The air in the living room of the Torvalds Suite seemed alive from the electric hum and lights of the dozens of custom-made stand-alone computer boxes, monitors, routers, switches, and myriad cables that snaked across the room.

Now were talking, said Todd, seated at the main console. 
Who wants takeout? asked Grant, coming into the suite with a cart piled with white bags and cartons from Thai Gardens. The group of five gathered around and helped themselves to lo mein, fried rice, sushi, shrimp, scallops, lobster, peapods, and orange beef.
So, are we almost ready to launch? asked Garrett in between mouthfuls of lo mein. He had pushed up his VR iShades to see the room in RL.

Almost. The coding is about 95% done,said Todd. We should be ready to launch during the solar eclipse. The Project was in its ninth month and had involved the work of hundreds of programmers from all over the world. Now this hotel room at DEF CON 53 was ground zero.

Did anyone see that talk by Vertex33 about his new jamming technique? asked Claire. He says that it can block the content filters from imagereaders and viewscreens for an entire city block, without being detected.
But, said Beth, in the Q&A VR discussion that followed, it appears that its not completely undetectable and could pose a risk to the user. Jammers were in use all over the country to block the content filters, even though they hadnít been perfected yet and were more or less illegal.
Anyone see the news about the latest scandal about the Apophis Tsunami Recovery Program? asked Claire. Looks like someone misplaced $10 Billion in recovery funds, again, and the restoration of California is still 5 years behind schedule.

I liked the demo using the Mark XXL MFN 3D Printer to make standalone computers, said Grant. This way there is a guarantee that the computer will NOT automatic link to the media-net, completely avoiding the content filters, and can be used for non-DISP video, books, etc. This was part of the retro movement, which also produced non-networked archaic physical media such as optical disks and paper books that didnít use networked electronic paper.
Canít wait for the 24-hour Videodrome show marathon. Said Garett. The Videodrome media-net show, which ran 2032-2040, was based on the classic 1983 movie and is the origin of this yearís DEF CON theme The video screen is the retina of the mindís eye.
Have you heard, said Beth,  DIPS just added 24 more books to the banned list for the Southern Filter District. Thanatos Pharmaceuticals just won a restraining order which prohibits warning notices on their prescribed medication, so those notices are now disappearing from the labels as we speak. Beth hated these kinds of content changes; her mother died after taking medication after a warning notice was so removed.

The retro movement can't keep up, said Todd. We can produce hundreds of stand-alone computers, static books, and non-networked optical disks, but it barely scratches the surface. Two decades ago, all books had been digitized and placed on the media-net. While book printing had not completely died off, the requirement that all new books be printed on networked paper with electronic ink made them just as susceptible to content filters as all the content on the net. Since all electronic communications on the net had been ruled part of the public spectrum its content was first regulated by the FCC and then by its successor, the Department of Intellectual Property Security.

Censorship is ubiquitous, he said. Books are either outright banned or merely sanitized to remove offending content. Same for audio, video, and all other content on the media-net. Copyright law has gone off the rails, also. Corporations and governments routinely file and win copyright lawsuits to take certain information off any existing media. However, other parties are also filing and winning legal decisions to change the content again and again. Toddís brother died from a new infectious disease after censorship in Saudi Arabia kept information about it secret until it had spread to the US.

These changes and censorship changes region by region and sometimes minute by minute, making media-net content more ephemeral than permanent, also, all forms of media content are subject to infection from computer viruses and intrusion from criminal hackers. Garrett continued.Unfortunately, most people have very short attention-spans these days and donít notice or donít seem to mind.
The worse effect is on the young, who not only spend every waking hour on the media-net or in VR space, but also have never lived without censorship and seemingly donít know what they are missing, Claire said. But since their understanding of reality is almost 100% through the media-net and VR space, this manipulation of their extended mind will have deleterious effects. Thus the current saying Donít trust anyone under 30.
That is all bad enough ñ we have massive amounts of content used by everyone in their daily lives that can change at a moment notice, said Todd. But now we have discovered that there is a nationwide semantic change going on in all content, that has been going on for a decade, designed to indoctrinate the public to not question authority, to not challenge the status quo, to not be curious, to accept what they have been told. We donít know specifically who is making these changes, we just know they are being made through the DIPS content filtering servers and that they have been going on for at least ten years. The retro movement and other partial measures wonít suffice, which is why we embarked on The Project.
Todd looked at his console. OK, everything is in place. Now, we just need help from Agent Farnsworth.

* * *

In the Chillout Room, which Farnsworth could see when he switched his VR iShades to ambient, was dimly lit with varied color lights along the ceiling and quickly changing videos playing on dozens of viewscreens. Dozens of attendees were coming and going, or sitting at the many tables, some eating food from the adjacent cafeteria, many just chatting or sharing VRS sessions with others. 
Agent Farnsworth. The voice came from behind him. Suddenly he was surrounded, three people moving into seats at the table with him in the Chillout Room, the speaker standing behind him. They all had random patterns of lights from their VR iShades constantly moving over their heads to defeat the facial recognition systems built into his corneal implants.
Donít bother, the speaker continued. We just severed your connection to DIPS control. Farnsworth suddenly felt blind, deaf, and dumb.

