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#and jason’s core values have always centered on keeping people from harm
jostenneil · 3 years
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i’m genuinely confused by people who think talia’s portrayal in the last issue of the lost days isn’t a direct product of racist writing and reducing her to a pawn in the narrative between jason and bruce (and even ra’s). like who comes out of that issue thinking there’s anything realistic about ra’s conveniently dying off the page so talia can retaliate against bruce by sleeping with someone whom she’s been looking over as a pseudo mother figure for the entire run before that. i don’t care that winick explains it away by saying that talia and jason are fucked up people so that’s why they do it. talia has had her share of grievances with bruce before but she doesn’t use them to retaliate against him, and there were even inconsistencies with how she was characterized in lost days as a whole—hardly reacting to jason mentioning a sex trafficker or other criminals she used to be loudly critical of in her original portrayals, ra’s saying she was caring for jason to get bruce to love her back when bruce’s love for her is never something she’s doubted bc she knows their obstacles are largely circumstantial—so it’s not like people (or at least me lol) are just picking the one issue to have a problem with. i like the potential the lost days sets up for a dynamic between talia and jason bc with regards to bruce there’s a lot that they can relate to each other on. but it’s shitty that some people think it can’t be explored just bc of that one issue that sought to mischaracterize and render her into a predator when it was entirely unrealistic for her as a person regardless of whatever issues she had with bruce. what kind of entitlement is it to tell someone they can’t pick and choose what canon to accept when racist writing is something present across a lot of a character’s portrayal? there’s not a huge amount of liberty available to cleanly accept entire runs or events as acceptable portrayals of characters of color. ofc we have to pick and choose even within runs themselves bc that’s how shitty white writers are
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satire-please · 5 years
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My Teeth Are Like Swords - Part 4
Summary: Tim’s in a sticky situation because of...Ra’s. Therefore sacrifices have to be made.  Personal ones.
Part 3, Part 2, Part 1
Ao3 Link
There are few things out in the world that can startle a drake.
Ra’s al Ghul is one of them.
In fact, Tim would like to put the Demon Head near the top of that list. Especially when the villain morphs into the edge of his peripherals at another charity event the Waynes are required to attend. Guess who’s the lucky token Wayne this time?
Yep. Apparently being a dragon doesn’t increase your luck when pulling straws.
Tim manages to repress a flinch when he spots the flash of gold and green. The surprise makes his heart pound in the most unpleasant of ways. Ninjas do that after all.
“Please excuse me, gentlemen, we’ll have to continue our conversation later,” Tim smiles with charm towards a throng of investors.
He takes his drink in hand and carefully makes his way to the wall...where Ra’s watches the crowd. No, that’s not right. Where Ra’s watches him, and Tim can feel that gaze rove over his form like dirty fingers as his stride become a more purposeful march.  At this museum, Tim vaguely and spitefully compares the man to the mess of artwork around him. Flowing, unironic, stupid cape arranged over a well-tailored suit, Surrealism matches the feelings the criminal provokes, a gnawing infestation under his skin. Tim’s wine glass moves to hover in front of his chest, over his core instinctively.
The man is dangerous.
He’s the type that scratches and digs to find what you hold dearest and wait for the right moment where destroying it would hurt the most. The kind with patience, the kind with knowledge, the kind that Tim knows would just love to hunt down a mythical creature of his own. Ra’s could make a poacher very...very happy and wealthy.
Tim can take him.
“Good evening...Timothy.”
“What are you doing here.” It’s not a question, it’s a demand. Tim’s face might be stuck in a pleasant countenance for their surroundings, but his voice is more frigid than the Arctic.
Ra’s gestures grandly with a hand around them, “Why to admire the innovative talents that Gotham has to offer.” A crooked smirk begins to cut across his face. Sharper than any blade. “The possibilities are astounding.”
“Huh, somehow I doubt you’re here to support our talented artists for the Wounded Warrior Project.” Tim’s lip curls into a sneer, “Instead of protecting veterans, you tend to sacrifice them instead. Isn’t that way your recruitment rate is so high?”
Ra’s uncoils from his relaxed pose against the wall. “How rude, Detective. My fallen are honored, especially when they give their all to my purpose. In fact, the esteem, the respect, the glory they earn is never retracted. Tell me, is the notion the same with the Bat’s broken little boys?”
It’s a jab against Jason. Maybe even against him. Tim’s smile fractures in the corner of his lips, a fang scraping the inside of his cheek and he sets down his glass harder on passing tray than he needs to. A deep breath, two. It would be a paparazzi dream come true to capture the money shot of Timothy Drake-Wayne socking an unknown foreigner in the face. But he’s no fairy godmother. “Why don’t we take this fascinating discussion elsewhere? Somewhere more private if you want to know what else can break.” Like your face. Or his arm, Tim’s not really picky. “That way you can be out with it. You’re not here just to trade quips to piss me off. You want something.”
“You would be correct in your deductions. I require something in this cesspit, a diamond in the rough so to speak. For me to claim success, I must have your assistance.” Ra’s tilts his head in agreement. “Yet for more precise details, lead on.”
“Great, let’s go. I can’t wait to tell you no.”
Tim storms off, Ra’s following leisurely behind them as they part through the crowd. His hackles raised as he’s forced to give the assassin his back. The two make their way past the less inhabited exhibits, then into the hall towards the back offices where new art pieces are received and cataloged.
“Oh, Timothy, I am sure you know why few have dared to refuse me. Yet before our business, I must inform you, Nyssa sends her fondest regards.” Tim jerks at the whisper brushing his ear.
He twists on his heel to snarl at the looming man. Obnoxiously tall man.
“Tell her mine are not as much and next time she wants to try for free ‘seed,’ she should take the guy out for dinner first.”
Ra’s simply waves a hand for them to continue forward, “Perhaps uncouth, unconventional, and yet–”
“She chained me to a wall.”
“–Yet what a vision you must have been. Helpless, bare and dazed from the blow…truly a sight wasted when it could have been shared.” Ra’s expression turns way too salacious and Tim’s knuckles itch with possibility. “Still no matter how forward perhaps, she regrets how short your time in her clutches was. It is unbearably unfortunate your knight in shining black armor appeared so early.”
“Well, Black Bat is always to kick a rapist’s ass anytime, anywhere.” And if the criminal tries anything like that again it won’t be just Cass, it’ll be a full-size dragon ready to fry the Ghul into ash. Really, it’s just self-defense, maybe Bruce will understand.
“Some battles are worth any wound for the prize.”
Tim manages not to gag. Barely. Instead, he decides not to give Ra’s the pleasure of a response. He goes to open a door only to find it unlocked. His fingers bite into the doorknob, how many rooms did Ra’s men make available for this...meeting? How long did Ra’s plan this?
The pause gives Ra’s a chance to prompt, “A penny for your thoughts, Detective?”
“Only the one I wish I crushed you with.”
“Our first meeting was truly memorable. It is not every century, a giant piece of currency attempts to take my life.”
“Regrettably, you have this terrible habit of dodging.”
“What a wretched inconvenience I am to you,” Ra’s purrs. Though in the Detective’s favor, the experience was quite the introduction. The memory still strong of being absolutely stunned, as this pale wraith of a child maneuvered an enormous slab of copper to split him from the Bat.
“I know, right?”
