It Could Happen Here - CZM Book Club: Escape, part two

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

Margaret reads the second half of an anonymously authored speculative fiction story about what people could do if large scale roundups began, and discusses it with an anarchist technology enthusiast.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey all you women's hoops fans, and folks who just don't know yet that they're women's hoops fans. We've got a big week over at Good Game with Sarah Spayne as we near the end of one of the most exciting women's college basketball seasons ever. The most parody we've seen in years, with games coming down to the wire and everyone wondering which team will be crowned national champions this weekend in Tampa. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spayne on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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And innovators like Jenny Nguyen. I would say 50% of the people that come visit the Sports Bra aren't sports fans. They come to be in community. They come to be part of this culture. Courtside with Laura Karenty is an iHeart Women's Sports Production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment.

Listen to Courtside with Laura Karenty on the iHeart radioio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu,

there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that prohibition was going to backfire so badly, it just might leave thousands dead from poison. Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Okay, Sam, that has to be the craziest podcasts. He wasn't with her. And it took me less than an hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Did you even? Well, to find out how this story ends, follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media Book Club, Book Club, Book Club, Book Club, Book Club, Book Club, Book Club, Book Club, it's the Cool Zone Media Book Club. Hello, welcome to Cool Zone Media Book Club, the only book club where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and my guest today to talk about tech security as it relates to this piece of speculative fiction is Greg.

Hi Greg. Hi. Nice to see you again. Yeah, nice to see you. I think we called you an anarchist technology enthusiast, I believe. I'm still enthusiastic, I think. That's great. I'm a like, I'm of two minds all the time about technology.

I'm both very interested in it. It's like one of my hobbies since I was very young. And I also think it's bad and we should just sort of throw all our laptops in the ocean. I go back and forth about these several times a day. It's very expensive to go back and forth about. I've spent a lot of money on laptops. And the ocean probably doesn't appreciate it much. No, it really doesn't. But you know, it's like so big you anything you put in there. It's just it's fine, right?

Yeah car batteries in the ocean. That's what I hear What does that actually do Putting a car battery in the ocean. Well, I imagine it leaks and it like electrify the ocean Is there like a mass of water at which it can no longer electrify? I think that electric yields probably take care of that enough for us. I think a single car battery is not going to do much. I mean, you're the one who told me that you could just touch car batteries and I was like, oh yeah, you can.

Oh, that's right. Yeah, I like 12 volt DC electricity or even 24 volt DC electricity in general that's the stuff I like. I mean DC is the is the one that Tesla approved of right and AC was the bad guy right? Or did I mix that up? So much I think Edison and Tesla had a pissing match and I am gonna lose all of my long lost seat punk cred that I don't remember which one was which. Yikes. Well, I know that Edison electrocuted an elephant and he's an asshole.

He also filmed when Shogosh got executed. Oof. Anyway, so we are reading from a piece called Escape put put out by CrimeThink, which is an anarchist publishing collective. And it's a piece of speculative fiction by an anonymous author. We started with part one last week. You should really go back and listen to it. And it is based on the idea that all of anarchists and presumably a lot of other sort of political undesirables are

suddenly raided and declared illegal within the United States, a reasonably near future, sort of a could happen tonight kind of timeline. And I brought Greg on because this piece talks a lot about a lot of different technological solutions to various problems. And I wanted to talk through how realistic those different solutions are, if there's other solutions, and, but not to necessarily,

I like this piece because I like that people are writing pieces like this. And I think that this is a kind of conversation that we need to be having more and more. I'm actually sort of hoping I get to run more book clubs talking about kind of similar things in the near future. Or I'm hoping that everything bad goes away and I'm just writing about the bad old world.

Anyway, where we last left our heroes, there's three different groups of people and they've all gone on the run and they're all kind of going now what? Now that they've all gone on the run and they're all kind of going now what now that they've all just barely escaped. So this section, chapter as it might be called, is called Communications. Jake doesn't have to trust the new app everyone's using while signals down. Long ago everyone in his affinity group created GPG key pairs, then verified each other's

keys and signed them. They also created private backup email accounts on other platforms, only to be used in emergencies. Jake's RiseUp account may be down, but his GPG keys were in the encrypted folder on his cached USB, along with a list of backup email accounts of his comrades. He goes through each one, encrypting a message to that person's public key and sending it to their backup email. After a couple hours at the cafe, one of them sends a message back to him.

Ethan is still free. Jake asks to know if he knows anything about Big C's supposed posts. Ethan says he'll check with someone in Big C's crew. He's also in contact with Ash. Ash emails back with a public key for Big C. She signs his key with her own. Ethan checks it and sees that it matches the public key

for Ash that he signed. Then he signs Big C's key and sends it to Jake. Jake messages Big C on the new app everyone is using. I'm just going to interject here. See how that's confusing? Anyway, it's hard to follow. Okay, anyway, back to it. On the other hand, I end up writing meetings, so I can't really talk shit.

Writing meetings into fiction is very complicated. Writing GPG into fiction is very complicated. Okay, now actually back to it. Ash emails back with a public key for Big C. She signs his key with her own. Ethan checks it and sees that it matches the public key for Ash that he's signed. Then he signs Big C's key and sends it to Jake. Jake messages Big C on the new app everyone is using. Instead of sending anything in clear text, he encrypts a message to the key he has for Big C. He adds his own

public key. On that same app in the general channel they're all using, someone's screaming that another account is a honeypot. People stop posting. If they move to a different channel or a different app, they never send Jake anything about it. But that doesn't matter because Big C responds his message likewise encrypted using GPG and then pasted within this new app. Jake decrypts and checks that it was signed by the same key for Big C that his friend Ethan certified. There's a time and location. Back room of a donut shop a couple punks work at. 11 p.m.

