Doubtful Joy—Part 1

Nought’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content:
’Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
—Macbeth III.ii

I had work to do. I’d been so caught up in sleeplessness, office politics, and relational bliss for the past 30 hours that I’d not yet examined the results of my search for the cyber-bully. Once Cali left my office to go to rehearsal, I settled in with my laptop and transferred control to the tower at my office. Working at the office has advantages since I have a lot more computing power there.

I pulled the drapes in the office and turned out the lights. I cranked up Alice in Chains and started following my leads. It wasn’t quite as dark as the apartment, but the level of adrenaline I felt pumping through my veins as I plunged into Philanthropolis was enough to block out all distractions.

***

IP addresses are assigned to devices participating in a network, in this instance, the worldwide web. Philanthropolis was hosted on multiple computers, with backup and mirroring on dozens more. Many of those computers functioned as virtual devices, meaning their hard disks might have several different addresses. When I added in the problem that Philanthropolis was a composite of numerous organizations and domains that had been organized together I was dealing with a problem of incredible proportions. My automated searches, however, led me deeper into this morass than I thought possible.

The building my searches all seemed to lead through was a massive structure in its own right. It housed such a reputable charitable organization that my first inclination was to ignore it and look elsewhere. I didn’t even want my search to lead me here. But not only is the Internet a great place to find things, it is a great place to hide things. The cyber-bully I was after wanted to stay hidden.

Off the main portal I entered an antechamber that held a number of awards and certificates of appreciation, each, I knew could open into the organization that issued it. That wasn’t where my spider was leading, though. In the back of the room was an unmarked passage and that is where I went.

The momentary disorientation of crossing from room to room was caused by the shift from domain to domain. This was leading me now through different countries as well. Being immersed in the U.S. Internet structure, it was easy for me to forget that there are over 200 different domain suffixes, many that are specific to countries. Some countries had found it profitable at the dawn of the Internet to begin selling domain names at prices less than the $78 per year then charged in the U.S. Tonga, .to, was a popular place for teens to get domains in the 90s because they charged only $10 to register. I was finding that there was still a sizable market in country-specific domains available.

It wasn’t unusual for a major company to buy the .com, .org, and .net domains for their businesses. Many also bought up the country specific domains in countries in which they did business. But what if an organization didn’t have a business presence in a country, but still owned a domain in that country. There had to be at least a thousand ways to hide; perhaps millions.

Buried in a backroom of an organization that didn’t exist in an African nation, I found the name of an owner. I’d been at it for two hours, but now that I had one, following the spiders to a dozen more went more quickly. I compiled search criteria for each of the names I found and sent the spiders out again. This time, I had to simply immerse myself in the data.

I think of the Internet as a real place with real people, buildings, streets, and rooms. When I’m immersed in a search as I was now, it is as if I am driving, walking, or running down those streets. In the “real world,” a casual observer would have seen me mesmerized in front of my screen, tapping out commands on my keyboard as thousands of lines of code flew by. I learned a long time ago that I couldn’t comprehend what I saw as the lines scrolled across the screen. What I looked for were anomalies. If I looked at a string of numbers—for example: 1', 3', 7', 10", 15', 22', 47"—I would immediately recognize that the 10 and 47 were out of order. All the other numbers are in feet. The 10 and 47 are in inches and should be ordered first and fourth in the list. Many computer programs could not even put them in ascending order of the numbers that a human would recognize. It’s just how my brain works. Matching a single word, phrase, or string on the fly or spotting one that is out of order is less difficult for me than sitting down to study a segment of code in detail. I could see the difference as though driving down a street of bungalows and spotting the Taj Mahal.

In six hours, I had 17 names. I sat back at my desk shaking. I hadn’t eaten, drunk, or gone to the bathroom. My neck, arms, and back were cramped and my head was throbbing. I pushed myself away from the computer in disgust and went to relieve myself. I washed my hands and looked at myself in the mirror. I hadn’t realized tears were running out of my eyes and I splashed water on my face to wash them away. I glanced into my office and just pulled the door closed and locked it. I couldn’t face looking at the screen again. I left the building, locked the door and wished I could burn it down rather than face what I’d left inside.

***

I’d walked two blocks before I grabbed my cell phone out of my pocket and angrily punched in the speed-dial command for Jordan. It was his private phone, not the office, and he picked up on second ring.

“Dag! How’s the great undercover adventure going? Put them straight yet?”

“It’s going okay, Jordan, but I need to talk to you about something else. I’ve got another client.” I quickly described my encounter with Daniel and his father, the bullying on the Internet forums and my searches through cyberspace. I skimmed through my adventures in Philanthropolis. Jordan knew I dealt with searches and results; he didn’t know what my mental imagery was.

“The net result is that I’ve found something that I can’t handle, Jordan. This is a job for the police.” I was still having trouble getting to the point. I didn’t want to believe what I’d found. I didn’t want any of it to be true. The work on credit card fraud, in fact my whole obsession with thieves, seemed insignificant and mundane.

“Dag, you know I have a lot of sympathy for victims of cyber-bullying, but mostly we have to tell them to cancel their accounts and stay away from the Internet for a while. We’ve got a caseload that’s too big to handle as it is. The chance we could make charges stick on a case of bullying are remote. You’re better off trying to get the school to take disciplinary action.”

“Jordan.” I measured my words carefully. “We don’t have a cyber-bully. We’ve got a predator. And he’s high up the food chain.”

***