“Then it is only fair for me to return the favor.” He herds the Detective into the small office. The shelves are full of covered paintings and bookkeeping litters the lone desk in the center. The smell of dust and resin permeates the air.
“You didn’t answer my question, why are you here, Ra’s?” He watches the way Ra’s prowls around examining their surroundings and Tim carefully puts the heavy desk between them. He’s not afraid. Not even nervous. Honest. But there’s no harm or shame in placing obstacles in a monster’s path.
Ra’s hums and rests his hands in the small of his back, he arches an eyebrow at the Detective. “To declare that perhaps I was too quick to judge the city of Gotham.”
“What? No,” Tim draws out sarcastically, “You think?”
“After all, why allow this filthy cesspit my presence long enough to evaluate it in full?”
“I’m surprised more people don’t punch you in the mouth whenever you open it.”
“Power, my dear,” he says absentmindedly, “However, now I see the error of my ways. I was too quick to strike, though I still long to destroy this hell, wipe it off the face of the planet like the divine fires of Gomorrah.”
“Is this the way you ask always for help? Because you suck at it.” Tim folds his arms across his chest.
A dark chuckle, “Oh, Timothy, I never ask for assistance. I demand it. Yet allow me to get to the point. Before Gotham meets its predestined fate, it may possess something of value after all.”
Tim arches a brow at him, this close from rolling his eyes.
“It is a thing...most precious. Something that must be recovered by the League at any cost, by any means possible.”
“I’m not a mind reader, Ra’s. Spit it out and get out of my face.”
“A creature. Behold these are the marks of a creature with certain properties I find...desirable.”
Yeah sure, I freaking bet.
Ra’s tosses a sheaf of papers. No. Photos. In pretty black and white, they hit the top of the desk and fan out before Tim’s eyes.
Ice.
‘Ice,’ the wraith of his mother whispers, Tim feels the memory of her nails digging into shoulders. The way she’d spin him to face the mirror and press her cheek to his. ‘Be as ice. Let the blue of your eyes harden for why should they know any intention of yours?’
Her old lessons crack like an egg over his brain, drip down his veins and out of his mouth, “Am I supposed to ooh and ahh over grappling hook marks?”
Ra’s picks up on photo to thumb the edges.“Ah. It is true they do appear similar, do they not? Yet not, Detective, such grooves are not made with any tool,” he says.  
Tim’s heart starts to pound.
“Nor can these distinctive charred marks be any coincidence.”
“To what? This is Gotham. Home of unusual and burnt up buildings everywhere. I’m still not following, spit it out.” Before he does. Tim’s mouth floods with nitroglycerin, it’s thicker than saliva and coats the back of his throat. A viscous layer ready at a moment’s notice, all it needs is a spark. All it needs is a reason to burn. He swallows it down roughly. He needs to prevent any evidence, not create it, remember?
“Forgive me, you know how much I love to build up the suspense.” Ra’s crooked smile widens and he pulls something heavy from his jacket pocket, “Allow me to lay out my conclusion.”
Between his fingers is a scale.
“Somewhere in Gotham is a dragon.”
The only thing that keeps Tim breathing is that the scale isn’t black...it’s white.
“A what? You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Tim keeps the thread of arrogant disbelief strong in his voice. Mother would be proud. “Aren’t you too ridiculously old for fairy tales?”
“It is not a simple tale for the bed weary child,” Ra’s loses his patience. His obsessive greed bleeding through as he forces the scale into Tim’s hands. “This piece of evidence is authentic as the pit itself.”
“It just feels like a spray-painted piece of the batplane.” Tim carelessly taps it on the side of the desk. “Like a mix of plastic and alloy.”
“Be careful with that!”  
Tim hits it harder against the surface. Just to hear the man growl. The keratin in the scale is weak. Seems like the dame he fought once upon a time wasn’t just stupid but malnourished as well. Scales are like nails, they show health and the brittle nature of it gives the detective more than enough to work with. In fact, if he jumped on it at a certain angle, he might be able to snap it in two.
Ra’s rips it from his fingers. Spoilsport. “That is quite enough,” he hisses through his teeth and tucks the scale protectively back into his stupid, melodramatic cape.
“So whoop-dee-doo, the Demon’s Head believes in Dungeons and Dragons. Is there a point to this lame show and tell?”
“Because I require the services of a Detective.”
“Oh goodie, I think this is my favorite part in our conversation so far. How about a Hell No?”
Ra’s hands slam against the desk caging Tim in. Tim doesn’t flinch, perhaps berating himself for not noticing Ra’s getting into range yet he stares dead straight into those jade eyes.
‘Be stone.’ Janet’s voice reminds, ‘Give them nothing to predict, nothing before you strike.’
“You forget your debt to me, Timothy,” Ra’s says venomously.
Tim tilts his head to the side eerily. There’s a coil of unease winding inside him. The word debt is a serious concept to a dragon and the instincts around it are hard to shake. “What debt? I owe you nothing. Though if you mean that lovely kick through a window, I could totally repay you for that. This art museum has a lovely roof, let’s go.”
Ra’s presses in, Tim reaches behind himself to grab his own wrist. His nails are becoming too long for his liking. A flash of desire, of digging, of gouging, of letting the intestines fall as they may. Ra’s isn’t wearing any armour...probably. “I gave you resources when you had none. When all thought your grief had turned you mad, only I believed your hypothesis that the Bat remained alive. Only I gave you that validation.”
“Fuck you, I didn’t ask for your help. I would have been fine.” His nails draw his dark blood under the sleeve of his suit.
“Your future was to be a bloody corpse on a cheap hotel bed if not for me.” Ra’s grip on the desk behind him creaks.
Tim could headbutt Ra’s, doesn’t know why he’s continuing to hear him out.
“Which wouldn’t have happened in the first place if it wasn’t for your war on the Council of Spiders. The one you gave no warning or intel for. Technically it’s you that owes me a spleen, I wasn’t the Widower’s original target after all. I was a bonus kill.”
“Come to the pit then if you are so keen for the organ’s return.” Ra’s hovers above him with malice, with interest at the notion.
“And go crazy like you? No thanks.”  
“Regardless I provided aid for your quest, now it is time for you to take your aid in mine. Furthermore what better than a Drake finding a drake?”
“Drake-Wayne, remember.”
“And what would the other dear Waynes think of our past association.” Ra’s finally leans away from him, his hands trailing on the wood before gesturing behind them. Ah, so that’s Ra’s real angle, blackmail. Go figure. “The Bat may think that our interactions were justified for your noble cause, yet somehow I think otherwise. I admit I am beyond curious for his reaction to those lovely months we spent together.”  
Tim could rattle off a thousand reasons why that rationale was a pile of shit. That, okay. Fine. Bruce would glower, brood, and never trust Tim again, but, hey, after the Boomerbang incident maybe that ship has sailed to the Bahamas and back. Plus, if B can’t weigh the definite pros to the whole knocking out the Council of Spiders and taking Ra’s down a peg as a decent notch on his vigilante belt, well...Tim is a big boy anyway.
A big dragon.
Pieces of your hoard don’t have to trust you anyway. They just need to stay alive and safe.
Safe. Wait, oh.
“You’re such a bastard, Ra’s.” Tim grits out, but he’s going to take this deal. Not for Ra’s ‘debt’ and how the term makes his inner wyrm burn. Not for Bruce’s sensibilities. But for the most important thing, his mother drilled into his head over and over again.
