“About the Googlecleaner?”

  “About my friends and family. My search history. My personal history.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They were sending a message to me. They’re watching every click and every search. It’s time to go. Time to get out of range.”

  “There’s a Google office in Mexico, you know.”

  “We’ve got to go,” he said, firmly.

  “Laurie, what do you think of this?” Alex asked.

  Laurie thumped the dogs between the shoulders. “My parents left East Germany in ’65. They used to tell me about the Stasi. The secret police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotic joke, whatever. Whether they meant it or not, what Google has created is no different.”

  “Alex, are you coming?”

  She looked at the dogs and shook her head. “I’ve got some pesos left over,” she said. “You take them. Be careful, okay?”

  Sam looked like he was going to slug her. Softening, he gave her a ferocious hug.

  “Be careful, yourself,” he whispered in her ear.

  They came for her a week later. At home, in the middle of the night, just as she’d imagined they would.

  Two women arrived on her doorstep shortly after 2 a.m. One stood silently by the door. The other was a smiler, short and rumpled, in a sport coat with a stain on one lapel and an American flag on the other. “Alex Lupinski, we have reason to believe you’re in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” she said, by way of introduction. “Specifically, exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information. Ten years for a first offense. Turns out that what you and your friend did to your Google records qualifies as a felony. And oh, what will come out in the trial…all the stuff you whitewashed out of your profile, for starters.”

  Alex had played this scene in her head for a week. She’d planned all kinds of brave things to say. It had given her something to do while she waited to hear from Sam. He never called.

  “I’d like to get in touch with a lawyer,” is all she mustered.

  “You can do that,” the small woman said. “But maybe we can come to a better arrangement.”

  Alex found her voice. “I’d like to see your badge,” she stammered.

  The woman’s basset-hound face lit up as she let out a bemused chuckle. “Buddy, I’m not a cop,” she replied. “I’m a consultant. Google hired me–my firm represents their interests in Washington–to build relationships. Of course, we wouldn’t get the police involved without talking to you first. You’re part of the family. Actually, there’s an offer I’d like to make.”

  Alex turned to the coffeemaker, dumped the old filter.

  “I’ll go to the press,” she said.

  The woman nodded as if thinking it over. “Well, sure. You could walk into the Chronicle’s office in the morning and spill everything. They’d look for a confirming source. They won’t find one. And when they try searching for it, we’ll find them. So, buddy, why don’t you hear me out, okay? I’m in the win-win business. I’m very good at it.” she paused. “By the way, those are excellent beans, but you want to give them a little rinse first? Takes some of the bitterness out and brings up the oils. Here, pass me a colander?”

  Alex watched as the woman silently took off her jacket and hung it over a kitchen chair, then undid her cuffs and carefully rolled them up, slipping a cheap digital watch into her pocket. She poured the beans out of the grinder and into Alex’s colander, and rinsed them in the sink.

  She was a little pudgy and very pale, with the social grace of an electrical engineer. She seemed like a real Googler, actually, obsessed with the minutiae. She knew her way around a coffee grinder, too.

  “We’re drafting a team for Building 49…”

  “There is no Building 49,” Alex said automatically.

  “Of course,” the chick said, flashing a tight smile. “There’s no Building 49. But we’re putting together a team to revamp the Googlecleaner. Sam’s code wasn’t very efficient, you know. It’s full of bugs. We need an upgrade. You’d be the right person, and it wouldn’t matter what you knew if you were back inside.”

  “Unbelievable,” Alex said, laughing. “If you think I’m going to help you smear political candidates in exchange for favors, you’re crazier than I thought.”

  “Alex,” the woman said, “we’re not smearing anyone. We’re just going to clean things up a bit. For some select people. You know what I mean? Everyone’s Google profile is a little scary under close inspection. Close inspection is the order of the day in politics. Standing for office is like a public colonoscopy.” she loaded the cafetière and depressed the plunger, her face screwed up in solemn concentration. Alex retrieved two coffee cups–Google mugs, of course–and passed them over.

  “We’re going to do for our friends what Sam did for you. Just a little cleanup. All we want to do is preserve their privacy. That’s all.”

  Alex sipped her coffee. “What happens to the candidates you don’t clean?”

  The Stasi put everything about you in a file. Whether they meant to or not, what Google did is no different.

  “Yeah,” the chick said, flashing Alex a weak grin. “Yeah, you’re right. It’ll be kind of tough for them.” she searched the inside pocket of her jacket and produced several folded sheets of paper. She smoothed out the pages and put them on the table. “Here’s one of the good guys who needs our help.” It was a printout of a search history belonging to a candidate whose campaign Alex had contributed to in the past three elections.

  “Lass gets back to her hotel room after a brutal day of campaigning door to door, fires up her laptop, and types ’hot asses’ into her search bar. Big deal, right? The way we see it, for that to disqualify a good woman from continuing to serve her country is just un-American.”

  Alex nodded slowly.

