The Data Broker
“People get this impression that what I do is easy, or that I rely on my network to do the heavy lifting for me. It’s not easy. Living like this is not easy. Upending my entire life to flee to a foreign country just to avoid being persecuted by secret organizations, you think that’s fun? You think I enjoy this? Believe me, if I could have kept my head down and stayed in my old position at [company] I would have. But that’s never been me. I’m the type of person to speak up for what I believe in, and I’ll never be silenced. And that’s what this is about, really. It’s about the right of ordinary people like you or me not to be silenced.”
The documentarian nodded. “That’s good, that’s really good. That might be a closing statement there, what do you think Robbie?” From his perch behind a camera, Robbie gave a thumbs up. The documentarian turned back to his subject. “Now, speaking of [company], I want to get a little more material about your time there. Nothing serious, just a couple VO lines, you know? You mind telling me about the office culture?”
The film crew left an hour later, leaving Petra to mentally review the footage they took for holes or leaks. She would get veto on the final cut, of course, but if she dropped anything really damning by mistake she wanted to be able to contact them and tell them to delete the raw footage entirely. She had managed to stop them from taking video of the view of her balcony out over the Montevideo skyline, but they might have filmed the approach to her apartment. She consciously relaxed her face, smoothing away the frown. The documentarian was unlikely to fuck her over — he was a fanboy, an ideologue at his core. She couldn’t blame him for being easy to manipulate; he was just trying to do his best, same as she was. He just hadn’t had as long to grow calloused.
The market always carried fresh fish, being so close to the sea, and Petra made sure to stop and get some hake for dinner that evening. She packed it in ice in the basket of her bicycle and munched on a gyro as she pedaled casually through the highrises. Montevideo was a shiny new city, the streets wide and lined with trees. When Petra reached Shannon’s Pub the sun was still high in the sky, but inside the pub was dark and dingy. A few regulars sat as far away from each other as possible, old, weatherbeaten men, lost in their memories, beers forgotten or untouched. The bartender was polishing a glass in the manner of a man who was not an experienced bartender, but he nodded at Petra in recognition. “Got something for ya.”
“I hope it’s a coke,” she said. Her sunhat came off just long enough for her to redo the bun underneath it.
The man pulled a soda bottle out of the fridge below the bar, and then fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. “Here’s the key. Somebody wants to chat about the DHS stuff again.”
Petra sighed, rubbing her temple. “I hope they know not to fuck me around this time.”
The bartender shrugged. “I’m just the courier.”
Petra nodded, and pulled a notecard out of her own pocket. “Standard fee,” she said, handing it to him. She waited while he inspected the card, satisfying himself that it was indeed a crypto wallet. “Anything else happen today?” she asked.
“Some guy got shot this morning outside de Muertos,” he said. “Nobody important, I don’t think.”
She rolled her eyes. “Alright, whatever. Take it easy.”
“See ya.” He went back to inspecting his glasses, and she carried her drink out the door.
Back at home, Petra fired up her work computer and flipped on her usual security layers. She booted up her messaging app and pecked out the public key on the sheet of paper given to her at the bar. Once she confirmed the account on the other end was legit, she shot a quick message to the new inbox, opening communications. The response was quick, and asked her if she had a secure phone line. She answered in the affirmative, her interest piqued. It wasn’t a guarantee, but someone who wanted to call her was more likely to have a serious offer for her. Either that or it was an impatient fed trying to sniff her out. Petra pulled a beer out of her cooler and waited for a response.
She got a phone number, and made the call — again, pulling up all her usual layers of security. Living in a foreign country meant USGOV had limited access to the infrastructure underneath her, but she was sure they could potenitally extort the records out of the Uruguayan government if they leaned hard enough, so she tried not to reveal her country of residence if possible. She had no idea if she was successful or not, but every day spent in freedom seemed to be an answer in the affirmative.
Her call was answered on the third ring. “Hello?” The voice on the other end was neutral, male, American. Probably Washington, not New York.
“Hey. I heard you were interested in a promo deal.”
