The Courier | Secret Life of Data

In 2022, I took part in a short story competition called "The Secret Life of Data" Run by the Jean Golding Institute at the University of Bristol. The purpose was to tell stories around personal data, and try to convey it in a fun & interesting way to a general audience, in the form of a short story. My story (The Courier) came 3'rd over all, and along with 10 other finalists, was published in "The Secret Life of Data Anthology" (ISBN: 978-1-909446-35-9) (PDF, print). I think I wrote it at a time of deep frustration at "academic security research", which seemed often to be trying to apply technological solutions to fundamentally social problems. The story then is an exadurated imagining of what happens when you take all of the tools, concepts and vocabulary we use to describe and enfoce computer security (themselves often derived from much more human and social roots) and re-apply them to the enforcement of social security. It's overwriten, dense, full of nerdy name drops, and it was very fun to write. Not one security researcher who read it and "enjoyed it very much" seemed to get the message, but that's on me.

The Courier

— 1. Transit —

The Courier tightened her grip on the briefcase. This Secret Box, entrusted to her by the client; containing what: she didn’t want to know, could not know, even. Openable only by “Alice” and her key at the other end of the journey. Whomever Alice is, or whatever her business with the client, The Courier prefered to remain ignorant.

Inhaling deeply, she stepped out into the street, joining the seething mass of others going about their business in this electric city. She paused to pat her coat pocket, feeling the familiar shape of her credentials, reminding herself they were there, and the protection they bestowed. It was not wise to be caught without credentials by the monitors. “I have the right to be here, I have the right to do what I’m doing” she reminded herself, heart rate returning to normal after flushing such intrusive thoughts from her head.

Forced on to the path to her destination, unable to step even a little out of bounds, she allowed her mind to wander as her feet could not. As the giant MMU building loomed ahead; she thought: it was not always like this.

She was old enough to remember a time when humans trusted one another implicitly, and there was no need for a profession such as hers. That starry eyed naivete and idealism which had given rise to this electric city and so many others like it. The free flow of information and ideas, the creativity and curiosity ushered in by the new age of instant communication and the replication of ideas which was too cheap to metre. Message boards where one’s pseudonym was not assigned or controlled. A place for every idea and every idea gracefully routed to its place. The dream of Organising The Worlds Information was a shared one, uncorrupted by financial or political motive. When we all aspired to Do Good, rather than the very bare minimum of Don’t Be Evil; or its final incarnation Don’t Get Caught which so quickly subverted it.

The street had widened now into a grand highway. Cars and Packet-busses rushed past the cramped pavement, sucking up all the available bandwidth of the highway faster than new ones could be built. She walked on, careful to stay in her allotted lane. Neon signs passed overhead, their warm glow exaggerated by the thick air of the city. Each one was surrounded by a halo of greasy light, tempting the eye to linger on them until their message remained visible even when your eyes closed.

Pressing on, the MMU building grew until it was foreground, midground and horizon all. Its huge pillars and unadorned concrete facade was so high it seemed to lean out into the street. Everything flowing in and out of the city core had to pass through here. That was one of the first “improvements” The Courier remembered coming in. The promise of “safe separation”, where only that which was supposed to be shared could be shared, and everything else remained hidden. To travel anywhere other than your current neighbourhood required special approval from the city operating systems. Without having your virtual destination address translated into something physical, tangible, by the denizens of the MMU building, you were essentially travelling blind. All but guaranteed to step out of bounds and suffer the immediate consequences. There were tricks of course. Gadgets that let you circumvent their rules and regulations, to “borrow” routes and addresses to one’s destination from other, unsuspecting citizens. Not that The Courier would ever admit to knowing them.

In the queue, she fished her credentials from inside her coat and flashed them to the monitor standing guard at the entrance. Briefly, her capabilities scrolled past the inside of his hyper-visor, checking and checking, looking for the one which granted her permission to travel. Panic rose in her, this was taking too long? Why wasn’t she being allowed through? Everything checked out, she was sure. “I have the right to be here, I have the right to do what I’m doing”.

“Sorry ma'am, cache miss, carry on. You must be the first out of town journey for the day, it’s always slower checking for the first time”.

He waved her through with a flick of his batton and waved the next person forward. Not encouraged by the thought of being the first one to travel this way, she picked up her route information at the next kiosk without looking back. A commotion had broken out further along the queue.