Who am I speaking to? asked Farnsworth. 
You can refer to us as Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta if you like. He pulled up a chair and sat down next to Farnsworth.
You folks having a good time at the Con? Farnsworth asked.
Yes, said Alpha, although its disconcerting to have so many F2F's in Meatspace, itís fun.
Of course, said Gamma, many of our interactions are still taking place in VRS, but at least we can use the highly secure ConCloud instead of the sieve-like public clouds. 
It is exhilarating to attend real talks with a live speaker, though, said Delta. And we can learn things together, in RL for once.
Enough small talk, said Alpha. What are you doing here, undercover?
Just observing. Nothing sinister.
Unlikely. We know you are on a mission. What is it?
You know I can't say. 

DIPS, of course, knew about the retro movement that produced jammers and stand-alone computers and media, but they had heard rumblings of something much bigger afoot, a much larger, more comprehensive than hacker strategy to be hatched at this DEF CON to bring the whole DIPS structure, hallowed by decades of legislation, legal decisions, and technological innovation, crashing down. Of what that strategy was no one in DIPS had a clue, so his mission was to find out and if possible stop it before the end of this DEF CON.
How many other DIPS agents are here? Planning on making any arrests today? The con was probably crawling with DIPS agents. Probably also many NSA, CIA and FBI agents, but DIPS was the real threat. Only the Thought Police mattered.
No, not today. It isn't a crime to just produce static books, as long as the royalty is paid, or to try out proof of concept jamming technologies. Thatís all I've seen here so far.
You knew about that before you came here. Why are you really here?
The gall you hackers have, he said, lashing out. To take it upon yourselves to decide what the world should be like. You romanticize the beauty of the baud, maybe you should have meant Baudrillard. Hmm, you hackers thought that the ëworld of the electron and the switch was your world. Whose world is that, now, really? Be careful of what you wish for.

We wanted a free internet, now the media-net, with free expression and truth, not this constantly shifting content polluted by censorship and patent trolls, said Alpha.
Truth, truth? asked Farnsworth. Truth is what we say it is. People, especially the young, need to be protected from salacious content that could corrupt them. When legal decisions are made by the courts that some information is not true, it must be removed from the content. The nature of truth is not constant, it changes constantly, it's ephemeral-- get used to it.
Censorship is mind control, said Alpha, pure and simple. Protecting people from ësalacious contentí or any content denies them the full experience of life, impairs the learning process, and directs their thinking process in all subtle or gross forms of brainwashing.
And since almost everybody gets almost all their experience through the media-net, not in RL, and because the images on the net and in VR seem more real than the physical reality, the effects of this pervasive censorship and content manipulation is severe, especially on the young, Alpha continued.
While they were talking to Farnsworth, Todd was busy finishing The Project.

***

At his main console, as the solar eclipse partially obscured the Sun over Las Vegas, Todd was busy putting the final touches on the worm. It was complicated, and had to operate in multiple stages without a hitch. Despite the thousands of hours that hundreds of programmers had put into The Project, there were still a lot of things that could go wrong.
Agent Farnsworth, unwittingly, had given them the final piece of the puzzle ñ an entry into the DIPS computer network, which would allow them to inject the worm into the Federal computers. Going in through the front door.

The worm would first infect the DIPS content filter servers to permanently disable their filtering capabilities. The infection would be quite extensive, impossible to remove even if the hard drives were completely overwritten and reloaded. Logs, on each server that kept them, would be carefully overwritten to show no evidence of the intrusion. This would disable the content filters nationwide for quite some time, until they could recognize the extent of the infection and get new servers online.
The most ambitious part of the worm was that it would next infect the legislative computers in the Senate to insert a hidden amendment into the annual Anti-Terrorism Authorization Bill, the massive 25,000+ page bill that has never been read all the way through by humans. 
Because of the long continued gridlock on Capitol Hill, this bill was one of the few passed each session. The worm would insert the hidden amendment to repeal the content filter legislation and also infect all the computers in Congress and the White House to not identify the amendment until, and after, the President had signed the bill. Since the DIPS servers are programmed to follow the law, even after they get new servers online the content filters will still be out of commission.

But wouldn't the amendment be ruled out of order and be voided by the courts? someone asked.
No, its still law even though no human could remember adding the amendment or voting on it. When this bill passes they will suspend all the rules including the reading of the bill ñ so it actually passed within the legislative rules, said Todd. And since the courts have ruled that Congress shall be presumed to have known what is doing when it passes bills, the amendment is still law unless Congress repeals it.
Besides, hidden amendments are put in this bill all the time, for National Security reasons, so it might look more like a mistake than a hack. Or maybe theyíll never admit it ever happened and blame it on just a hack of the DIPS computers. Then, we can count on the gridlock on Capitol Hill to delay or prevent for some time any attempt to repeal the amendment, Garrett said.
Has this ever been attempted before?
Not that we know of, if it has they never admitted it. Merely an unavoidable result of depending so much on computers to run things ñ what could go wrong?
So the people will get a vacation, maybe for one or more years, from the content filters and be able to enjoy freedom of expression again, for at least a while, said Todd. And maybe we can keep the repeal on the books as well.
There was pounding on the door of the suite. DIPS agents were about to break in. They didnít know what he was about to do, fortunately, all they knew is that they had to stop it. They may stop one of us, but they canít stop us all.
Todd hit the enter key and sent the worm on its way, and which would also wipe the evidence from his computers.

###