The safety of control.
His face is cold, but his belly is hot. “Where do we start?” This is a mess to clean, his show to run, and his plan is solid.
Ra’s smiles.
So does Tim. He can’t wait to see the assassin’s’ aspirations go up in flames after all.
***
He manages to keep the Bats uninvolved for a record of forty-eight hours. It’s an accomplishment Tim should take note of really.
For example, he managed to scramble Barbara’s cameras subtly, though he’ll a semi truck of gourmet coffee to get back in her good graces when she finds out, just so Ra’s can show off various pieces of evidence his men have found around the city without surveillance. Tim had dutifully nodded during lengthy monologues only to innocently suggest that wouldn’t it be better to catalog all their data in one place? It’s so easy to convince Ra’s to have the marked roof tiles and stones removed, so easy to retrieve them later. Mother would scold him for how clumsy he had been. The least he can do is exterminate the crumbs that a wolf took advantage of.
Meanwhile, he throws out other morsels to divert and distract, “Looks like your ‘dragon’” Tim mockingly uses finger quotes. “Hasn’t been here for long. Maybe two months at most.”
“Oh? How can you deduce that?” Ra’s crouches down to trail his fingers over the grooves where Tim had stupidly filed his claws weeks ago. Stupid hygiene.
“The lack of erosion. Gotham has had a rainy year. Notice the iron embedded here and here next to the mark?” He points at the orange strain spreading over the bricks, “If made last year, the rust would bleed into the scratches yet note the chunk lacks any of that.”
Ra’s purrs, “Clever, Detective. So our drake must be new to the city. What a godforsaken place for it choose for its migration.”
“Not if it has the ability of camouflage.” Tim shrugs. The wind ripping through his cape as he eyes the security camera trying to turn their way and glitching. He has another three minutes before Babs catches on.
“In bright hues of white? I think not,” Ra’s scoffs.
“You said that dragons have powers beyond your ken. Is it really out of the realm of conception? If moths can do it, why can’t fire-breathing imaginary creatures?”  Two minutes.
“What an excellent point. It would give a reason for it to stay as well. My resources tell me that old cities provide the best nooks and rubble for one to hide their trove. Plus, the larger the city, the more ease the drake has to blend in.”
“Blend in?” Tim parrots. Shit.
“Why, of course. Not only does a dragon have strength and intelligence, but over eons, their best defense is to hide in plain sight.” Ra’s straightens to stand and looks to the night skyline. Tim thinks about the scales that not even makeup can hide behind his ear. The black iridescent ones that dot his collar bones that Dick once poked at and cooed before smothering him without another blanket. 
Heat regulation is still a bitch.
“Gotham.” Ra’s draws out the name. “Full of blind spots, full of soft brick and lead to dig through, full of abnormalities that over time each turns into a just another mundane occurrence to the public. Yes. I can now see the appeal that could persuade a drake.”
He sounds so much like his mother that Tim’s posture becomes still and rigid. His fist clenches on his knee. She always did mention that this was the perfect breeding ground for similar reasons. Even when he was young, she’d encourage him to stalk the city instead of stay in the mansion, her hoard, just in case. Even to the point of taking him into an alley since he was five, turn her face into one wall and slowly count to twenty. His record in evading her? Three hours.
If Tim wanted to disappear, really disappear into Gotham’s underbelly? He could.
He knows how to hide.  
“It seems we have been discovered, my Detective.” Ra’s smiles at him from the side. “What a pity. Our progress to this point has been phenomenal.”
But there’s always a time and place to hide and when the clock hits forty-eight hours and fourteen minutes, Tim doesn’t bother to make any move against the flash of a cape in his peripheral. “Not your detective, Ra’s. Have your men collect the rest of the samples and we’ll  reconvene once I analyze the possibilities of your fairytale whereabouts.”
“Very well. Oh, and do tell your mentor that I find myself sorely disappointed at his waning skills of concealment. A true agent of the night would never be drawn from the shadows so easily.”
Tim mutters, “He’s doing on purpose. If he didn’t want you to see him, you wouldn’t see him.” It’s more of Bruce waving a goddamn flag of ‘I know you’re in my city, get out of my city.’
“Besides every hunter knows how to distract dangerous prey,” a new voice says disdainfully.
They turn to the slight figure who managed to sneak only a foot or two away from them. One steel-toed green boot (a present from Jason) tapping the roof impatiently. Crossed arms over the Robin uniform, Damian Wayne has mastered the art of glaring with a domino on. “Grandfather, must your ninjas multiply like ants?”
Ra’s huffs through his nose, “Many hands make light work, Grandson. Farewell, Timothy. I await your every enlightenment.” And like a true magician, he throws his gaudy cape over a shoulder and disappears into the night.
Tim’s shoulders release, but he notes that Damian’s do not. Oh. He’s mad at him. Though to be fair, that is Damian’s default emotion to anything.  
Damian begins his hissing tirade, “I should submit you to Arkham myself. Such displays of insanity, must you attempt suicide in the most ridiculous of complex fashions? Why else would you positively associate with my grandfather?”
“One, I know what I’m doing. Two, there is nothing positive about it.” He gets up and away from the building edge before Damian gets the magical idea to shove him off it. Again.
Damian gets closer, one finger stabbing in his direction, “Why does video evidence say otherwise? You are clearly working in tandem with his aims. To think that father would even believe that you are being coerced is beyond my ken. Do you wish to die, Drake?”
The name is emphasized more than normal, and Tim gets his implication immediately.
“I have this under control, but thanks for worrying, brat.”
“Worrying? Why would I be worrying? You must be insane, yes, this is further evidence that padded walls would suit you.”
“Padded walls are flammable,” Tim reminds him.
With his thumb, he makes a small gesture and Damian’s breath hitches minutely. Even Tim can smell the Demon Head’s men. He can hear them. Their rabbit-like heartbeats underneath the awning are enough in his limited range. “But you’re right in a way, I am going along with Ra’s for a bit. For as long as it suits both our purposes. Though why he would willingly work with someone who double-crossed him before definitely needs the lesson of, ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Tim then hums in the back of his throat. “Actually, he’s probably already expecting that. It sounds like just the game he loves to play.”
“But is it one that you are assured to win?” Damian grabs his wrist to tug him along. Grayson wants him home immediately. The moment Oracle sent a live feed of Tim’s current companion to all the Bats, Robin wondered if he would have to take measures to aid his mentor through a panic attack. It was not pleasant. Grayson is very...concerned over the welfare of his brothers.
Tim snorts, “Please, who do you think you’re talking to?”
“A fool.” Ouch, Babybat doesn’t need a katana to cut him in half. The grip on his arm tightens, even as they descend into the alleyway where the Batmobile waits. It sits with the top already open, eager to trap Tim so specific overprotective brooding vigilantes can sit on him.
Lame.
Somehow telling the Bats of his true nature has multiplied every unnecessary precaution by a factor of eleven.
Damian shoves Tim into the vehicle. B moves in the driver seat to stare at him. A lot, not bothering to twist back to look out the windshield, just pushing the button for autopilot in a very pointed manner.
Damian presses the com in his mask subtly. So anyone on the line can hear his interrogation. “Now tell us. What shall you do in the matter concerning my grandfather? This is beyond a simple threat against your very person.”