“Do you know who I am? Of course I can travel this way!” - “Check your privileges sir, this capability was revoked weeks ago.” More monitors were being attracted by the attention, like brutish little moths looking for a flame to snuff out. The Courier hurried on, eager not to be swept up in the trouble and end up Containerised.

She stepped onto the transport bus and sank into her allocated position. It hasn’t always been this way, she sighed.

— 2. Daydreams —

The sharp edges of the city’s core gave way to the blurry mess of the suburbs. She gazed out of the window, careful to fully occupy only the allocated space she was given, but still her mind wandered free.

You could understand how it happened. Sort of. Back when the internet was only decades old, it had eaten the world far faster than anyone had expected. Before you knew it, people used it for things no one had even anticipated. Where once there was only the happy chatter of niche communities and new possibilities, now there was the deafening roar of digital heavy industry. Life and death decisions made across infrastructure with no one owner, no one responsible authority, with no guard rails for safety other than the ones you brought yourself. Disaster was inevitable, and so disasters occured.

“We do offensive research in order to better our defence” was the cry of researchers in the past. But there was no one doing defensive research to hear it. Countermeasures weren’t sexy enough to publish in prestigious journals, let alone win grant funding for. What was it to be safe when you could move fast, break things and be rich?

Millions died in the first wave after the accident. When some nation state happened upon another’s particularly dangerous malware toolkit. They stole it, but it escaped into the wider internet. Every piece of technical cunning from the nation’s security services' most deviously creative minds had been poured into this particular piece of malware. Decades of research into the problems of the internet and its connected infrastructure, the naivete and good nature of its original pioneers exploited and warped for clandestine gain.

First it went for the water plants, then transport infrastructure, then finally, when everything electrical which could be corrupted had been, it went for the power sources themselves. Plants, dams and turbines all ground to a halt. By the time the power came back, no trace of the malware was left. Plausible deniability became a popular talking point. In the end, no one could be blamed, because everyone could have been at fault. Everyone was at fault. “We brought this on ourselves” the world cried.

Never again would such negligence be allowed. As once humanity had pulled back from the brink of nuclear apocalypse, so now we would solve for a digital one. Software engineering became one of the least trusted and most regulated professions almost overnight. The very idea that “engineers” could put something out into the world with literally zero guarantees as to its safety or quality became unthinkable. Where once you could go from rookie to pushing to production after a 12 week boot camp, now a degree in computer science took longer to obtain than one in medicine. Doctors after all could only kill their patients serially. To really screw up, you needed a computer, where parallelism was king.

And so for a while, buoyed by the kind of hubris which only those who have been most severely humbled can possess, humanity stumbled into a brief golden age of computer security and safety. Digital security by design! Principles of least privilege! Formally verified or bust! We had solved the problem of computer security, and in the radiance of our success, we basked.

An appropriate number of monuments to the dead were raised. Though, it is ever our nature to celebrate progress more than to scrutinise failure. Not least when the professional class of saviours were also the architects of our original doom. Because the real world was not idle in these distracting years either. Our world was still on a path to ecological ruin. Mother nature, though a slower agent of change than the computer, was no less determined to see a price for negligence paid. And pay we did, but not in the way we expected.

— 3. Suburbs —

The bus transport glided to a halt and The Courier stepped off, feet returning her to the real and present, back from her daydream.

She was in one of the RAM (Random And Miscellaneous) suburbs thrown together in a hurry to accommodate all the refugees who came streaming into the cities after the first famines. The buildings themselves were wrecks from the outside. Flaking cement and rubble littered the roads, themselves cracked to the point where some hardy plant life poked through. Such were the results when two generations of energy and focus went into propping up the virtual at the expense of the physical. “Zero bugs for 1406 days and counting for this neighbourhood’s systems” read a conspicuously clean and functional advert screen. “Zero out of bounds incidents for 10 days and counting”.

Here and there though, there were splashes of colour. Great paintings wrapped buildings in their pigmented embrace. Images of animals, species long extinct, kept alive in memory and mural. Music too drifted from upper story windows, a cacophonous mix of melodies from a hundred different peoples, all clinging to what they had brought with them from their drowned homes. Every speaker, woofer and tweeter tuned minutely to stay within bounds, lest the sound carry further than allowed by the monitors.

