Thirty-Eight

The Great Hall of Geek Fantasies has many rooms. There is the “I am Actually a Wizard” Pavilion, the “I Wrote a Million-Dollar App” Gallery, and the “I Won the Video-Game Tournament” Alcove. But place of pride, largely because it is the only one that could really happen, goes to the “I’m Eating Pizza and Coding While a Sexy Person Watches” Rotunda.

Sitting in my kitchen with an open laptop, a box of pizza, and Mel by my side should have been a high point in my life. The incarnation of my fondest fantasies.

It wasn’t working out that way.

“You misspelled tweet,” said Mel.

“Thanks.” I fixed it and tried to remember what I was doing.

Mel and I had scoured Twitter and had seen that PwnSec tweeted a lot. The tweets all had a similar ring to them, telling me that they were being written by one person. While many people liked the tweets, there was definitely a recurring set of names who almost always had something to say about them. This gave me a plan.

Most people are under the impression that Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media companies consider users to be their customers, and that these companies provide wonderful means of sharing pictures of one’s lunch in order to better the world, or at least in order to better the lives of their users.

I imagine that pigs on a farm see it the same way. They lounge about all day, comparing the quality of today’s slop to yesterday’s slop, complaining that the barn was pretty drafty last night, and generally acting as if they are the farmer’s customers. But of course, they are not. They are the product. And so are we.

Social media allows those with the right tools access to information that could only be guessed at by the Mad Men of the 1960s. Whereas those guys were forced to hold focus groups, send out surveys, and rely upon the genius of guys like Don Draper to suss out the great trends in the market, today’s Mad Men can go to Facebook or Twitter and extract a detailed and extensive web of information about who influences whom, who talks together, and how they feel.

Doing all this requires that programmers be able to access the data on a social-media site, and it was that data that I was going to access tonight. My plan was simple. Gather up the @PwnSec announcements, see who liked them the most, and work from there.

But Mel was getting in the way.

The first problem was not her fault. It was mine. I was unaccustomed to having a pretty woman in my condominium, and I’d never had one there who could understand the code I was writing. The caveman part of my brain grunted in approval.

Tucker write program. Tucker get woman.

The problem with the lower part of your brain is that even though you know it’s an idiot, you can’t keep it from coloring the way you see the world. In my case, an insistent hum of sexual distraction caused the typos that Mel caught.

The second problem was, perhaps, Mel’s fault. She had an uncanny ability to ask me a question just as I was getting a clear picture of what I needed to do next in my program. I’d get the picture, then Mel would ask “What if we did it this way?” and then my plan would be gone.

“You know,” I said. “I’m not making much progress. I’m pretty beat. It’s bedtime.”

“I knew this would happen,” said Mel. “I just knew it.”

“Just knew what?”

“This always happens. Typical guy.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I wasn’t inviting you to bed with me.”

“Inviting me to bed? I didn’t think you were inviting me to bed. Eww.”

“Eww? What were you talking about, then?”

Mel pointed at the two empty beer bottles. “You’re too drunk to code.”

“That’s what always happens?”

Mel stood, grabbing her jacket. “That’s what always happens when guys drink and code. They get sleepy, then sloppy, then they poop out.”

She headed for the front door and turned. “Give me a call tomorrow after you’ve gotten some sleep.” The door clicked shut behind her.

The caveman in my brain was not pleased, not one little bit.

Write code! Show her!

And so I did. Unencumbered by “teamwork,” I was able to crank out a program that catalogued all the PwnSec tweets, the tweets of those who liked those tweets, and the network of followers that surrounded the whole thing. It became clear that there were four people who really cared about PwnSec: @Runway aka Peter aka the headless hacker, @Eliza, @Tron, and @NotAGirl.

All four aliases followed @PwnSec and followed each other. They liked or commented on almost every PwnSec thread, except for
@Eliza, whose own tweets read remarkably like PwnSec tweets, making it pretty clear that @Eliza was the author.

Now to do some doxing.

Having a nickname on the Internet forces one to choose between fame and privacy. If you want identity, then the best thing to do is to use the same nickname on Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet Relay Chat. That way, people who meet you in one place can find you in other places. If you want privacy, however, you use different nicknames in different places, and never engage in cross-channel communication.

The PwnSec nicknames broke all these rules. These kids were definitely in it for the fame. Some Googling showed their names all over the place, and as Peter had learned, it’s almost impossible to have that much cross-communication without having someone make a mistake. I doxed them all. They all lived in and around Boston.

Tomorrow, they’d be getting a visit.