Sister Maria was at the front of the Hamer auditorium, the biggest gathering space in the center. Students dropped into the seats that rose steeply in the raked hall; across the front of the room the entire faculty was arrayed at a long table. “Thank you for your promptness,” said Maria. “As you may have heard, a few times each year we cancel regular classes for what we call a ‘charrette.’ It’s an exercise borrowed from the architects, and it’s designed to make you think quickly and creatively—it’s like brainstorming, but with more focus. The point is not to come up with the absolute best decision, because that would take months. It’s designed to come up with a solution that might work. If you find your team stalled, remember the architects: someone gives them a funny-shaped lot to build on, they don’t say ‘that’s impossible, give me a square.’ They take the funny shape and use it as a stimulus. We’ll give you a problem, and then you’ll break down in teams of four and spend the next three hours coming up with a proposed solution. Then we’ll meet and present and critique. And critique is the part we all like, right faculty?” The row nodded vigorously, except for Tony, who looked a little distressed at the concept of critique.
“Professor Kinnison, would you please present the problem?”
“Thank you, director Santos,” he said, walking to a lectern as he unfolded a pair of reading glasses from the pocket of his cardigan.
“The challenge for today’s charrette comes from Fresno, a city of 500,000 in the Central Valley of California,” he said. “A new police chief has announced plans for the most extensive surveillance system of any department in the western world. They have installed a so-called ‘Real Time Crime Center’ in a bunker under the police station. It has 57 monitors, connected to 200 cameras they’ve installed at points around the city—and an additional 800 cameras on traffic lights and in the schools. They also have a system that can scan license plates and compare them against a database of two billion recent sightings across the country to make a match. In addition, they’ve installed new technology called ShotSpotter that can instantly triangulate a location for the sound of gunfire anywhere in the city. And they’ve added a software program called MediaSonar that constantly trawls social media accounts, looking for suggestions that residents might be a danger. They have four drones in regular circulation overhead, able to zoom in on any coordinates immediately—and, since they’re constantly recording they’re able to look back for ten hours and see anything that seems important in retrospect.
“All of this technology is in use in other places, but no jurisdiction has combined it as extensively as Fresno,” he continued, looking around the room. “They’ve gotten extensive financial support from the new Justice Department. And they’ve added a new component, a software program called Beware. When a police officer receives a call, it instantly analyzes everything known about the people at the pertinent address, and gives the officer a color-coded threat level: Green, Yellow, or Red.
“Civil libertarians have flagged a number of issues with the new technology, even beyond what some have called the Orwellian level of surveillance. For one thing, it’s apparently less smart than it appears: last year, for instance, a girl tweeted about a card game called ‘Rage,’ but since that is one of the ‘trigger words’ the software looks for she was immediately labeled a red-level threat. And of course there is fear, given the 1,532 police shootings nationwide last year, that a red label will be an invitation for law enforcement officers to arrive on the scene predisposed to take hasty action. Are there questions about the scenario?”
“This is for real? Or you’re making this up?” Ramon asked.
“This is entirely for real,” said Professor Kinnison, severely. “I deal in facts.” “And now, with those facts, the rest of you need to get to work,” said Maria. “Your job is to come up with a campaign plan that reacts to this new reality. You can use books, computers, anything is fair game. We will see you in three hours.”
Cass, MK, Natty Rajimder from Delhi, and Icarius de Costa from the south of Brazil took over a table at the far end of the center’s small library.
“Has anyone been to . . . Fresno?” MK asked.
“Wikipedia says it’s the 5th least educated city in America, and the fifth most polluted,” said Natty, looking down into his laptop. He got the best grades in Professor Kinnison’s class, and he’d also taken to wearing the same crewneck sweaters as the professor, and using both hands to frequently reset his glasses on his nose. His classmates called him Database, DB for short; he sincerely believed in Wikipedia. “Also, of 372 American cities it’s got the sixth worst unemployment rate. On the other hand, there’s an underground house built by a Sicilian immigrant that’s open for tourism, which is good because the average July high temperature is 97 degrees. Oh, and 20 percent of residents have asthma, compared with 8 percent for the nation as a whole.” “Sweet,” said Icarius—Ick to his friends. He was adjusting the earbuds attached to his phone.