Jake spends most of the day at the cafe trying not to attract attention. Then he scarfs down some fast food and gets a bus across town to the doughnut shop. He gets off a couple stops early and circles around it on back streets, looking for any car or person that could be staking things out. He decides to wait a little longer in an alley. But the alley isn't empty. Ethan's there, smoking a cigarette and also scoping things out. They hug.

You're the first person I've seen in like two days, man. Ethan's heard a rumor about some kind of legal defense committee being set up, but he can't stand one of the people he thinks is in it. Jake quietly regales him with the saga of his nearly nude escape. They look at the donut shop down the street. If it's a trap, maybe only one of us should go. I'll go.

If it's chill, I'll come back out and get you. Maybe they raid us only once we're all inside. Do you wanna wait out here all night? Fuck man, I don't know. Jake goes in. A punk he doesn't know ushers him through the employee's side door. It's just three. Big C, usually known as Cookie, the unknown punk, and Ash. Ash is chowing down on donuts nervously. Cookie gets up and extends out a hand, then turns it into an awkward hug. They don't really know each other like that, but Jake accepts, surprisingly eager for physical

touch. Are we waiting for anybody else? Who'd you share this with? I don't fucking know. I told Ash and Sydney, and Sydney said she just told her band, but like I don't trust them to- Hey, Mitch is cool. Yeah to. Hey Mitch is cool. Yeah sure Mitch is cool.

I'm just saying I don't trust them not to tell someone random, you know? Jesus says the punk Jake doesn't know, looking out the cracked open employee door. What? It's Zoe. She's down the street but she's coming this way. Some shared glances. No one wants to let Zoe in. Well, let her in.

Half an hour later, the tiny donut store back room is swampy with seven nervous anarchists, Ethan included. What are we fucking doing? Besides running and hiding? I say we make distractions, make them feel like they got the wrong folks. They're not the threat. So what? They've already grabbed everyone. It's not like they're gonna let them go to get us instead.

They'll just keep them detained and then use all their resources on the few of us. No, the last thing we need to do right now is remind them they didn't get all of us. To what fucking end? Solidarity means attack. Look, if you think of some way to bust people out, I'm all for it. But like, right now we can't even keep ourselves safe. We bust people out, we have no way to house them. They're just raiding random, totally apolitical squads. They just cleared the last houseless encampment near the airport.

Look, you can run and hide if you want, honestly. Honestly, I mean that. I don't judge. But I know if I was captured right now, the number one thing I'd want to see in this world would be cop cars on fire in the county jail parking lot. The meeting ends a couple hours later. They have sorted into two groups and a lone individual. One group will focus on risky active strikes.

The other group will try to build an underground capable of keeping people safe. Ash is going to run a clearinghouse email account to take submissions and push out notifications. Only people within the signed network of GPG keys. If they shut down her email she'll just pivot to a different one, using the same keys and sending to the same recipients. They can't shut down email wholesale, too much of capitalism runs on it. She'll try to maintain a public counter-info site for certain announcements marked to be public, but no promises.

Two of the punks present are going to be shown how to use GPG. Jake and Ethan head out into the night. Ethan's got a van they can sleep in. Kat said that Vera could stay as long as she needed, but they've never actually lived together before. And as the weeks go by, little frictions keep coming up. Vera forgot she sided with the bandmate of Kat's old boyfriend that one time, but Kat hasn't.

Kat doesn't approve of the lengthy showers Vera takes. Vera had no idea that Cat was such a morning person. Normally, these would be nothing, but the isolation and background stress is taking a toll. Vera feels like it's hard to keep her head together, hard to be her. Without the reference points of her normal life she feels unmoored and frazzled. Always a step behind. Saying things she would have

thought through more. Cat doesn't have a Netflix account and Vera has nothing to do all day but pace around Cat's basement and read Cat's books. Cat doesn't use the internet much and Vera is trying not to suddenly flood Kat's router with a ton of activity. Every morning, around the time Kat said she sometimes checks her work email, Vera takes the new laptop Kat bought for her and connects to the internet. Insofar as the raids are getting attention, it seems to be mostly because some prominent journalists got detained too.

It joins the background shrieking about journalists' rights being under attack, but the news outlets mostly just want to use that narrative to bolster their subscriptions. With social media effectively gone, there's little coverage of the mass detentions of anarchists, save some conservatives chortling that it was about time, and see, the old establishment was deliberately choosing not to fight terrorism the whole time. She's careful to build a profile of internet activity that doesn't match her prior use. She chooses different websites for news, even to check weather reports. She doesn't want to deviate too far from Cat's previous activity. If Cat

used Bing for searching about mushroom harvests, so will she. If Cat didn't use an ad blocker, she won't add one. The goal is to slowly build up Cat's internet usage so she can use it more frequently while stuck at home. She holds herself back from checking radical websites. In the last three weeks, Vera has almost never left Kat's house. One afternoon, there was an unusual car parked all day within view of the front door. Even Kat was convinced it was sketchy. Kat's home cooking is very cumin and vegetables oriented, but she picks up the Thai food Vera loves a couple times with cash, not card. Vera is hesitant about booting tails off the USB she had on hand and connecting on the

home network because she's worried that will draw attention. Instead, she gets Kat to go to a nearby cafe during the day and write down the Wi-Fi password. Then, in the middle of the night, she goes out with Cat's crusty old laptop, sits behind the café's dumpster, boots tails, and connects to the open internet. A lot of anarchist websites are gone, and the foreign ones are thin on substantive reportbacks. Meaningful news or how-to guides are overshadowed by essays that triumphantly advocate one or another grotesque alliance and declare the time of principles to be over. This provokes, in turn, angry evocative screeds that fetishize death.

