Кори Доктороу - Make Shift - Dispatches from the Post-Pandemic Future

Thus, our streets today are clogged with foreigners embodied in robots, subject to little surveillance or control. It defies common sense to think that these foreign operatives in disguise would not poison our public discourse with unfiltered foreign propaganda. After repeated demands from me and Vice President Gossy, our intelligence services have uncovered vast and sophisticated attempts by foreign states to influence American policy and elections. For example, the PNA sent waves of teletourists to describe alleged conditions in Palestine to the American people in February this year, in advance of the planned peace summit, and Chinese trolls disguised as ordinary tourists flooded the District of Columbia in June to participate in the “Million-Bot March” against our deployment of advanced tactical nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Indeed, the recent waves of demonstrations by anti-war radicals in California and New York appear to have been directed and amplified by Russian intelligence using hired teletourists from around the world.

Despite this clear and present danger to our democracy, my attempts at regulating the speech of teletourists have consistently been rebuffed by the courts. My order that all teletour robots be equipped with a filter that automatically refused to translate or silenced utterances of ideas and phrases not compatible with American interests has been voided by extremist left-wing judges defying my constitutional authority. They appear to hold the mistaken notion that foreigners, present in the United States only by remotely operating a robot, somehow enjoy the same God-given constitutional rights as real Americans. The very idea is absurd. This is especially so when regimes like China have erected virtual walls that make it extremely difficult for American citizens to take jaunts into China. We cannot remain open when our enemies do not extend us the same courtesy.

We cannot allow telemigration to undo all the gains we’ve made in regulating immigration. Thus, in order to protect American jobs from unfair foreign competition, to defend our technological secrets from foreign spies, to ensure that our citizens are not subjected to foreign propaganda delivered in the guise of teletourism, I am issuing an executive order that immediately bans all attempts to connect to telepresence robots within the United States from abroad. Secretary Narro will have the details.

Don’t tread on us.

God Bless America.

Factchecking Notes on President Bombeo’s Statement by Teletourists Without Borders, September 3, 203X

…(39) “THUS, OUR STREETS ARE CLOGGED WITH FOREIGNERS EMBODIED IN ROBOTS.”

According to the Association of Teletourism Providers, the largest US-based trade organization for the industry, foreign-based teletourists were only 3.4 percent of the total number of teletourists in the United States. According to JauntsNow, less than 5 percent of the jaunts booked on US-based teletour robots were from addresses abroad. In any event, it seems clear that the vast majority of jaunts in the United States are taken by other Americans.

…(43) “Our intelligence services have uncovered vast and sophisticated attempts by foreign states to influence American policy and elections.”

The President’s examples of bot-swarms by foreign nations attempting to influence American politics have been well publicized, but there is considerable skepticism among security experts because the reports were produced by the spy agencies under intense political pressure and thus considered not entirely reliable. The President also failed to note some other instances of foreign-sponsored bot-swarms that may have been more in line with his preferred policies (see below). Thus, the picture he presented is misleading.

• The bot-swarm in support of Myanmar’s government when Congress contemplated sanctions against officials in Nay Pyi Taw for persecuting ethnic minorities. The officials in question enjoy a close relationship with President Bombeo, and multiple researchers have concluded that the demonstration involved protesters-for-hire purchased in the Philippines.

• The bot-swarm in support of President Bombeo’s decision to reject the findings of the United Nations Human Rights Council against Saudi Arabia. Multiple researchers have concluded that the demonstrators were using a semi-open relay known to be closely associated with ascendant members of the ruling family.

…(45) “Indeed, the recent waves of demonstrations by anti-war radicals in California and New York appear to have been directed and amplified by Russian intelligence using hired teletourists from around the world.”

The report from a privately funded Washington, D.C. think tank that a large number of demonstrators were Russian operatives controlling multiple bots has been dismissed by most security researchers as based on flawed metrics and over-aggressive machine-classification algorithms. The lead authors of that report are also known for arguing that the Black Lives Matter protests from the last decade were instigated by Chinese and Russian trolls, a position that has been comprehensively debunked.

…(47) “My order that all teletour robots be equipped with a filter…”

The President failed to make it clear that his order not only applied to foreign teletourists, but also could potentially be applied to American citizens and permanent residents using telepresence robots as well.

README.txt

NENE HUDDLE IS A HIGH-PERFORMANCE, PRIVACY-FIRST, ADAPTIVELY STRUCTURED,peer-to-peer network to facilitate anonymous, hard-to-trace connections between telepresence robots and operators.

Running the Nene Huddle software turns your machine into a node (called a “pylon”) on the Huddle network. The pylons communicate with one another through encrypted channels that are constantly multiplexed and switched to defeat attempts at tracing metadata. The ultimate goal of the network is to enable operators anywhere in the world to connect to telepresence endpoints without leaving a traceable record linking any individual operator with any individual endpoint.

It is primarily useful for getting around the restrictions various states have imposed on inbound and outbound telepresence connections. For instance, if you don’t live in the United States or one of its four “Deep Trust Allies,” then currently the only way to take a jaunt into the US without going through the onerous and Orwellian televisa process is routing yourself through the Nene Huddle network. It is also one of the only avenues left to enter China without giving up all your data at the border.

Note, however, that the Nene Huddle network doesn’t directly provide any consumer-oriented functionality such as searching for open telepresence endpoints, advertising to jaunt customers, paying to use open endpoints, disguising yourself as a domestic teletourist on JauntsNow, and so on. You’ll have to use other applications built on top of Nene Huddle.

It is already confirmed or at least very likely that running the Nene Huddle software is considered illegal by authorities in countries such as the United States, Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom (the list of such states is growing). Before installing and joining the movement, weigh your risks carefully. It is simply a fact of life that freedom requires you to be ready to pay a price, to have skin in the game.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who makes Nene Huddle? Volunteers who have made it a point to not know one another’s identities.

Why do you make it? There is no way to answer this question for everyone who has contributed to the project. By design, we don’t know one another’s real names, real jobs, real nationalities, real motivations, anything at all, really.