“So. Ideas?” asked MK.
“Um, well, the obvious thing is a protest at City Hall,” said Cass. “We could get some leading civil liberties people to talk. Or a sit-in, at the city council.”
“Right,” said Ick. “Absolutely.”
“Actually,” said MK, “that sounds kind of boring. Like, if there’s a demonstration at City Hall about civil liberties would you even bother to read about it in the newspaper. It doesn’t do much for me.”
“Actually,” said Cass, “you’re right. It doesn’t . . . tell a story. Like, we need something that gets people to think about why this stuff is such a bad idea. Maybe we could get that Twitter girl to play Rage on the steps of City Hall. Reporters would cover that.”
“Rage is a cool game,” said Ick.
“Ick,” said MK. “Do you have any good ideas at all here? Like, think of this as a computer problem.”
The boy thought for a few moments, and looked up shyly. “DOS,” he said. The others looked blankly.
Natty was pounding keys on his Chromebook. “It could mean ‘disk operating system,’ which was something Microsoft used a long time ago. Until something called Windows 98. But that doesn’t make much sense.”
“It’s hacker,” said Ick, pulling out one earbud.
“It’s a hacker thing,” he continued. “DOS. Denial of service. Like, you get a botnet, and you activate it all at once, and you just, like, swamp some website. We—they’ve done it to the Pentagon, and the White House, and, like Yahoo. The server is getting so many hits it just stops. It even happens by accident. Like when Steve Jobs died, so many people headed to, like, Reddit. Things crashed.” Ick looked exhausted, and carefully put his earbud back in. “So we should overwhelm their computer systems? By having people log in from all over the country?” asked MK. “Like, if we got Anonymous or something, and they just broke their network?”
“I don’t think quite like that,” said Cass. “I think there’s another way.”
Three hours later they were back in Hamer Auditorium, listening to other groups present their plans.
“And so, in summary, group 4 would defeat the drones—which seem to be a linchpin of the system—with a series of weather balloons attached to steel cables over contested neighborhoods,” Ramon de la Cruz was saying. “If a drone flew into the cable it would crash, so they’d have to ground them. Denied access to the air, the city’s intelligence capability would be degraded, and they’d be forced to negotiate with residents on a more realistic policing system.”
“Thank you, group 4,” said Maria. “Faculty?”
“I have a question,” said Linny Matthews—29, strikingly beautiful, with a mostly shaved head, she was in charge of “physical skills” for the school. A veteran of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, she had once climbed the side of an advertising blimp while it was in the air, so she could drop a banner over the side that made it read “2015 Was Not a Goodyear for the Climate.” She usually stuck to more grounded skills with the SGI students: the day before had been devoted to the question of how to keep large banners from blowing away on a windy day. (Cut airholes). “My question is, what are you planning to attach these steel cables to.”
“Weather balloons,” said de la Cruz.
“No, on the other end.”
“Oh, to, um, to . . . houses and trees and stuff I guess,” he said.
“So why won’t the police just drive up to those houses and trees and untie the steel cables and let the balloons float away?” asked Professor Matthews.
“I told you it was a stupid idea,” said Maylee St. Louis, from Trinidad and Tobago. She was part of Group 4 too, reluctantly.
“Now, there are no stupid ideas,” said Tony—Professor Goccilupe. “It’s a charrette, after all. And anyway, the whole idea raises an interesting philosophical question. You’re calling this action non-violent, but aren’t you really just giving notice that if they fly a drone where you don’t want it, you’ll destroy it with a steel cable? How is that different from announcing you have an anti-aircraft gun that will shoot it down?”
“Yeah, but there’s no one in it,” said de la Cruz. “It’s just a drone.”
“Which is an interesting philosophical question too,” said Tony. “One we get to most years. Is destroying property really non-violent? It’s obviously less violent than attacking people, but is it right?”
“You have to break some eggs to make an omelette,” said de la Cruz with a small smirk.
“Anyone know who said that originally?” Tony asked.
“Um, Jack Nicholson to Kim Basinger in the 1989 Batman?” said Natty, who was staring at his laptop.