To survive is a betrayal of our fallings, says one. It's our duty to die beautifully together. Someone else is aggressively promoting a Patreon. In her backup email account, there's an encrypted message to her, signed by her old comrade Matthew. He survived the raids that got every other anarchist in their town and has taken formal sanctuary in the basement of a Quaker house. The cops seem to know he's there though, or at least suspect it. They keep a squad car parked out front at all hours and have followed the two old Quakers who come and go.

He's heard from a friend who escaped the raids in another city and has been riding the rails. Matthew has a normie friend, a former movement lawyer who has fallen off the radar doing corporate work for a decade, but who he is certain would put his other friend up. It's just that he's got no way to contact him. He has another friend who made it down across the southern border, but his penny list needs a money transfer to get an apartment and look for a job. It could be cryptocurrency, even a mailed check. Is it possible to get an anonymous money transfer?

When Kat gets home, Vera is ready with questions. In the middle of the night, Julie and Maggie have to leave the farm. They drive out with six of their friends lying flat in the back of their truck, supplies and blankets packed on top of them. Every time they swerve around a bend on a back road and see headlights, they flinch, waiting to see if it is the cops or the local militia who promised to kill all of them. The sudden collapse of two major cities from back-to-back environmental disasters has killed thousands, but it has also resulted in the establishment of an immense internal refugee

camp in the South. The rumor is that the authorities can't demand ID because so many people have lost theirs. There are enough white people in the vast camp, with enough friends and family outside, that it looks unlikely they will be purged like so many immigrants had been if they just keep their stories straight and avoid speaking with an accent. They should be safer there than at the farm where they have lived for the last year. The roads are too chaotic, the internal border checkpoints too overwhelmed.

The eight of them make it south intact. They buy Taco Bell and doughnuts along the way. When they get to the camp, the armed guards shake them down, pilfering whatever they think might be of value. From the shoddy posters everywhere, they quickly discover that there are out leftists in the sprawling camp, the kind that want to be an armed gang and won't count as any organizing that isn't under their umbrella. Every few weeks, one of them ends up dead,

and it's rarely from the guards or conservatives. The better relief organizations are all fatigued and thin on resources. They keep getting squeezed out by Christian groups and political organizations looking to gain contracts or legitimacy. It's unclear to what extent this is the ruler's acolytes cannibalizing a federal project in an orgy of corruption and to what extent the powers that be are deliberately inflicting pressure on the refugees. Busses with corporate branding on the sides promise quick work contracts to those in the camps.

People come back bone weary, but they do come back through the security cordons and fencing that surrounds the camp. The ruler brags that this program is finally providing jobs for real citizens. It's said that Amazon is restructuring its national supply chain to center around the concentrated cheap labor that the refugee camp provides. Julie and Maggie keep their heads down, forming a tight circle with their friends from the

farm. When administrators try to split them up into separate tracts of tin sheds, they find a way to meet up again. When the guards took their jewelry and cash, they left them with their bulk filtration system, chemical water purifying tabs, and beaten laptop. These turn out to be worth more than gems within the camp. Being able to purify gallons of water every day makes their crew self-sufficient. What remains of the internet and the rest of the nation isn't much to speak of, but

there's almost nothing in the camp besides a single app that takes over your phone, charges you dearly, and pronounces news headlines from a single source. Julie and Maggie ignore phones entirely, sticking to Maggie's Casio watch and their laptop. They disable the wifi on it and pretend it is just for showing pirated shows. Electrical power is available in the camp for a hefty charge, but folks rig up DIY tin can and magnet turbines in the river that can recharge batteries if you wait long enough. Once you're in camp, you can't leave,

but smugglers promise to get letters or even packages to and from the outside world. Rumor has it that many of them steal whatever you entrust to them and turn anything incriminating over to the cops for rewards. Julie and Maggie have signed GPG keys with everyone they lived with at the farm and those who didn't flee with them to the camps are now vital relays to a wider network. The uncle of the three girls they saved has left the adjoining farm to join up with the family further east.

His white father's name and address is above suspicion so far. They operate a rudimentary onion network, mailing USBs out with the smugglers. First, they encrypt a message to the final recipient, then they encrypt that encrypted message, plus a note about how to relay it to them, to a friend, like the uncle. This encrypted file they hide is a malformed gif among other memes and similar junk of the sort that has passed around the internal refugee camp. If the smugglers or anyone else inspect the USB on its way to the uncle, they just see some memes and a broken GIF.

It's crude and not every message makes it, but enough do. Soon enough, Julie and Maggie are writing reports on the camps that are getting to anarchist journalists and info sites in other countries. One of the companies that oversees the camp's most hated enforcement drones gets its supply lines attacked in the Mediterranean. The CTO is assassinated at a gala. When news reaches the camp, even conservative grannies who are always on about racist conspiracy theories are suddenly praising those anarchists.

A communique from distant comrades makes its way back through the laborious series of USB exchange. Solidarity, it reads, means attack. Dun, dun, dun. But you know what doesn't mean attack, but instead means shifting to advertisements? It's when I shift to advertisements, like now. Hey there, Ed Helms here, host of Snafu, your favorite podcast about

history's greatest screw ups. It's the 1920s, prohibition is in full swing, and a lot of people are mysteriously dying? Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt is becoming increasingly desperate in forcing prohibition. She was a lone warrior. I mean, how could Mabel not be feeling the pressure? Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, even Congress is full of hypocrites. So if Mabel is going to succeed in laying down the law,

she needs to make the consequences for drinking hurt a lot more, which she does, arguably a little too well. Find out more on season three, episode four of Snafu Formula Six. Listen and subscribe on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in

an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through

the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deep fake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy.

And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer.

