestnut:

"Paedophiles," he would declare.

"What?" the attedant would reply with some alarm.

"I can't get online because a paedophile ring is trying to take over my computer. So they can add it to their botnet."

Before the helpdesk attendant could get into the twisted logic of this assertion Alfie would launch into everything that was happening with his computer. "I can see your IP coming up with Wireshark and---"

"Chil-dren!" Alfie would then say. "These people are going after children!"

And so it would go. Alfie would offer such ridiculous arguments in order to offer a sense that the incident was of an importance requiring official inquiry by law enforcement. This itself was a kind of chaff--Alfie's chaff--because the more the attendant dutifully tried to fix his problem the more they would come to realize that the channel that DoS attack was coming in on was, in fact, official.

Once the help desk guy saw that Alfie was being suppressed by somebody in a position of power he would naturally try to get him off the phone, content in the knowledge that Alfie probably deserved the hassle he was getting. One favorite way to get rid of people like Alfie was to suggest that it was on his end: He obviously had a computer virus. And if the attendant was especially cruel he would hint it might have come from visiting porno sites or some other dark corner of the Internet. Either way, the answer could be a quick sorry pal, can't help you and poof, off the phone.

Alfie's attempt to take the extreme line to obfuscate the real situation was a trait he learned from watching right wing politicians on Fox News. As for the hacking exploits themselves, the fear of exposure generally frightened off the attacker and Alfie would be back online soon enough. Generally Big Brother relented after a time, convinced that Alfie had been left whimpering after his latest whuppin'. Or maybe cocktail hour had commenced down at the officer's club, and they all just got bored and went home.

It was an odd and very dysfunctional relationship. On the one hand Alfie knew he could never win, but he didn't have to win. He just had to not lose. Every time he had one of these bare knuckle fist-fights with Big Brother he got a little bit better at taking a chunk out of the big galoot.

And furthermore, Big Brother had the challenge of not leaving a digital trail: A trail that one day could well lead Alfie to the wicked old fascist's lair, where Alfie would corner him amidst cries of Aaaa-HA! while the dark hordes of lawyers behind him would mutter words like settlement and punitive damages. "Ha-yeh, ha-yeh, ha-yeh," Alfie would chortle. "Whadder we got here boys? Oner them vi-o-laters of 'Merican civer libradies"

Alfie chuckled to himself. Yea, right, He always got a little worried, in a cognitive dissonance kind of way, after one of these incidents. The reason was that he had developed an extensive library of actionable scans using Wireshark, Nmap, and a hand full of other free intrusion and penetration detection programs. This would all come in handy once he mopped up the courtroom floor with these guys. He had identified his tormentors down to the agency or military unit just using open source packages.

But on the other hand if he, a guy who despised computers, could track them down, then what about genuine state or non-state actors? It was no wonder that China was kicking our ass with programs like Operation Aurora.

Lest we forget, he told himself, we're all supposed to be on the same team. None of this existential bullshit he found himself so often facing had anything at all to do with national security, battling an external enemy, or keeping the American Republic in one piece while protecting its legacy of liberty, but it was what passed for Alfie's existence, for now anyway.