When Petra left her lucrative deep learning career 4 years ago, she carried a flash drive out of the building with her filled with government contracts. Facial recognition, market analysis and political prediction models were the big ones. She leaked to the press, and then online, and made waves for a couple of news cycles. For the first time in her life, Petra had been intensely scrutinized, and intensely vulnerable. Then there was a mass shooting at a high school in Texas, and mainstream media outlets snapped to attention like a Pavlovian dog, leaving her unscrutinized — and even more at risk. When her house got ransacked and the only place to report on it was the local paper, (which called it “indicative of the rising crime rates under Mayor X’s regime”) she knew it was time to leave town. But she hadn’t had the funds to leave the country by herself, so she turned to the internet. That’s really where it started.
She told people she used crowdfunding to keep her operation running, to fund servers, stay in contact with journalists, set up sage houses and falsify identities, keep a network operational to amplify any whistleblower who approached her. And some of that was true. Certainly, people donated to her organization, and she wasn’t too proud to pick up free cash. But the steady stream of donations from EFF fanatics and journalism pundits wasn’t enough to keep her in business. That had come with her first outside contract.
Someone else in a USGOV contract apparently had the same moral qualms about their work that she did, although not the daring. An anonymous email asked her to leak a set of documents related to government corruption. Federal level stuff, very hot. Petra refused, not wanting any more glowies after her than there already were. The leaker then sent back an offer of crypto.
In retrospect it was a mercenary decision. She sold it to herself as a moral-pragmatic one at the time, claiming that the money would allow her to shelter against the blowback that would otherwise make the offered leak unviable. Taking care of the practical concerns, so that she could free herself to do what’s right. But really it was only about the money. The money let her move to Uruguay silently, under an assumed name meaning “rock”, which is what she intended to live under. The money made her life so easy it would have been criminal not to take it. The leak itself didn’t really interest her; it hit the news cycle, a couple D.C. heads rolled and it was all forgotten about after the next national election. But the money — that made a lasting impression. And when her wallets began to drain, she thought about who else in the echelons might want a similar service.
She started to put out feelers, implications. She took a couple charity cases, just to make it seem like she was aboveboard: a Scientologist in too deep wanted to publicize documents from the inner circle, or a marine biologist in Sydney trying to anonymously get the word out about his lab’s abuse of animals. Whitewashing her reputation as a patron saint of whistleblowers worldwide, a hero’s hero. So when the biologist’s boss’s boss came to her with a corporate espionage gig for twenty times what she made in a month’s donations, nobody realized that she was leaking illegally obtained documents about a premier biotech firm from one of its biggest competitors. They figured she was representing some anon little guy somewhere, same as always.
Petra tried to tell herself that there wasn’t really much difference between getting a corporate gig and doing pro bono leaking, but if she was honest, she could intuit the difference. Something in the intent colored the whole affair. Lone whistleblowers always had a desperate air of fighting Goliath around everything they did. Their leaks were chaotic, destructive, aimed at tearing down great edifices. Corp jobs were smoother, more predictable in their effects on public opinion. And a corporation never rocked the global technocapital boat too hard. They were pussies.
“I guess we’re cutting straight to the point, then?” The voice on the other end was slightly nervous.
“This is a secure line,” Petra said. “We both know how this works, so let’s talk details.”
The man laughed, three soft chuckles without any air in them. Petra could hear the tension in his throat. “Alright then, since we’re being honest with each other, my name is Frank.”
“Petra,” said Petra.
“Petra, I’ll level with you here and now: I work for the U.S. government.”
Her natural baseline of paranoia ratcheted up an octave. She wanted to annoy USGOV as little as possible. “Go on.”
“Well, I guess I’ll lay all the cards on the table. I’m approaching you on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. We have reason to believe that dissident elements within our sister bureau, the Department of Homeland Security, are engaged in extralegal activities including but not limited to bribery of foreign government officials, exposing state secrets to foreign entities and peddling those secrets for money. In addition, we have reason to believe they recently approached someone outside the United States with the intent of paying that person to leak those secrets to satisfy a third party.”
Petra could feel the dampness of a cold sweat beginning to form on her back, arms, neck. “Can I ask what the nature of this leak was?”
“You probably already know it. There were certain defense contracts between Boeing and Iran: Ballistic stuff, violation of U.N. sanctions, a lot of dirty money flying around. We were running a sniffer op, trying to out their contacts in Tehran, but the dissident elements over in DHS broke security and leaked our case files. They have connections to Russian diplomats as well. You can see how we have a level of investment in resolving their personnel problem.”