Should I stay? Okay Sam, there has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime podcast history. Well John, that's because it's dumpin' week and this user writes, my partner told me when we first got together that he has cancer He's currently living with his mom while he is in recovery So that it takes the pressure off me caring for both him and her baby until he's well enough to move into our new

Home with us good so far well last week we had attempted break-in I asked my husband who was supposed to be at his mom's to come over and change locks But he wouldn't then his mom told me he wasn't with her I went to Facebook and it took me less than an hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Oh, what else is he lying about? Well, one thing my paranoia just wouldn't let up was about the cancer in his treatments.

I asked his mom about it, who told me he doesn't have cancer. She also informed me he was in rehab, not the hospital. He suffered from addiction and was trying to recover for me and our baby. Did she leave him? Well, to find out how the story ends, listen and follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one.

I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language. It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless **** with Me on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever. You get your podcasts. And we're back. Okay, so that was a chapter. What's your take on their onion network of USBs? It seems complicated, honestly.

This section starts to, I think, get into a little bit of science fiction-y just because I don't really know what it would look like. Now because it's hard for me to sort of imagine it, but yes, you could do this. I was thinking of a story though. So during the Edward Snowden links he was trying to get his stuff out to a journalist links. He was trying to get his stuff out to a journalist. And Glenn Greenwald now has gone off the deep end.

But back then, he was a person to talk to about these sorts of things. And Edward Snowden and a researcher from the EFF both tried to get Glenn Greenwald to understand GPG, and they couldn't do it. So I think that there's like, you know, and these both very technical people. And they're like, OK, we're going to teach this journalist how to use GPG. They couldn't do it. So I'm very there's like, you know, and these both very technical people and they're like,

okay, we're going to teach this journalist how to use GPG. They couldn't do it. So I'm very impressed in this section of like how much they're like, oh yeah, we're going to teach these two punks GPG in an evening. And like, maybe you can do that. But again, like you, as you interrupted yourself in the piece, this stuff is complicated and it's complicated to get right and maintain. Like I think that's also, it's like you do it and you're like, okay, it's done. And then you don't think you have to think about it,

but then you lose your key or you lose your private key and then everything's borked. Or you sign somebody's key and they change keys or something like, it's just, it's very complicated. And like this piece tries to break it down and I appreciate that but I I would really like to see sort of like a broken down guide and I think that at the end of this piece they go into it a little bit and I didn't go through that but my I want to challenge you know people who aren't really familiar with this stuff on a day-to-day basis

Go through that tutorial and see how easy it is Because yeah, I don't know if you would make it through the first first pass Yeah, I know. What were your thoughts? I think that It's actually the kind of thing that's a little bit easier with someone teaching you then reading things on the internet about it Yeah, which is sort of ironic considering kind of what it's about. I can imagine this kind of working, but I think that the like lost nodes, like overall the internet wants to reroute around damage, right? Yeah.

But this system doesn't seem like the way I understand it, doesn't seem like it can really reroute around damage. And so it just has damage. And they talk about not everything getting through and things like that. And I think having signed GPG keys with your friends and affinity group and stuff like that makes a certain amount of sense.

I think that there's a use case that actually is kind of interesting about GPG, about how you can use it in these other apps, right? Oh, I don't trust this other thing that people are doing, so I'm going to use this thing. But I also, I think that it presumes like a complete omniscient state actor, you know? Actually, one of the things that I was thinking about with this piece is like, you know, they're talking about like being nervous meeting up in the donut shop and things like that, right? And that makes sense. I would be too.

I would be incredibly nervous. This sounds like the most terrifying thing that anyone could have to, well, among the most terrifying things that people could have to go through. But I also think that, I don't know, my touchstone is more history reading than anything else, right? Because of my other podcast, they should listen to, cool people did cool stuff. And one of the things that I feel like comes up is that shit gets done when people trust people more than they think they should.

Yeah. And this idea of like only trusting the most secure, and I'm not even saying the author is saying this, but like this like level of like only the most secure thing. Like look, if you are planning certain kinds of stuff, which spoiler they start planning in this story, maybe that's the kind of thing you are planning with like absolute complete OPSA, right? But like this getting news in and out stuff, it might not need to be so complicated. Like I would suspect a more likely way is that it is clear text and it comes with a

bribe. You know, like, I don't know. I find the GPG USB thing really interesting and I think it's like an interesting framework. But I also think that like, where's mesh networking in this? Where is, well, I guess radio is going to come up in a little bit. But like, mesh networking seems more interesting to me, right? Yeah. I don't know.

Yes. I think mesh networking solves a little bit different of a problem of more of just like being able to put together sort of a quick ad hoc network, but I agree with you. And I also think like I was talking to a friend about this piece and they were like, oh, I would just use a one-time pad. I'm not gonna go into the details of one-time pad, but.

Yeah, but like one-time pads are a little bit more simpler, but still offer unbreakable encryption, as long as you're keeping the key together. And again, I guess you don't get the advantage of a public and private key, but you still get some security. And I do think that there may be a technique, though, for this of getting out information, is maybe you want it as public as possible sometimes because it sounds like in this world, they're in a space where it's like, it's a media blackout almost.

And it's like, maybe it's a sticker you put on every single like package or something that's going out of a particular place. Or like, my mind went to also HF radio, which is with very little wattage, you can get across the world a message, and then you could at least get it out. Yes, there is ways to triangulate a radio station if it was broadcasting all the time, but I think that that would come up as well. So yeah. There's something to be said with like,

this is a little bit of like, using technical terminology, but like having a data classification standard for the types of messaging you're saying. So like, you know, like you got to consider like what's public information versus private information essentially. So it's like, you know, you don't want to put your social security number out there or your name and address, but like information and news maybe is something that's in a different data classification standard and can be like, oh, okay, these are the precautions that I'm going to take at these different levels of the who needs to know. That makes sense to me. I actually think one of the things that I liked about this particular piece, this chapter of it,

the part where they're just changing where I think it's Vera is just using cats internet It doesn't want to like change the way that the internet gets used and change the way that the algorithm sees it and stuff Like that. I feel like there is like Understanding threat models at different levels. I think that like sometimes you're like, oh I just kind of need to make sure the algorithm doesn't catch like, I don't trigger any like flags of like an AI that's snooping on me and looking for algorithm, like looking for changes in behavior or something like that. Do you know about like browser fingerprinting?

