The Urban Riot Squad

Things were getting out of hand in Metropolis, and the riot squad captain knew why.

There were street uprisings all over the world, in Paris, London, Cairo, Belgrade, Los Angeles and Seattle sometimes — anywhere there were social networks. The rioters were the scum of the earth, using phones and computers. These lowlife scum always had something to fuss over — because they were violent losers — and they had to be repressed.

There were two good, efficient methods to do that, which didn’t require blood in the gutters, tear-gas and knocking people’s heads in. The first was informants — finks, plants and undercover cops, who would mix with the malcontents and figure out what they were doing. The second was the cybercop method — just hack into their social media, their encrypted email, whatever, and just outguess them that way.

The riot squad captain didn’t much care what the rioter networks were called — they could be radical bulletin-board systems, cyber black markets, chat boards, anarchist websites, he’d seen them all. When he clubbed one over the head, another showed up.

But the “Cyberdeck” one was bad. He could tell by the smell of Cyberdeck that these were not the usual cheap punk agitators. These were heavy operators, probably state-supported cyberwar services running subversive “operations other than war.”

These “Cyberdeck” people thought it was easy to make a cop’s life miserable. But they didn’t realize one thing — they were on his turf. They didn’t realize that cops were deeper into the criminal networks than the perpetrators who built them.

So the bad-guys were gonna go down hard.

Bruce Sterling