  “So you’ll help the girl out?” the woman asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. There’s one more thing. We need you to help us find Sam. He didn’t understand our goals at all, and now he seems to have flown the coop. Once he hears us out, I have no doubt he’ll come around.”

  She glanced at the candidate’s search history.

  “I guess he might,” Alex replied.

  The new Congress took 11 working days to pass the Securing and Enumerating America’s Communications and Hypertext Act, which authorized the DHS and NSA to outsource up to 80 percent of intelligence and analysis work to private contractors. Theoretically, the contracts were open to competitive bidding, but within the secure confines of Google’s Building 49, there was no question of who would win. If Google had spent $15 billion on a program to catch bad guys at the border, you can bet they would have caught them–governments just aren’t equipped to Do Search Right.

  The next morning Alex scrutinized her self carefully as she shaved (the security minders didn’t like hacker stubble and weren’t shy about telling her so), realizing that today was her first day as a de facto intelligence agent for the U.S. government. How bad would it be? Wasn’t it better to have Google doing this stuff than some ham-fisted DHS desk jockey?

  By the time she parked at the Googleplex, among the hybrid cars and bulging bike racks, she had convinced her self. She was mulling over which organic smoothie to order at the canteen when her key card failed to open the door to Building 49. The red LED flashed dumbly every time she swiped her card. Any other building, and there’d be someone to tailgate on, people trickling in and out all day. But the Googlers in 49 only emerged for meals, and sometimes not even that.

  Swipe, swipe, swipe. Suddenly she heard a voice at her side.

  “Alex, can I see you, please?”

  The rumpled woman put an arm around her shoulders, and Alex smelled her citrusy perfume. It smelled like what her divemaster in Baja had worn when they went out to the bars in the evening. Alex couldn’t remember her name. Juan Carlos? Juan Luis?

  The woman’s arm around her shoulders was firm, steering her away from the door, out onto the immaculate lawn, past the herb garden outside the kitchen. “We’re giving you a couple of days off,” she said.

  Alex felt a sudden stab of anxiety. “Why?” Had she done something wrong? Was she going to jail?

  “It’s Sam.” The woman turned her around, met her eyes with her bottomless gaze. “He killed himself. In Guatemala. I’m sorry, Alex.”

  Alex seemed to hurtle away, to a place miles above, a Google Earth view of the Googleplex, where she looked down on her self and the rumpled woman as a pair of dots, two pixels, tiny and insignificant. She willed her self to tear at her hair, to drop to her knees and weep.

  From a long way away, she heard her self say, “I don’t need any time off. I’m okay.”

  From a long way away, she heard the rumpled woman insist.

  The argument persisted for a long time, and then the two pixels moved into Building 49, and the door swung shut behind them.

  * * *

  Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger—the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother, and novels for adults like Rapture of the Nerds and Makers. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

  “Scroogled” was previously published in Radar Online (2007).

  Nanolaw with Daughter

  by Paul Ford

  On a Sunday morning before her soccer practice, not long after my daughter’s tenth birthday, she and I sat down on the couch with our tablets and I taught her to respond to lawsuits on her own. I told her to read the first message.

  “It says it’s in French,” she said. “Do I translate?”

  “Does it have a purple flag on it?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You don’t actually have to worry about it unless it has a purple flag.”

  She hesitated. “Can I read it?” she asked.

  “If you want to read it go ahead.”

  She switched the screen from French to English and read out the results: “‘Notice from the Democratic Republic of Congo related to the actions of King Leopold II.’”

  This was what I’d been avoiding. So much evil in the world and why did she need to know about all of it, at once? But for months she’d asked—begged—to answer her own suits. I’d told her to wait, to stop trying to grow up so fast, you’ll have your whole lifetime to get sued. Until finally she said: “When I’m ten? I can do it when I’m ten?” And I’d said, “sure, after you’re ten.” Somehow that had seemed far off. I had willed it to be far off.

  “Honey,” I explained, “you’ll get a lot of those kinds. What happened is, a long time ago, the country Belgium took over this country Congo and killed a lot of people and made everyone slaves. The people who are descendants of those slaves, their government gave them the right to ask other people for damages.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I thought you had to do something.”

  Where do you start? Litigation-flow tariff policy? Post-colonial genocide reparations microsuits? Is there a book somewhere, Telling Your Daughter About Nanolaw?

  “You know,” I asked, “how you have to be careful about giving away information?”

  She did. We talk about that almost every day.

  “So this is why you have to be careful,” I said. “They buy a whole lot of files. So in this case, they could purchase, like—when people do genetic testing to learn about their families? They’d buy all the records and see who is from Belgium. Or if you watched a soccer game with Belgium in it, or you have just one Belgian friend on your network. They take the records for billions of people and put it all together and do math.”

  She nodded, but couldn’t get past the fundamental problem: “Why me?”