I don't. So there's this thing that exists that is basically like your browser can be a unique identifier for an individual based on things as minute as like the window size. And this is one of the reasons that Tails has a standard window size that it does not change. Like it always gives a certain resolution. So it's exactly the same. So anybody using Tails shows up in exactly the same way.

Because there are, like, you give up when you go to a website, your device gives the browser, you know, the version number and you have cookies in your browser that tell different information. And then also it's like things like, they can determine different people based on like, they're your screen size Yeah, and so I did appreciate it that part of like she understood this threat model of like, okay These are the different ways that like things can be tracked and I'm just gonna use it exactly like this person So it doesn't look like anybody else. I think that's

there are more technical ways to implement that and I think tails does that of course, but Thinking about that. I think is a good idea, especially if you're, and again, I don't think it's saying this in the piece, but I think we're supposed to be expecting that like, yes, we're in a very heightened monitoring state, which maybe we don't exist in today, but like I know like Chinese internet, for example, is more heavily monitored than United States internet at least in an explicit level and

so Yeah, I mean I feel like in the US were just being monitored in a way that they just sell our information advertisers But I feel like yeah that threat model could change or is changing One more thing I want to say about this chunk of it I don't think that hitchhiking and hopping trains is a good way to move around when you want to avoid police. I understand why that was used and I even suspect just literally based on the outlet that is Crime Think that the author might have experienced both of those forms of travel.

But I also have experienced both of those forms of travel. And in my mind, hitchhiking is the easiest way to interact with police. I can't think of a hitchhiking trip I went on where I didn't end up searched or at least stopped and had my ID run, you know? And that's without living in like fascist dystopia look for the anarchist land. And riding trains is a really good way to go to jail in the modern world. I've read a lot of fiction where people are like, we got to go off-grid. I know, let's ride the rails. And everyone's like, yeah.

And I'm like, there isn't a good easy way to get around without drawing attention to yourself or being surveilled like bicycles or draw some attention to yourself. Anyway, yeah, I felt there was another part of this, like around the legal defense and like. I felt there was like a moment of inviting to it's like there was like an individual who was coming, who was like, I don't like them. Yeah. And I thought that was very on point because. Yeah, I like the realization that you're like like sometimes you just got to get over that shit Even though like some of that stuff is real, but it's like there's just a scale There's just a scale of like how much is this person your enemy?

It's the thing that I always go on and on about is deescalate all conflict that isn't with the enemy and people are like well Well, how do you define the enemy and I'm like I kind of define the enemy as if there was a shooting war They'd be shooting at me. Yeah. You know? Not that they are currently, that that's currently what's happening, but if there was one, they'd be shooting at me. I'm like, okay, well it's the enemy. You know? Yeah. And if they're not that, then it's not, ignore the conflict.

It's deescalated. Alright. Exactly. You ready for attack? Yes, attack. Okay, but you know what else you're ready for? Solidarity means attack, right? And solidarity means ads.

Oh, that's the old saying. I forgot. Yeah. Did you know that I learned this more recently? Oh no, I learned this a bit ago, but I've been very happy about it since I'm someone who accidentally sells ads for living through radical content. Do you know that all the old radical newspapers, they all sold ads? Makes sense to me. Yeah, they're like, this local barber's down with the,

the like, you know, socialists organizing this town or the, you know, whatever. Anyway, here's ads and if they're for gambling, don't do it. Oh man. See ya later. Get away with saying that. And here they are. Hey there, Ed Helms here, host of Snafu, your favorite podcast about history's greatest screw ups.

It's the 1920s, Prohibition is in full swing, and a lot of people are mysteriously dying? Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrand is becoming increasingly desperate in forcing prohibition. She was a lone warrior. I mean, how could Mabel not be feeling the pressure? Her bosses are drunks, her agents are incompetent, even Congress is full of hypocrites. So if Mabel is going to succeed in laying down the law, she needs to make the consequences

for drinking hurt a lot more. Which she does, arguably a little too well. Find out more on Season 3, Episode 4 of Snafu Formula 6. Listen and subscribe on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked.

Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about

technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy and I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay?

Okay Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime podcast history. Well John, that's because it's dumpin' week and this user writes, my partner told me when we first got together that he has cancer. He's currently living with his mom while he is in recovery so that it takes the pressure off me caring for both him

and her baby until he's well enough to move into our new home with us. So far. Well, last week we had attempted break-in. I asked my husband who was supposed to be at his mom's to come over and change locks, but he wouldn't. Then his mom told me he wasn't with her. I went to Facebook and it took me less than an hour

to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Oh, what else is he lying about? Well, one thing my paranoia just wouldn't let up was about the cancer in his treatments. I asked his mom about it who told me he doesn't have cancer. She also informed me he was in rehab, not the hospital. He suffered from addiction and was trying to recover for me and our baby.

Did she leave him? Well, to find out how the story ends, listen and follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey kids, it's me, Kevin Smith. And it's me, Harley Quinn Smith. That's my daughter, man, who my wife has always said

is just a beardless, d***less version of me. And that's the name of our podcast, Beardless, D***less Me. I'm the old one. I'm the young one. And every week we try to make each other laugh really hard. Sounds innocent, doesn't it? A lot of cussing, a lot of bad language.