Tim thinks of the scattered white scales he scraped off the dame. How they must litter the sand on that beach like sparkling stones. He thinks of the trail he could plant, not that he can just point the League of Assassins in her direction, not even when the offensive white plastic bag of a dragon deserves it. No, he needs to create the perfect dead end to Ra’s little expedition. But how could he–
The light bulb comes on and blood fills his mouth as his fangs drop. Can he really?
“Oh, you know what? I’m going to give him exactly what he wants, Damian.” Tim decides grimly, “I’m going to find him a dragon.”
***
Tim is going to throw up.
The stalactites drip around him, the sound that was once soothing but now every drop that hits the wet floor makes him want to retch. He shouldn’t be here. They shouldn’t be here.
Not in this particular network of caves.
“Are you sure the creature will be found here? The opening is far too small to accommodate their size,” Ra’s demands. The band of his men are few, only the chosen may aid him in this task to witness what the Detective has wrought. They have traveled approximately twenty minutes, yet with every second his appetite grows at the possibility, at the results of Timothy’s work. The boy is clever. However, the tunnel narrows here and there, scraping their chests as the rock practically hugs their forms.  
“Stop doubting me. You said dragons are shapeshifters right? So why couldn’t they transform back and forth to crawl in here and hide? I’m only going off of the intel you gave me, Ra’s. The beach where you found the scale is not far from here. Plus look at these.” His boots make a hard crunch in the dim light of a torch.
Ra’s is a traditional, dramatic egoist, of course. A freaking torch.
“Prey,” the assassin breathes out. His eyes glittering in greed. It makes Tim want to shift forms, to roar at this filth entering this place with such hunger. Under their feet, stretching for a good thirty feet is a cemetery of bones. Most of the skeletons clearly intact with white and yellow rib cages on display.
“There must be at least a hundred of them,” Ra’s declares.
There are not. There are only forty-three. Tim does not correct Ra’s though.
The antechamber begins to widen until it has about a fifty-yard radius. The light flickers, yet the shadow of Ra’s’ hand gives an obvious signal, “Spread out. Search. This area appears most...promising.”
Tim wanders among the wet stone in a pretense of looking around as Ra’s men discrete this place with their presence. He avoids the west side of the chamber. His gloves running their hands on a wet large skull or two. Kills he had been proud of once upon a time. Those kills he had been sure would entice his–
“My lord! We have found something!”
–his mother to eat.
“No.” A voice roughly snarls. “No!”
On the ground, a few white scales lie in patches next to a giant boulder that stretches alongside the back cave wall. The details of long limbs and a tail are obvious and simple.
Tim’s fingers come up to squeeze the backs of his elbows, hugging himself for a moment. His inner core fluctuating, his heartbeat loud but he manages to repress the urge of curling up by her.
“This cannot be!”
What would mother think of him? To use her corpse as a diversion like this? To give Ra’s an empty platitude of what he wants? Would she be proud?
Yes.
Ra’s fury and despair gets loud, “I have only just found you! Why? How could I be too late?”
Janet always scolded Tim for his soft sentimentality. A tool is a tool. A resource is a resource. It is truer to their nature to use any means to fulfill their objective.
“The dead are dead, my pet,” Mother reminded him whenever she took him hunting, the claws of her painted nails sweeping delicately under his eyes when she found him sniffling over the wild kill of a deer. “They do not feel your tears. Our long memories exist to never forget what was. Now eat, the meat will soon grow cold and you make a mockery of the life by wasting it.”
No, Tim never got the ‘stop playing with your food! You should be grateful, some people in China are starving’ approach to picky eating. And Mother always kept him fed one way or another.
Tim comes up behind Ra’s, “So this is your dragon. Huh, is it supposed to look like that?”
Ra’s twists to snarl at him. “No, it is not. Not unless it is–”
“Dead?”
Tim admits Ra’s is rocking the look of utter anguish right now. If he wasn’t steeling himself, keeping his voice and expression blank he’d be howling with bitter victory.
“What happened to it?”
Ra’s reaches out to pet rough features of a jaw morosely. “The legends say that once the lifespan of such a beast ends, they naturally calcify into stone.”
Tim very much wants a copy of those legends. Too many things they’ve gotten right. “I thought they lived forever?”
“No,” Ra’s says, schooling his grief into something more palatable. “They do not, yet they can live on for several centuries.”
“Like you,” Tim points out. “With the help of the pit that is. Why do you want a dragon anyway?”
Carefully he steps around the man, trying to angle his cape a certain way.
“Why does any man seek power and beauty? Such things are what drive and keep the human race alive. With a dragon, I would be absolutely unstoppable.”
“You are already pretty unstoppable, how about you give the rest of mankind a fighting chance? You got power, check. You got the ultimate green regimen against aging that every older woman would gladly beat you to death for, check. Maybe you should just stick with trying to rule the world bit instead of chasing magical creatures.”
A chuckle. How interesting that the Detective can sway his despondent mood so easily. Oh, how he longs… “Even I need a pet project, Timothy. Besides do you not think the years would pass more gracefully with such a companion, such a specimen by my side?”
“Somehow I think the specimen would be more inclined to end your years rather than spend them with you.” In fact, Tim is sure of it.
“Ah, but what is life without the thrill of surprise? Whatever bond we forge will never be without fire.”
Tim snorts. Well, that’s an understatement. Still, he lifts a glove to trace the stone closed lid of an eye. Just like he did so many years ago, he’s positioned himself well. Maybe they won’t find his–
“What do we have here?” Ra’s pushes past him with an air of curiosity.
Gosh, how many times will Tim bite his lips raw tonight?
“Lift that up.” Ra’s motions his men to hurry. True the beast would be far more preferable breathing, but he can still catalog the proof of their existence. Plus even this is a find. The body is wedged tightly between the stone paws but any resistance is solved with a strong pull. “Come, Detective, you must see this.”
Reluctantly Tim stands near the new find.
How long did it take for him to swallow his grief? Just to pull off stealing his dad’s corpse? To crack open the heavy mahogany coffin and wrap the rotting remains carefully in a sheet. The fabric soiling quickly with the putrid oozing bits. It wouldn’t do to have flesh remaining, not on the body of a mate, but the cave bugs and open-air took care of that. In fact, Tim only had to wait a  month to adorn the skeleton befitting of his worth as a dragon’s husband.
With the sockets clear, Tim worked in two egg-like sapphires the same shade of his eyes. A border of pearls and pink stones for a nose. He weaved fine chains of gold as a delicate filigree in and out of ribs. Each piece back then gave a sense of calm. Tim always knew this task would fall to him one day, never so soon, but, hey, that’s death for you. Final. Inevitable. He's most likely bound to do it for his brothers, for Bruce as well.
There’s a final piece attached to the hips in braided silver; the first “discovery” Janet and Jack Drake found on an archaeological dig together. A saber sword almost appearing of Assyrian origin. Mother may have recounted the story a few times to send Tim to sleep. How adorable, her mate looked waving around one of her fangs excitedly like that. How easy it was to convince him to display the treasure in their private home, right above their bed. How quaint to watch the man fondly as he stoked the sword before bed when her dear had no idea what it really was.
It had been one of Tim’s favorite bedtime stories. Where sleep took him fast at the warm purr in Mother’s voice.
