Six

Boston has two ends, a North End and a South End. It once had a West End, but urban renewal destroyed it in the 1960s. The cozy streets and brick tenements that had been gentrified into prosperity in the North and South End never had a chance to flourish in the West End. Instead, developers evicted the tenants, bulldozed their homes, and put up high-rise apartment buildings. All that’s really left of the West End today is a sign on Storrow Drive that says, If You Lived Here You’d be Home Now.

I had left Adriana’s place in the North End and was heading for my home in the South End when I remembered that the Boston FBI office sat between the two. I pulled out my Pop-Tart-sized Android phablet and called my buddy, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Bobby Miller.

“You in the office?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got some dirty pictures for you.”

“Then come on up.”

I had crossed Government Center, another monument to urban renewal, and had gone on up. I now watched as the Internet rage overtook Bobby Miller.

“Motherfucker!” he said.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Did Maria see these?”

“Yeah, she saw them, and so did all her little Facebook friends.”

“Isn’t she too young for Facebook?”

“Don’t you start.”

Bobby flipped through a few more pictures and said, “You know who’d like to see these? Mel.” He yelled into the hallway, “Hey, Mel! Get in here and check out these pictures!”

Mel: perfect name for a guy who’d love to see porn.

Bobby made eye contact with someone behind me. “Tucker, meet Mel Hunter.”

I turned, expecting to see the sweaty lips and fishy handshake of a porn-lover. Instead I saw the black hair and curvy suit of an FBI agent—a fresh-faced, female FBI agent.

She stuck out her hand. “Special Agent Hunter, Mr. Tucker.”

Bobby said, “Mel is just out of Quantico.”

I shook, noting the warmth of Mel Hunter’s hand and the confidence of her grip. “You can call me Tucker.”

She said, “You can call me Special Agent Hunter.”

“Okay.”

“You two wanted to show me some dirty pictures?”

“How did you know they were dirty?”

“Because Bobby was looking at them.”

Bobby said, “Nice.” He told her the story of the pictures.

Special Agent Hunter flipped through the woman-on-woman action, her eyes flitting around each picture before looking at the next. She seemed to be looking at the pictures without looking at their subject.

“Yeah,” said Hunter, “these are in the database.”

“Database?” I asked.

“Our porn database,” Bobby said.

I said, “Why not keep them in a folder like normal people?”

“We’d lose the indexing,” said Hunter.

“What indexing?”

“You know those websites that track currency?” asked Bobby.

“No.”

“Those ones where you take a buck from your wallet, put the serial number into the site, and it tells you where your money’s been.”

“They have those?”

“Yes.”

“Cool.”

“The FBI does the same thing with porn.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” said Special Agent Hunter. “We originally wrote it to help with child-porn investigations. Then we expanded it. We web-crawl all the porn sites, download the porn, and store it in a database. Then we can track where it’s appeared on the web and who posted and commented on it.”

“Isn’t that spying?”

“Spying shmying,” Bobby said.

“It’s really just collating public data,” said Hunter.

“But if we do get a warrant for some terrorist’s computer, we can use the porn to make connections to other people,” said Bobby. “Porn is a universal tracking system.”

“But it only works for men,” I said.

“Exactly,” Hunter said. “It’s a great filter.”

“That’s creepy on so many levels.”

Hunter tapped on her phone. “Yup. Found them. They were on 4chan.org.”

Bobby asked, “On that /b/ thing?”

“Yeah.”

Bobby said, “Figures.”

“The 4chan/b/ board?” I said. “Gross.”

“Yup,” said Bobby. “The anus of the Internet.”

In 2003, an unassuming student named Christopher Poole got a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. The fifteen-year-old Poole created a website called 4chan.org that let users anonymously post images to the Internet and discuss them. He had imagined that it would be used for anime. He was mostly right, and wildly wrong.

The site provided a variety of discussion boards. Poole named the discussion board for anime 4chan.org/a/, and the board for video games 4chan.org/v/. But as in fairy tales, one board was different from all the other boards, a chaotic board without rules or reason. This was the random board: 4chan.org/b/.

Imagine a website where images that generate a long string of comments and replies float to the top of the message board, while ignored pictures drift down and disappear from view. Next, imagine that you’re a lonely kid who’s desperate to post an image that will keep people talking. What will you post? It probably won’t be kittens in a basket. Unless, of course, the basket were on the Niagara River and the kittens were about to go over the falls. You could also post naked pictures hacked from a celebrity’s phone, an uncensored picture of a gruesome suicide, or unique porn.

4chan.org/b/ really was the anus of the Internet.

“Those pictures were all on 4chan?” I asked Hunter.

“Yup. They were posted two days ago. I can trace them back further if you want.”

“The timing’s right. Maria got hacked yesterday. Can you see who downloaded them?”

“No. That would be spying.”

“I just don’t see how little Gustav got pictures like that.”

Bobby asked, “Who’s Gustav?”

“Gustav Olinsky is Maria’s classmate. He apologized to Maria for the hack. I think his brother Peter might be involved.”

Hunter and Bobby exchanged a glance.

“What?” I said. “You know a ten-year-old named Gustav Olinsky? He on the most-wanted list?”

Bobby looked at his watch. “Don’t we have a meeting, Mel?”

Hunter pulled out her phone, glanced at it. “Crap, you’re right.”

“Yeah, Tucker. We’ve got to get going.”

“We’ll look at those pictures for you and see if we can find anything.”

“Yeah, absolutely. You know the way out, right?”

With that, Bobby and Hunter skedaddled out of the room and down the hall.

I stood in the empty office.

What just happened?

Pulled out my phone. Tweeted:

@TuckerInBoston: That #awkward moment when you clear a room.