It's for adults only. Or listen to it with your kid. Could be a family show. We're not quite sure. We're still figuring it out. It's a work in progress. Listen to Beardless, S***less Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. You get your podcast. And we're back. Attack

It's actually pretty hard to live in the forest. Jake and Ethan knew it would be when they drove their van far off an abandoned logging road and began burying it with dirt and branches to avoid detection by overhead drones. But they couldn't live in the city anymore. Not after the attack on City Hall. Every night they laugh about the video of the supposedly progressive mayor, the one who had approved the executions of so many of their friends in black sites or ditches,

screaming as he emerged from the burning ruins. Every night we are still alive to cherish this as a gift, they tell each other. It makes freezing on a punctured air mattress and throwing centipedes out of their bedding a little more tolerable. Before they had escaped the city in their increasingly suspect van, stencils had started appearing of the dying mayor's face on the newsreel. Printed underneath was, no pity.

Food is a problem, though. They rapidly pick the surrounding valleys clean of dandelions, miners' lettuce, chickweed, and blackberries. After they almost get caught raiding a dumpster for something with calories in it, they realize they need a better system. Once a month, they make their way through the forest to the outer suburbs of the city. Cookie leaves two plastic bags of food and stove gas canisters for them to pick up in a forested nook just outside an army graveyard. Peanut butter, chocolate, granola, olive oil, instant rice, chili. Sometimes there's also a book or a board game.

There's never any tea for Ethan, though. It's impossible to get hormones for anyone these days. Back at the buried van, they carefully rationed their laptop use, laboriously rebuilding battery charge from a damaged solar panel. They hook up to the Baofang radio at specific times. With email effectively banned, Ash is now running communication bursts in the region via radio. About once a week, she bikes out to random locations around the edge of the city and fires off a blast of noise over ham radio before taking off. A few drones now circle the city taking pictures, triangulating her signal each time she sends it. She's in a race against time with them.

her signal each time she sends it. She's in a race against time with them. This noise is encrypted, of course, and decrypted via private keys now shared by a wider set of anarchist survivors. Each communication burst includes the time of the next burst, though not the place. Jake and Ethan connect their radio to a program on their laptop each time, waiting to read and decrypt. Most nights it's just news from the wider world, ferried in via underground networks, warnings of systemic sweeps planned for certain neighborhoods or local highways being closed by militias. But one night, it's something new.

The ruler of the new regime is coming for a photo op. They're going to drag out one of the comrades that kept alive from the original raids and execute her as the mastermind of the attack on City Hall. There will be a ton of security, but maybe not enough for six different shooters. It's dangerous to keep connecting to the Wi-Fi in the middle of the night at the same cafe. So Vera rotates cafes, making sure that Kat doesn't get the Wi-Fi password on the same days and doesn't bring a phone or device when she does go.

With tour blocked, Vera knows that every time she uses the internet at a cafe to check sketchy websites, it's a signal to the authorities there's a radical still running around her town. She tries not to check sketchy websites the same night at the same cafes where she checks the backup email account she's been using to message with Matthew. She writes most of her emails ahead of time to minimize time on the ground. No more than three minutes connected

than back into the night. The cops could catch her if they really put resources into it, but she's banking on their laziness. Then one day, her emails are blocked. All emails seems to be blocked. There's new ID legislation that's gone into place. This is the last night Vera goes out to a cafe. But by that point,

she's already helped build a relay network across town. Every Monday, Matthew hands a USB to one of his Quaker hosts, who slips it down the side of a bench while sipping coffee in a park. Kat checks on the side of the same bench a couple hours later and brings it home to Vera, who decrypts it. Relay points and drop spots now exist across town because Matthew's efforts to rope in the former movement lawyer have succeeded. There are now two anarchists hiding out on the lam from other cities in his house.

One lives in the attic. The other has changed her hair color, removed some piercings, added a full face of makeup, and is working a job under the table. A month ago, they helped relay the complete archives of a major anarchist collection that had supposedly been purged from a university. It went south with an anarchist backpacking a long mountain trail. Hard drives with copies of the collection are now squirreled away in various places.

Another anarchist that their new network loosely knows has set up a hidden camp on an island in the river, taking a little canoe back and forth into a national park in the wee hours once a week and getting supplies. Kat and the lawyer are finding ways to slip an extra hundred a month to him. Conservatives have been screaming about demolishing the little libraries on people's lawns because liberals stuck a few banned books in them. They have no idea that Vera's network uses them as flags to notify couriers about drops. A pulp sci-fi book with a spine turned inward placed on top of a certain little library means to surreptitiously pick up a USB from a Burger King bag in a trash can down the

street. They're getting a whole system going. Vera doesn't need to know the network beyond her immediate circles. With her pre-existing GPG public keys for certain distant comrades, she can just send encrypted messages with a distant city as a public destination, and wait for couriers and swaps to copy and circulate it until her recipient can decrypt it. Messages get lost but some get through. Through the network distant strangers trade tips and tricks they have learned keeping their

local networks up. With so much of the internet down normies have started engaging in wider swap networks for saved files. It's almost like the libs are making their own little really, really free markets. It doesn't matter that Kat doesn't have a Netflix account because now Vera has access to every show once torrented by local nerds. She keeps the new laptop that accepts such USBs air gapped from everything else.