Petra nodded to herself. “Yeah, I saw that. Don’t know who leaked it though. Totally anonymous, nobody taking credit. Unusual for a leak of that caliber, you’d think someone would want that on their resume.”
The CIA man laughed his airless laugh again. “We have a pretty good idea of who it was, but that’s not important right now. This is technically out of our jurisdiction and DHS leadership is being uncooperative — top brass doesn’t want a scandal on their hands. We’d like to fight fire with fire, so to speak. This is where you come in. We give you the relevant documents, you launder them so it looks like they came from a source inside the DHS, and then you publish them, solito negotium. Public opinion will hopefully provide the pressure we need to get their chief of staff working on this.”
“I guess you can use your Mockingbird guys to signal boost me? You’re gonna have to, if you want this to take.”
The man paused briefly. “That program was shut down several decades ago, as you know. We think you will do a good job in getting media outlets to bite. That’s why we chose you.”
Petra wished desperately that she could pull the phone away from her ear long enough to gasp for breath — she felt dizzy. “Just to clarify, this is official CIA business, you’re not a lone actor?”
“This is off the back end of a black bag operation, off the books. But no one from our department will ever come knocking on your door about it. It’s been word-of-mouth cleared.”
“Collateral?”
“We’ve authorized what we feel are sufficient funds for the op. I’ll wire you details.” We can buy you, he meant.
“Give me time to put out some feelers and look over the details. Can you send me the documents in question?”
The man clicked his teeth. “Not until you agree to the terms. I’ll send you a summary, but it’s pretty unremarkable — paper trail between the dissident elements and Russian oligarchs, records of illegal operations being conducted and acknowledged by DHS agents, et cetera. Nothing a mid-level analyst wouldn’t have access to. I’ll give you details about clearance level for each document, so you can construct a persona to put behind the leak.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“I expect to hear back from you within 12 hours.” The man hung up.
Petra finally breathed, deep and long. She leaned back against the wall, then slid down it to sit on the ground. She ran her hands through her hair. The computer chimed with a new email, but she ignored it.
Of course she knew about the Boeing job, the guy had told her he was a Boeing rep. She suspected his motives were impure, but she never would have guessed he was lying about his identity. Was he actually a rogue DHS operative? Why was DHS poking around corporate accounts? Or had the CIA guy been lying to her? She knew there was some inter-department competition among the three-letters; could he be manipulating her into dumping some hot papers about the DHS to swing a congressional committee or something? Suddenly Petra felt she didn’t know nearly enough about the government agency funding process. How could she know what kind of blowback or scrutiny to expect if she wasn’t certain what was even happening? Or was the CIA guy rogue instead, trying to blow up American security agencies? Would she become an asset in a terrorism case?
Petra’s policy was never government jobs — too risky. Too high a possibility of punitive justice afterward. She would republish already leaked government docs, and that was it. But she had already done a government job unwittingly, apparently, unless the CIA guy was gaslighting her, she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t turn this one down, they knew she had leaked CIA documents — unless the guy was working alone, in which case accepting would mean she was going to leak DHS documents. Petra groaned. The whole situation was rotten.
Could she handle being a government pawn? She stood up, and checked her new messages for the fee they were ready to give her. Yes, probably she could handle being a pawn just fine. She pulled out her phone, debating who to call first. She needed to verify that this job was legit before proceeding. But if it was… well, why not? The money spent, and she could stay anonymous. Nothing in the report sent to her looked to be particularly difficult. She already had a vague sketch of the person behind her leak — she needed a character to act as even if she never explicitly revealed the identity of her source, just to give conspiracists and dedicated journalists something to gnaw on. She would drop a couple references to customs analysis, a hardheaded, no nonsense, practical source. She could probably have this leak live by the end of the week.
When she finally decided on her first contact to call, Petra still didn’t realize she had already decided to take the contract. Because after all, she might still say no, depending on what the contact would say. But money was money, and information wants to be free. What harm could she really do, exposing corruption in a federal agency? That’s what she signed up for; that’s why she started this project in the first place. At the end of the day, she gave people factual documents, and they decided what to do with them.
Petra activated her usual layers of security, and dialed the first number.