Art still flourishes, The Courier thought, because what cannot be perfectly described or identified, cannot be perfectly controlled.

She carried on walking, absorbing the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood. Her destination wasn’t far now, and she was eager to complete the job. Addresses hung from the buildings left and right. Everything was assigned a 128-bit number, uniquely addressable across the entire planet. After all, what cannot be identified, cannot be controlled.

Here and there she could hear groups of people, huddled in front rooms of the creaking buildings or gathered around brazier in an alley. Everyone wore the hunched and chilly look of the purposeless. Just idling, waiting for their scheduled part of their day to begin, or end. She’d read about the mass de-schedulings of late. Thousands of people had been de-prioritised and were now out of work. The inflicted idleness was breeding resentment. The air was thick with it. The Courier became suddenly conscious of how her clothes set her apart as someone who did not belong. She was a tourist here, on safari in the dangerous un-core of the city peripherals.

She clutched the briefcase tighter and marched on. It wasn’t her anyone would be interested in, it was the briefcase. Its contents. Though no computer existed which could break its various ciphers by crude brute force yet, everyone knew they would arrive soon enough. In the meantime, folks were very happy to snatch you off the street now and store you until such time as the box could be made to reveal its secrets. Store now, decrypt later: a professional hazard. However long it took. To think that she risked her life over information she wasn’t even privy too. Still, the pay was good. And everyone knew that to use the internet now was foolish if you did not want your every action traced back to you. Hence the personal service. Physical transit of data had become, in a world of perfect security, much safer than virtual transit. So long as she wasn’t caught and stored that is.

The destination was a warehouse, isolated from other nearby buildings by rubble and rusting fences. Aware that other people seemed to be converging on the other side of the building, she approached the small side-door and knocked.

“Certificate?”

She held her card next to her left eye, allowing both to be scanned. A few moments passed while the chains of authenticity were verified. Layers and layers of trust inherited through acquaintances and friends. Verification complete, the challenger opened the door and let her through, satisfied she was who she claimed to be.

No one simply was any more, they could only claim to be. Existence depended on verifying a claim of personhood, rather than simply observing the physical evidence before the challenger.

Inside was dark and dank. Slivers of light poked through cracks in the derelict roof while dim flood lamps swung lazily throughout the room. Other people were filtering in through doors on the other side, the same hunched creatures she had seen earlier.

“This way” the challenger hissed, resting a hand under her elbow and encouraging her to a small office tucked into the corner of the warehouse. She noted the small stage and makeshift podium. People filtering in were gathering around it. They stood looking anxious, but staid by curiosity. And hope.

The office was dingier than the warehouse. A single bulb threw harsh light on a grubby table, two chairs, and someone exceedingly tall and thin. Their black boots and black coat were completely matt, such that they resembled their shadow more than their own image. The shadow nodded to the challenger, who deposited The Courier next to the table and left, closing the office door behind them.

“Do you have it?” The shadow’s voice was to sound as velvet is to touch. Soft, not so much spoken as poured.

She placed the briefcase on the table, presenting its mechanism to the shadow, who deftly inserted their key. More moments passed while the decryption took place. Neither person’s gaze left the box. The Courier's heart beat in her ears, this was the moment which thrilled her most. The correct key would return the message, anything else would destroy it.

The box popped open. Success. The Courier looked away while the shadow took a small tablet from inside and read its contents. Without looking up, the shadow spoke, excited. “Thank you. I am Alice, and you have done us a great service”.

The Courier only nodded, and made to reach for her briefcase.

“Wait” said Alice, placing a gloved hand on the briefcase. “Stay, I have another message for you to carry.”

“That was not our arrangement.”

“And I am not asking. Stay, this is something you will want to hear.”

“I never read the messages I carry.”

“I am not so sure, I sense you carry part of this message already. You look old enough to know, it wasn’t always like this.” Startled to hear her earlier thoughts spoken back to her, The Courier paused in her move to leave. “Stay, sit, listen. Afterwards, do as you please, but my job will be done.” Alice glided out of the office and onto the podium.

Hush fell over the crowd as The Courier leaned in the office door frame, watching from the side. Hundreds of people had filled the warehouse as they had talked, all with the same anxious look of those who knew they weren’t supposed to be there, and the desperation of having nowhere else to go.