Even if it's not the show she'd prefer, Vera can watch TV again. Have something to do, knowing they can make a difference helping other anarchists, has Kat and Vera in a much better mood. Their city is a locus point in an emerging national underground railroad. That friend of Matthew's south of the border

that Kat sent cash to, he has a job now and his apartment is packed with anarchists who have survived the dangerous trek across the border. They still have internet down there. As Vera's little sneaker net develops, folks begin to loop in around the edges, certain liberals from the pirate networks who have proven they can be trusted, at least with some things, at least to help relay GPG messages. One of the liberals in the network finds a way to tap into the credit card reader communications

network and sneak packages of information back and forth with a programmer friend in another country. When the Quaker house is raided and Matthew is summarily shot inside, it hardly breaks anyone's stride. And soon enough, the network of safe houses and dead drop couriers is so well established that a subsection of it can risk moving not just people and money, but guns. Julie holds the wound closed while Maggie applies the glue, a contraband gift slipped into the camp via their smuggler friends.

The fallen striker is cursing up a storm, but at least he's not fainting. Where's that blasted red cross worker? The crowd around them isn't howling or chanting. They're just jumping up and down in waves, a tactic somehow revived from decades ago in apartheid South Africa. It makes the earth seem to shiver and shift,

an avalanche of people, a force of nature. The usually sandy ground of the camp is already muddy with the rains of the flash flood. All the jumping makes it squelch in a way that adds up to something like the roar of the ocean. This is it. More bullets are going to fly. But the guards don't have enough and the camp knows it. The gangs have disappeared. The leftists who talk endlessly about a mass strike are nowhere to be

seen. The rune-tattooed fascists who work hand in hand with the guards are magically gone too. A scrawny white boy who usually proudly hawks black market items is beating his chest wildly as he jumps alongside the grizzled Latina dyke who drives the aid workers around. Maggie's Casio watch is beeping with some irrelevant reminder. Their mud-soaked dog is jumping excitedly too, deciding the vast crowd is playing a game with her. Maybe the three of them will survive this too. If that video of the ruler's photo op that was smuggled in is to be believed, anything is possible.

Dun dun dun! And also, it is worth pointing out that CrimeThink has addended a specific note. The publishers endorse Signal as the most secure, widely used option for encrypted messaging. But yeah, alright. The fourth and final chapter. Whatcha thinkin'? Um, well, one of the things is just, this is probably my piece punk roots of just like, I don't think I would be one to be repetitively watching a video of somebody dying and laughing

about it. I know. And I think like shit sucks and it's really important that we keep our humanity in times of crisis. And I don't know if I would be able to do that, but I do think it's important. Yeah, but I'm not sad when you know, like Nazis get hurt, but I don't know. No, there should probably be a heaviness to it, even when it's necessary, yeah, in the science fiction story. But yeah, then they started talking about this like

radio noise encryption thing, which I was thinking a lot about, like I don't know. So a bow thing is a analog radio, and so you would have to connect it to a computer, of course, which they do talk about, but I don't know of any current protocols that you could send in that way that they're describing. But if there was a sort of a network of, it sounds like they're just talking about two

individuals which I was doing a little bit of research and it looks like if you have two people holding a radio at like head height that are, they're both like about six feet tall, you get about six miles of distance. So that's your area of communication. Now, if you're on top of a mountain, I've known people to get like, you know, halfway across the state through a handheld radio. It's kind of pretty amazing.

So you'd have to put that into account as well. And so maybe these people are relatively close by, and then they're using some technology that doesn't exist yet to communicate cryptic messages. I thought you could transmit data like, I know, isn't there a thing where you can like get pictures on your phone from the space station that they send down via radio. Yeah, so that's slow scan television. So that would be a way to do it, is you could use slow scan television and send images. But again, those aren't encrypted. Right, but if you can send data, can't you send encrypted data? Potentially, yeah. I just don't know what exactly that would look like today.

Okay. I don't know if there's a way to put GPG into audio. So I'd have to look up that. But if anybody knows, maybe they can tell us. I think you can transmit data over an analog channel. And if you can transmit data, then you can transmit encrypted data. I know you know more about radios than me. I'm just like... You definitely can. I just don't know what protocol they'd be using. That's what I'm just like. You definitely can. I just don't know what protocol they'd be using. That's what I'm curious about. Ah, I see. Yeah, like the encryption protocol that's used by police is digital.

It's P25. Basically it's like, that's not something a Baofeng can do, is what you're saying. No. It also depends on sort of what you're, like if you connect an analog radio to a computer, there's a lot you can do. Like there's one of the main ways

that ham radio operators communicate today is through computer to computer communication over high frequency bands. Okay. Like, you know, the email blocking thing was interesting to me. I don't know if commerce would allow emails to be blocked. But maybe like businesses maybe would be exempt, but I, that one was a little bit. Like, I just feel like there's so much commerce that happens via email. I don't know.

Yeah. It would have to be like, I mean, you know, we're obviously talking about a fairly different society. I feel like a society changes very dramatically from the start of this story to the end of this story. Yeah. And I guess I could imagine like, well, if there's just like other ways that commerce is like communicating just like different channels, different protocols that are being

developed for it or whatever. It seems like if they can block the Tor network, they could probably block sketchy websites from other countries. Yeah. But that's like maybe nitpicky. I like that they use the Underground Railroad. I actually like this section a lot. This might be my favorite of the four sections in terms of, partly because it starts breaking out of, and now I'm maybe even just being critical of it like as a piece.

Again, I like this piece. I wouldn't have read it if I wouldn't find it interesting. There's a lot of ideological, us anarchists are the smart good ones and everyone else is kind of a bunch of dumb-dumbs or whatever, implied until you get to this part. And now you have liberals who are like part of the dead drop system and you have like- And Quakers. Yeah, that's true. And like, it almost makes sense. This most hopeful section is when they stop only talking to other anarchists and like start working with a broader coalition of

people. Yeah. And I really like that one of the main reference points that they use is the Underground Railroad. I actually think that when it comes to this country, we have an incredibly rich history in this country of what resistance to a system that's even worse than what's presented in this story is.