“This is a meager compensation, but it will have to do.” The Demon Head yanks the sword from Tim’s father’s bones. It cracks both the radius and ulna of the arm and Tim sees red. “It would be a shame for a treasure such as this to waste away here. A fang. A real fang, my dear Detective.”
“Are you done playing graverobber? It won’t be long before Batman catches your trail.” Tim manages to bite out. His eyes narrowing under the cowl. His eyesight too clearly taking in the breaks in the stone and bone, the footsteps that mock this place, the way the ninja crawl over his mother like black maggots.
He needs them gone. Now.
Ra’s eyebrows raise, “Our trail, Timothy. Yet why waste this moment of limited triumph? Allow me at least to bask in the sight of the creature.”
“Bask later.” There is a second of tension. Where all ninja in the cave go still, ready for the command to attack. Their bodies tighten. Tim casually turns on his heel and walks towards the cave opening. Then with a roll of the Demon Head’s shoulders, a minuscule tilt of the head orders the ninja to concede to the vigilante’s wishes. Besides, Ra’s sweeps his gaze over the beast and plans. They require more men, more tools to recover this...treasure. So he follows after Timothy, to the edge of the cave and back into the dark, one hand almost hovering over the small of his slim back. His fingers twitch when the boy says, “Is this the first time you’ve seen one?”
“No, it is my third.” Tim’s face pinches at that. “The first happened in my earliest centuries, capturing the sight of one in flight. The second during a war campaign, in human form.”
Ra’s eyes slide over Tim’s body. “Did you know they look exactly like us, Detective? Almost identical in every conceivable way. If not for a few errant scales here and there hidden under their clothing.”
Tim’s own tender scales itch under the suit. “How could you tell?” Tim asks.
Ra’s smirks, “Drakes reveal themselves in times of high emotion. They are easy to rile. Then it is quite simple to observe their flashing eyes and other tells.”
Janet Drake could be milliseconds from ripping off his head with not a hair out of place, Tim can be, will be the same.
The skyline reflects over the water as they emerge from the narrow opening in the rock. Each building’s light almost looks like a star in the smoky haze. Under their feet, except for the lapping waves, the beach is quiet as not one of the party makes a sound.
The silence breaks. “Are you finished? Did you get what you needed?” Tim fiddles with something in the pouch over his chest.
“Never. Not until a drake’s heart beats in my own chest. Yet my eyes have seen another fine specimen, my suspicions have been confirmed...and my trophy is adequate.” Ra’s caresses the dragon fang sword now adorned at his hip. “I am done with Gotham for a season.”
“Good.” And Tim lifts his hand showing the detonator.
Ra’s eyes go wide, his mouth opens to shout.
Tim presses it.
His eyes remain glaciers while his back feels the rush of heat and smoke from the explosion behind. It bellows around him as the earth shifts violently, shudders and settles. Ra’s ninja bend over to protect themselves from the blast as Ra’s himself coughs over and over into his fist.
Tim doesn’t bother. He doesn’t turn around either.
It’ll hurt too much if he does.
‘The dead are dead, my pet.’
“Detective.” Ra’s face is contorted in a grimace of rage.  
“What’s wrong, Ra’s? You said it, not me. You were done. Now I believe I’ve repaid any debt to you in full, a mystery for a mystery and gosh don’t you think that’s enough sightseeing of Gotham for you?”
“I could have sent teams to investigate those remains further. With the discovery of such a preserved creature and you–”
“Graves are for the living. The dead don’t care,” Tim says with a chilling smile, “Maybe I grew tired of watching you break and fondle old bones.”
“You destroyed the cave! The incredible wonder. How is that preferable to my actions?”
The crumbling rock should be enough to cover up the nearly-silent sounds of boots, of Gotham’s shadows taking their final positions twelve seconds after the explosion as planned.
Through the haze, Red Robin smiles white in the night, “It’s preferable because I get to piss you off. Now get out of my city, I promise you the only drake here is me.”
“And I promise you, Detective. The destruction of your city will be just as quick and ruthless as that cave.” Ra’s storms towards him, but the shadows take shape, and the yellow insignia comes through the dusk, the glint of the red helmet, and maybe a little blue and black mixed in, all the colors of the night flaring out over Red Robin’s shoulder, a heavy hand, gloved and gauntleted, ready for the fight, gives a brief squeeze of encouragement.
“You heard my son, Ra’s. it’s time to leave our city.”
But Nightwing gives a laugh, twirling one escrima stick through his fingers, “Nah. I think you should stay a while. This would make good fighting terrain. How many ninjas do you think made it out of that blast again?”
There’s a snort through synths and Red Hood nudges Robin, who’s standing next to him, “Gotta say, I don’t think it’s gonna be enough to keep the five of us interested for long, you feel me here, Baby Bird?”
“Tt, we were promised a sensational final brawl, Drake, and here you have failed to deliver.”  
“I’m not Santa Claus, Robin. How was I supposed to know Ra’s men would be so lame?”
“I had expectations that your plan would yield better results.”
Tim’s lips twitch. “Pfft. Next time, you can plan the bad guy takedown, and I’ll go get roof tacos with B, N, and Hood. Deal?”
“I think for now,” B interrupts the witty banter, moving with a swish of his cape to stand by Red Robin’s side, putting them shoulder-to-shoulder, “we’re going to say it one. Last. Time. Get the hell out of our city.”
And the depth of B’s voice is the thing that makes him the most feared man in the city. It’s enough to make Ra’s al Ghul pause and narrow his eyes over at Red Robin.
“Touche, Detective. As always, you never fail to disappoint during one of our little...games.” And even if he doesn’t move any closer, doesn’t even tighten his hold over the fang, Tim feels a shiver run down his spine. “Enjoy your victories for now, Timothy, but one day you may see this very fang again, and your blood will sate it.”
And even if it’s just way overdone, Ra’s gives barely a twitch of his fingers and the shadowy assassins leap away, running as they’re bid, and Ra’s himself turns sharply on his heels, clutching the fang by his side.
The Bats all take a collective breath.
As one, four heads swing to the vigilante in the middle, arms crossed and toes tapping.
“Okay, so not my best plan maybe, but it’s been one hell of a night. Can we just call it and go home?” Red Robin looks again at the rubbled remains of his family’s burial site, the space in his chest hollow even with the victory.
“I’m pretty much on board with that plan,” and because B knows about pain like this, sharp and biting when it comes to things that can never be regained. He pointedly grips one of Red’s shoulders, turns him gently away from the remains. “Besides, we have a meeting tomorrow and I need you to make me look like a rich idiot, remember?”
The returning laugh is tinged with sadness and B gives him another pat before leading the way back to the Batplane waiting for them all.
“We’re riding with Timmy!” Nightwing calls, already wrapping himself around one of Red’s arms. Hood lays a hand on Red’s other, giving a gentle squeeze.
Robin chuffs at them and leaps into the cockpit with Batman, waving them away to the plan Red came in to meet Ra’s.
Hood takes over, warming the plane up to fly while Nightwing hangs in the back with Red, pulling off the cowl so Tim couldn’t hide.
“Tell me really, are you okay, Baby Bird?” Dick gently tugs his brother into his body, taking in how he sags into the hold.
“I’m...fine.” Tim grips the arm half around his neck, careful of his claws under the gauntlets. “I just, you know, destroyed the grave of my parents. Let the most disgusting man walk away with my mother’s fang. I just–”
“Ensured your safety by leading Ra’s around by the nose.” Bruce finishes through the comm link in the planes. “The Demon Head will never suspect your nature now. When he returns it’ll be for your head, not your heart...we can work with that.”
