Meet At Joe's

6 Confrontation Part 1 The Wild West

POV: 3rd person omniscient

"Is it true?" Julie demanded. They were sitting outside at one of the tables in Joe's outside eating area. It was cold outside; so, they had the area to themselves. Julie was cold but the conversation was becoming heated. Julie had just confronted John about the possibly criminal software he was developing.

"Sort of," John confessed. "It is also complicated. Give me a chance to explain." John was caught off guard. He was recovering from finding out the FBI was on to him while trying to figure out how to explain things to Julie.

"I'm listening." She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest.

"Okay," John sighed, got his thoughts together and leaned forward. In a calm deliberate and low voice, he began, "Yes, we are working on software that will allow us to surreptitiously gather information from other internet users, but our intent is not to take advantage of others, but to protect them."

"Protect them by spying on them?" Julie questioned his logic.

"Don't governments and police do that all the time?" John shrugged as if his point was indisputable.

"They only spy on bad guys and it is their job not yours." Julie leaned forward to emphasize her displeasure.

"Even the government has to spy on good guys to make sure they aren't bad. Do you realize, how many bad guys there are on the internet? Honestly, law enforcement is just not up to the job. How many data breaches have you heard about in the last few years? And there are a lot more breaches that don't make the news. And how many people have you heard about being arrested for it? Not many I bet.

"It is a whole new world, Julie. Everything is done online now. Your banking, your shopping, your dating, your medical records, it is all out there, and most people don't realize the implications. Law makers don't even understand what laws we need much less how to enforce them.

The internet is truly the modern-day wild west. The wild west got that way when our country expanded into unknown territory where things were no longer done the way people were used to. Cattle roamed wide open ranges where they were vulnerable to cattle rustlers. People's personal data are the new cattle roaming unsupervised and there is no shortage of rustlers. Yet we don't have laws to punish these rustlers. Most people don't realize the value of what is being stolen because it is not tangible. But it does have value and its loss does impact us, just not in the same way we are used to thinking about such things.

"In the old west, communities were separated by distance making them more vulnerable to attacks from outsiders. Now they are separated by ignorance of the technology which also makes them more vulnerable. Back then when bad guys rode into town people had to take the law into their own hands because the nearest law enforcement was too far away. Now law enforcement is just too unfamiliar with how the technology works so once again, people have to take care of themselves.

"Back then some communities would hire gunslingers for protection. Unfortunately, the gunslingers' primary motivation was money, and they often had their own agendas. Today we have companies that specialize in cyber security. Can you guess what their primary motivation is? Hint, it is not altruism.

"These companies actually try to convince people to turn over all their critical information – passwords, account numbers, etc.so they can store it securely for you." John paused to shake his head. Then he explained. "Let me ask you, if you are a hacker, are you going to try to hack a million individual computers or are you going to hack the company that is storing the information for those million users? Even if that company's security is a thousand times better than that of the individual computers, the smart hacker is going to rob the bank, not the local candy store. Clearly these gunslingers masquerading as security companies are more interested in getting your money than protecting it, even if they could.

"So, we are in the wild west. We can't rely on the government, we can't trust the gunslingers, and the cattle rustlers are everywhere. What do we do?" John let the question hang in the air and then answered it himself. "I'll tell you what we have to do. We have to form a posse comitatus. But first we need a weapon that will put our posse on equal footing with the rustlers and criminals? And that is what we are trying to develop. We have already developed a preliminary version that is superior to any software out there, but we want to refine it even further. That preliminary version is detectable by very sophisticated users. We are continuing to improve it and the final version will be completely undetectable." John was clearly proud of his group's accomplishments.