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the serving plate. “Design a real set of privacy enhancing features.”
    “What?” I’m too deep in my thoughts and I’ve lost the thread of the conversation.
    “Carl wants to make money with a privacy product. You should design a real privacy product.”
    “He’s not going to care about the technical details of privacy.” I take the other skewer. Beef grilled over sumibi charcoal, with a smoky flavor. My mouth wakes up and I realize I’m starving.
    “Give him a whole product, not only technical details. Describe the experience of using the product, and how they’ll make revenue, and why this is better than the alternative.”
    “I want to write SQL queries, not make slides.” This is one way of saying I want to sit alone by myself and not interact with anyone.
    “Do you? Or do you want to change the world?”
    I set aside my food and stare at Thomas, his soft brown eyes, the little crinkles at the corners, the sideburns peppered with gray. This is why I love him. Not because he sees infinite possibility in every situation, but because he senses some deeper truth about me that even I lose track of. Unbelievably, he likes what he sees.

CHAPTER 5
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    I OWN A thirty-year-old VW bus. Well, own is a strong word, since it’s not registered to me. I paid cash in a private sale twelve months ago in Idaho. I have a fake driver’s license corresponding to an actual New Yorker who doesn’t own a car, and a real vehicle registration in their name. It was a complicated bit of work, but it will cover me in the event of a routine traffic stop. The final touch was installing flowery curtains. Now it’s the mobile office I use when I need the highest level of security.
    I wrote a script to pick a random place to park the van, usually in the parts of Portland where you find the most hippies. The VW blends in well.
    Today I’m a quarter of a block down from a coffee shop with a good wi-fi signal. I aim the directional antenna at the coffee shop until I maximize the signal strength.
    From there, the direction my packets take is very, very complicated.
    The Raspberry Pi, a tiny computer smaller than a credit card, is dirt cheap and can do anything a regular computer can do. Each iteration gets smaller, more powerful, and less battery-hungry. I paid cash for a thousand units direct from a distributor.
    In my own version of a clean-room, dressed in a biohazard suit so I wouldn’t leave DNA on them, I embedded the tiny computers inside weatherproof cases, marrying each to tiny solar panels and a rechargeable battery. Each component was chosen because they were cheap Chinese parts manufactured by the millions.
    The little computers run a secure variant of Linux, with a single open port, protected with heavy encryption. Part of the computer board contains a sensitive accelerometer, which means I can detect when the computer is moved.
    When I travel, I find coffee shops and homes with wi-fi signals and flat roofs, and I toss one of these onto the roof.
    If you were to find one, pick it up, and look at it, you might not be sure what it was. If you plug a headphone into the jack, it plays pirate music stations.
    Of course, that’s what it does only if it’s been moved or if the battery level drops too low. Because when the accelerometer detects motion, the code I wrote replaces my extensive software with a simple dummy music app and erases the remaining storage a hundred times over.
    If it hasn’t been moved, and the battery level has never dropped too low, then it does what it’s supposed to do: operate as part of my private onion routing network with hundreds of nodes to disguise my digital trail so others can’t trace my location.
    This secure private network is what I’m using right now to research Erik Copley, my packets bouncing back and forth in encrypted channels. I haven’t trusted TOR since the government took down Silk Road. I don’t buy the explanation that they used unrelated weaknesses. The government