“Go back a little farther,” said Tony. “Check out a guy named Robespierre on Wikipedia. The head of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, who demanded that the king be executed without a trial. He was called ‘the Incorruptible,’ and he helped run the Reign of Terror, sending lots of the people to guillotine, until it was his turn to go.”
“We’ll get to the debate around violence to property soon in ‘Introduction to Nonviolence,’ Maria said. “We’re not going to solve it today. What we are going to do today is hear from our last group.”
“We call our approach ‘HDOS,’” said Natty. “Human Denial of Service. You won’t find it googling, because we thought it up.”
“It’s like a Denial of Service attack on a website, where you overwhelm it with, like, too many logins,” said Ick, who then sat down.
“Here’s the strategy,” said MK, pulling up a couple of Powerpoint slides. “Imagine, for instance, the 200 cameras and the 57 monitors. They’re useful precisely because most of the time most of them are showing nothing. But if they’re all showing something—well, then you’d need 57 policemen sitting in the control center just to try and keep track. So, since everyone knows where they are—I mean, every driver is clear on which traffic lights have a camera, right?—we recruit enough people to go stand in front of each one doing something. Maybe pretending to fight, maybe dancing. People could hold up signs that say ‘There’s a crime going on here,’ and the police would have to respond.”
“Or imagine the drones up there,” said Natty. “Flat rooftops start sprouting huge banners: ‘It’s a crime.’”
“Social media’s the easiest part, because people can join in from anywhere,” continued MK. “The Fresno Police Department twitter account is @fresnopolice, for instance. A few hundred people an hour tweeting them to say ‘I’m in a Rage about civil liberties’ should pretty much render it inoperable. If a few thousand people in town put a few key words— say, ‘I’m binge-watching Homicide tonight,’—on their facebook page, the Beware thing would be almost useless. If everyone’s coming up coded Red, then Red won’t mean much.”
“And the thing is,” said Cass, looking at Maria, “all the action really adds up to a story. Everyone who hears about it has to think, ‘I say stuff on Facebook all the time—does it really make sense for the police to be deciding beforehand who’s a criminal?’ Our approach doesn’t just make life hard for the police, it makes a point. The sillier people are with it, the sillier it makes the whole deal seem. And it could spread elsewhere. Surveillance only works if people are worried about being seen. But if people decide to perform for the cameras—well, there are way more of us then there are police. I mean, the people, united.”
She stopped suddenly, and blushed a little—she’d gotten carried away. But Tony said “it’s kind of brilliant. It’s like performance art. It’s like a flash mob. You could send the police on scavenger hunts, and when they got to the end there’d be, I don’t know, a hundred people singing Christmas carols.”
And then came a shaky voice spoke up from the far end of the faculty table. “Overloading of facilities,” the frail man said. “Boston City Hospital, 1967. The doctors couldn’t go on strike for higher wages, obviously, so they did the opposite, admitting everyone with even minor complaints. Before long the hospital board had to give in.”
Everyone in the room was silent—it was the first time all year they’d heard the man speak. Dr. Marco Vukovic was the world’s leading authority on the history of nonviolent protest, or so they’d been told, the author of innumerable books and the curator of a massive file on every known instance of civil disobedience back to the 18th century. But he was also 94, and seemed perpetually lost in thought. From every class one student was picked to stay at SGI for an extra year, to serve as his assistant. It was a great honor—and so, apparently, was his comment on the Fresno plan, because every other member of the faculty had turned to him, nodding their heads.
“Thank you Dr. Vukovic,” Maria said. “Thank you very much for your perspective. And thank all of you for this exercise today—I hope it’s got your mind working. I will say that some of the solutions to the problem were highly creative. But I was disappointed by one thing. I had hoped it might occur to some of you to ask if we really did want to hamper the police here. As a little research would show”—and here she nodded to Natty—“Fresno is the 5th most crime-ridden city in America, and of course most of the victims are precisely who you’d expect. The poorest, and the most vulnerable. Maybe you want to defund the police, maybe you want to turn them into people who know how to deal with poverty. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I do know you should plan on writing an essay about it, to be emailed to my office before the start of classes tomorrow. That will be all.”
Nice turn at the end with open question!
NB. The chapters are out of order!