Chapter 8

I thought this chapter was so fascinating. Pretty much, the arphid cloner is an automatic terrorism detector, or so the DHS thinks that monitoring the patterns of the people using the technologies captured via the cloner means they’ll catch terrorists. This cloning device pretty much begins the war on the DHS as Marcus posts a HOWTO for building an arphid cloner and how to use it effectively. He warns of the paradox of the false positive and that terrorists are really rare (like the disease mentioned in the previous blog). He also says that for a city like San Francisco, to catch 10 bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate 200,000 innocent people. He sums it up in this statement, “What this all meant was that the DHS had set itself up to fail badly. They were trying to spot incredibly rare events-a person is a terrorist-with inaccurate systems.”

Marcus is now on a mission and begins to have followers on the Xnet. In this chapter, Operation False Positive begins. These cloners mostly captured and switched numbers on ATM cards, Fastrak, and Fast Pass. People throughout the whole city had produced the arphid cloners and jammed up the city. Marcus closes the chapter saying that his dad got home 3 hours late that night because he had been pulled over, searched, and question twice! So, this is coming back to bite his dad in the behind.