“Yeah, death is just so much easier to work with than being hunted, captured like a pretty pet and trained as one,” Tim mutters.
“Plus Bats never stay dead!” Jason yells back in an ugly fashion.
“Seconded,” is Dami deadpanning in the back.
“I’ll worry about it when the day comes. Until then, I’m going to be very glad my secret is safe.” But Tim sits heavily, head dangling between his shoulders, so fucking tired. A hand reaching back pats his calf while Jay stays at the controls, and Dick flops beside him, already wrapping a long arm around his ribs.
“You’re safe,” Dick says low in his ear, low enough that the plane’s microphones can’t pick it up. “That’s what matters. You’re safe with us, and when that day comes, we’ll be here, Tim. We. Will. Be. Here.”
After the reassuring squeeze to his calf and the vigilante crushing his spine, hearing the low purr of B and Robin’s engine through the comm link, knowing Alfred is at home waiting with coffee and food and bandages, all of it makes him feel that much better.
“Our love is a terrible thing,” his mother’s voice whispers from memory. “But take comfort in this, you are mine. Now, until my last breath and forever.”
Tim...can work with that.
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Exclusive: Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks' malware checklist #1yrago
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Boing Boing is proud to publish two original documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, in connection with "Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition," a short story written for Laura Poitras's Astro Noise exhibition, which runs at NYC's Whitney Museum of American Art from Feb 5 to May 1, 2016.
“I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.” This is what I shout at the TV (or the Youtube window) whenever I see a surveillance boss explain why none of his methods, or his mission, can be subjected to scrutiny. I write about surveillance, counter surveillance, and civil liberties, and have spent a fair bit of time in company with both the grunts and the generals of the surveillance industry, and I can always tell when one of these moments is coming up, the flinty-eyed look of someone about to play Jason Bourne.
The stories we tell ourselves are the secret pivots on which our lives turn. So when Laura Poitras approached me to write a piece for the Astro Noise book -- to accompany her show at the Whitney -- and offered me access to the Snowden archive for the purpose, I jumped at the opportunity.
Fortuitously, the Astro Noise offer coincided perfectly with another offer, from Laurie King and Leslie Klinger. Laurie is a bestselling Holmes writer; Les is the lawyer who won the lawsuit that put Sherlock Holmes in the public domain, firmly and unequivocally. Since their legal victory, they've been putting together unauthorized Sherlock anthologies, and did I want to write one for "Echoes of Holmes," the next one in line?
The two projects coincided perfectly. Holmes, after all, is the master of HUMINT, (human intelligence), the business of following people around, getting information from snitches, dressing up in putty noses and fake beards... Meanwhile, his smarter brother Mycroft is a corpulent, sedentary presence in the stories, the master of SIGINT (signals intelligence), a node through which all the intelligence of the nation flows, waiting to be pieced together by Mycroft and his enormous intellect. The Mycroft-Sherlock dynamic perfectly embodies the fraternal rivalry between SIGINT and HUMINT: Sherlock chases all around town dressed like an old beggar woman or similar ruse, catches his man and hands him over to Scotland Yard, and then reports in to Mycroft, who interrupts him before he can get a word out, arching an eyebrow and saying, "I expect you found that it was the Bohemian stable-hand all along, working for those American Freemasons who were after the Sultan's pearls, was it not?"
In 2014, I watched Jennifer Gibson from the eminent prisoners’ rights group Reprieve talking about her group's project to conduct a census of those killed by US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan. The CIA conducts these strikes, using SIGINT to identify mobile phones belonging to likely targets and dispatch killer drones to annihilate anything in their vicinity. As former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden once confessed: "We kill people based on metadata."
But the CIA does not specialize in SIGINT (that's the NSA's job). For most of its existence, the CIA was known as a HUMINT agency, the masters of disguise and infiltration..
That was the old CIA. The new CIA is just another SIGINT agency. Signals Intelligence isn’t just an intelligence methodology, it’s a great business. SIGINT means huge procurements -- servers, administrators, electricity, data-centers, cooling -- while HUMINT involves sending a lot of your friends into harm's way, potentially never to return.
We are indeed in the “golden age of SIGINT”. Despite security services' claims that terrorists are "going dark" with unbreakable encryption, the spooks have done much to wiretap the whole Internet.
The UK spy agency GCHQ really tipped their hand when they called their flagship surveillance program "Mastering the Internet." Not "Mastering Cybercrime," not "Mastering Our Enemies." Mastering the *Internet* -- the very same Internet that everyone uses, from the UK's allies in the Five Eyes nations to the UK Parliament to Britons themselves. Similarly, a cursory glance at the logo for the NSA’s Special Source Operations -- the fiber-tapping specialists at the NSA -- tells the whole story.
These mass surveillance programs would likely not have withstood public scrutiny. If the NSA’s decision to launch SSO had been attended by a nightly news broadcast featuring that logo, it would have been laughed out of the room. The program depended on the NSA telling its story to itself, and not to the rest of us. The dotcom boom would have been a very different affair if the major legislative debate of the day had been over whether to allow the surveillance agencies of Western governments to monitor all the fiber cables, and harvest every click and keystroke they can legally lay claim to, parcel it into arbitrary categories like “metadata” and “content” to decide what to retain indefinitely, and to run unaccountable algorithms on that data to ascribe secret guilt.
As a result, the entire surveillance project has been undertaken in secrecy, within the bubble of people who already think that surveillance is the answer to virtually any question. The surveillance industry is a mushroom, grown in dark places, and it has sent out spores into every corner of the Internet, which have sprouted their own surveillance regimes. While this was happening, something important was happening to the Internet: as William Gibson wrote in 2007's "Spook Country, "cyberspace is everting" -- turning inside out. Computers aren’t just the things in our bags in the trunks of our cars. Today, our cars are computers. This is why Volkswagen was able to design a car that sensed when it was undergoing regulatory inspection and changed its behavior to sneak through tests. Our implanted defibrillators are computers, which is why Dick Cheney had the wireless interface turned off on his defibrillator prior to its implantation. Everything is a networked computer.
Those networked devices are an attack surface that is available to the NSA and GCHQ's adversaries -- primarily other governments, as well as non-government actors with political ambitions -- and to garden variety criminals. Blackmailers, voyeurs, identity thieves and antisocial trolls routinely seize control over innocents' computers and attack them in every conceivable way. Like the CIA and its drones, they often don't know who their victims are: they find an exploit, write a script to find as many potential victims as possible, and harvest them.
For those who are high-value targets, this lurking insecurity is even more of a risk -- witness the recent takeover of the personal email accounts of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper by a group of self-described teenagers who previously took over CIA Director John Brennan's email account.
This is the moment when the security services could shine. We need cyber defense and we need it badly. But for the security services to shine, they'd have to spend all their time patching up the leaky boat of networked security, while their major project for a decade and more has been to discover weaknesses in the network and its end-points and expand them, adding vulnerabilities that they can weaponize against their adversaries -- leaving these vulnerabilities wide open for their adversaries to use in attacking us.