The Courier’s gaze returned to Alice, one hand on the podium, the other placing the tablet just in front of her. She tapped the microphone twice, softly, leaned in towards the already transfixed crowd, and began to pour her words over them.

— 4. The Speech —

It was not always like this. It did not have to be this way.

You all know how we got here. First the engineers and the researchers did the good thing. They put their time and energy into the most immediate problem of humanity’s consciousness and, for lack of a better phrase, “solved computer security”.

Ultimately though, security is just a byword for purposeful control. Control of what can and cannot happen, who has the right, who does not. “Security” is simply the enforcement of what the powerful decide is permissible. These engineers, these researchers, did not realise, or want to realise their role as enforcers. For it is hard to make a man (for they often were, men) understand a thing on which his salary, wellbeing and self-image depends upon his not understanding.

Their achievements merely pushed the problem of control out of the realm of the digital and into the realm of the physical, the social, the human. Because when the system is claimed to be perfect, only its inputs can be suspect and corrupted. It is “the user” who is at fault, poisoning the perfect systems with their incompetence or malice. Such was the attitude of the time. Cloaked in the veil of “human factors in cybersecurity”, the ultimate goal (whether they realised or not) was to know how best to control the humans, not their tools. When all of the digital problems are fixed, what is left to fix but the human.

Had the domain of human-caused cataclysm remained inside of our computers, perhaps all would have been different. But while we fixed the digital world, the physical one fell apart. Climate change continued, accelerated and worsened. Millions perished and billions migrated to avoid its effects.

By the time enough people were awake to the problem, only the absolute adherence to the planned solution would do. There could be no special cases, no room for deviance from the collective efforts needed to avert our own extinction. Everyone must comply, or everyone would pay the price. Limits on food and water, living space and breathable air. How could humanity cope with so sudden a need and necessity to change their behaviour?

When all you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail. Such was the solution proposed by the engineers and the academics who had so recently come to humanity's rescue. “We solved it for computer security, we can use the same approach for human security” they chimed.

And so it was. Gradually, the concepts, language and tools used to harness the chaos of the digital began to be applied to the social.

Every behaviour monitored, every action checked. Freedom to do became permission to do. Where once the default was to allow, now the principle of least privilege crept into our psyches as well. Did you really “need” to do this? Or that? If not, you were denied. Trying to access more resources than your allocation? You were no longer breaking the law. You were “Out Of Bounds”. The degree did not matter, the punishment was the same. Containerised, unable to affect your surroundings or be affected by them, everyone became a process: spawned, run, controlled and, if out of bounds, killed.

In the name of saving humanity from itself, we took solutions to engineering problems and applied them to social problems. Human problems.

In doing so we have not solved the problem of humanity's greed and shortsightedness, but turned ourselves into the very tools which were supposed to serve us.

We were not meant to live this way. Even in the face of climate catastrophe, if we allow the tools of our creation and dangers of our curiosity to rule us, then what is left of humanity to save? We should have chosen community, not control. Collective responsibility, not individual oppression. Collaborative solutions, not top down diktats and assertions. Education of the many, not the elevation of the few. “Don’t roll your own” should have been “build your own and be responsible for it”. Instead, we let the knowledge of digital safety become the domain of a few: mythologised and inaccessible.

We are so much more than our “data”. Reducing us to “our data” is an insult. Data is formless, it requires interpretation and distillation into anything useful. Humans, we interpret for ourselves. We have inherent value to anyone who cares to stop for a second and see. Do not let your worth be reduced to data. Rage to be seen for your wisdom, your flaws and your virtues.

This is why we are here. Grave times call for grave actions, but those times are past, and this end has not justified its means. If we do not act now we will be stuck like this forever. A program has no right to rebel against its environment, it has no capability to make a better life for itself without the beneficence of its overlord. This is where we are headed! They seek to make programs of us all. Without the language to even express what ails us, let alone the tools to fight it. This is why your capabilities are granted rather than denied. How long before the capability to even speak these truths is revoked?

You. All of you, you know this. You feel this. Some of you might even have helped, however indirectly or accidentally, to bring all of this about. Sleepwalking into a prison of your own design.

My question to you, is will you hear this and forget, or are you going to do something about it?

— End —

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