The genocide slave nightmare country that this country was slash is built upon. And like the Underground Railroad wasn't, I mean, yeah, it had a disproportionate number of Quakers, right? But they weren't like, hey, you better be Quaker or the following type of abolitionist in order to be part of this, you know, there was a lot of trust and There was a lot of like just being like well

We're gonna do what's right, you know and like finding people who are gonna do what's right And so I think the Underground Railroad is a really brilliant touch point Yeah, and I wanted to talk about that a little bit too because like at the end of the piece It seems like they're sort of like having a guerrilla war. And, you know, we have the example of Spain, the Spanish Civil War of having a period of, you know, at least winning or progress or not being completely annihilated. But like. I just get really, I guess, despondent about the fact that like, when fascism has been sort of like,

stamped out, it's been because of other states, like in World War Two, like there was a lot of resistance movement, but if it weren't for the other governments, what would have happened? And I think that like the, it's a two tiered system that needs to happen. I'm not trying to say that like the only resistance to fascism is more state. But certainly the fascist governments that fell quickly, you know, Italy and Germany. And by quickly, I mean, 20 years and 10 years. Yeah, each, you know, that my numbers aren't exact, sorry. And those fell because they entered a war that they lost, right?

A lot of times dictators last until they die. But dictatorships do fall just often a generation or two later, and often because of this upswell of social movements. And especially when the social movements are not afraid of being down with the people who are also doing violence for that cause. And I haven't done as much reading about the resistance to apartheid South Africa as I would like to, but everything I've read about it, you have groups that are working both above ground and underground and like,

and you're pulling in political pressure from elsewhere. And a lot of the Latin American dictatorships that I've read about have fallen in similar ways, where like combination social movement, but then like the people kind of keeping the flame alive are often the people who are burning things down. Yeah, well, and the burning things are often the people who are burning things down. You know? Yeah. Well, and the burning things down and feeding people and taking care of people's kids and

like, I think that there's definitely, I like to see about, you know, the network, you know, that it's not just one thing that is needed. And what this piece I think does really well is kind of calls out like we do kind of need everybody to do whatever they're good at or whatever they feel like is important. Totally. And you're looking at our three protagonists groups doing three different things. Two of them are like burning stuff and shooting people. One of them is, you know, two of them are just moving information around and two of them are like participating in a broad coalition social like movement.

Yeah. Which I do think is a strength of this piece and seeing how like the three of them relate. Well hopefully all that stays science fiction. When I look at this, this is not quite my threat model and I'm more concerned about things going very badly than most of the people I know, to be honest. But this is not quite my threat model, but I think it is absolutely worth thinking about a lot of possibilities and thinking about like how we prepare. And I really appreciate this piece's like Attempt to just breaking down like I don't know here's an idea of how to do some technological stuff and like I think there's a lot of good ideas in it and

Hopefully it never comes to any of that, but you know We'll see I mean I think it's always good to practice and I think that if you're somebody who isn't as familiar with these technologies or haven't done your own threat models or, you know, have had a passing interest in this stuff but never sat down with it, it's totally useful to just say, like, I think one good piece of homework would be try to learn how to use PGP, you know,

and understand at least what's going on under the hood. When somebody mentions it, you're like, oh yeah, I'm familiar with that, I know what's going on under the hood. When somebody mentions it, you're like, oh yeah, I'm familiar with that, I know what's going on. Or try to send your friend a message, I don't know. But yeah, I think if we constantly are sort of, I guess it is a form of play. If we're playing around with these technologies, we're trying to see what works and what doesn't.

And in low stakes situations where we're just sending each other cat memes, we can maybe figure out how to do things when it does matter. Yeah. And I would say in general, I think radio communications and a lot of these things can be fun to play with. Also, those people who lived in a van would have done great if they had cashed a bunch of stuff

in the woods ahead of time or kept their van more prepared. If their van is a very good place to cache things is a van. You know any five gallon buckets of beans and rice you can fit in a van? How many? I don't know but I have a fair number of. Anyway, yep, that's it for Cool's On Media Book Club and next week I will probably get back to my book The Barrel of Send What It May and let something like this comes up and then I get to interrupt it again. But who

knows? Talk to you all soon. Thank you. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly, at coolzonedmedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey all you Women's Hoops fans, and folks who just don't know yet that they're Women's Hoops fans.

We've got a big week over at Good Game with Sarah Spain as we near the end of one of the most exciting women's college basketball seasons ever. The most parody we've seen in years, with games coming down to the wire, and everyone wondering which team will be crowned national champions this weekend in Tampa. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spayne on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, I'm Laura, host of the podcast,

Courtside with Laura Corenti, a masterclass case study of the business of women's sports. I'll be chatting with leaders like tennis icon, Alana Claus. I don't do what I do only for women. I do it for everyone. And I want the whole market. And innovators like Jenny Nguyen. I would say 50% of the people that come visit the Sports Bra aren't sports fans. They come to be in community. They come to be part of this culture.

Courtside with Laura Corenti is an iHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Courtside with Laura Karenty on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Imagine you're scrolling through TikTok. You come across a video of a teenage girl and then a photo of the person suspected of killing her.

It was shocking. It was very shocking. Like that could have been my daughter. Like you never know. I'm Jen Swan. I'm the host of a new podcast called My Friend Daisy. It's the story of how and why a group of teenagers turn to social media to help track down their friend's killer.

Listen to My Friend Daisy on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Okay Sam, that has to be the craziest story in okay story time podcast history. Well John, that's because it's dump of week

and this user writes, last week we had an attempted break-in. I asked my husband, who was supposed to be at his mom's, to come over and change the locks, but his mom told me he wasn't with her. And it took me less than an hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Did you even? Well, to find out how this story ends,

follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.