The NSA and GCHQ have weaponized flaws in router operating systems, rather than telling the vendors about these flaws, leaving the world’s electronic infrastructure vulnerable to attack by the NSA and GCHQ’s adversaries. Our spies hack core routers and their adversaries' infrastructure, but they have made themselves reliant upon the continuing fragility and insecurity of the architectures common to enemy and ally alike, when they could have been making us all more secure by figuring out how to harden them.
The mission of making it as hard as possible for the enemy to attack us is in irreconcilable tension with the mission of making it as easy as possible for our security services to attack their adversaries.
There isn't a Bad Guy Internet and a Good Guy Internet. There's no Bad Guy Operating System and Good Guy Operating System. When GCHQ discovers something breakable in a computer system that Iranians depend upon, they've also discovered something amiss that Britons rely upon. GCHQ can't keep that gap in Iran's armor intact without leaving an equally large gap open in our own armor.
For my Sherlock story, I wanted to explore what it means to have a security methodology that was all attack, and precious little defense, particularly one that proceeded in secret, without any accountability or even argument from people who thought you were doing it all wrong.
The Documents
Though I reviewed dozens of unpublished documents from the Snowden archive in writing my story, I relied upon three documents, two of which we are releasing today.
First, there's the crux of my Sherlock story, drawn from a March 2010 GCHQ document titled "What's the worst that could happen?" marked "TOP SECRET STRAP 1." This is a kind of checklist for spies who are seeking permission to infect their adversaries' computers or networks with malicious software.
It's a surprising document in many regards. The first thing that caught my eye about it is the quality of the prose. Most of the GCHQ documents I've reviewed read like they were written by management consultants, dry and anodyne in a way that makes even the famously tortured prose of the military seem juicy by comparison. The story the authors of those documents are telling themselves is called something like, “Serious grownups, doing serious work, seriously.”
"What's the worst..." reads like the transcript of a lecture by a fascinating and seasoned mentor, someone who's seen all the pitfalls and wants to help you, their protege, navigate this tricky piece of the intel business without shooting yourself in the foot.
It even tells a kind of story: we have partners who help us with our malware implantation. Are they going to help us with that business in the future if their names get splashed all over the papers? Remember, there are clever people like you working for foreign governments -- they're going to try and catch us out! Imagine what might happen if one of our good friends got blamed for what we did -- or blamed us for it! Let's not forget the exploits themselves: our brilliant researchers quietly beaver away, finding the defects that the best and the brightest programmers at, say, Apple and Microsoft have left behind in their code: if you get caught, the companies will patch the vulnerabilities and we will lose the use of them forever.
On it goes in this vein, for three pages, until the very last point:
“Who will have direct access to the data resulting from the operation and do we have any control over this? Could anyone take action on it without our agreement, eg could we be enabling the US to conduct a detention op which we would not consider permissible?”
That's where the whole thing comes to something of a screeching halt. We're not talking about Tom Clancy net-wars fantasies anymore -- now we're into the realm of something that must haunt every man and woman of good will and integrity who works in the spy agencies: the possibility that a colleague or ally, operating without oversight or consequence, might descend into barbarism based on something you did.
Reading this, I thought of the Canadian officials who incorrectly told US authorities that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, who was suspected of being connected to Al Qaeda.
Arar was detained by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) during a stopover in New York on his way home from a family vacation in Tunis. The Americans, acting on incomplete intelligence from the Canadian Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), deported Arar to Syria, a country he had not visited since his move to Canada, and which does permit the renunciation of citizenship.
Arar claims he was tortured during his imprisonment which lasted almost a year, and bombarded with questions from his torturers that seemed to originate with the US security services. Finally, the Syrian government decided that Arar was innocent of any terrorist connections and let him go home to Canada. The US authorities refused to participate in the hearings on the Arar affair and the DHS has kept his family on the no-fly list.
Why did Syrian officials let him go? "Why shouldn't we leave him to go? We thought that would be a gesture of good will towards Canada, which is a friendly nation. For Syria, second, we could not substantiate any of the allegations against him." He added that the Syrian government now considers Arar completely innocent.
Is this what the unnamed author of this good-natured GCHQ document meant by "a detention op which we would not consider permissible?" The Canadian intelligence services apparently told their US counterparts early on that they'd been mistaken about Arar, but when a service operates with impunity, in secret, it gets to steamroller on, without letting facts get in the way, refusing to acknowledge its errors.
The security services are a system with a powerful accelerator and inadequate brakes. They’ve rebranded “terrorism” as an existential risk to civilization (rather than a lurid type of crime). The War on Terror is a lock that opens all doors. As innumerable DEA agents have discovered, the hint that the drug-runner you’re chasing may be funding terror is a talisman that clears away red-tape, checks and balances, and oversight.
The story of terrorism is that it must be stopped at all costs, that there are no limits when it comes to the capture and punishment of terrorists. The story of people under suspicion of terrorism, therefore, is the story of people to whom no mercy is due, and of whom all cunning must be assumed.
Within the security apparatus, identification as a potential terrorist is a life sentence, a “FAIR GAME” sign taped to the back of your shirt, until you successfully negotiate a kafka-esque thicket of secretive procedures and kangaroo courts. What story must the author of this document have been telling themself when they wrote that final clause, thinking of someone telling himself the DIE HARD story, using GCHQ’s data to assign someone fair game status for the rest of their life?
Holmes stories are perfectly suited to this kind of problem. From "A Scandal in Bohemia" to "A Study in Scarlet," to "The Man With the Twisted Lip," Holmes's clients often present at his doorstep wracked with guilt or anxiety about the consequences of their actions. Often as not, Holmes's solution to their problems involves not just unraveling the mystery, but presenting a clever way for the moral question to be resolved as well.
The next document is the "HIMR Data Mining Research Problem Book," a fascinating scholarly paper on the methods by which the massive data-streams from the deep fiber taps can be parsed out into identifiable, individual parcels, combining data from home computers, phones, and work computers.
It was written by researchers from the Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research in Bristol, a ”partnership between the UK Government Communications Headquarters and the University of Bristol.” Staff spend half their time working on public research, the other half is given over to secret projects for the government.
The Problem Book is a foundational document in the Snowden archive, written in clear prose that makes few assumptions about the reader’s existing knowledge. It likewise makes few ethical assertions about its work, striking a kind of academic posture in which something is ”good” if it does some task efficiently, regardless of the task. It spells out the boundaries on what is and is not ”metadata” without critical scrutiny, and dryly observes that ”cyber” is a talisman -- reminiscent of ”terrorist” -- that can be used to conjure up operating capital, even when all the other government agencies are having their budgets cut.
The UK government has recognized the critical importance of cyber to our strategic position: in the Comprehensive Spending Review of 2010, it allocated a significant amount of new money to cyber, at a time when almost everything else was cut. Much of this investment will be entrusted to GCHQ, and in return it is imperative for us to use that money for the UK’s advantage.

Some of the problems in this book look at ways of leveraging GCHQ’s passive SIGINT capabilities to give us a cyber edge, but researchers should always be on the look-out for opportunities to advance the cyber agenda.

The story the Problem Book tells is of scholars who’ve been tasked with a chewy problem: sieving usable intelligence out of the firehoses that GCHQ has arogated to itself with its fiber optic taps.
Somewhere in that data, they are told, must be signatures that uniquely identify terrorists. It’s a Big Data problem, and the Problem Book, dating to 2010, is very much a creature of the first rush of Big Data hype.