  “If you’re going to answer suits by yourself, you have to understand that to these people, you aren’t you. You are stuff they found in a box.” I considered for a moment. “Remember two years ago, you bought the code dog for Griffin Village?” God knows I remembered. Each of her 100 Griffin Points, when earned, was heralded by a shrill trumpet noise, and my daughter’s even more shrill cries of joy. The dog had been named—Wallace? Waffles? No, it was Willie, and she used her 100 Griffin Points to buy a Billy Cat. Which caused more shrieking. Those were long months. “Maybe Willie Dog was programmed by Belgians? Or maybe Griffin Points is backed by a bank in Belgium and we never knew. The people in Congo might not even know. It might not even be the people in Congo but instead people in Italy doing it and they’ll give money to the Congo people if they win anything. It might be that their computer thinks it’s possible. But ultimately their government thinks that it’s fair for these people to demand some of your money.”

  “I never got anything from Belgium.”

  “They think you did,” I said. “And see, they could be right. They have to be a little bit right to file in the first place and have it go out through a suenet without getting filtered. Maybe it’s not Griffin points. It could be anything.”

  “But that’s amazingly stupid,” she said, forgetting now, I saw, how badly she’d wanted to do this. She had imagined that we were denying her access to some adult mystery, not shielding her from drudgework. That’s a lesson too, right? Or was it a mistake to let her try? She already did her own laundry and had a bank account. Other girls had been answering lawsuits since they learned to read, lawyers’ kids especially. “It’s just part of life,” I said. “You have to think about yourself not as a person but as data.”

  My daughter was first sued in the womb. It was all very new then. I’d posted ultrasound scans online for friends and family. I didn’t know the scans had steganographic thumbprints. A giant electronics company that made ultrasound machines acquired a speculative law firm for many tens of millions of dollars. The new legal division cut a deal with all five Big Socials to dig out contact information for anyone who’d posted pictures of their babies in-utero. It turns out the ultrasounds had no clear rights story; I didn’t actually own mine. It sounds stupid now but we didn’t know. The first backsuits named millions of people, and the Big Socials just caved, ripped up their privacy policies in exchange for a cut. So five months after I posted the ultrasounds, one month before my daughter was born, we received a letter (back then a paper letter) naming myself, my wife, and one or more unidentified fetal defendants in a suit. We faced, I learned, unspecified penalties for copyright violation and theft of trade secrets, and risked, it was implied, that my daughter would be born bankrupt.

  But for $50.00 and processing fees the ultrasound shots I’d posted (copies attached) were mine forever, as long as I didn’t republish without permission.

  Of course I consented, going to the site-of-record and tapping the little thumbs-up box to release funds. And here we were ten years later, thinking of Belgium.

  I asked my daughter: “How much do they want?”

  She looked down at the screen. She is quiet and serious when working. “Two euro cents.”

  “Normally one like that I’d just go ahead and pay, except it doesn’t have a purple flag. The purple flag means our government said they could sue people here in America. But if it’s from another country without a purple flag you can ignore it.”

  “So I’m not actually in trouble?”

  “You’re never in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong. You’re just named. And in this case they can’t actually claim damages. Trash it.”

  She looked relieved. The rights of the Congolese were not her problem this morning. Her mother called from the other room: “Soccer soon.”

  “Okay,” we both yelled back.

  “How many are left?” I asked.

  She looked at her tablet and said: “Fifty-seven.”

  “We can handle that,” I said. I walked her through the rest: Get rid of the ones without flags. Pay those a dime or less by hitting the dime button. How many now? (Only six.) We went through the six: Four copyright claims, all sub-dollar and quickly paid.

  She opened the penultimate message and smiled. “Dad,” she said, “look.”

  We had gone to a baseball game at the beginning of the season. They had played a song on the public address system, and she sang along without permission. They used to factor that into ticket price—they still do if you pay extra or have a season pass—but now other companies handled the followup. And here was the video from that day, one of many tens of thousands simultaneously recorded from gun scanners on the stadium roof. In the video my daughter wore a cap and a blue T-shirt. I sat beside her, my arm over her shoulder, grinning. Her voice was clear and high; the ambient roar of the audience beyond us filtered down to static.

  It had been only a few months, but already she seemed older than the singing girl. Soon, we had been warned, she’d demand a cryptographic shield for her diary. “It’s terrible,” said one friend whose daughter is thirteen. “I think, what if she’s abducted and I need to read her messages, and the police can’t read them? What if she runs away but all of her logs are locked? How do I keep her safe with all of those secrets?” But our family is not yet there. If I ask her politely, my daughter will look left, then right, then squash her nose into my cheek and whisper her Griffin Village password. I would never tell.

  Watching the video I thought that it was wise of Major League Baseball to combine this sort of sentimental moment with mass speculative litigation. It kept brand values strong. I felt strangely grateful that I could have a moment to remember that afternoon. Surprised by the evidence of both copyright violation and father-daughter affection.

  I told my waiting daughter to go ahead and pay the few dollars, just part of the latent cost of a ticket. She tapped and the tablet made its cash-register sound, and the video was irrevocably destroyed so that it could never again be shared. She opened the final message.