Amazon Review: Confessions of an Xnetter.

(3 1/2 Stars)

After the attack on the Bay Bridge I found myself constantly in a state of unease. I wasn't involved in the riots, but was shaken when reports of missing persons started flooding in. Several of my classmates didn't come to class the days fallowing the incident. Men in armored suits and shields started roaming the streets of my local neighborhood block. Sporting DHS logos neatly placed on their helmets. I'd first noticed them installing cameras across the street from the local Turkish coffee shop I frequented. I remember overhearing a fight with the shops manager one night, over something about transaction tracking. I'd always payed with cash, since I like keeping track of my spending, so I hadn't noticed at first.

Over the next next week or so, I became gradually more paranoid as the prevalence of surveillance started to thicken. One night, while confiding in a friend, he passed me a copy of Xnet without even batting an eye. He told me to look for a user named M1k3y. Said that he usually hung around in the Clockwork Plunder game, that he could help me escape the DHS's all seeing eye. It took me a couple of days scouring servers, but sure enough I found him waiting to be wound up in one of the neutral trading posts. We got to talking for a while. He told me about how he had been held captive by the DHS and that he was planning something big to blow their cover wide open. It sounded as if he was talking about a plot to some comic book. How he described his detainers and the methods of interrogation seemed almost paint-by-numbers as far as villains go, especially without any prior conviction. I felt a little skeptical of his story, but decided the consequences were to great to just be disregard.

He started to tell me about how he'd been using apherids for jamming the tracking information held on FastTrack cards. As someone who isn't a super computer savvy individual, who just wanted to protect his privacy online, a lot of the technobabble he preached went strait over my head. Though, he said he was trying to lie low on the jamming front due to recent hikes in surveillance efforts, which was fine by me. I wasn't planning on going to the slammer anytime soon for tampering or identity theft. It did give me a sense of relief however, that such technology existed and that people such as M1k3y were out their protecting our privacy. Even though I found his self-righteousness a bit sickening. He logged off soon after that.

Since that day I haven't heard or talked to M1k3y since. Shortly after my contact with him a huge controversial story about Guantanimo by the Bay hit the news stands. A lot of people were shocked. They would have never guessed how much their new fangled government surveillance and how technology in general had effected their lives in such a profoundly negative way.

It soon became clear amongst fellow Xnetters that this story would be passed down to future generations as a warning. That we should fight to stay free at all costs.