For the researchers, the problem is that their adversaries are no longer identifiable by their national affiliation. The UK government can’t keep on top of its enemies by identifying the bad countries and then spying on their officials, spies and military. Now the bad guys could be anyone. The nation-state problem was figuring out how to spy on your enemies. The new problem is figuring out which people to spy on.
"It is important to bear in mind that other states (..) are not bound by the same legal framework and ideas of necessity and proportionality that we impose on ourselves. Moreover, there are many other malicious actors in cyberspace, including criminals and hackers (sometimes motivated by ideology, sometimes just doing it for fun, and sometimes tied more or less closely to a nation state). We certainly cannot ignore these non-state actors".
The problem with this is that once you accept this framing, and note the happy coincidence that your paymasters just happen to have found a way to spy on everyone, the conclusion is obvious: just mine all of the data, from everyone to everyone, and use an algorithm to figure out who’s guilty.
The bad guys have a Modus Operandi, as anyone who’s watched a cop show knows. Find the MO, turn it into a data fingerprint, and you can just sort the firehose’s output into ”terrorist-ish” and ”unterrorist-ish.”
Once you accept this premise, then it’s equally obvious that the whole methodology has to be kept from scrutiny. If you’re depending on three ”tells” as indicators of terrorist planning, the terrorists will figure out how to plan their attacks without doing those three things.
This even has a name: Goodhart's law. "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Google started out by gauging a web page’s importance by counting the number of links they could find to it. This worked well before they told people what they were doing. Once getting a page ranked by Google became important, unscrupulous people set up dummy sites (“link-farms”) with lots of links pointing at their pages.
The San Bernardino shootings re-opened the discussion on this problem. When small groups of people independently plan atrocities that don’t require complicated or unusual steps to plan and set up, what kind of data massaging will surface them before it’s too late?
Much of the paper deals with supervised machine learning, a significant area of research and dispute today. Machine learning is used in "predictive policing" systems to send cops to neighborhoods where crime is predicted to be ripening, allegedly without bias. In reality, of course, the training data for these systems comes from the human-directed activity of the police before the system was set up. If the police stop-and-frisk all the brown people they find in poor neighborhoods, then that's where they'll find most of the crime. Feed those arrest records to a supervised machine algorithm and ask it where the crime will be and it will send your officers back to the places where they're already focusing their efforts: in other words, "predictive policing" is great at predicting what the police will do, but has dubious utility in predicting crime itself.
The part of the document I was most interested in was the section on reading and making sense of network graphs. They are the kind of thing you’d use in a PowerPoint slide when you want to represent an abstraction like "the Internet". Network graphs tell you a lot about the structures of organizations, about the relative power relationships between them. If the boss usually communicates to their top lieutenants after being contacted by a trusted advisor, then getting to that advisor is a great way to move the whole organization, whether you're a spy or a sales rep.
The ability of data-miners to walk the social and network graphs of their targets, to trace the "information cascades" (that is, to watch who takes orders from whom) and to spot anomalies in the network and zero in on them, is an important piece of the debate on "going dark." If spies can look at who talks to whom, and when, and deduce organizational structure and upcoming actions, then the ability to read the content of messages -- which may be masked by cryptography -- is hardly the make-or-break for fighting their adversaries.
This is crucial to the debate on surveillance. In the 1990s, there was a seminal debate over whether to prohibit civilian access to working cryptography, a debate that was won decisively for the side of unfettered access to privacy tools. Today, that debate has been renewed. David Cameron was re-elected to the UK Prime Minister's office after promising to ban strong crypto, and the UK government has just introduced a proposed cryptographic standard designed to be broken by spies.
The rubric for these measures is that spies have lost the ability to listen in on their targets, and with it, their ability to thwart attacks. But as the casebook demonstrates, a spy's-eye view on the Internet affords enormous insight into the activities of whole populations -- including high-value terrorism suspects.
The Problem Book sets up the Mycroftian counterpoint to Sherlock's human intelligence -- human and humane, focused on the particulars of each person in his stories.
Sherlock describes Mycroft as an all-knowing savant:
The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearinghouse, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience.
While Sherlock is energized by his intellectual curiosity, his final actions are governed by moral consequences and empathy. Mycroft functions with the moral vacuum of a software: tell him to identify anomalies and he'll do it, regardless of why he's been asked or what happens next. Mycroft is a Big Data algorithm in human form.
The final document I relied upon in the story is one we won't be publishing today: an intercepted transcript of a jihadi chat room This document isn't being released because there were many people in that chat room, having what they thought was an off-the-record conversation with their friends. Though some of them were espousing extreme ideology, mostly they were doing exactly what my friends and I did when I was a teenager: mouthing off, talking about our love lives, telling dirty jokes, talking big.
These kids were funny, rude, silly, and sweet -- they were lovelorn and fighting with their parents. I went to school with kids like these. I was one of them. If you were to judge me and my friends based on our conversations like these, it would be difficult to tell us apart from these children. We all talked a big game, we all fretted about military adventurism, we all cursed the generals who decided that civilian losses are acceptable in the pursuit of their personal goals. I still curse those generals, for whatever it's worth. I read reams of these chat transcripts and I am mystified at their value to national security. These children hold some foolish beliefs, but they're not engaged in anything more sinister than big talk and trash talk.
Most people -- including most people like these kids -- are not terrorists. You can tell, because we're not all dead. An indiscriminate surveillance dragnet will harvest far more big talkers than bad guys. Mass surveillance is a recipe for creating an endless stream of Arars, and each Arar serves as inspiration for more junior jihadis.
In my fiction, I've always tried to link together real world subjects of social and technological interest with storytelling that tries to get into the way that the coming changes will make us feel. Many readers have accused me of predicting the future because I've written stories about mass surveillance and whistleblowers.
But the truth is that before Snowden, there was Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, and Bill Binney and Thomas Drake before them, and Mark Klein before them. Mass surveillance has been an open secret since the first GW Bush administration, and informed speculation about where it was going was more a matter of paying attention to the newspaper than peering into a crystal ball.
Writing a Sherlock Holmes story from unpublished leaks was a novel experience, though, one that tied together my activist, journalist and fiction writing practices in a way that was both challenging and invigorating. In some ways, it represented a constraint, because once I had the nitty-gritty details of surveillance to hand, I couldn't make up new ones to suit the story. But it was also tremendous freedom, because the mass surveillance regimes of the NSA and GCHQ are so obviously ill-considered and prone to disastrous error that the story practically writes itself.
I worry about "cybersecurity," I really do. I know that kids can do crazy things. But in the absence of accountability and independent scrutiny, the security services have turned cyberspace into a battleground where they lob weapons at one another over our heads, and we don't get a say in the matter. Long after this round of the war on terror is behind us, we'll still be contending with increasingly small computers woven into our lives in increasingly intimate, life-or-death ways. The parochial needs of spies and the corporations that supply them mustn't trump the need for a resilient electronic nervous system for the twenty first century.
Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, edited by Laura Poitras, features my story "Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition," as well as contributions from Dave Eggers, Ai Weiwei, former Guantanamo Bay detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, Kate Crawford, and Edward Snowden.
The Astro Noise exhibition is on at New York City's Whitney Museum from February 5 to May 1, 2016.
Henrik Moltke contributed research to this story.
https://boingboing.net/2016/02/02/doxxing-sherlock-3.html
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