Read Online Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling - Free Book Online

aggressively conventional. Carlotta, the Church girl, wore a sleeveless scarlet beach top, a short skirt, and heavy makeup. A brimming chalice was tattooed on her bare, freckled shoulder.
    Laura introduced her husband and the Lodge staff to the Grenadians. David gave the old pirate his best hostly grin: friendly and tolerant, we’re all just-folks here at Rizome. Overdoing it a bit maybe, because Winston Stubbs had the standard pirate image. Raffish. “Howdy,” David said. “Hope y’all enjoy your stay with us.”
    The old man looked skeptical. David abandoned his drawl. “Cool runnings,” he said tentatively.
    â€œCool runnings,” Winston Stubbs mused. “Have nah hear that in forty year. You like those old reggae albums, Mr. Webster?”
    David smiled. “My folks used to play them when I was a kid.”
    â€œOh, seen. That would be Dr. Martin Webster and Grace Webster of Galveston.”
    â€œThat’s right,” David said. His smile vanished.
    â€œYou designed this Lodge,” Stubbs said. “Concretized sand, built from the beach, eh?” He looked David up and down. “Mash-it-up appropriate technology. We could use you in the islands, mon.”
    â€œThanks,” David said, fidgeting. “That’s very flattering.”
    â€œWe could use a public relations, too,” Stubbs said, grinning crookedly at Laura. His eye whites were veined with red, like cracked marbles. “I-and-I’s reputation could use an upgrade. Pressure come down on I-and-I. From Babylon Luddites.”
    â€œLet’s all gather in the conference room,” Emerson said. “It’s early yet. Still time for us to talk.”
    They argued for two solid days. Laura sat in on the meetings as Debra Emerson’s second, and she realized quickly that Rizome was a barely tolerated middleman. The data pirates had no interest whatsoever in taking up new careers as right-thinking postindustrialists. They had met to confront a threat.
    All three pirate groups were being blackmailed.
    The blackmailers, whoever they were, showed a firm grasp of data-haven dynamics. They had played cleverly on the divisions and rivalries among the havens; threatening one bank, then depositing the shakedown money in another. The havens, who naturally loathed publicity, had covered up the attacks. They were deliberately vague about the nature of the depredations. They feared publicizing their weaknesses. It was clear, too, that they suspected one another.
    Laura had never known the true nature and extent of haven operations, but she sat quietly, listened and watched, and learned in a hurry.
    The pirates dubbed commercial videotapes by the hundreds of thousands, selling them in poorly policed Third World markets. And their teams of software cracksters found a ready market for programs stripped of their copy protection. This brand of piracy was nothing new; it dated back to the early days of the information industry.
    But Laura had never realized the profit to be gained by evading the developed world’s privacy laws. Thousands of legitimate companies maintained dossiers on individuals: employee records, medical histories, credit transactions. In the Net economy, business was impossible without such information. In the legitimate world, companies purged this data periodically, as required by law.
    But not all of it was purged. Reams of it ended up in the data havens, passed on through bribery of clerks, through taps of datalines, and by outright commercial espionage. Straight companies operated with specialized slivers of knowledge. But the havens made a business of collecting it, offshore. Memory was cheap, and their databanks were huge, and growing.
    And they had no shortage of clients. Credit companies, for instance, needed to avoid bad risks and pursue their debtors. Insurers had similar problems. Market researchers hungered after precise data on individuals. So did fund raisers.