- Even though he didn't fall asleep until 3 a.m., Marcus's dad still wakes him up by 7 to get ready to go to school. Marcus wishes his parents would let him drink coffee at home.
- Walking to school, Marcus sees trucks, new sensors, and surveillance cameras installed basically everything. Talk about a Brave New World.
- Time for some coffee. Marcus goes into the Turkish coffee shop on 24th Street to get his fix. He goes to pay for the cup of "lethal jet-black coffee-mud" with his debit card (6.5).
- The Turk says he no longer takes debit cards. Pushed to explain, he says it's became of the security measures and monitoring by the government.
- PATRIOT ACT II passed yesterday in Congress. This allows for monitoring. The Turk left Turkey twenty years ago for freedom; he's not so keen on governments watching their citizens' every move.
- Marcus doesn't have any cash, but the Turk says to give the money to the ACLU instead. Sounds like he's been giving out lots of free coffee that morning. Marcus promises to give the Turk all his business and feels like the two of them had joined a secret team.
- When Marcus shows up at school, turns out everyone thought he was dead.
- Surprise. He gets some kisses from girls, hugs, handshakes—his fellow students and teaches are stoked that Marcus's no longer missing or dead.
- In Ms. Galvez's class there's now a camera at the front of the room. She gives Marcus a note for his parents asking their permission that he remain in "protected" classrooms (i.e. cameras, cameras, cameras everywhere).
- Marcus starts a short debate about if the terrorists win because everyone's afraid.
- Charles says the cameras make them feel safe, but Marcus tries to probe exactly how that works. Ms. Galvez stops the debate and turns the discussion back to the suffrage movement.
- Missing Darryl—who's not in class because he's still missing—Marcus explains to us how he's burned 20 Paranoid Xbox discs and given them out to gamers he knows at school. Free, unmonitored games sound pretty great, don't they?
- Two weeks have passed and now people are talking about the Xnet, which Marcus basically started handing out free discs. People have been copying and passing more copies out, all the way to Oakland.
- BART no longer allows for cash fares, meaning that everyone has to use a card with an arphid tracker in it. People are protesting.
- Marcus now has a new handle—M1k3y —and a fake email address through the Pirate Party, a Swedish political party that hates internet surveillance. He's mostly using the Xnet now, using his bugged laptop less and less.
- Next we get a short lesson in cryptography (crypto): how it works, why the math was outlawed at various times, and how the Nazi cipher called Enigma was broken by a British guy named Alan Turing.
- Secret crypto always gets broken, so the best security ciphers are published widely so that tons of people can test them.
- Marcus gets off the BART and heads out to 24th Street. He's followed by two big white guys and thinks they're DHS.
- Good thing all those discs he'd burned to hand out aren't in his bag. Trying to be cool, Marcus goes into a Mexican place and orders some food.
- The two guys eventually come inside, boxing him in at the counter and standing close.
- They show their police badges and ask Marcus to step outside with them.