Freedom Read Free Page B

I have to ask myself how a software construct with the intelligence of a tapeworm managed to do this to us. The free market quest for efficiency has made our infrastructure vulnerable.”
    BCM: “You can’t expect the market to operate inefficiently . Efficiency is what makes modern life possible.”
    NSA: “Yes, but we might need to place a greater emphasis on resiliency.”
    CSC (gesturing to the screen): “Why? Because a few people are dead? These machines are not militarily significant. They’re glorified toys.”
    NSA: “I was speaking more in terms of network security—but these razorbacks are becoming a serious public relations problem as well. Witnesses have seen these machines navigating at night on highways. People are uploading videos to Web sites.”
    BCM: “We’re already aware of these videos, and are taking steps to minimize their public impact.”
    NSA: “My point is that we may soon have no choice but to reveal the existence of the Daemon to the general public.”
    BCM: “That will be difficult, Mr. Director—especially after going through so much effort to convince the public the Daemon was a hoax. How would you explain executing Peter Sebeck for a crime that never occurred?”
    FBI: “That wasn’t our doing.”
    BCM: “Nonetheless. If word got out that the Daemon had taken control of thousands of corporate networks, it would cause a stock market panic.”
    CSC: “Mr. Director, we can assure you that none of these razorback videos will ever gain credibility by appearing in mainstream news.”
    NSA: “But they’re being shared over the Internet. Millions of people have already seen them.”
    EndoCorp: “That’s a manageable problem.”
    NSA: “What do you mean it’s manageable ?”
    EndoCorp: “We’ve copyrighted the razorback.”
    NSA: “How does copyrighting them solve anything?” EndoCorp: “Owning the IP gives us legal control of their image. We’re spinning these viral videos as stealth advertising for an upcoming video game.”
    CSC: “Which means the general public won’t take them seriously.”
    NSA: “Whose idea was this?”
    CSC: “We don’t get down in the weeds. It was done by our psyops division. As far as the Millennials are concerned, these razorbacks are just guerrilla marketing.”
    CIA: “But people have witnessed these things. People have died . How do we explain that?”
    BCM: “Fact and fiction carry the same intrinsic weight in the marketplace of ideas. Fortunately, reality has no advertising budget.”
    CSC: “Persistence and presence create truth online.” EndoCorp: “We’ve neutralized eyewitnesses in Web forums by flaming them as shills for the game’s whisper campaign. We’ve created 3-D models, and fictitious how-it-was-done videos to ‘prove’ surveillance clips and cell phone videos are fakes.”
    BCM: “So the public knows about razorbacks, but they don’t really know what they know.”
    FBI: “Then we’re using some of Sobol’s jujitsu, then?”
    BCM: “We might even see net revenue on the resulting video game.”
    CIA (shaking his head): “When I hear this crap, I start to understand why Sobol is attacking us.”
    FBI: “Don’t even joke about that.”
    CIA: “Seriously, you’re going to sit there and tell us your idea for combating the Daemon is to develop a video game around it? If Sobol were alive, he would be laughing at us.”
    CSC: “You said yourself that in the short term we can’t remove the Daemon from infected networks without triggering catastrophic data loss. Until a reliable countermeasure is available the only thing we can do to avoid panicking the populace and further disturbing capital markets is to make sure everyone thinks the Daemon is just a fiction.”
    NSA: “And what happens when the Daemon’s army of followers takes more aggressive action?”
    CSC: “Then we call them terrorists—anything but ‘Daemon followers. ’ But we cannot risk direct action against the Daemon itself until we find a way