Status Updates From Red Team Blues: Vom Jäger z...

“Even more conspicuous. He was a very bad conspirator. Clearly, he did most of his work with a fountain pen, not a six-gun.”

… I found a seat near a plug and connected my laptop, manually changed my laptop’s MAC address, opened up a Tor session, and started hunting the Zetas’ banker.”

“San Francisco Public Library was the first public library branch in the country to hire a full-time social worker. It loaned out suits and ties for job interviews. It had a coat check that would securely store my bundle buggy. And it had privacy-loving librarians who did not allow the city or the feds to monitor connections to its Wi-Fi, a Wi-Fi connection that accepted Tor sessions. …

“Homelessness is the American vanishing point”

“Bates’s proposal is a death sentence, only slower. Change your name, abandon your friendships, leave your country, live underground until you die. Not because you committed a crime but because Bates doesn’t want to lift his hand to _stop_ the crimes that will arise from doing the honorable thing.”

“‘You lead a very exciting life,’ she said at last. ‘It sounds terrible.’”

“But industrial locks had a much longer duty cycle than bike locks, and changing them out was a nightmare, requiring that new keys be made and distributed to the maintenance people, letting agents, owners, et cetera. How much hassle would a building owner go through to make it more difficult to get into the garbage room?”

“in whatever building I was destined to spend my years in, in Tangiers or Lima or Stockholm”

Dell Duke also used wildlife documentaries to fall asleep…

“Team blue is team minimalism, the Marie Kondo of security. If a procedure does not fill you with joy, remove it and replace it with a simpler one.”

… Wait long enough and you can meet up for a nice beach vacation somewhere very far from here.”

(All p. 139.)

“If you had a wife or a kid, sure—but, Marty, you are a sixty-seven-year-old childless bachelor. You don’t even have an _ex_-wife. You are the perfect candidate for the kind of disappearing act we specialize in. Give it a few months and you can even start communicating with these old pals of yours, provided you trust their discretion and take care to use self-deleting encrypted messaging tools. …

“We have substantial resources—the civil asset forfeiture program means that any time we run short on funds, we just seize one of the many bank accounts we’re keeping tabs on.”

… We’d much rather _neutralize_ these people: periodically seize their war chests, arrest the odd boss, arrange to have a bunch of uniforms on the street when someone’s war party shows up so that they cancel their plans. If we’re going to have crime, we want to make sure it’s _organized_. When we do the organizing, we can do a lot of harm reduction.”

“No, Mr. Hench, we don’t want to roll up these organizations. They have competitors, you understand. If we created a vacuum, these competitors would rush in to fill it, and once again, we’d have a serious mess on our hands, the kind of thing that spills over to the real world. …

“‘Goddamn it,’ I said. ‘Either you’re DHS and able to do things like divert an Uber, or you’re a bad guy and able to divert an Uber, or maybe you’re DHS and working for the bad guys.’”

Let’s see how Cory Doctorow handles the DHS now…

“‘Naturally. If Azerbaijani finance vehicles are good enough for my clients, why wouldn’t they be good enough for me?’

‘Fair point. Like they say in the tech world, you’ve got to eat your own dog food.’”

… Moreover, I suspect you knew you were wrong all along, but hand-waved that away because the share of the proceeds that stuck to your fingers was so exciting that you didn’t want to dwell on it.”

“I just want to point out that the situation you’re describing isn’t unusual. In my experience, it’s absolutely typical. You spent your career as a facilitator of criminals and thought you could define what that relationship looked like, and you were wrong. …

Nice SF commentary.

“When had I stopped crying like that for my dead? Why hadn’t I cried like that for Danny? I would have, once. Now, my grieving was a numb thing in a distant place, honored only through empty solemnity, raising a solitary glass to him and trying to actually think about him, rather than thinking about how I was thinking about him.”

“When had I stopped crying like that for my dead? Why hadn’t I cried like that for Danny? I would have, once. Now, my grieving was a numb thing in a distant place, honored only through empty solemnity, raising a solitary glass to him and trying to actually think about him, rather than thinking about how I was thinking about him.”

“I’d cultivated the art of boring bartenders to tears so that they’d quickly forget about me once I’d finished asking nosy questions.”

“I looked into houses but couldn’t decide where I’d want to live. I looked at vacations but couldn’t decide where I’d go.”

“My rock star had mercifully subdued taste (by rock star standards, at least)”

“You have a very large fortune, Mr. Hench, but it’s an _off-the-shelf_ sort of fortune, the kind of thing that fits very neatly into a standardized template. The kinds of bespoke services offices like this provide are for people in pursuit of global domination, of a dent in the universe, of a dynasty, of their own libertarian island nation, or just their own senator.”

“Nevertheless, I had the thought, considered the thought, and then dispelled it, because having that kind of thought is my job, which is why I was ready to retire.”

I don’t think you’re supposed to mix those substances… right?

Dang.

“I parked at a charger in the [SFO] Terminal 2 short-term lot and went and looked at the exhibits in the little museum, savoring them in ways that almost no one would. I like airport museums: so much love poured into those display cases, only to be rushed past in a stressed-out whirlwind or to be stared blankly at during a long layover.”